What does “racism” mean? Part 4/5 — What does “systemic racism” mean?
Systemic racism is something which didn’t get talked about much in my childhood. It definitely didn’t get talked about in those terms. “Racism” was always something that a person did. It might be the case that a group of racist people did racist things as a group. It might even be the case that they created a racist organization that racist people could join for racist reasons. But even then, the reason that the group was racist was that the individuals in it were racist. As far as I knew for a very long time, “individual racism” was all that “racism” was about. It wasn’t until my adult life that I encountered the concept of a racist system which is racist in and of itself without any person thinking overtly racist thoughts. Expanding my understanding of racism required foundational work in my understanding of the world. I wanted to understand what people meant when they said “systemic racism” so I talked to people and read on the topic. If you’re a person who, like myself, grew up understanding “racism” to be identical to the concept of “individual racism” then hopefully this will help you better understand what people mean when they say “systemic racism” too. It begins with the concept of “social technology”.
“Technology” is something that most people have an intuitive understanding of. It’s the stuff that humans make to do things for them. Artifacts are usually what comes to mind most easily when I think about technology. Things like buildings or running water. Maybe more advanced technology like electricity, automobiles or computers. If you’re like me then when you think of “technology” it’s unlikely that what you think of first are things like handshakes or fashion or voting. Those are technologies though. They were all invented by people in order to serve some social purpose. Some were invented intentionally with lots of experimentation and deliberate intention. Others came about by accident through the natural flow of life and were maintained and built up because they were useful. In fact, social technologies are some of the oldest types of technology humans have. Rituals, legends, taboos and customs are all forms of social technology. So long as it serves a social purpose and was either created, discovered or curated by person for that purpose then it’s a “social technology”. The fear of spiders wouldn’t count because that’s instinctual. Neither would someone’s personal habit of checking the locks on their house before leaving. That’s internal to that person’s life and isn’t part of a social context.
To give a concrete non-trivial example, consider the Catholic habit of tracing the outline of a cross over their head, shoulders and heart when passing a church. It serves many social purposes without needing to draw people’s explicit attention to those purposes. Once it becomes habit, monitoring for churches while you drive becomes as automatic as monitoring for children. It’s simply one of the things that you’re looking out for on the road. Without making people think to much about it, that habit reminds people of their religious affiliation constantly. Even though I am no longer Catholic I still find that I have the urge sometimes when I drive past a church. That technology is still active, regularly reminding me of the religion I used to be a member of. Social technology can be as simple as that example, a small habit to remind a person of their social affiliations but they can be much more complex.
The United States justice system is social technology writ large. There is no possible way to derive the rituals and customs associated with a US courtroom from natural laws. Nothing in physics will help you to understand why a bailiff says “all rise” when a judge enters the courtroom wearing their formal black robes. However, it is important that the bailiff says those words and it’s important that the judge wears those robes. The bailiff’s pronouncement ritualistically transforms the courtroom from one state of affairs to another in a very efficient manner. The judge’s black robes serve as an easy visual cue to identify them no matter where in the room they are and no matter what the specific configuration of the room is. These facts and a million more are all vital components to the mechanical functioning of a US courtroom. If the judge came into the room wearing jeans and a t-shirt the cases would still get heard and verdicts would still get rendered but the court would function ever so slightly less efficiently because of the small amount of extra effort everyone would have to exert in order to remind themselves who the judge is. It would be a grit of sand in the gears of the legal machine.
The US legal system contains the courtrooms I just described and is built to serve many different purposes. In addition to the federal and state laws which govern the legal system there are many rites, customs and scripts which constitute the guts of this gigantic machine. No single person understands the operations of the entire system. It’s simply too complex for a single mind to encapsulate it all. Lawyers spend many years studying and practicing the law in order to become experts in some very small portion of the system. This means that a reductionist approach of understanding the legal system by understanding the internal relationships of its component parts isn’t possible. It’s just too complicated. The only real way to understand what the system is “doing” at a macro-scale is to examine what outcomes it achieves in various situations.
