These "narratives" are just that, fictional stories told to support a prevailing social ideology, and yes, they are dangerous, not the least because they ignore the facts.
It may be better for children of color to be ignorant about it, but certainly not adults of any racial background.
Though anecdotal, I know several adults who have fallen into the "it's because systemic racism that I can't get ahead" trap. One example is a low-achiever socially awkward friend of mine that complains about not being able to find a tech job, yet spends the vast majority of his days playing video games. Instead of recongizing that his skills (social and coding) are subpar and addressing it, he chalks it up to systemic racism, makes an angry post on Facebook and calls it a day.
A lot of what we're teaching now is the opposite. It's like anti-CBT. Teach everyone they are helpless against the nefarious powers that be.
At the same time there is systemic unfairness both in the legacy of racism that has created inequality and in how society operates to this very day and I don't know how you solve those problems if you don't address them. The status quo is not acceptable to myself or a lot of other people
By conditioning people into believing that an outside force is the primary, if not only factor impacting their lack of success, you demotivate them from trying to adjust other factors that could improve their situation. The issue isn't that we address racism, it's that racism has become the end-all rationalisation for any deficiency at the individual level.
I get that you're of the opinion that telling people about racial inequality can demotivate them and make them feel fatalistic about their futures, but I don't necessarily agree with your assessment to the degree this is the case and you seem to think there is no room for nuance here. We must stop talking about this immediately. People are too simple to understand that there is still some unfairness that needs to be resolved, but that they should do their best regardless. No we must lie to them and tell them the system is fair and through their ignorance they will magically overcome the disadvantages they face.
You seem to think fear of systemic racism is a bigger obstacle to the success of black people than actual systemic racism and I just think that's absurd. Your basic premise that fear of institutional racism can be demotivating is valid and worth consideration. You're elevating it to the root cause of all problems is absurd. A black job applicant will receive half as many callbacks for job interviews compared to an identically qualified white applicant. There are little obstacles like that all over our society. Can they be overcome through tenacity and perseverance? Yes. Does that mean we shouldn't work to fix that %#@#? Hell No!
One encourages them to hold out as it gets better, the other for them to give up till it gets better.
I'm not calling it the root of all problems either, so please don't put words in my mouth. I'm saying it's not even a solution, it's the opposite, worsening the situation and feeding itself.
And to be specific here, I'm referring to the narrative around racism being the sole and primary cause of failure.
Principally because "the framing" isn't some well-defined objective thing, it's all a matter of perception, which means it's always possible to read whatever narrative you like into the facts.
Like this:
> the narrative around racism being the sole and primary cause of failure.
This perception is yours, not the facts on the ground.
Outside of very liberal strongholds identity politics can't get passed and they get in the way of any progress you want to actually make at trying to minimize the difference in outcomes between races.
People define systemic racism as different outcomes for black people than white people.
Basically no one denies that.
Which environment is easier to influence, one in which you are more aware of underlying factors, or one in which you are less aware?
In the case of that particular individual I'd say it's less laziness and more of systemic racism being deterrent to attempt self-improvement. In the "even if I try, I won't get ahead because these systems will hold me back" sense.
The point I was trying to make is that it's a lot easier to point the blame at something than admit to yourself that you suck - even if you're capable.
I don't know what your definition of systemic racism is, so I can't make a proper argument for/against it.
In any case, your comment has given me some food for thought in how I approach this person.
I would just say that anyone who claims they won't get ahead even if they try because of systemic racism is being ignorant. They might have to try harder than a white person would. They might face some adversity, but there really is no excuse for not trying. It would literally perpetuate the problem.
Not only does systemic racism exist, not only has the environment succeeded in inducing a victim mentality in this person, you are now blaming them for it? Classical "pull yourself by your bootstraps" bullshit. Do you really not see how dehumanizing your viewpoint is, and how such attitudes help perpetuate that person's inaction?
>As someone who also spends a lot of time thinking about global warming there is a tendency to have bouts of feeling doomed here and there.
Not to belittle your own existential fears, but feeling doomed due to global warming at least doesn't make you feel like there's something wrong with you in particular.
