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Answering “Systemic Racism”
The claim of “systemic racism” is not merely a vicious slander against a great country. It’s also a terribly damaging fiction, an excuse that prevents us from looking for the actual causes of failure within our at-risk communities.
Those who invoke this fiction are culpable in the perpetuation of real human suffering. They need to be called out on it, accused of wittingly or unwittingly abetting violence and injustice. Because that’s what they’re doing.
They aren’t simply mistaken (though they are certainly mistaken), they’re destructive. They’re hurting people, just as surely as a quack doctor advising people to forgo medical care for a serious illness and, instead, take some ineffectual nostrum would be hurting people.
It isn’t enough to respond to the systemic racism charge as I’ve habitually responded to it, with a “no, that’s not true, we really aren’t a racist country.” This isn’t a rarified academic discussion, something about which reasonable and unreasonable people can agree to disagree. People are dying, lives are being wasted and ruined. Human potential is being extinguished. Young women are trying to kill other young women with knives (watch the video). Young men are kicking young women in the head as the women lie on the sidewalk (again, watch the video). And morons, including elected morons, are calling for the police to be taken off the street because they’d rather win political points than look for real answers to deep and serious problems.
We need to tell people to stop making excuses for violence, to stop turning a blind eye toward murder, shootings, abuse, addiction, horrible schools, and broken homes. That’s what saying “systemic racism” does, and we have to figure out how to communicate to the people who say it that, far from having the moral high ground, they’re a big part of the problem.
Published in Domestic Policy
Racism is impossible without “race”. I’ll argue again that “race” is merely a social construct, and no matter how benignly it was originally intended by Europeans as a reference to certain newly-discovered foreign populations, it clearly is being propounded and used today by political forces to delay and decay the social and educational environment of a particular group of citizens. What is more, in order to further foment discord in America, “race” is now being redefined and its hierarchies are being restructured to meet short-live temporal political objectives. The broad heading to these reclassifications is the social and economic proximity of “white adjacent” and “black adjacent” population groups, such as south Asians, east Asians, Pacific islanders, various “indigenous” people, and Hispanics and “non-white Hispanics”, which shift adjacency depending on the desired outcome, and whom the government wants to reward and whom it wants demonize and punish at the moment.
Though I’m sure I can be dissuaded of this, I am coming to the belief that there is “systemic racism” in America, not among the general citizenry, but, if not in the law itself (though I think it is there) then certainly in the government, its bureaucracies, and its “government-adjacent” government-subsidized corporations and non-profit organizations.
At the very least the government’s sponsoring of CRT is evidence of blatant bureaucratized racism. It this systemic yet?
Hey! Spin! Long time no see.
It’s ingenious deviltry isn’t it.
Three Card Monty with human beings.
I see now that my comment had already been roundly stated by pretty much everyone. :)
To paraphrase Ben Shapiro, to those who talk of systemic racism I say show me a racist policy or a racist official acting against others because of race and I will stand with you to fight them. Otherwise, we’re just fighting ghosts.
Unconscious racism? That’s a ghost of a ghost.
That’s what I’ve been saying!
I agree with much of this comment.
I think that we should just disregard race, and treat people as individuals. If we were doing do, I would have minimal interest in evaluating genetic differences between different racial or ethnic groups, or whether such differences affect various traits, characteristics, behaviors, or outcomes. It would be a potentially interesting academic question, but of no practical importance.
This is not possible in the current political environment, because of accusations of racism that accompany every difference in average outcome between groups. When this accusation becomes an important political issue, questions of race and ethnicity, and culture, become important in order to empirically evaluate the credibility of the claim of racism.
I continue to disagree with your assertion that race is a social construct. It is not, and it has a biological basis. But I would agree that the way that we think about race is partly a social construct. The part that is a social construct relates to our methods of grouping — usually black vs. white, plus some other fairly large groups.
[Cont’d]
By the time you get to the point where you’re arguing whether or not race is real, you’ve lost the audience. I’m looking for ways to push back against the systemic racism canard by turning around the moral position. Not just denying it’s real, but arguing that it’s a hurtful and destructive fiction.
Don’t bother with logic. Go directly for emotion and honor. We are terrible ape-scum and most of us can’t really do logic.
Think of your audience. Those who play the race card have always counted on moral authority to implicitly stand behind them. The systemic race card, however, is on the wrong side of the moral equation, and in an obvious way. Use that.
That’s what I’ve been saying. The problem is that it isn’t, or hasn’t been, an acute pain. They ways in which the notion is harmful are diverse and a bit of a dull ache. But the burning of cities makes the pain acute. They will argue that the burning and looting is in response to systemic racism. And we will say “It is in response to the notion of systemic racism”, but that isn’t the same thing. And at that point, you’ve also lost the audience.
The political leaders of the majority black county that i live in have indulged themselves in the rhetoric of systemic racism. Although to some degree, it may pander to their primary constituency, there is a backlash coming. The property tax paying latinos gonna aren’t gonna buy it any more than caucasians do. They will note the color and gender of those wearing the judicial robes, and of those who sit in council, and once police depts. become less white, what excuse will be left?
Schools will become a war ground. The day of reckoning is coming for the power hungry folks here who like to call themselves the “majority minority”. To them, the monopoly of power seems guaranteed by the ballot box. Time will tell.
This is so true. I’ve been say it as well. There is no systemic racism. They can’t even define what systemic is. It’s baloney and we need to resist acceptance of it when it is invoked.
I don’t think that matters. I am given to understand that the Minneapolis police chief is black, that most of the leadership of the police department is black, and a large percentage of the police force are black. Yet that doesn’t stop the peddlers of systemic racism from saying that George Floyd was killed as the result of it.
I can show you quite a bit of systemic racism, but it is in favor of blacks (and some other minorities).
Our current VP was selected because of her race and sex.
Many, many colleges and universities have explicit preferences in favor of black students.
I think that this is going on in a great many corporations, and has been for many years, but I don’t have the empirical evidence or specific examples to hand.
I’ve even noticed, over the past year or so, what seems to be a strange prevalence of so-called “black and brown” people in advertisements and TV shows. It looks like many entertainment outlets are making hiring decisions on the basis of race or ethnicity, in the anti-white direction.
I’ve heard of local government policies offering money, or Covid shots, or the like, to racial minorities but not whites. Even President Biden said something along these lines, if I recall correctly.
Then there’s the selective news. If some black guy or gal is shot by the cops, it’s all over the news and the Twitterverse, no matter how justified the action. If it’s some white guy or gal, who cares.
It is getting quite annoying. It’s almost as if some powerful spirit, full of hatred and malice, is trying to set us all at each other’s throats.
They can define it. Systemic racism are the structures (and by structures they do not mean laws) and language devised by white people to maintain white supremacy and white power. For instance the language of “equality” is designed to deflect away from the real issue of “equity”. It is why the renaming of things is so important to the Woke. Any group differences which show unequal outcomes for any groups other than whites are examples of systemic racism. To argue against this definition is evidence you are a racist. It is why CRT advocates will not debate you, because the language you would use to debate them is merely a tool of white supremacy and they will not accept that as a valid premise.
Yes, it’s crazy, but that is how they think.
And by “they” I also include the Biden Administration.
I call that force Mara. He’s a jerk. This is him trying to interfere with the Buddha.
Maybe Mara needs a sex robot.
Ask a wokist to define either systemic or racism and his answer will be pure nonsense. This is by design. They’ve lost all the rational arguments, and the right is having a dickens trying to argue against the irrational.