‘Systemic Racism’: America’s Karma

How Social Division and Privilege Turned a Serious and Lasting Problem into a Phantom and an Absurdity and Dissolved Centuries Worth of Moral Insight and Duty...

           Part I: Snatching Defeat From the Jaws of Victory

1.) Fighting REAL Racism…

I don’t believe in Karma as a true cosmic principle: psychopathy and acquisitive violence too often yield net gains for individuals and, especially, societies. Our history as a species is full of wars of rape and annihilation and if there was an inevitable comeuppance for such things one imagines they might have been less frequent or less profitable, ultimately. The principle that history is written by the victors seems to contradict any higher principle of cosmic justice.

However, karma is a satisfying and useful idea and there does seem to be a caution there: evil has a cost not only in the external consequences and reactions but in the spiritual effects on the evil actor. Our modern lens of victimizer/victimized or privileged/marginalized doesn’t encourage reflection on how victimizing others (even with apparent success) warps the character and outlook of the victimizer but Martin Luther King Jr. recognized this about the racism of his time. It was horribly dehumanizing and costly for his own people but it also took a toll on those maintaining it, in suspicion and callousness and fear. Systematic violence changes the world but it changes everyone involved in it. Often the cost is worth bearing but it’s a cost that should be kept in mind.

What are the modern costs of America’s centuries of racist oppression? Today when racism (or even the hint of racism) is so heavily stigmatized and the history of black suffering is treated with reverence it’s hard to argue the effects on modern people have been brutalizing. Instead, I think our history has divided us into firm categories of privilege, with the higher category of (mostly white, but also black and brown) well-raised, safe, educated people so separated from the poor and those who struggle that they embraced a myth of nobility and mass evil for which there’s no evidence, and which flies in the face of what we know about human nature. If this myth was simply a fable which organized the world into neat categories it might be sustainable and less harmful but it simultaneously implicates EVERY part of American (indeed, modern) society in its story (math, logic, science, punctuality, fairness, schools, the police, conversation, dating, etc., etc.) while removing an understanding of the ACTUAL nature of racism and any impetus to address it. It turns the struggle against racism from a moral and political fight against a specific kind of malign and durable human error into a way to criticize anything (yes, literally anything) while offering no alternatives.

 The Civil Rights movement accomplished every one of its goals. Even in the early 1960’s there was enough political support and compassion for black Southerners to compel Congress to eliminate all legal racial barriers to access and employment. The dream of would-be liberators in the 19^th and 20^th century was not (as is too often claimed today) ‘equity’ or a weighted balance or set-asides for certain groups. Perhaps, in some cases, their goals were dictated by pragmatism rather than principle. Perhaps after legal segregation and racial discrimination were successfully consigned to the scrapheap of history some of them would have pivoted towards racial quotas and equality of outcome but I suspect not. They were all (Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr.) classical liberals who celebrated the ideals of America’s civic identity (equality before the law, the right of people to influence their government, the freedom to speak and write and assemble absent any threat or defamation) and wanted those ideals applied universally. The ones who weren’t classical liberals (Malcom X) would have scoffed at the idea that condescending hand-outs from the system were the path toward empowering his people.

The United States never had a truth and reconciliation commission. We never reckoned with our past and we’re only 2-3 generations removed from the country which politically and economically subordinated black people in certain places and treated them with widespread fear and hostility and disdain more or less everywhere. It’s difficult to see how things might have been different given the especial American talent for oblivion and denial (the other side of our more pro-social tendencies toward optimism and self-interest) but one imagines that if WE (by which I man white America) had a contemporaneous thinker and a leader of the stature and character of Martin Luther King Jr. our country might have taken a sunnier path.

