I admit—though I am embarrassed to admit it—I was shocked by the murder of George Floyd. How could a police officer kill a man over the course of nine minutes in broad daylight in front of onlookers with cell phone cameras? How does that happen in 21st-century America?
The media coverage of George Floyd’s murder drew my attention to the murders of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and the startling reality that charges were not brought in these cases until there was a massive public outcry. (Charges still have not been brought in the case of Breonna Taylor.) It seemed obvious that racism—the likes of which I thought long since dead and buried—was alive and well.
Then I saw a contrasting viewpoint in the form of a viral social media video from Candace Owens who asserted that George Floyd was not the saint the media were making him out to be. He had a dense criminal past including threatening a pregnant woman by pointing a gun at her womb. At the time of his murder George Floyd had drugs in his system. I was confused as to why the stories I had read/heard had downplayed or omitted this information.
Later in an interview with Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens asserted that systemic racism was absolutely not real and that black people were responsible for improving the situation of black people. She cited black excellence in sports and her own experience of victimhood being foisted on her by others as evidence.
The two competing views of George Floyd’s life could be reconciled in my mind. It is possible for anyone to have made bad—even loathsome—choices and yet be undeserving of murder. The question of the reality of systemic racism was harder to answer. In my gut, I felt Mrs. Owens was wrong but I didn’t have a stable of facts with which to refute her claim.
Since then, I have sought to learn about systemic racism against black people in America. I am by no means an expert (and I am not done learning) but I conclude that systemic racism is a fact in America. Even in 2022. Even after the protests following George Floyd’s murder. I am not equipped to offer a comprehensive analysis of systemic racism but I will offer evidence of it in criminal justice, education, and wealth. I will also explain why I believe the solution to systemic racism “belongs to the nation”.
Two notes before I begin:
1) In her book White Rage, Professor Carol Anderson outlines the various iterations of race-based social control in America from chattel slavery to the present day. Although it can be argued that the current glaring inequalities between Blacks and Whites are the bitter fruit of centuries of chattel slavery followed by the black codes, convict-leasing, Jim Crow, redlining, disenfranchisement, lynchings, and other forms of oppression, that is not the argument I am making here. Instead, I plan to cite contemporary examples of systemic racism. In most, if not all, cases these current examples have their roots in older systems. However, I want to avoid giving the impression that Blacks are merely just recovering from old systemic racism and that—if just given enough time—eventually we’ll all be on equal footing.
2) In this essay when I refer to systemic racism, I am talking about a law, policy, or other structure that adversely impacts a racial group whether or not that impact was intended. It is deceptively easy to think that if a law, policy, or other structure is not intended (at least on the face of it) to adversely affect a racial group then it cannot be racist.
Systemic racism in criminal justice
The United States of America is the world leader in incarceration with 2 million people in prison or jail. That is a 500% increase over the last 40 years (The Sentencing Project). In the introduction to The New Jim Crow, activist and author Michelle Alexander notes that, “No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.” A report to the UN on sentencing disparities adds, “Although African Americans and Latinos comprise 29% of the U.S. population, they make up 57% of the U.S. prison population. This results in imprisonment rates for African-American and Hispanic adults that are 5.9 and 3.1 times the rate for white adults, respectively—and at far higher levels in some states” (The Sentencing Project). Those figures balloon when you add in those people on probation or parole. In 2010, roughly twice as many people were on probation as were incarcerated (The New Jim Crow, 128).
The racial disparity in rates of incarceration is usually explained away as a result of higher rates of violent crime among black men. This is not the case. Alexander notes in the third chapter of The New Jim Crow, “homicide convictions account for 0.4 percent of the past decade’s growth in the federal prison population, while drug convictions account for nearly 61 percent of that expansion.” According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, total violent crime has decreased by almost 4% since 2010; the rate of violent crime per 100,000 inhabitants fell by almost 10%. It might sound like mass incarceration is responsible for the decrease in violent crime but “as numerous researchers have shown, violent crime rates have fluctuated over the years and bear little relationship to incarceration rates” (The New Jim Crow). The racial disparity in rates of incarceration is due much more to the prosecution of the War on Drugs than to rates of violent crime.