It's strange - people with a victim mentality are victims of their victim mentality. It's recursive and self-fulfilling, and it does take some amount of bootstrapping - which is, however, perfectly impossible in the absence of a bootloader and someone to push the power button.
Not really my point. But what you're saying is legitimate too. Though who are we to judge, considering we don't even have unambiguous language to discuss the subject without risking to offend each other's sensibilities.
>I was most concerned about pushing back on the notion that this subject should be taboo because somehow discussing systemic racism is the real cause of inequality.
I'm not sure if I can resolve the nesting of those clauses. IMHO, taboos are generally counterproductive because avoiding the taboo gives it more power. And enforcing a particular language, tone, or other mode of discourse about race relations can be used to perpetuate thinking that reinforces racism "in the name of fighting racism".
This whole thing is starting to look more and more like we need to find out if we're even capable of discussing systemic racism without freaking out, so we can try to conclusively establish what systemic racism is, so that we can look for a solution to systemic racism, so that we can finally stop cops from shooting civilians for being the "wrong" color. This yak shaving is truly the work of a higher intellect...
For me it's 3 main things.
1. The way historical oppression can set a group behind another group even after any specific policy has been repealed.
Poverty is often a cycle that can go on indefinitely for generations especially depending on things like upward mobility which has coincidentally been getting weaker since the period of official apartheid ended in the USA. Strange that we seem to be uninterested in spending much on the uplifting of our people now that such spending would need to include all people.
2. The way that bias against a group can result in that group being disadvantaged despite there being no rules or laws in place that require that and even in spite of it being contrary to policies.
Like the way that black people are half as likely to receive a callback for a job interview as an identically qualified white applicant or that despite being less likely to be found with contraband black people are twice as likely to be searched by police.
3. Would be laws and rules that do not target racial groups, but unfairly benefit or disadvantage racial groups.
This would be local property tax based school funding resulting in poor neighborhoods getting inadequate funding for schools resulting in predominantly black schools being underfunded. This is also drastically harsher penalties for crack compared to cocaine.
Later, in the 1920s, African Americans had a higher rate of employment than White Americans! But after the federal minimum wage passed, their economic power was destroyed and has yet to recover.
Today, most people don't consider it as having anything to do with race, but when it was first put on the books, it was specifically designed to hurt them.
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...
[1] Police stop black drivers significantly more than white drivers when the sun is up and they are able to see that the driver is black, but not at night when they can't see the race of the driver. Meaning race is often the determining factor for why black drivers are pulled over.
[2] Unarmed black people are 3.49 times as likely to be killed as unarmed white people and local crime rates have zero effect on this statistic.
[3] Black and white officers use force at similar rates in white neightborhoods, but White police officers use force significantly more compared to black police officers when responding to calls in minority neighborhoods.
[4] Police in oakland find contraband at the same rate regardless of the race of the person, but search black drivers 4x more often.
[5] The more white a suspect appears to be the less likely police are to use force. The more black a suspect appears the more likely it is that police will use force.
[6] Black police officers are more likely to be shot by their fellow police than white police officers.
[7] Oaklad police disproportionately handcuff blacks at stunning levels regardless of which area of the city you look at.
[8] In San Francisco, “although Black people accounted for less than 15 percent of all stops in 2015, they accounted for over 42 percent of all non-consent searches following stops.” This proved unwarranted: “Of all people searched without consent, Black and Hispanic people had the lowest ‘hit rates’ (i.e., the lowest rate of contraband recovered).”
[9] The DOJ investigation into Ferguson PD, found “a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct within the Ferguson PD that violates the 1st, 4th, and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, and federal law.” The scathing report found that FPD was targeting black residents and treating them as revenue streams for the city by striving to continually increase the money brought in through fees and fines.
[10] In Chicago, a 2016 report found that “black and Hispanic drivers were searched approximately four times as often as white drivers, yet Chicago PDs own data show that contraband was found on white drivers twice as often as black and Hispanic drivers.”