‘Systemic racism’ as a concept is America’s karma. When an individual experiences trauma or irreconcilable suffering reflexive protective mechanisms begin to work: denial, repression, projection. They are all adaptive in the short term (keeping the individual from fully confronting experiences which might overwhelm their psychic energies) but they are always distortions of true perception and involve a lessening of capacities for cognition and feeling. Ultimately trauma must be processed and incorporated into the mind or trouble awaits. I doubt that policies of fairness and redistribution were beyond the collective energies of the America of the 1960’s and 1970’s but they were too often foregone in favor of a more predictable course: protecting privilege. Systemic racism (SR) as an idea is reminiscent of the psychological distortions experienced by trauma patients. It redefines ‘racism’ so badly that actual racist acts (like a man interracially killing a family because of their skin color) are NOT racism, while a single warranted (and rare) death at the hands of police is or even a racially disproportionate rate of participation in an activity for which black people have a low level of interest is. A black man who attacks an Asian man and kills him in a fit of rage after posting racially incendiary messages online isn’t racist. A college department in which every member of the faculty describes themselves as an anti-racist and is dedicated to expurgating all traces of white supremacy is. SR is an idea which could only be formulated by people who have never really experienced the worst effects of racial hatred. It is a clear artifact of privilege and of our recent status hierarchies (prominent in certain areas, like media companies and universities and corporations) where any connection to ‘marginalization’ (on the basis of group identity, not personal experience) gives you added worth and gives your words and ideas extra authority. SR comes from an idealized vision of poor black Americans that can only be maintained so widely because many Americans have never KNOWN any poor black Americans (or poor white ones for that matter). That is why SR is basically unquestioned in our richest and youngest urban enclaves and is unknown or dismissed in areas where there is a real daily struggle. It’s a wrong and harmful distortion arising from the fact that we are still a segregated country… and the believers of SR are making that problem worse.

Education is the key to liberation, as generations of reformers and revolutionaries have posited. Education is also increasingly important in the fight to secure the comfort and prosperity theoretically and (now) legally available to every American citizen. The inherent worth of many college degrees is dubitable but they are powerful sorting mechanisms. Whether or not they should be so significant in the fight to join or remain in the middle class isn’t the focus here; they are. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, policymakers noticed that the racial segregation of public and private schools wasn’t getting any better. Black people could legally shop in every store and hold any job and couldn’t legally be treated differently because of their race but neighborhoods and schools were still divided by bright lines that didn’t seem to be blurring. Even today, 60 years removed, the problem (for it is a social problem, both indicative of deeper ills and a cause of difficulties) seem to be WORSE in many places.

THIS (the immediately post-Jim Crow period in America) would have been the moment of collective acknowledgement of America’s past. Were students bused to different schools to racially equalize student bodies the parents of the students would have been given a common interest: improving ALL public schools through community involvement and funding. By spreading social pathologies and private family resources mor evenly across school districts it’s quite possible that the invisible and incalculable Gini coefficient of American privilege could have been lowered. At the very least we would not have such stark divisions as we do today: schools full of failing students with very little promise or encouragement available. Other schools, meanwhile, are full of ambitious, neurotic over-achievers. They then go on to believe in things like systemic racism after being taught by an older generation of people who never themselves stepped outside of a classroom. For years the courts upheld busing as a legitimate policy in the public interest. In 1974, in Milliken v. Bradley, the Supreme Court drew a firm boundary between de jure and de facto segregation and only allowed the kind of redress that busing promised in cases where school districts had explicitly discriminated against admission of black students, and a huge opportunity was lost.

It’s not hard to see why busing was unpopular. In many cases it probably had less to do with racism and was simply tied to parental concern. Parents’ care for the quality of the children’s schools is a constant in the United States. It’s a powerful factor in home values, for instance. There were certainly private schools in the South that fought integration on more ideological grounds (opposition to the laws prohibiting public funds from going to such schools were a galvanizing force that shaped the Moral Majority, the nascent white evangelical alliance with Republicans, and hence the modern GOP) but most parents just recognized the facts: many majority black schools had huge issues with discipline and performance and parents didn’t want their students attending them, nor did they want trouble-makers and underachievers joining their local schools.