On the face of it, the War on Drugs appears to be race-neutral—it is a war on a thing not a people. However, its execution has been extremely racially lopsided. In 2000, Human Rights Watch reported that “the impact of incarceration as a weapon in the war against drugs has fallen disproportionately on black Americans. Blacks are overrepresented in U.S. prisons relative to their proportion of the population and…relative to their rates of drug offending.” The report also found that in several states blacks comprised a staggering 90 percent of all those admitted to prison for drug offenses; in one third of states they comprised more than 75 percent of drug-related prison admissions. “The drug offender admissions rate for black men ranges from 60 to a breathtaking 1,146 per 100,000 black men. The white rate, in contrast, begins at 6 and rises no higher than 139 per 100,000 white men.”
Perhaps the overrepresentation of blacks in the prison system is due to their much higher rates of selling and using drugs? Not so. For example, in a 2000 study of drug use by students the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that “for all drugs, licit and illicit, African American [high school] seniors reported lifetime, annual, 30-day, and daily prevalence of use rates that are lower—sometimes dramatically lower—than those for White or Hispanic seniors. …the same can be said for African American students in eighth and tenth grades;…therefore, the low usage rates in twelfth grade almost certainly are not due to differential dropout rates” (Monitoring the Future, p. 76, emphasis in the original). That same year, Human Rights Watch cited government data that white youth were actually the most likely of any racial or ethnic group to be guilty of possessing and selling illegal drugs (The New Jim Crow). The previously mentioned report to the UN affirms this fact: “More than one in four people arrested for drug law violations in 2015 was black, although drug use rates do not differ substantially by race and ethnicity and drug users generally purchase drugs from people of the same race or ethnicity” (The Sentencing Project). Now, it should be noted that this disparity statistic from 2015—blacks were roughly 13% of the US population and roughly 30% of those arrested for drug law violations (Drug Policy Alliance)—is a decrease from the disparity rates in the mid-90s referenced by Human Rights Watch and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. In an essay for the Brennan Center, Nkechi Taifa also cites progress in the form of the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act that reduced the sentencing disparity between powder and crack cocaine, the Supreme Court Ruling in Miller v. Alabama that mandatory life sentences without parole for children violated the Eighth Amendment, and the 2013 Smart on Crime policies that favored prosecuting major drug traffickers as opposed to small time dealers or users (2021). All these trends may be good but there is still little cause for celebration because the legal system that created the disparity in the first place is still deeply flawed.
The legal framework that allowed the War on Drugs to incarcerate an inordinate number of black Americans still exists. This framework consists of a series of Supreme Court decisions that eroded constitutional guarantees of legal due process for all citizens. The New Jim Crow offers a much more detailed analysis of these cases but I’ll offer three examples here:
In Whren v. United States the US Supreme Court held that police officers are allowed to use minor traffic violations as a pretext for stopping a vehicle to search for drugs. The Court held that this does not violate the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. The issue becomes that if police can search any and all vehicles (because no one can follow all traffic laws perfectly all the time) they have to use their discretion instead of the higher standards of probable cause and reasonable suspicion. Operating solely from discretion—”I’ll stop whomever I think I should stop”—makes the first step of the process susceptible to huge amounts of conscious and unconscious bias. Now the Court did appear to offer a check and balance to Whren by stating that victims of race discrimination could state a claim under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment but this is a bitter irony given our next case—McClesky v. Kemp.
In McClesky v. Kemp, a black man (Warren McClesky) who had murdered a white police officer sought to challenge his death sentence on the grounds the Georgia’s death penalty scheme was racially biased and violated the Fourteenth Amendment. McClesky’s case hinged on the Baldus study—an exhaustive examination of more than two thousand murder cases in Georgia. After accounting for all nonracial variables, the Baldus study found that defendants charged with killing white victims were over 4 times more likely to receive a death sentence than defendants charged with killing blacks. The Supreme Court rejected McClesky’s claim. They did acknowledge the clear statistical evidence of racial bias but stated that unless there was evidence of conscious racial bias (i.e., a prosecutor or juror or judge saying, “I’m gonna sentence him to death just because he’s black”) then there was no unlawful discrimination. To make matters worse, the majority opinion from the Court acknowledged that long-standing rules prevent litigants from discovering the prosecution’s motives or charging patterns in a case. The same holds true for jurors. In essence, the very evidence someone would need in order to make a case of racial discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment is evidence they won’t have access to. (This catch-22 also appears in United States v. Armstrong.)