[11]2014 ACLU analysis of Illinois DOT data found: “Black and Latino drivers are nearly twice as likely as white drivers to be asked during a routine traffic stop for ‘consent’ to have their car searched. Yet white motorists are 49% more likely than African American motorists to have contraband discovered during a consent search by law enforcement, and 56% more likely when compared to Latinos.”
[12] Black people are more likely to be wrongfully convicted and more likelt to be framed for a crime they didn't commit.
[13] Black kids are more likely to be tried as an adult.
[14] Black people get 20% longer prison sentences for the same crimes even when you control for criminal history.
[15] Black students are more likely to be arrested at school. This appears to be a function of increased security at predominantly black schools and not because black students commit crimes at school at higher rates.
[16] Security levels in schools are determined by how many black kids go to the school and not crime levels.
[17] Predominantly black schools are chronically underfunded compared to predominantly white schools.
[18] An identical resume with a white sounding name like Stephen or Susan is twice as likely to recieve a call for a job interview compared to the same resume with an ethnically black sounding name like Jamal or Latisha.
[19] Minorities who alter their resumes to seem white get more job interviews.
[20] Banks targeted black homeowners for predatory homeloans and refinancing in the lead up to the 2008 crisis. Causing black families to be disproportionately harmed by the forclosure crisis.
[21] owner-occupied homes in black neighborhoods are undervalued by $48,000 per home on average, amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses. This study controls for crime rates. Neighborhood amenities like schools, parks, walkability, and public transportation. The size and age of homes etc.
[22] In an experiment landlords responding to emails treated Blacks, Arab males, Muslims, and single parents unfavorably.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[3] https://www.nber.org/papers/w26774?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_me...
[4] https://stanford.app.box.com/v/Data-for-Change
[5] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/194855061663350...
[6] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/wien...
[7] https://sparq.stanford.edu/opd-reports
[8] https://sfdistrictattorney.org/sites/default/files/Document/...
[9] https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releas...
[10] https://chicagopatf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/PATF_Fina...
[11] https://www.aclu-il.org/en/press-releases/traffic-stop-data-...
[12] https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race...
[13] https://www.wnyc.org/story/black-kids-more-likely-be-tried-a...
[14]https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-d...
[15] https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/01/25/black-students...
[16] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160608180824.h...
[17] https://psmag.com/education/nonwhite-school-districts-get-23...
[18] https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
[19] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...
[20] https://www.aclu.org/files/field_document/discrimlend_final....
[21] https://www.brookings.edu/research/devaluation-of-assets-in-...
[22] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01660...
There are of course other ways to save comments, such as bookmarking with your browser or other bookmark applications.
May I recommend an organized note taking system copying the literal text and link for reference. I like org-roam with a hotkey to capture title and if existent any highlighted text.
https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam
There are of course about a million ways to skin this particular cat and plenty of them are good.
The benefit of using your own system is that you can trivially reference information from many websites via one method instead of relying on the many and varied features of many sites. The benefit of copying the full relevant text is both that you can search that text and if a site or a comment goes missing tomorrow or 5 years from now you aren't out the information.
The statistics on unarmed people being killed by police account for differences in population sizes. Also while that is a hot button issue it's really the tip of the iceberg for this subject. The body of work showing systemic racism is an ongoing problem in the US holds up just fine if you ignore police shootings altogether.
Could you point to such a law or even better cite a paragraph from such a law where you feel it targets certain minorities? How do police officers from minority background do their job?
Also the war on drugs started under the Nixon admin was an intentional effort to target black people and anti-war activists.
https://www.businessinsider.com/nixon-adviser-ehrlichman-ant...
There was a strongtowns article that literally had nothing to do with race, merely about getting rid of single family zoning. It didn't take long for someone in the comment section to post how building affordable housing in those places will ruin everything and everyone is naive because they haven't had to live in a ghetto.
There was an economics explained video about real estate that even implied that race was one of the factors was how far the homeowners are away from other races.
Coming from Europe this was completely unexpected for me, turns out, segregation in the USA never went away it merely became more socially acceptable.
http://projects.andrewwhitby.com/uk-ethnicity-map/
but it's more fine grained than that. Bangladeshis are separate from Pakistanis, for instance.