At this point the modern reader is probably scoffing at the racist framing here: back people have been oppressed for centuries! OF COURSE there might be social pathologies and educational attainment gaps! That’s true but it was also irrelevant to the white parents of the 1970’s (just as it is to even the most progressive parents today). Why should their students possibly be hurt by an effort to resolve a history in which they barely participated? That is the calculation of modern parents just as much. In the choice between promoting equal opportunity and protecting the educational privilege of their children, I know of no progressives who have put their money where their mouths are. As far as I can see they simply don’t exist. What is a ‘bad’ school? It’s one with widespread problems reflected in test scores and behavioral issues. Poor schools aren’t necessarily bad but they tend to be worse, as rich schools tend to be better (there are many causes for this correlation, some of which are common sense and other which are well established by data but controversial). The worse schools tend to be (majority) black and black schools are (generally) worse by these metrics. Denying or suppressing the fact doesn’t change it and precludes any honest appraisal or solution. Investigation the various causes for these patterns is outside the scope of this essay. A larger share of white, educated, prosperous voters now describe themselves as ‘anti-racist’ than any other demographic. How many of them send their children to struggling schools? Busing was a chance for the government to collectively address a public goods issue which it ended up squandering. Like most public goods issues, though, action by individuals (if the group is large enough) can have just as positive an impact. Where is the individual action here? Where are the white parents willing to use their own children to demonstrate their thirst for reform? Concepts like ‘social justice’ and ‘anti-racism’ (which is something much different than a mere opposition to racism, as we’ll see) are now most fervently taught in magnet and private schools: boutique institutions that only EXIST to perpetuate the educational segregation of America (along lines of class and intellect rather than race – but those lines are even more distinct and consequential than racial divisions in the contemporary United States).

Were we to have implemented busing in a sustained way across the country one suspects that we wouldn’t have the kind of mutual incomprehension that now plagues us. ‘Systemic racism’ is America’s payment toward our karmic debt for refusing to take positive steps to remedy the drastic imbalance of privilege that persisted after the Civil Rights Act’s passage. It’s a deeply strange idea that flies in the face of everything we came to understand about racism in the decades that we (as a divided and inconstant but morally-concerned nation) fought it and it would be a concept foreign (and probably) ridiculous to the thinkers and activists on the 1960’s (from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Malcom X) who lacked the luxury of abstraction or empty theorizing when it came to racism. The racism THEY fought was widespread and violent and intentional. Actually all meaningful racism that must be combatted socially is intentional somewhere close to its source… or it’s simply not racism. I’m not aware of racism ever arising naturally from the structure of a social system without any bigotry or intent and when we dive into what racism is and what it looks like when it’s institutionalized you will see that such a thing is extremely unlikely, if not impossible.

2.) Where We Find Ourselves

Now we have a situation in which the most privileged Americans disproportionately believe in the myth of systemic racism (SR). The concept has huge flaws (which I’ll address below) but first I want to focus on its worst aspect: it turns ‘racism’ into an ever-present phantom and not the result of specific beliefs and acts and policies and removes any responsibility to address it. Fixing racism becomes a project involved primarily with holding certain opinions, using certain words, and posting certain content on social media. Instead of an ACTUAL problem that affects millions of people racism becomes something that is potentially everywhere (like mendacity or greed) and can best be combatted by labelling oneself an ‘ally’ or an anti-racist and taking a certain attitude towards American life. That’s it.

Ask a self-described ‘anti-racist’ how they’ve ACTUALLY fought racism. Have they intervened after watching black customers denied service? Have they calmed and dispersed any lynch mobs? Have they objected upon hearing slurs or ideas of racial inferiority verbalized? In most cases I think they have not, and the awkward fact for them is that such things are now quite rare in American life. ANY decent person would intervene upon seeing or hearing such things and the qualities that predict the courage to resist the mob have nothing to do with political values: all one needs is personal courage, the asocial integrity of the introvert (or the contrarian bent of the iconoclast), and basic human decency. I’ve never ONCE met an American who was committed to racial subordination ideologically. The VAST majority of people in this country (of any group or political affiliation or educational level) believe that unequal or abusive treatment on the basis of race is abhorrent and oppose any instance of such treatment.