The Supreme Court has generally acknowledged this fact. One key way it has done so is by upholding that “disparate impact” is a sufficient condition to establish discrimination. This has been tested several times, particularly in reference to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. If some practice which, on the surface, seems completely racially neutral reliably produces outcomes that favor one race over another then that practice is in violation of the law. You don’t need to prove malicious intent and you don’t need to explain exactly how the practice causes the favoritism. You only need to prove that, in otherwise identical circumstances, the practice causes better outcomes for people of one race over another on average. This legal doctrine was the first thing that began to help me understand what “systemic racism” means. A system is racist if it treats people of different races differently even if they are otherwise the same in all relevant ways. Even if individual rules such as “must be able to read in order to vote” seem like they are racially neutral on the face of it, they may still be intentionally or unintentionally causing racially biased outcomes.
The “same in all relevant ways” provides the real complexity though. What are the “relevant ways” that people can be different which justifies different treatment? If there is a difference in outcomes for people in different racial groups is it because of their race or is it because of some other “relevant” difference which “just happens” to correlate with race? One example of this is the fact that black men are far more likely to serve time in prison than are white men. Some people attempt to explain this by claiming that black people simply commit more crimes. They say that poverty is correlated with crime and, while it’s unfortunate that black people are in poverty, that doesn’t change the fact that they committed a crime. This argument has some amount of merit for some violent crimes and we’ll get back to those later but drug usage is a completely different story. There’s a fairly good deal of data that says white people do just as many drugs as black people but do far less prison time for them. At every stage of the process, black people are treated more harshly. They’re more likely to be arrested, more likely to be prosecuted, more likely to be convicted and more likely to get long prison sentences. Most people would agree that the only relevant factor for whether someone should go to prison for a crime is whether or not they committed the crime. Since white people and black people do drugs at roughly the same rates it must be irrelevant factors that cause the disparity. In fact it’s many irrelevant factors but tracing them all would take a book so I’ll just trace though one.
Whether or not a district attorney chooses to prosecute a case is almost completely up to the district attorney themselves. A grand jury can prevent a DA from bringing a case to trial but no one can make a DA prosecute a case that they don’t want to prosecute. In the real world, DAs take many things into account when determining whether to take a case to trial. Untangling the motives behind decisions is difficult if not impossible. So, to best illustrate racism without racists, let’s assume that the DAs motives are as pure as possible. In this example, all the DA considers is whether they think the person committed the crime and whether they think they can win the case. Whether they can get a conviction is important because a DA has limited resources and literally can’t try all of the people arrested for crimes (more on this later). They have to drop the charges on some and plea bargain with others in order to whittle things down to a manageable caseload. One of the factors which contributes to whether or not the DA can win a case is whether or not a person can afford a private attorney or has to use the public defender. This is largely because public defender’s offices are usually funded at much lower rates than the district attorney’s offices. Even with the exact same evidence for the exact same crime, a DA is much more likely to win against a public defender than against a private attorney. It’s not that public defenders are worse attorneys. It’s simply that since they’re funded at lower rates than the DA, each individual public defense attorney usually has several times as many cases as each prosecuting attorney.
So all things being equal, if the DA has to choose between prosecuting a person who can afford a private attorney and a person who can’t, the DA will likely choose to prosecute the poor person. Since black people in the US are on average poorer than white people in the US, district attorneys are more likely to prosecute black people solely for this reason which, in and of itself, is indifferent to race. This hypothetical DA will choose to prosecute a poor white person over a rich black person. Race isn’t the factor which the DA is using. They’re only using a factor which correlates with race. So a factor which is not relevant to the decision is causing disparate outcomes for people of different races. It’s racism without racists.