Why "Even" ? It does not say anything about racism if you do not control for other factors, like criminal history and society inclusion. It's phrased as if it would still hold without control variable, and the author is doing a favor to potential nitpicker. It may be true, but the "Even" does not make me confident of the scientific value of the publication and the absence of confirmation bias of the author.
Is there a meta-source you got your list from?
https://twitter.com/_SAWI__/status/1299096866789834754
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/mpabvz/serious_r...
So a normal black kid can safely pursue life without worrying that he or she has been held back by systemic racism.
Racism of course. Since it’s selecting people based on race.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
43% of white students at Harvard are legacies, athletes, or related to staff and 75% of these 43% wouldn't have been admitted on merits.
Around 1/3 of white people at Harvard are there because of effectively white affirmative action.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-...
A drive to pick people solely on merits would sound more meritorious if we applied it to white people first. I say this as a white man who believes in theory colorblind meritocracy in an imaginary world where such a thing can actually exist.
This can also apply to antiracism, which as I understand it [1] is policy that attempts to undo structural racism, not policy that is absent of race-conscious treatment. I think this question would also be more interesting to answer because everyone already agrees that affirmative action literally does factor in race. The more controversial part is whether it serves to reinforce or counteract some forms of systemic racism.
[1] From a modern viewpoint (e.g. Kendi), although I'm not sure if this word previously had different uses.
Hmm, is this racism or anti-racism? Because it's literally what Harvard does.
I do.
Less than one full generation has passed since redlining was made illegal. It's been less than 60 years since segregation was ruled illegal across the board.
Do you really believe that the entirety of society has been reshaped in that amount of time and every negative system has been eliminated? In what is essentially less than the lifespan of a single generation?
People treat the civil rights movement like it's this very old event that we've all moved past. I don't necessarily blame people for having that perspective, because that's the way we're taught about it in schools. But the civil rights movement was very recent.
You think we overhauled the entire housing market in 60 years? We have not yet had even a single president that was born after the civil rights movement. So from my perspective, even ignoring the stats and research on this subject, I keep hearing people tell me that when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the voting rights act of 1965 passed, all the racists just, I don't know, died or something. That they can't possibly exist anymore, and they can't possibly have taught anything negative to their immediate kids who went on to be CEOs and politicians.
I've met plenty of people who I believe would actively discriminate against someone because of their race, and I'm an asocial white person who avoids public spaces. I just replied to a comment on this very page that openly argued that unequal outcomes in Black communities were the result of biological differences. I don't know what word to use for the belief that Blacks are biologically inferior other than the word 'racist'. I can't speak to anyone else's experiences, maybe you've been fortunate to interact with better communities than me, but I don't personally think this stuff is particularly rare.
If we're going off of what is and isn't hard to believe, I don't find systemic racism to be far-fetched. There was, objectively, an omnipresent, elaborate rouse being played on Black communities for the entirety of American history leading up to at least the civil rights act. That part isn't debatable. So for me, the wild conclusion to draw is that after >180 years of targeted oppression, everyone involved in those systems immediately vanished after a law was passed.
60 years is not enough time to fix wealth gaps in a preexisting neighborhood, not unless we take active steps to fix them. It's just really obvious to me that the reason many ghettos exist is because we built them; there's records of banks deliberately choosing not to invest in those areas because of race. We never did any kind of restitution plan or went back and gave those communities the investment money we denied them earlier. Those areas didn't immediately become rich or get better schools just because a law was passed.
But if you want to look at statistics instead of anecdotes, this is also something that has been studied a lot if you're willing to put in the effort to research it. There's a lot that people can debate around systemic racism, but at the very least, it's pretty hard not to acknowledge that there are unequal outcomes happening. I know you saw breakyerself's comment, do you think that none of those stats are worth being concerned about?
I have seen people giving white guys changes again and again and again. And then make them fall upwards. Some took up those chances, others did not. I am not even calling something sinister in all those situations (through in some yeah). Just stating that giving a white guy a chance is not something rare.
https://www.vox.com/2018/8/10/17670992/study-white-americans...