‘Yes, but it’s SYSTEMS that perpetuate racism!’ the woke will answer. This fact probably would have come as a surprise to the actual victims of racism throughout history who were attacked by racist people or by policies created and implemented by racist people but I’ll address the fallacy here in the next section. For now I would only answer: ‘okay… college admissions and housing and the job market have racism built into them. You’re white. You describe yourself as an anti-racist. Surely some of your social advantages are due to your white privilege. What have you given up? Housing? A job? School placement?’

Of course, none of them have ever actually sacrificed anything but the problem is much worse than that. None of them have any idea how the systems themselves should be fixed! Ibram X. Kendi has been speaking for years about systemic racism in America’s schools. He’s made millions of dollars selling books and giving talks to white people (many of whom have never been in a black neighborhood) and the exchange is transactional. Ibram gets money and prestige. White people get a nice warm feeling inside that they CARE and are therefore on the right side of this important issue. Like the public displays (intermittent in 2020, thankfully rarer these days) of white people bowing for forgiveness to groups of black people there’s a great deal of SENTIMENT here but everyone leaves and nothing has changed. If those white people volunteered to tutor black students or hire black employees in addition to bowing it might seem worthier to the skeptical observer. If all of the readers and attendees digesting Mr. Kendi’s message surrendered some of their resources and opportunities American society would see a noticeable equalization of privilege tomorrow. At least they bought the book, I suppose. It might do nothing for poor black Americans but it does transfer a small share of wealth to Mr. Kendi and his (probably white) publishers.

To my knowledge Mr. Kendi has never actually identified the racist elements in our schools though. He’s a prominent public intellectual with a massive and adoring platform. His appearances in the Atlantic and NPR and the NY Times receive unquestioning support from MILLIONS of (disproportionately) rich and well-placed listeners and readers. Some might say that such a critical mass of people concerned with race issues and NO serious racist critics (that I’m aware of) might indicate that the U.S. has made great progress on this issue… but Mr. Kendi would not say that. Any measurement of progress or message of hope dampens the sense of urgency and establishes actual metrics by which we could understand the scale and effect of racism in American society and therefore we could, possibly, one day declare the fight won and turn ourselves to other matters. This is not a prospect that SR believers regard hopefully.

Regarding schools, Mr. Kendi has promoted the idea of more black teachers as a way to improve the outcomes of black students (there’s some data here but it’s ambiguous) but if the racism reveals itself in ‘inequities’ that’s not going to begin to fix the problem he’s identified. The sad fact is that, on average, black public school pupils in the U.S. do MUCH worse than white ones (whether those students have a back or a white teacher)… to the point that being black during the college admissions process lends a +300 point mean SAT advantage. It’s like he thinks that labelling a system as racist is all that’s required and his work is done. You see this over and over and over again: the justice system (which really DOES have some systemic racism if you look at the data), policing (which does not), education (does not), house sales (data is ambiguous… in certain areas there seems to be serious racial disparities that are otherwise hard to explain), employment (does not), house rentals (does not). Where are the solutions though? In a later section of this paper I will use policing as a case study because 1.) it’s an emotional subject (historically for black Americans and just recently and somewhat sporadically for wealthy white ones) 2.) there is a lot of data and 3.) the abuse of social science and resulting dearth of policy suggestions is especially egregious.

‘Anti-racism’ and systemic racism (SR) are distinct ideas but there’s a great deal of overlap in their perspectives and in who believes in them. The common element I want to focus on here is the toxic aspect of ubiquity: racism is everywhere. When portraying social institutions as racist a few well-worn statistics are trotted out: black mothers have worse health outcomes, black citizens are much more likely to be killed by police, job applications with ‘black’ names are less preferred than ones with more traditional names, black families have a small percentage of the family wealth of white ones. Some of these numbers actually do indicate some racism (probably) but when you understand the parameters and control for variables they become much less shocking and, many times, completely predictable.