That example is a fairly simple and transparent one. It intentionally wiped out millions of other tiny components of a district attorney’s decision of whether or not to prosecute someone. It even included two things that I stuck a pin in to get back to. Isolating the impact poverty has on a DA’s likelihood of prosecuting a case from all of the other factors in a real case is nearly impossible. This is one of the reasons that systemic racism is so hard to understand. People who have been subject to it understand it at a holistic level because of its presence in their daily lives. But even people who live with it as a reality usually can’t dissect the causal chain of a specific case in order to isolate how racism was introduced. Meanwhile, some people who benefit from systemic racism simply think that they caught a lucky break and don’t realize that the dice they rolled were loaded. It’s just the default background music of their life that never even rises to the level of conscious attention. The fact that much of the US is still racially segregated makes it unlikely that the beneficiaries of systemic racism will ever see the harm it causes, even second hand. A system so complex that no single person can understand all of it with racism been woven through it so subtly that it can be virtually invisible to the people who benefit from it. No wonder it wasn’t a concept which came naturally to me, one of its beneficiaries. But when I back up and look at the numbers it becomes clear that it’s a system that benefits one race over another. The example of jail time due to drug usage is just one example among many. So that leaves the question, how does a system become “racist without racists”? There are two main ways that I’ve learned about.
Firstly, “racism without racists” means currently the system would behave in racist ways without having racist people in it. It doesn’t mean that it wasn’t built by racists. For example, red lining was an explicitly racist practice but it plays a big part in why schools with a primarily black student body receive less funding than schools with a primarily whit student body. To understand why you have to consider how it has interacted with the laws which fund public schools in the US. Public schools are primarily funded through local property taxes. This means that if the houses near your school are expensive then the school gets more funding than if the houses near your school are cheap. Red lining kept black people out of white neighborhoods and ensured that the wealth in white communities only went towards educating white children. Even after the US Supreme Court stuck down red lining as racist, the funding of schools through local property taxes fueled “the great white flight” and ensured that racial distribution in places like the San Francisco Bay area wouldn’t change. Even today, the places where black people live are the areas where those red lines were drawn. There’s nothing overtly racist about funding public schools through local property taxes. However, in the context of historic wealth distribution and with an awareness of red lining’s overtly racist interaction with it, this practice serves to maintain a grossly inequitable funding of education for people of different races. So in some cases, the racist system was created by racists for racist reasons. It’s just on autopilot now being driven by economic factors.
Secondly, the construction of social technology isn’t a constant forward march towards ever improving systems. Changes to the system are frequently bad and need to be reverted. In America such mistakes are often corrected at local or regional levels of government. Few truly new ideas get implemented at the national level without first having been tested at the state level. The prohibition of alcohol is one of the few notable exceptions where the US federal government made a change to the system which was later reverted because it was deemed to have been a mistake. Usage of conscription for the military is another example although it has not been publicly acknowledged as a mistake in the same way as prohibition was.
The fact that some changes get reverted after being identified as mistakes is relevant to systemic racism because they have to be identified. Social technology is rarely, if ever, designed and constructed with the same level of care and testing as things like airplanes. If nothing goes obviously wrong after a new law is passed or procedure is implemented then it’s likely to stay. Laws which disadvantage a minority of people are less likely to be recognized as bad simply because fewer people see the negative effects. Also, if the law or procedure disadvantages people with political power then the people who notice will be more likely to have the power to do something about it. Because of those reasons we should expect that changes to social technology which negatively impact black people in the US will build up at a faster rate than changes which negatively impact white people. Not because of any individual being racist but solely because changes that negatively impact white people are more likely to get noticed by people with the power to fix them.
That is how you get racism without racists. Sometimes through malice and sometimes through chance. Changes get made which advantage the majority and disadvantage the minority. They have become entrenched in our social technologies and are neither easy to identify nor easy to remove. Well intended people, like the fictional DA I constructed, do their jobs as best as they can with true civic duty as their motivation. That DA only cares about whether a person is guilty and whether they can successfully get a conviction. However, because of the constraints within which they’re working, their actions systematically disadvantage black people. That DA might even feel really bad about it and wish the world were different. They might wish that more black people could afford private attorneys. Of course, despite all of that wishing, that DA is unlikely to advocate for increasing the funding of the public defender’s office to match that of the DA’s office. They’re even less likely to advocate for reducing the funding of the DA’s office. That, along with the two things I said I’d get back to, are where I’ll start the fifth and final part of this essay.