> Respondents were asked how important their race was to their identity on a five-point scale ranging from “not at all important” to “extremely important.” They were also asked a question measuring their feelings of white solidarity: “How important is it that whites work together to change laws that are unfair to whites?” This followed the same five-point scale. Finally, we can assess survey respondents’ feelings of white victimization from their answers to the question of how much discrimination whites face in the U.S., also on a five-point scale, ranging from “none at all” to a “great deal.”
These people are opposed to affirmative action. The Biden administration is literally excluding white people from things like farm loan forgiveness and SBA loans. Cities are excluding them from things like mortgage subsidies. Companies are openly talking about quota systems. “White men” is used as a pejorative.
Maybe these people are like the “war on Christmas” folks and are blowing this stuff out of proportion. But when there is literal discrimination against white people being baked into our laws, calling them “white supremacist” for saying in a survey that white people should try to get those laws overturned is totally psychotic.
https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...
As to Black voters: https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/ge...
> Majorities of whites (74%), blacks (69%) and other minorities (82%) say voters should be required to show photo identification before being allowed to vote. Voters under 40 support voter ID laws more than do older voters.
Because “systemic racism” is a term used mostly by college educated white people for other college educated white people. Not only that, it deliberately repurposes a label that ordinarily refers to prejudiced beliefs, and applies it to structural forces that operate without any individuals being consciously racist. The same academics who talk about “systemic racism” readily admit that prejudiced beliefs have actually declined.
If you educated people about the history of e.g. FHA redlining and how that affects people today, I think you’d find far fewer people deny that those effects exist.
Besides that, we’re now teaching it to all children of color, who definitely don’t suffer from systemic racism. Asians and Latinos are on a course to achieve economic parity with whites, just like previous immigrant generations:
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353
> It may be better for children of color to be ignorant about it, but certainly not adults of any racial background.
Sure, we should definitely teach kinds about the history of these things, how they create structural barriers, statistics on persistent disparities, when they’re old enough to understand. But even then, we should actually say what we mean instead of using rhetoric chosen by activists for shock effect.
Immigration comes to mind, where profiling is rampant in enforcement (but only really for people who look Mexican, not for people who look / sound Canadian). Or even immigration quotas -- there's the same annual green card cap per country, whether it's India or China or Iceland, thereby implicitly biasing toward smaller countries.
Or, affirmative action being used as a wedge issue for Asian Americans especially.
And just because some Asian populations are doing well, doesn't mean that _all_ of them are.
In the US economic disparities drive pretty much everything else.
> Immigration comes to mind, where profiling is rampant in enforcement (but only really for people who look Mexican, not for people who look / sound Canadian).
As a brown guy with a beard, maybe I get screened more at TSA, or maybe I don’t. (I definitely do outside the US.) At most that’s just regular racism caused by the preconceptions of TSA officers. It doesn’t lead to some systemic or persistent disadvantage.
> Or even immigration quotas -- there's the same annual green card cap per country, whether it's India or China or Iceland, thereby implicitly biasing toward smaller countries.
I’m not sure I would even call this racism.
> Or, affirmative action being used as a wedge issue for Asian Americans especially.
This is backward. It proceeds from a false premise “non-white solidarity” that’s broke by the use of wedge issues. The opposite is true: Asians have distinct interests and people trying to get them to support affirmative action measures are trying to get them to vote against their own interests. Ibram Kendi-style “equity”—where races are represented in proportion to their share of the population—would be disastrous for Asians. We would go from 20-40% in top universities to 6%. We’d go from 35% in Silicon Valley to 6%-10%. And that’s not a hypothetical thing. I went to TJHSST, where progressives voted to eliminate the admissions test. That will cut Asians from 70% to 20%. NYC is trying to do the same thing.
Asians, and to a great extent Latinos, have very little self-interest in rocking the boat. While immigrants in Europe are seeing generational poverty, Asians and Latinos enjoy similar or even higher levels of income mobility as whites. Cubans and Vietnamese came over as refugees with nothing, and achieved economic parity with white Americans within a single generation. There’s only a handful of countries (UK, Canada, Australia) where that sort of thing happens. We have very little self interest in messing with the current system.