The statistics are NOT the fuel for the theoretical fire of systemic racism though. The critical theorists who have created and spread these ideas would never want to be tied down to such a concrete and real-world considerations. Were the disparities to disappear, according to the REAL believers in systemic racism, the racism would still be there. This is an important logical paradox that you will see again and again when you view these ideas (as I’ve been doing recently; far too much, probably). If you are an anti-racist white person who admits your own racism you are racist. If you are a white person who rejects the label of ‘racist’ you are a racist (the millions of black citizens and scientists who don’t think racism is an ever-present evil and are skeptical or even hostile to the claims of systemic racism are never mentioned). If you don’t select a racially diverse cast or company or classroom to represent people of different experiences and backgrounds you’re not an ally. Once selected, if you ask those diverse members about their perspective or experience as nonwhite Americans you have committed a terrible faux pas. Also not an ally. If you intentionally identify members of struggling demographics and help them you’re a ‘white savior’ and regarded with disdain. If you ignore members of struggling demographics you’re not checking your privilege and are perpetuating inequities. If you date black women or men you’re fetishizing them and possibly acting on harmful sexual tropes. If you don’t date them you’re probably a racist (although in my contact as a white person with this community, interracially dating black people surprisingly seems to be more stigmatized than dating within your race. I’ve never been able to get a straight answer on why this might be the case but one possible hint is that the black people who actually DO make ‘anti-racism’ part of their identity skew heavily female, educated, and wealthy, from what I can see). If an institution pushes black people to succeed and compete equally it’s racist. If it treats them as less-qualified or indicates in any way that they’re sometimes not competitive it’s racist. The space between these positions isn’t even a knife’s edge – it’s the part of the Venn diagram where no circle touches. Everything that a (white) person might do or say on this issue is potentially racist and every institution is presumed to be racist. There’s no way to expurgate racism… and, it seems, there never will be.

Racism is assumed (in the individual or the system) and the narrative is crafted backwards, working from the conclusion. When any less-than proportional representation of black people in an organization is revealed that is take to be a priori racism. This regardless of interest or the applicant pipeline, and regardless of the fact that given a random distribution of people throughout groups almost NONE will perfectly represent the greater society; some will have more, some less. It’s like the social scientists making these claims are comfortable ignoring the most basic fact of statistics – i.e., a normal distribution. If the organization as a whole seems to fit the standard of strict mathematical precision (which human behavior never actually adheres to) a certain job or class or part of the organization can probably be shown to lack ‘representation.’ When asking about race (traumatic, insensitive) reveals racism in the individual but also not raising the subject (privileged, oblivious) reveals racism in the individual the same trick can be used. If you assume racism in everything (regardless of intent or effect or circumstances) which is literally the departure point for the proponents of SR, it becomes an axiomatic article of faith that guides all successive inquiry… not a result of metrics or analysis. After all: if there were standards for evaluating racism then some people and organizations might be shown to be more or less free of it and that’s unacceptable. In order to establish racism everywhere all we’ve had to sacrifice is a focus on the real cost of ACTUAL racism… and the hope that it can ever be solved or even ameliorated. There are certain anti-racists who claim that racism hasn’t actually improved since the 1950’s in the United States. This is an insane perspective but if you follow the reasoning of systemic racism far enough you can easily find yourself standing at such a position.

What should a person do? What exactly are the recommendations for personal development of those who believe that America is saturated with racism? The way forward in terms of policy is murky and hope is not bountiful, as we’ve seen. Surely there are some suggestions to make oneself a better ally? Yes; you’ll be happy to learn that there area. ‘Doing the work’ is a common refrain in this culture but it seems to revolve more around a sensitivity to language and parroting certain shallow ideas (some of which I’ve addressed elsewhere) than anything that a normal person (or even a therapist) might regard as ‘work’. Believing dubious propositions when you’re privileged and almost everyone in your social set believes them isn’t exactly a herculean task. It’s difficult to see where the sacrifice is. And, as we’ve seen, there isn’t exactly a consistent standard of norms and values to guide a person towards or away from values or behaviors. If you’re not white you have a great deal of leeway (especially if you’re black or indigenous), including the ability to just say ‘I’m so tired of… ’ on Twitter and have entire institutions cower before you. If you ARE white (or, increasingly, Asian or Jewish or a conservative/libertarian/heterodox thinker of any racial group) you should resign yourself to an interminable, low-level struggle session. Your viewpoints and tendencies are automatically suspect, to some degree, and whatever you feel like doing or saying might be problematic, so just deal with it. Racially-apportioned value and criticism isn’t exactly a program for personal growth, though. There IS one maxim that anti-racists propound with frequency and zeal though: listen. Read. The implication is that this should be done with a critical attitude, trying to detect biases and preconceptions.