The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a speedy trial by one’s peers. In the case of black Americans, this was not a guarantee until the 1985 Supreme Court decision in Batson v. Kentucky which stated that a prosecutor could not prevent a juror from serving solely because of their race. Even after Batson it was a tenuous “guarantee”; in order to craft an all-white jury, prosecutors were now required to come up with other reasons for preemptively striking someone from jury service. Unfortunately, just ten years after Batson, the Supreme Court ruled in Purkett v. Elm that just about any race-neutral reason—even one that is ludicrous—will satisfy the requirement of Batson. In Purkett the prosecutor struck one juror just because he had long curly hair and a goatee. Another juror was struck because he had a mustache and a goatee and “the beards look suspicious to me” (The New Jim Crow). The Supreme Court said that the prosecutor does not need to provide “an explanation that is persuasive or even plausible” (Purkett v. Elm, 768). In an ironic twist that harks back to McClesky, the Court added, “Unless a discriminatory intent is inherent in the prosecutor's explanation, the reason offered will be deemed race neutral” (Purkett v. Elm, 768). Thus, the tremendously low bar established by McClesky and Purkett will only keep out prosecutors who are foolish enough to explicitly state racist intent in their decision making.
Consider three pieces of evidence that the justice system is still broken and adversely impacts Black Americans. First, in 2019 the United States Sentencing Commission found that, “Black male offenders received sentences on average 20.4 percent longer than similarly situated White male offenders, accounting for violence in an offender’s past in fiscal year 2016…. This figure is almost the same as the 20.7 percent difference without accounting for past violence. Thus, violence in an offender’s criminal history does not appear to contribute to the sentence imposed” (emphasis added). Second, the Equal Justice Initiative studied the cases of 73 people serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for crimes they committed when they were 13 or 14 years old. Despite the fact Blacks make up less than 20% of the population, 49% of the people in the study are African-American. Furthermore, “all of the children condemned to death in prison for non-homicide offenses are children of color. All but one of the children sentenced to life without parole for offenses committed at age 13 are children of color.” And third, a brief by the National Association of Social Workers reported that in 2015, although Black youth were only 14% of the total youth population they were nearly half (47%) of youth sent to adult court. Furthermore, in some states where the data is available, Black youth are more likely than White youth to receive an adult prison sentence and received longer prison sentences that White youth for the same type of offense.
The result of the racism baked into the justice system is that (among other things) Black Americans are more likely to be stopped and searched for drugs, more likely to face stiffer sentencing, more likely—as youth—to be tried as adults, and less likely to be tried by a jury of peers. This ought to be enough of a concern but the pain continues to mount even after someone has “paid their debt to society”. Once someone has what Alexander calls, “the prison label” they are subject to legal discrimination in employment, housing, government benefits, and voting (The New Jim Crow). For example, “Felony disenfranchisement rates for voting-age African Americans reached 7.4% in 2016—four times the rate of non-African Americans (1.8%). The majority of disenfranchised Americans are living in their communities, having fully completed their sentences or remaining supervised while on probation or parole” (The Sentencing Project).
The fact that more Black Americans are serving prison sentences (or are on probation) for drug crimes which they do not commit at higher rates than other racial groups is evidence of systemic racism. The fact that Black men receive longer prison sentences than similarly situated white men is evidence of systemic racism. The fact that the legal protections that Black Americans ought to enjoy have been allowed to founder—and in some cases have been held hostage by ironic catch-22s—is evidence of systemic racism. And the effects of these systems do not end once the people in question leave prison or finish probation. The label of “felon” follows them like a ghost resulting in legalized discrimination in employment, housing, voting, etc.
Systemic Racism in Education
Education in general (and higher education specifically) is supposed to be an engine of social mobility and equity. Getting a good education is the path to stable employment with its twin benefits of prosperity and status. However, access to quality education is still largely segregated based on race and wealth.
