The Past in the Present
More than 150 years after slavery's legal end, de facto segregation, racial discrimination, and other forms of subtle and blatant exclusion are still with us – part of a system of prejudice that perpetuates inequality in America. While discrimination against many groups has occurred throughout American history (Native Americans, religious minorities, and ethnic immigrants from Europe and Asia, for example), discrimination against African Americans presents a unique prism to examine the cruel machinations of systemic racism. Systemic racism's impact on America can be seen in historical data, in modern sociological statistics, and in the racial reasoning that shapes our present. It forms a unique American reality scarred by divisions, tensions, and violence.
Systemic racism upholds fixed stereotypes and racist attitudes that sustain enduring structures of inequality in education, housing, employment, wealth, and overall well-being for Black Americans. America's long history of negligence toward addressing systemic racism, whether on the part of institutions or individuals, challenges our most cherished American ideals. As Ronald Dworkin observes, “No government is legitimate that does not show equal concern for the fate of all those citizens over whom it claims dominion and from whom it claims allegiance. Equal concern is the sovereign virtue of political community – without it government is only tyranny – and when a nation's wealth is very unequally distributed, as the wealth of even very prosperous nations now is, then its equal concern is suspect” (Dworkin 2000:1). As Dworkin describes, modern nations rely upon communities stitched together with a shared sense of common good. In order to be successful, a nation must uphold the dignity and rights of all individuals and treat its citizens with equal respect under the law. To not commit to a bold, all-embracing vision for all individuals is to underwrite a kind of communal and material failure, a failure which in turn becomes enshrined in a nation's laws and codes.
And yet the failure to fully engage with inequality and racism is not just a “policy” failure. At its heart, racial injustice is a spiritual problem that threatens the secular success of the American state. As a fundamentally immaterial challenge, racial justice echoes concepts of human dignity – that unalterable condition that applies to all human beings. Human dignity brings attention to the sacred nature of all of us. The scourge of racism is evil and the antithesis to dignity. Where racism exists, corruption abounds. Where corruption exists, racial injustice in all its forms – individual and institutional – stands to destroy the moral standards and integrity of a society and nation. The blight of racism and the prescription for its eradication are matters critical to the survival of any Republic. Every citizen and every institution must make a determined effort to bring about racial equality.
At its heart, racial injustice is a spiritual problem that threatens the secular success of the American state. As a fundamentally immaterial challenge, racial justice echoes concepts of human dignity – that unalterable condition that applies to all human beings. Human dignity brings attention to the sacred nature of all human beings. In contrast, the scourge of racism is evil and the antithesis to dignity. Where racism exists, corruption abounds. Where corruption exists, racial injustice in all its forms – individual and institutional – stands to destroy the moral standards and integrity of a society and nation. The blight of racism and the prescription for its eradication are matters critical to the survival of any Republic. Every citizen and every institution must make a determined effort to bring about racial equality. Dismantling systemic racism is a daunting task – but so is maintaining the status quo. America's greatness, and its potential for prosperity, happiness, and peace, is a worthy goal. Yet before this goal can be reached, there must be an assessment of the barriers to this goal.
The Present in the Past
Racial prejudice and the entrenched divide between Black and White America remain features of American society – and all racial prejudice springs from the corrupted root of slavery. Though it has metastasized to more modern forms of systemic racism, slavery acts as a kind of big bang that gave shape to the nation's moral cosmology. One recent event embodies the long drift from slavery to systemic racism. In June 2015, nine parishioners at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, were killed after they invited a young man into their Bible study. Twenty-one-year-old Dylann Roof had been welcomed with open arms, yet he still decided to murder those assembled. After investigating the case for months, Pulitzer Prize essayist Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah (2017) noted the cultural environment in which Roof was raised:
Dylann Roof was educated in a state whose educational standards from 2011 are full of lesson plans that focus on what Casey Quinlan, a policy reporter, said was “the viewpoint of slave owners” and highlight “the economic necessity of slave labor.” A state that flew the Confederate flag until a Black woman named Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole and pulled it down. A place that still has a bronze statue of Benjamin Tillman standing at its statehouse in Columbia. Tillman was a local politician who condoned “terrorizing the Negroes at the first opportunity by letting them provoke trouble and then having the Whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable … to rescue South Carolina from the rule of the alien, the traitor, and the semi-barbarous negroes.”
Roof also noted how his education-by-internet had formed his views, when he tumbled down some of its particularly nasty byways. The internet website to which Roof referred was masked and designed to look “normal,” while in reality it was a White supremacist propaganda site designed to provoke hatred. The content communicated in such websites is a form of systemic racism perpetrated through the internet:
Roof explained how he was not raised a racist but through his exposure to the Internet, “me and White friends would sometimes would [sic] watch things that would make us think that ‘Blacks were the real racists’ … but there was no real understanding behind it.” He later noted:
The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up … It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words ‘Black on White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal Black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these Black on White murders got ignored?
(Roof nd; https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/dylann-roof-manifesto-full-text)
Roof (nd) finally concluded:
Segregation was not a bad thing. It was a defensive measure. Segregation did not exist to hold back Negroes. It existed to protect us from them. And I mean that in multiple ways. Not only did it protect us from having to interact with them, and from being physically harmed by them, but it protected us from being brought down to their level.
Understanding Systemic Racism
To dismantle systemic racism, we must first understand what systemic racism is. Systemic racism is:
… a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. It identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with “whiteness” and disadvantages associated with “color” to endure and adapt over time. Structural racism is not something that only a few people or institutions choose to practice. Instead it has been a feature of the social, economic and political systems in which we all exist.
(Aspect Institute 2019)
Systemic racism moves through the social structures of the day. “A social structure,” according to Peter Blau (1977:4), “can be defined as a multidimensional space of differentiated social positions among which a population is distributed. The social associations of people provide both the criterion for distinguishing social positions and the connections among them that make them elements of a single social structure.” Social structures are made up of social actors whose interactions and relationships determine their social position. Social positions, in turn, shape opportunities, or the lack of opportunities, for life choices and the well-being of individuals and groups.
Anti-Black systemic racism occurs within organizations and in cultural settings whereby employment, housing, education, health care, and other such structures combine to produce racialized outcomes. As such, systemic racism casts a wide shadow on societal structures. It consists of a system-wide network of organizations that form an organic whole which negatively affects the lives of both individuals and populations. Systemic racism...