That’s actually quite promising! Carefully examining your bias and patterns of speech and stereotypes and listening to black people about their experience and taking their lessons seriously are not things that an intellectually and not-racist person could disdain. I would probably throw in a few lessons about actually helping other people and learning about the issues in question but this isn’t my world. The presumption is that black experience is more valid than news articles and survey data and that the role of white people is to LEARN.

This would work extremely well for the theoreticians of systemic racism IF black people shared their worldview… but I find again and again that that’s not the case. To be sure, there are MANY black and brown people in the United States who hold the idea of systemic racism close to their hearts and regard all those who don’t with suspicion. These are uniformly privileged people though, in my experience, and not the marginalized communities we hear so much about. They tend to be EXTREMELY well-educated (which could indicate something about the validity of the concept or it could just indicate how common it’s become in the halls of academia and wealth and power). They tend to be young (but then so are most of the people I communicate with). They tend to be female. There are also many excellent black writers and thinkers who regard the concept of ‘systemic racism’ as a bigger threat to the well-being of back people these days than racism itself. If the choice is to listen to BLACK thinkers who regard SR with contempt or WHITE thinkers who embrace it, the Left would have you privilege the white viewpoint (although this is quite a sore subject for them). ‘Listen’ actually means ‘come to believe as they do, on everything’. Any dissenting conclusion or critical thoughts? You probably guessed it by now: they’re racist. As someone who has lived in many places around this country and worked many jobs and met many people I can only share my own (white, privileged, and educated) perspective. There are many people from my past that I keep in intermittent contact with mostly in order to keep my finger on the pulse of American cultural and political life.

What have I learned from ‘doing the work’? From listening? I’ve learned what social science data supports: American society has become segregated on the basis of education and political/cultural viewpoint even more starkly than on the basis of race. A well-educated black person in the United States has no real obstacles to advancement or acquisition (actually they have a number of huge and measurable advantages). A poorly-educated white one struggles and their struggles are not plainly less desperate than black people of similar station. Most Americans want more or less the same things (good schools, good teachers home ownership, competent and professional police, decent public services) and understand that fact about each other. Most people are moderates on most issues. Most people don’t think that many other people are racist and the people most likely to think that are not poor black Americans but rich white ones. Poverty and hardship aren’t equally distributed but there is not a general feeling of being victimized by racism. Most people understand that their choices are the biggest factors in determining the outcome of their lives (bounded harshly by parameters of wealth and opportunity, certainly). Most parents understand that even in an unfair and sometimes oppressive world focusing on ‘systemic’ factors might be good for casting votes or forming ideologies but doesn’t assist the individual (their child) in achieving her fullest potential. Most people don’t think that an over-sensitivity to racism in conversation or socializing is healthy or productive. Most black people understand that the government is fairly incompetent. They understand that intra-racial murders are a much bigger and more serious problems for their community than murders by police. They don’t want a radical revision of American society or the abolition of the police or racial quotas at work. They want better public schools and more money and opportunity. Most people (of every race) don’t see the government as their savior or regard the media with fondness or trust and want these institution to have less social power rather than more.