Racial inequities in K-12 education exist in qualifications of teaching staff, the availability of coursework needed to prepare for college, and funding schemes. For example, a 2014 Office for Civil Rights Data Snapshot reported that black students were more likely to have a higher percentage of first-year teachers in their schools, were more likely to have teachers who were paid less than teachers in schools (within the same district) with the least percentage of black and Latinx students, and were more than four times as likely to be enrolled in a school where 20% or more of teachers were not yet certified/licensed than white students. This is concerning given that teachers are among the most important factors in students’ future academic success and life success (see Chetty, Friedman, & Rockoff, 2014). (One caveat: a literature review by Burroughs, et al., 2019 found two studies where teacher certification did not correlate with teacher effectiveness. However, teacher experience was consistently correlated with teacher effectiveness.) Black students are also less likely to have access to the full range of math and science courses they need in order to prepare for college (Office for Civil Rights).
One of the most glaring racial disparities in K-12 education exists in how schools are funded. School districts are funded in large part by local tax dollars with state governments attempting (and often failing) to make up the shortfall. Thus, school funding is strongly tied to community wealth. An analysis by EdBuild found that, on average, predominantly non-white school districts received $2,226 less per pupil than predominantly white school districts. The result is a combined $23 billion disparity in funding nationally between predominantly non-white school districts and predominantly white school districts despite the fact that they serve equal numbers of students. While community wealth is a large factor in this disparity, race still factors in. Poor non-white school districts receive almost $1,500 less per pupil than poor white districts.
This funding disparity persists because school districts are allowed to draw boundaries arbitrarily, concentrating wealth in small predominantly white districts. On average, predominantly white districts enroll just over 1,600 students (half the national average) while non-white districts enroll over 10,000 students (three times the national average). This pattern holds true even in high-poverty districts (EdBuild). One result of this school boundary gerrymandering is that nearly seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education was supposed to have ended segregation in schools just over half of K-12 students in America attend largely segregated school districts. 27% of students attend districts that are predominantly non-white; 26% attend districts that are predominantly white.
Systemic racism is not confined to K-12 education. The racial opportunity gap exists in higher education as well. This plays out in recruiting, admissions, and financial aid. For example, a study of the recruitment patterns of fifteen large public research universities across the country found that most of these schools heavily prioritized out-of-state recruiting at affluent public high schools and were significantly less likely to visit out-of-state high schools with a high percentage of black, Latinx, and Native American students (2019). A report by the Education Trust found that nearly 60% of the country’s 101 elite public universities enroll a smaller percentage of black students today than they did 20 years ago. The report went on to say that “over 75% of these colleges received F grades for their representation of Black students. Fewer than 1 out of 10 (9%) received an A, indicating that the percentage of Black students on campus was representative of the state’s Black population. …Institutions in states with larger Black populations were the least accessible. Nearly all of the 32 institutions in the 14 Southern states, which account for over half of the nation’s Black population, received failing grades” (2020). The case could be made that these schools have to enroll more affluent white students who can pay the full freight of college tuition in order to stay financially solvent. However, two more studies by the Education Trust show that is not exactly what is happening.
In the 2006 report, Engines of Inequality, the Education Trust found that the nation’s flagship universities—the most prestigious and selective, and generally oldest universities—spent 50% more on financial aid for students whose families make more than $100,000 per year than for students whose families make less than $20,000 per year. The Education Trust’s 2010 report titled Opportunity Adrift found a similar pattern—large public universities and flagships were providing as much financial aid to students in the top two quintiles of family income as students in the bottom two quintiles of family income. In essence, they were spending their precious financial resources wooing wealthy students who didn’t need the money and would attend college anyway while low-income students were left to finance their own education in amounts up to 70% of their families’ annual income. The report went on to say that a wealth of research “tell[s] us that there are far more poor and minority students who do have what it takes to succeed at these institutions but who never get a chance to attend. Indeed, among the best prepared students in the country, those from low-income families enter selective colleges at half the rate of similarly prepared students from high-income families” (2010). It could be argued that low income and minority students can get a good education at other, less-selective, universities and that this backward system of financial aid doesn’t really matter much. There are two problems with this claim. First, public research universities and flagships were expressly designed to grant a high-quality education to students who could not afford the cost of private higher education. Second, according to Inside Higher Ed, attending a selective university lessens the earnings gap between students from the richest and poorest backgrounds.
