What does “racism” mean? Part 5/5 — Systemic Racism IS Individual Racism
Preamble: This fifth part of five was the hardest to write. I’ve gone back and forth on various drafts for months remaining unsatisfied with the rhetoric. I realized today that the rhetoric was the problem. So I edited it down to the bare bones and just left the emotions on the page. As a father and a soldier and as an American, this is what I feel and I don’t think I’ll ever get the words fundamentally better than this. At some point I’ll aggregate the five parts of this essay into one whole but for now here’s what I got.
Content begins
If systemic racism is a machine which was built by racists decades in the past, ask yourself how that machine keeps running. All machines run down and break. Entropy always wins. Anyone with an old car knows that maintenance is required. Even new cars get refueled. For systemic racism to do its job requires maintenance. Maintenance done by people in the present. The racists who built the system were aware of this. They had no confidence that the rest of the world would share their ideological beliefs so they built the system to reward the people who maintain it.
Property taxes fund public schools. Higher property taxes means better schools. This creates incentives for people to move to wealthy areas. People with good education are more likely to become wealthy. Red lines, historic racism and state boundaries are only a ste away from the grandfather clause. This isn’t segregation “because” of race. It’s just an “oopsie” that all of the black people “happen” to live in the poor places. Add in a cultural myth of meritocracy and you have a society which believes things are “earned” rather than one built on the bones of history.. Wealthy white people segregate themselves not based on skin color but on who “happens” to have more money. Since being “meritorious” gets you more money it must be that being poor is a commentary on character flaws. The elite schools become only for the children of people who “happen” to live in the meritorious parts of America. Never mind the public funds. Never mind the egalitarian principles of the enlightenment. The children of wealthy people deserve a better education than those of the poor. The poor didn’t “earn it”.
Is it possible for one five year old to “deserve” a better education than another? If you believe that your child deserves better public services more than any other child then you and I will never see eye to eye. I am wealthy. My children deserve neither more nor less from public services like the public schools than do any other children. Do I “deserve” the luxuries I enjoy? Maybe, maybe not. Regardless, my children have certainly done nothing one way or the other to have a stake in it. They’re children. The difference in “deserving” is based on what someone has done. My children are all too young still to have DONE anything. What possible moral right could one five year old claim over another?
When you poke at that concept even a little bit it comes unraveled. The beneficiaries of this system quickly turn to statements like, “Do you want me to punish my children for the fact that history was racist?” That moral switch, from analyzing systems of oppression to an analysis of personal incentives is exactly what the architects of systemic racism were counting on. By building a system that benefits the children of non-racists so long as they behave in racist ways, they enshrined racism as a public virtue for generations after their passing. They created truly rational arguments which, on the face of them, have nothing to do with race which justify racist behavior. “I wasn’t being racist. I was just following my rational self interest.”
Racial violence is the flash point for much of the discussion about systemic racism. Watching a video of police murdering an innocent black man is the sort of evidence which is irrefutable. Racism is alive and well in modern day America. Want to say it’s not? Show me a video of police murdering a white kid in public. Even the cleverest racists have a difficult time justifying these murders without invoking explicitly racist ideas Hell, a whole bunch of them marched down the street shouting “Jews will not replace us” and America wanted to have a “civil discussion” about it.
White people in America are horrified when they see these videos, not because of the inherent violence of the act, but because it shows them an America that they don’t want to think about.. Many white people can’t possibly imagine a police officer treating them or their family that way. They are forced to choose between two realities. One in which the American system regularly brutalizes black people or one in which that cop in particular was just “a bad apple”. With each successive video depicting casual murder, it becomes increasingly difficult for people to convince themselves that the problem is individual police officers.
Racial police violence is, unfortunately, only the last mile in a very long pipeline of racial oppression. Police are put in a very difficult situation. The general populace endorses laws and criminal justice tactics which result in racial violence. Police are supposed to be violent towards criminals. Police are supposed to protect people’s lives and their property. Police are supposed to ensure that law abiding citizens aren’t bothered by people disrupting good order. These principles are broadly endorsed by the public. Doubly so by the wealthy. They endorse them “in principle” and never examine either the motivation or the result.
There’s a reason that one of Dr. King’s most important pieces of writing was the “Letter from a Birmingham jail”. Even peaceful mechanisms of effective change are illegal. The key word there, of course, is “effective”. Beneficiaries of our system are very quick to endorse peaceful mechanisms of change which are ineffective. They focus on the “peaceful” aspects of Dr. King’s work and gloss over the “civil disobedience” aspects. When people peacefully blockade interstates with marches, “law abiding citizens” call for the murder of dissidents. “Those hooligans are disrupting the economy”. Of course the police had to shoot at them. Beneficiaries of our system don’t generally say that police should refrain from shooting non-violent criminals all together. After all, people need to get to work. When someone is protesting the system in a way that actually matters … kill them.
That is the end game of systemic racism. Somewhere in that last mile of the pipeline is faith. Faith that if a police officer killed someone then they must have done something to deserve to die. Very little is required to justify it. A drug charge five years ago. A rape allegation. A hasty movement while disclosing a legally owned firearm. It doesn’t take much. Literally whatever excuse someone can come up with other than “they were black”. Just a word from the powers that be about how “scared” the big tough police officer was is enough to mollify the masses.
Almost no one who benefits from a rigged game wants to look into how the dice are loaded. They want to believe that they’re just lucky. Or they want to believe that their “system” of blowing on the dice and chanting “money money money” is the cause of their prosperity. Anything. Literally anything. So that the prosperous don’t realize, “Oh it’s because I’m white that my mediocrity got elevated to godhood.”
The true tragedy is that the poor white people are roped into the delusion. I grew up poor. I’ve been homeless. I’ve been arrested. Each and every time I came out the other side stronger and ready to continue the fight. I’ve used my failures to forge a stronger self and to build towards greater heights mindful not to make the same mistakes. It would be so easy to convince myself that it was because I was smarter or stronger or more virtuous. It would be so easy to think that I “earned” what I have. It would be so easy … if I forgot my black brothers and sisters who died in hardships that gave me only a few bruises.
Every time you say “all lives matter” as a response to “black lives matter”, you’re greasing the wheels of the racism machine.
Every time you talk about “lowering the bar” in reference to equity initiatives, you’re greasing the wheels of the racism machine.
Every time you ask “well was he really an angel?”, you’re greasing the wheels of the racism machine.
Every time you refuse to acknowledge the obvious truth that it is FAR better in modern America to be white than black, you’re greasing the wheels of the racism machine.
Fuck the machine. Live free or die.