It’s fair to argue that we should give up some of our privilege to help reduce systemic disparities. But that’s a completely different argument. But telling us that these changes are in our own self interest, because the existing system is racist against us, is just gaslighting.
> And just because some Asian populations are doing well, doesn't mean that _all_ of them are.
Yes, virtually all of them are. When you see people incoming intra-Asian disparities it’s almost invariably based on pointing to Asian groups that are recent immigrants. That’s why you suddenly started seeing articles about the plight of “Bhutanese Americans.” Virtually all of them came here during the Obama administration, as refugees. They might be poor now, but that’s to be expected at this stage.
I’m Bangladeshi. Bangladeshi Americans are one of the poorer Asian groups. But Indian Americans are one of the richest. That’s not the product of “racism”—that would be absurd, even we can’t usually tell each other apart by sight. Instead it’s because Indians started immigrating in the 1960s and Bangladeshis only did so in significant numbers since the 2000s. But even Asian groups who come here in poverty quickly move up the ladder. In 1980, Vietnamese were among the poorest ethnic groups, having come here as refugees. Today, they have reached economic parity with whites.
(Immigration quotas are a weird one -- on one hand, you want to keep all the H1B visas from going to the mega-consultancies like Tata or Infosys that end up not paying very much, but on the other, of the 18 most populous countries, US is at #3, Russia is at #9, and the rest are outside of Europe. It's probably not racism! But at the same time, it does limit immigration from these larger countries which disproportionately skew Asian in favor of smaller countries that skew white. Europe is split into roughly as many countries as Asia, despite having a sixth of the population!)
I mean, affirmative action as a wedge issue for Asian Americans is already in place, whether it's achieving proportional representation or not -- the premise is that there are already higher admission standards at elite universities for Asian Americans than even whites (see: Harvard lawsuit). I agree with you there, that on the face of it, when taken in isolation, affirmative action is bad for Asian Americans! At the same time, you know which group is really under-represented at Harvard and would benefit from proportional representation? Non-hispanic whites (with "only" 40% of the student body, versus 60% of the US population).
I'm honestly curious to what extent the stats on median household income or whichever metric(s) you're using to gauge economic parity are skewed by the tendency of Asian Americans to concentrate in high cost-of-living urban areas. For instance, it's not a fair comparison to say "oh, Asian Americans who disproportionately live in NYC / SF make more than the median white American who lives in Wisconsin".
Immigration quotas that you speak of were created to increase diversity of immigrants. If we didn’t have them, then Chinese and Indian immigrants would get most of the visas pushing out other countries. It’s actually the opposite of systemic racism since it’s increasing racial diversity of immigrants.
Must be systemic racism.
But we can agree that it exists, right? Whatever term you’d use, the phenomenon it describes is real. And it refers to present injustices as well as historical ones.
If you want to understand why, I'd encourage you to read Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell.
Here's one example:
> These various facts might be summarized as examples of racism, so that the causal question is whether racism is either the cause, or one of the major causes, of poverty and other social problems among black Americans today. Many might consider the obvious answer to be "yes." Yet some incontrovertible facts undermine that conclusion. For example, despite the high poverty rate among black Americans in general, the poverty rate among black married couples has been less than 10 percent every year since 1994.
> The poverty rate of married blacks is not only lower than that of blacks as a whole, but in some years has also been lower than that of whites as a whole. In 2016, for example, the poverty rate for blacks was 22 percent, for whites was 11 percent, and for black married couples was 7.5 percent.
> Do racists care whether someone black is married or unmarried? If not, then why do married blacks escape poverty so much more often than other blacks, if racism is the main reason for black poverty? If the continuing effects of past evils such as slavery play a major causal role today, were the ancestors of today's black married couples exempt from slavery and other injuries?
The problem is the language around "systemic racism" cites outcomes as proof of preexisting conditions. That is, it asserts a tautology without presenting causal links, or ruling out other factors as causes.
When you do consider other factors, the detection of systemic racism collapses into one of point-stupidities (bad policies) and fairly ordinary economic forces not subject to racial choice. This is especially so when you start examining things like South Africa during apartheid (which was an example of systemic racism), or America at the turn of the 20th century.