The Education Trust summed it up this way:
“State flagships sit atop this pyramid of opportunity, offering the hope that students from humble origins can learn alongside talented students from all backgrounds. This was America’s promise: work hard, excel in school and you, too, could follow your dreams into your state’s flagship university. Over time, however, that compact has been broken, and in its place has come something quite different: the relentless pursuit not of expanded opportunity, but of increased selectivity. Rated less for what they accomplish with the students they let in than by how many students they keep out, many of these flagship institutions have become more and more enclaves for the most privileged of their state’s young people. Even as the number of low-income and minority high school graduates in their states grows, often by leaps and bounds, these institutions are becoming disproportionately whiter and richer.”
People from across the political spectrum agree with—or at least pay lip-service to—the idea that if you study hard and do well in school you can have the American dream. The reality is that for black students, especially black students from low-income families, there are significant hurdles at the K-12 and post-secondary levels to securing a quality education regardless of effort. As EdBuild writes, “a single fact is clear—financially, it is far better in the United States to have the luck and lot to attend a school district that is predominantly white than one that enrolls a concentration of children of color. That is the inherent shame of the system we’ve built, and one we haven’t gone far enough to fix.”
Systemic Racism in Wealth
The existence of systemic racism in wealth is harder to parse out since the racial wealth gap is both symptom and disease. The result is a chicken and egg problem. In this instance it can be helpful to look first at the size of the wealth gap and then examine how poverty interacts with systemic racism in other areas.
According to the Federal Reserve, “In the 2019 survey, White families have the highest level of both median and mean family wealth: $188,200 and $983,400, respectively. Black and Hispanic families have considerably less wealth than White families. Black families' median and mean wealth is less than 15 percent that of White families, at $24,100 and $142,500, respectively.” This staggering disparity in wealth exacerbates the effects of systemic racism in criminal justice and education.
People living in poverty have a much higher likelihood of facing the legal system all alone. “Approximately 80 percent of criminal defendants are indigent and thus unable to hire a lawyer. Yet our nation’s public defender system is woefully inadequate” (The New Jim Crow, 107). Public defenders face poor pay, terrible working conditions, and huge caseloads. And in some jurisdictions even a court-appointed lawyer is a luxury. Consider, for example, Wisconsin where anyone who earns more than $3,000 dollars a year is considered able to afford their own lawyer (The New Jim Crow, 107). (In a depressing side note: if poverty means someone is much more likely to face the legal system all alone, wealth means accessing the kind of legal representation that can bring the whole system to heel. See, for example, The Syndicate and The Empire of Pain.)
Facing the legal system alone or with an overworked public defender means people are more likely to take a plea bargain (whether they are guilty or not) because a short sentence or probation seems preferable to rolling the dice in court. This is especially troublesome when you consider that if someone pleads guilty to a minor, nonviolent felony (drug possession, for example) they might get only a few months in prison but the resulting label of felon (as mentioned previously) subjects them to legalized discrimination in housing and employment—the very things needed to escape from poverty.
Another intersection of money and the legal system is in the form of fees and fines related to incarceration. Jail book in fees, jail per diems, public defender application fees, bail investigation fees, pre-sentence report fees, public defender recoupment fees, work-release program fees, and monthly parole/probation fees are some of the fees, fines, and costs charged to people convicted of crimes (or even those awaiting trial) across the United States (The New Jim Crow, 193-194). To make matters more difficult many states tack on additional late fees, payment plan fees, interest, and collection fees when people fall behind on paying off their debts. “Some of the collection fees are exorbitant. Alabama charges a 30 percent collection fee, and Florida allows private debt collectors to tack on a 40 percent surcharge to underlying debt” (The New Jim Crow, 194). All of these fees and costs are especially damaging considering incarcerated people are more likely to be poor to begin with. In an analysis of Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Prison Policy Initiative found that “in 2014 dollars, incarcerated people had a median annual income of $19,185 prior to their incarceration, which is 41% less than non-incarcerated people of similar ages" (emphasis in the original).
In another example, in 2019, ProPublica reported on a study that found that the counties most heavily audited by the IRS are poor, predominantly African American counties in the Deep South whereas residents of middle income, predominantly white counties are least likely to be audited. “In a baffling twist of logic, the intense IRS focus on [one of these poor, predominantly African American counties] is actually because so many of its taxpayers are poor. More than half of the county’s taxpayers claim the earned income tax credit, a program designed to help boost low-income workers out of poverty.”