This is a disappointing fact that the zealots of systemic racism will never really acknowledge. Black public schools have too often been a shambles, for decades, and they receive generous federal funds. To bring this essay back to its opening historical events: if you want to improve the condition of black America shouldn’t schools be a primary action item? Certainly home appraisals and criminal sentencing (two areas where racism seems to exist in measurable quantities and also two areas where consequential decisions are made by INDIVIDUALS and not systems) are issues that must be discussed but EVERY person in the United States goes to school and most black adults have kids in school. Social science has provided some very promising remedies for pathologically failing schools (led by the excellent black Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who is certainly hated by the proponents of systemic racism more than they hate the racists themselves) and they could be implemented tomorrow. They could be implemented in select areas, to gather data and evaluate the models. They have been implemented in Harlem and Washington D.C. with stunning results already. They are not favored by the proponents of SR because they are opposed by their natural political allies: teachers’ unions and activist nonprofits. Make no mistake: incremental change is not and never has been the goal of those who preach the message of SR. It is instead a wholesale revision of the system. Into what? I’ve been reading these people for years now and your guess is as good as mine, but the lack of a viable, proven alternative never kept a critical theorist from rejecting the status quo.

People cannot believe in SR because it offers real steps to improve the world – that much is clear. They don’t believe it (generally) because they’ve been poring over social science data and arrived at certain conclusions. Nor have they witnessed specific acts of destructive racism, for if they had their focus would be on such ACTS and the attendant motivations and not on a general and abstract idea of malign ‘systems’. I will address some of the contradictions and absurdities of SR in the next section of this essay. If systems and their construction are what create racism do those system still retain their racism when they only serve or deal with white people? What about when they’re mostly run and controlled by black people? Why did none of the historical activists against racism when it was systemATIC understand the nature of systemic racism. Why has it only emerged as the reality of real, violent racism has faded from prominence? Why do so many brilliant black thinkers regard SR with skepticism? Why won’t anti-racists or proponents of SR as an idea EVER debate those black thinkers? If the entire system is racist how can government action (which is the reflexive recommendation of pro-SR policymakers, inasmuch as there are any) be a solution? If the operation of the system has kept black Americans subordinated, wouldn’t a DISENGAGEMENT from that system (mutual aid collectives or family loyalties or autonomous organizations) be possible solutions? Why are these possibilities NEVER discussed or pursued?

We’ll dive into these objections and more in the next section, but for now I want to close by explaining why I think so many people in the U.S. believe in SR and believe it SO fervently. We’ve already touched on the remoteness of many of these people from the kind of harrowing daily struggle still common in America. The reasons are deeper though and, despite the absurdities of SR itself, are actually somewhat promising. Most people want to be good and considerate citizens. That’s it. If you’re an SR skeptic (as I obviously am) you might try venturing into the many online forums where such discussion is possible and natural (not gardening blogs, for example).

What you will find is that stating the situation as I see it is regarded with something more than disagreement or skepticism. It’s regarded with real moral horror. 9/10 times these dialogues are happening with white people (who are, true to form, generally well-educated and financially comfortable it seems). It becomes obvious very quickly that this is a MORAL position for them, like the doctrine of the Virgin Birth might have been to a 14^th-century Christian. Stating doubt of it automatically puts one in a suspect moral category (the heretic) and questioning motivations soon follows. I usually raise the fact that I’ve never ACTUALLY known a person who wanted to institute real anti-black policies because they were racist and I gather that they haven’t either but there’s no other motivation that they will consider. Mentioning major studies, or data, or black social scientists in agreement, or the ways their ideas don’t contact reality or even the ways that they hurt ACTUAL black people are mostly futile. These are ideas that the believers in SR generally won’t consider because they CAN’T. It makes them feel like bad people to do so. It is literally a quasi-religious axiom that they cannot doubt or question. It simply MUST be true, and anyone who doubts it cannot simply have a different opinion; they must be racists themselves. This is discouraging for those who want to believe in the analytical faculties of regular people but promising for those who want to believe in their well-intentioned nature. If only the idea of SR prompted some kind of real positive action or personal sacrifice or growth or real learning, instead of discouraging those things…

[Next, Part II: ‘What IS Racism?’ and ‘Betraying The Dream: Equity and its Discontents’]