There are a bundle of assumptions rolled up into that term that each merit discussion. If we're going to ever seriously talk about what behaviors and policies we should adopt, we ought to at least get the causes straight rather than leaping to the conclusion that "it" exists.
The effects of Systemic racism is quantifiable and reproducible. You can simply do things like sending resumes to different employers with no meaningful changed but making the resume seem more like it's written by somebody of a different race. From what I see westernized Asians and Caucasians are preferred, anybody who sounds too foreign or too much like another minority is not.
Affirmative action is meant to counterveil this but in itself is the most brazen and blatent example of systemic racism in society, involving both power and prejudice, since affirmative action has teeth. The entire function of it is to put your finger on the scale to ensure certain racial groups get hired in preference of others.
Sure prejudiced beliefs have likely declined in general since say the 60s but racism is prevalent and omnipresent and hidden behind euphemisms and not called racism. The big reason why "systemic racism" specifically has come into vogue is that people are more opaque and dishonest about their prejudices for the sake of social survival.
People advocate for systemic racism while proudly calling themselves anti racists. Those against affirmative action and such also consider themselves anti-racists, but seem unconcerned that no affirmative action would effectively lead to a society where certain groups will certainly disperportionatey suffer from systemic racism - often conveniently to their own benefit.
I can't see racism as not pervasive, although I think it's easy to start fearing prejudice and microagressions from others that simply don't exist out of paranoia, to end up getting oppressed by phantoms.
To posit the issues as 'merely explaining' is kind of to strawman people's legit concerns.
CRT, for example, goes way beyond 'explaining' - on purpose.
If this were an in issue of merely 'explaining to people who systematic limitations might work' - and being sufficiently nuanced about it, then I think this whole thing would be a lot less controversial.
I think there's a way for us to talk to kids about the potentialities of systematic racism without using the language of activism.
That is not true. Critical Race Theory is a framework for viewing legal and social structures through the lens of race and racism.
I’m not an expert here, but this seems to be a fairly balanced summary: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...
The link you provided is a nice reference, but it's a very small-c conservative description and avoids the harder parts of the issue.
The notion that 'minorities face challenges that majorities will have difficulty perceiving' is not unreasonable. But CRT uses language such as 'White Supremacy' - reminiscent of Men in Pointy White Hats' to describe those 'majority systems'. Their stated objective is to 'deconstruct and destroy Whiteness', implying that the 'majority culture must be removed', and that those who do not realize this and actively participate are holding up structures of White Supremacy.
So they use 'whiteness' in kind of an abstract way, something that 'stands in contrast to blackness' - but they also mean every classical cultural trait.
Things like a 'focus on the correct answer', 'focus on literacy', 'objectivity' etc. - these are artifacts of 'whiteness and white supremacy'.
The link you provided actually is fairly decent, if that text represented CRT then I think there would be controversy, but much less so.
But CRT in practices uses the language of race war: 'Destroy Whiteness or you are a White Supremacist'. In that case 'Whiteness' is effectively an ethnicity, broadly 'Westerners' or 'White People'.
Finally, even if we can agree on what CRT is, it plays heavily into ideological victimhood: 'the student failed to learn to read at a high level because that's a racist, colonial imposition, and shouldn't have to achieve literacy to graduate high school' etc..
When we're talking about 'systematic issues' then those who have a propensity for victimhood can view racism/sexism in literally everything. The 'truck' toy with the 'boy' on the front cover? Gendered language? Your company founders are white and male? It's all oppression.
On one hand, while the notion of systematic racism has legitimacy, CRT ideology opens up an ugly pandora's box that allows people to take an activist perspective on the basis of conjecture about literally everything and it plays directly into, and validates people's worst bigotries.
This article about how 'the sidewalks are racist' is not a joke. They make completely unsubstantiated and bigoted notions about how 'White people walk on sidewalks' at Northwestern U. This is the kind of crude, fantasy racist bigotry, supported and endorsed by CRT thinking. [3]
From the University of Toronto [1]
Wikipedia [2]
[1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory
[3] https://dailynorthwestern.com/2021/04/05/opinion/allen-are-t...