As I mentioned earlier, education is supposed to be an engine of social and economic mobility. However, wealth and poverty play important mediating roles. In his book, Jackpot, Michael Mechanic notes that attending an elite college is a great equalizer, often propelling students from poverty to wealth. He cites a study where the poorest students attending the 82 most selective universities in the United States only ended up 7 percentile points behind the richest students in terms of post-graduate earnings. While that is encouraging, consider that “the Ivy-Pluses [traditional Ivy League schools plus University of Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford,] enroll more students from top-earning 1 percent families than from the entire bottom 50 percent…. Equally shocking, compared with kids from the bottom 20 percent, the children of 1 percenters were seventy-seven times more likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college” (Jackpot). Part of the difference in admissions is that poor students and families lack access to the network of premium preschools, private tutors, exam prep coaches, and the discretionary income to invest heavily in tax-advantaged 529 accounts. “College admissions has become an arms race. The stakes are high, and those with the most money have the superior weapons” (Jackpot). (For an extreme example, see Operation Varsity Blues.)
Whatever the cause or causes for the vast racial wealth gap there are some clear effects. Black Americans are more likely to be poor. As a result they are more likely to face the justice system without adequate legal representation and then face fees, fines, and legal discrimination in employment, housing, and voting. They are less likely to attend a high-quality K-12 school and be courted by college reps from elite universities. And although many Black Americans clearly overcome the disadvantages inherent to poverty, the size of the racial wealth gap demonstrates just how many do not.
“The Burden Belongs to the Nation”
If Black Americans are facing racism in the criminal justice system and education and if that racism is the result of laws, policies, and other structures (even ones that are nominally race-neutral) then what is to be done?
The straightforward answer is to dismantle those laws, policies, and structures. In the criminal justice system it would mean ending the War on Drugs; funding rehab instead of incarceration for those who use drugs; ending federal grant money to police departments based on the number of drug-related arrests they make; funding job training for people once they leave prisons and jails; ending harsh mandatory minimum sentences for minor crimes; ending legalized discrimination in employment, housing, and voting; restoring Constitutional protections around due process and freedom from unreasonable searches; and so on. In education it would mean ending legacy admissions, incentivizing universities to recruit and represent the communities they were designed to reach, disentangling local funding from local control, and so on.
Easier said than done.
The creation of these laws, policies, and other structures has been slow, insidious, and ostensibly race-neutral and color-blind (because overt racism is largely passé in America). These laws, policies, and other structures are multi-faceted and interconnected—just consider my brief exploration of how wealth, education, and the criminal justice system interact. And these structures of racism have numerous stakeholders who are invested in the status quo. Let’s say we want to fund rehab instead of incarceration. Consider that the two largest private prison corporations, Core Civic and GEO Group, have a combined annual revenue of 3.5 billion dollars (Source: The Sentencing Project). And those two corporations only account for about 4% of the total US prison population. Furthermore, the corrections system employs almost 400,000 people. If ending mass incarceration were even to be suggested there would be angry pushback from executives, shareholders, and employees of the corrections system facing a threat to their bottom line.
The same pattern would likely hold true for any of the aforementioned reforms. This may be why three common responses to systemic racism often play out: ignore it, bootstrap it, or tinker with it.
ignore it
This response is unfortunately easy to do. By design, those who perpetuate systemic racism seek to keep the marginalized group isolated. It is possible for one American to know absolutely no one who has been pulled over for a minor traffic violation and summarily searched for drugs and for another American to know several. It is just as possible for one American to know absolutely no one who has attended a severely underfunded high school and for another American to only know people who have attended such a school. With no readily-available examples of systemic racism to draw upon, many Americans revert to viewing racism as a “bad apple” problem—some people are just racist and to solve racism we have to find these “bad apples” and help them see the error of their ways. This approach falls short not only because of the actual scope of the problem but also because many of those involved don’t see their actions as racist—they’re merely “tough on crime” or “finding the best-fitting student”.
