The core of the argument for a certain conception of anti black systemic racism is not rooted in explicit legal and institutional racial discrimination and doesn’t hold that anti black racism is the explicit crude belief that one race is inferior to another.
The core is disproportion in ratio to the percentage of blacks in the population (the “ratio.”) and gaps in testing for merit. There is a persistent disproportion in the number of blacks in most merit based positions and in merit based admissions measured by the ratio. And, more, a persistent performance gap exists in most merit testing.
The argument for systemic racism is that these disproportions and gaps must be a function of an insidious racism woven into the folkways, mores, conventions and beliefs which majoritarian whites are socialized by and inculcate, as if this racism is the social air whites breathe. And it’s as invisible as air.
This is the subtle racism whites unconsciously form and it’s held unawares. So it’s not evident in the crude explicit racism of the past. Rather, it’s evident in whites’ biases and implicit tendencies, their immediate responses to issues and events. This insidious racism lies deep and unaware to them in their everyday practices: whom they hire; whom they suspect; whom they fear; their immediate, reflexive appraisals of the implicit other; whom they avoid or shy away from; whom they prefer; whom they choose; to whom they gravitate; their private jokes; their deep structure beliefs. And on and on.
A downward spiral thereby becomes inevitable. Whites don’t grow up in a vacuum. In a general way, all breathe the same socializing air. All of whites, blacks, others, breathe this air, internalize it. So blacks having breathed in their sense of inferiority see it in themselves. In this way, they tend to be beaten before they start, not by reason of inherent incapacity but by trodden down self esteem.
This is systemic racism. And once one sees it this way, then the implications and ramifications come rushing. For example, on this account, white fragility is white blanching at the implacable, not easily seen racism deeply rooted within them. The more rhetorically and superficially liberal and egalitarian is a white person, likely the greater the fragility.
The argument for systemic racism at bottom turns on, flows from, the binary proposition that disproportion and gaps are answered by this racism; otherwise, the explanation has to be genetic, namely genetic inferiority.
The logical fallacy here is the excluded middle, even if the explanations comprising the middle are imperfectly understood. Why does it follow, that if disproportion and testing gaps aren’t the effect of a racist cause, then the only other possibility is genetic inferiority?
Simply put, it doesn’t.
The dynamisms, complexities and complications involved in these issues illuminate that logical fallacy and feed and bolster what’s excluded. The way groups perform and change, the way group IQs change, the conditions and circumstances that inform those changes, they’re all part of what’s excluded.
The shimmering, bright virtue of the answer “systemic racism” lies in what it is, something pat and at hand explaining everything, distilling all complexity to a single accessible explanation. But what shimmers is often a mirage or just some flashes of brightness bursting from more prosaic, less accessible, varied and hard-completely-to-understand variables.
The answer is in fact itself too fragile to support the systematists’ overweening analysis. It’s actually a species of intellectual fragility, the causes of which also defy easy analysis and are worth exploring.
“There are 8,000,000 stories in The Naked City,” that TV program’s final summation had it. And there are many lines of critique of this idea of systemic racism. As The Naked City’s summation concluded, “This has been one of them.”
