Systemic Racism

Cody Johnston takes on the right wing argument that institutional racism doesn't exist. While it may be true (although weakened or unenforced) that discriminatory laws don't exist as they used to, history matters. White people were given specific advantages to build wealth. Without those same advantages, black people were segregated into impoverished areas with greater pollution thus reduced property values thus less money for education thus more concentrated poverty thus greater police presence thus mass incareration from discriminatory drug sentencing laws thus the loss of political power to make any changes.

So how are vast racial inequalities explained without a systemic reason? We left with the characteristics or culture of the group in question. But if "race" is a social rather than biological construct, on what basis are distinctions made? Hmmm . . .

Update (August 3):  David Barber argues that a focus on "white priviledge" overlooks vast class differences among white people.

Privilege is the bribe our elite white rulers have offered us, historically and in the present, in return for our silent assent to their rule, rule over black people, and rule over own selves.

If my life, as hard as it is, is easier than black people’s lives (and in the end, that’s all that white privilege is, that our lives are not so difficult as are the lives of black people) – then living here as I do, without any vision outside of this dog-eat-dog society, I’m going to defend that privilege. But if we understand privilege as a bribe to keep poor and working-class white people passive in the face of their own oppression, if we are able to articulate for them the vision of a just social and economic order, I think we are better able to take up the task that the young people in SNCC and the Panthers long ago asked of us: to challenge and transform our own white communities.