Bootstrap it
The second response is to acknowledge racial discrimination or disparities but say that the responsibility for overcoming the problem belongs to the group being discriminated against. In the introduction, I mentioned Candace Owens (see endnote 1) talking to Ben Shapiro about systemic racism. She seemed to advocate this second response, citing Black Excellence in sport as if to say, “when Black Americans really want to be awesome at something, nobody can stop us”. As Michelle Alexander notes, people ask “how can something akin to a racial caste system exist when people like Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Barack Obama are capable of rising from next to nothing to the pinnacles of wealth and power?” (The New Jim Crow, 308). There certainly appears to be no limit to what Black Americans can achieve. Then why are so many incarcerated or mired in poverty? Those advocating for the bootstrap approach would reply it’s because they’re not trying hard enough. I would ask, why should one group have to try harder just because another group said so?
Tinker With it
The third response assumes that systemic racism does exist but that it is a house of cards rather than a web of interlocking structures—one blow to a critical law or policy will bring the whole thing down. Racial justice advocates fighting in the legal arena might cite Brown v. Board of Education as a powerful example of how a single court case defeated the separate but equal claims of the old Jim Crow regime. However, the reality is that Brown did not solve the problem. Professor Carol Anderson described how in the South many states circumvented Brown by privatizing their education systems or outright refusing to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling (see White Rage). To put it more bluntly, “‘The statistics from the Southern states are truly amazing. For ten years, 1954-1964, virtually nothing happened’” (The New Jim Crow, 292, emphasis in the original). Even today—as I noted in the section on systemic racism in education—just over half of students attend de facto segregated schools.
This pattern of a significant change in the legal structure followed by cold outrage in the mainstream and an evolution in the system of oppression occurred after the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments—convict leasing and the Black Codes replaced chattel slavery. The pattern repeated as the Black Codes evolved into Jim Crow and then again into the elegant, pervasive, superficially color-blind system we have today. As Michelle Alexander points out, “In the absence of a truly egalitarian racial consensus these predictable cycles inevitably give rise to new, extraordinarily comprehensive systems of racialized social control” (The New Jim Crow, 292). So while Brown provided a legal structure to end “separate but equal” it took decades of protest and advocacy to create the actual change.
A TRUE CONSENSUS
I believe that ending systemic racism—truly ending it instead of pressuring it to evolve into something new yet equally deplorable—is an all-hands-on-deck challenge that requires “a truly egalitarian racial consensus”. We all must see the problem for what it truly is: systemic. We all must see each other for what we truly are: children of God.
As Michelle Alexander wrote in the conclusion of The New Jim Crow:
“All the needed reforms have less to do with failed policies than a deeply flawed public consensus, one that is indifferent, at best, to the experience of poor people of color. …It is this failure to care, really care across color lines, that lies at the core of this system of control and every racial caste system that has existed in the United States or anywhere else in the world.”
Building this consensus is not merely the province of politicians, policymakers, or police. It is not up to one race or gender or socio-economic class. It can’t be done only in a courtroom, boardroom, or classroom. The work required to end this system of oppression is vast and thus the work requires all of us, everywhere, always. As W. E. B. Du Bois said, "the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.”
We will all have to sacrifice something. Maybe it will be something monetary—allowing a county to fund all schools equally instead of keeping all funds within the highest earning city or neighborhood, for example. Maybe it will be something mental—giving up cherished notions of who is deserving of what and why. Maybe we have to sacrifice the comfort of staying silent about injustice, oppression, privilege, and racism. Maybe we will have to speak out and stand up for people who have been wronged even when those wrongs seem justified. The necessary sacrifices may be painful as the required solutions go beyond the scope of what many Americans are used to or what many think is needed. Yet as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his final book: “Justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change of the status quo” (Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community).
If we as Americans follow this path united and extend mercy, trust, and power to all Blacks caught in the current systems of oppression I can see our nation becoming truly just, free, and great. It is my hope and prayer that this essay makes some small contribution to building that consensus.
ENDNOTE
While I disagree with what Candace Owens said about systemic racism, I do agree with what she said about the dangers of victimhood. Following an incident at school she said she was made to feel like a victim of racism and that deprived her of the power she needed to control her own life and destiny. The subject of victimhood and personal power merits its own discussion and I won’t go into it here. However, I will say that I think accepting personal power is a necessary yet insufficient solution to the problems discussed in this essay.