This is something in the news a lot. Canadian politicians discuss it. Others say it exists, and I suspect it often does. But no one defines it. Can anyone?
It’s tough to pin down. To begin, this is a two part question, with definitions for both the systemic and the discrimination part. Discrimination is probably the easier of the two. I would include under that term bigotry against someone due to their race, gender, sexual orientation, disability status, and in general any factor that we do not have any control over. When it comes to membership in a group that one elects to be a member of (religion, political party, etc.) things get a little trickier.
As for the systemic part, I understand what is meant by it, but I don’t like the term. In my opinion a system is just a really large collection of individuals. If the bigoted individuals in question could magically be replaced by individuals who aren’t bigoted, that would fix the “systemic” part of the equation.
I think this is better suited to IMHO than General Questions.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
My simple-minded explication: whenever the rules of the organization, formal or informal, de jure or de facto, work as a whole in favor of the members of one group and/or against the members of another group. To count as discrimination for most people there are two conditions: membership in the “group” as mentioned above should be involuntary (the usual race, gender, sexual orientation, country of origin, and so on) and/or membership in the “group” should be irrelevant to the functioning of the organization (e.g. in most cases religion, politics, what neighborhood you live in, what lodge you belong to, who your father is, and so on).
I want to highlight some terms that might be overlooked: “formal or informal, de jure or de facto” means the systemic discrimination doesn’t have to be legally sanctioned to qualify – for example, real estate “red-lining” was neither formal nor supported by law in most cases, but it was (and may still be) a widespread and deeply harmful practice; and “as a whole” which just means all of the rules taken together – if there are ten discriminatory rules and one fair rule, it probably still qualifies as systemic discrimination.
Under this definition you can fit small private organizations up to national governments. Which of those you want to be concerned about is a different question, I think.
I would say that systemic racism is racism that is an emergent property of a system that is racist without requiring individuals acting within the system to be racist.
Some examples:
A checkbox on a job application that asks if you have been convicted of a felony. Non-racist employers want to ask that question because there are good reasons to not hire felons (on average), but because the criminal justice system is deeply racially biased, this question results in that bias and racism to seep into employment decisions.
Schools funded by local property taxes. People want to have local control of education, but the result is that housing and public schools become racially segregated, which leads to racial bias in education outcomes and property wealth. In some cases this is intentional, but in others it’s really not.
In Canada discrimination is often applied to age, martial status, physical and mental disabilities, etc. which would likely be included in “ and so on”. I am not sure socioeconomics and education are usually included, but it is reasonable in many specific instances, such as health care.
The systemic part is a little more nebulous to me. Within one organization? Within a specific sector? Within a group of different organizations? I think the most general definition may be best. I have my ideas about what it is. But “I know it when I see it” does not seem a great legal standard.
For what it’s worth, I think this article phrases things better than I could. It hints at a definition of systemic without providing one.
I agree with this. The system doesn’t have to be deliberately created to be racist, but ends up being that way. A classic example is finance redlining, a now-outlawed practice where loans were denied to applicants based solely on what neighborhood they lived in, because those neighborhoods were identified as high-default-risk areas. But those areas were also mostly Black and Latino, so it discriminated against non-whites just because of where they lived, not based on an assessment of their individual creditworthiness.
Ironically, when this practice was outlawed by “ban the box” laws, employers started using demographics including race (i.e., young Black and Latino men) to rule out candidates for jobs since they were perceived as more likely to have a criminal background and they couldn’t outright ask. So employment among that demographic dropped. The law hurt the very people it was designed to help.
Yeah, I’m aware of that and it’s one of those really unfortunate can’t-win scenarios. Although while not hiring felons is systemically racist due to the above-mentioned issues, not hiring Black or Latino men because they’re more likely to be felons is just straight-up directly racist, not systemic. Some individual person with hiring authority had to actually make the call to decide based on race (and sex, I suppose). Take away the checkbox and you now have a racist system only if individuals within it act with racist intent.
This practice is supposed to be addressed by federal (and usually state) civil rights legislation, but the problem, of course, is proving that’s what happened. All you can do is point to patterns of behavior, but they’ll always have some sort of plausible deniability prepared.
Frankly, I think companies that adopt that kind of practice are, in fact, racist in that they just don’t want minorities if they don’t have to have them. “Don’t want to hire a felon” may be what they tell themselves, but they are lying to their audience.
Why do you say that? The “systemic” part, to me, means that the system itself is racist, independent of the personal feelings of the individuals involved.
Powers &8^]
Or in many cases, it was created with racist intent, but it now perpetuates racism even in the absence of deliberate racist actions by individuals.
Poverty does a number on people. Poor people are more likely to be targeted by the police and child welfare services, treated worse by medical and mental health professionals, and viewed less favorably by teachers and prospective employers. But poverty also causes trauma that makes a person more likely to develop medical and mental health problems, more likely to commit acts of violence, and less able to learn in school and perform at work. So even a good cop/doctor/teacher/whatever who tries to be unbiased can often find objective criteria on which to judge a poor person more harshly.
Black people were brought to this country as slaves, unable to build or maintain their own wealth. But even after their emancipation, they were attacked economically as well as physically, over and over, by white people seeking to keep them in their place. They are more likely to be poor because of this multigenerational assault, such that even if a magic wand made everyone instantly unable to see or remember color, they’d still have a much worse lot in life, on average, for at least a couple more generations.
Yeah, that.
A law or a policy that requires that an employee be male or white or right-handed or whatever is systemically discriminating in an overt and obvious way. That’s out.
A law or policy that says you can employ any clean person but a person who has menses is unclean and a person whose skin is still dark after washing is unclean and a person whose signature smudges because they write with the pen in their left hand is obviously a person of unclean habits too— these are de facto discriminatory as well, they’re less obvious but they are laws & policies designed with a “normal person” in mind who isn’t based on a typical member of the out groups who are then kept in their status as out groups because they don’t measure up against those standards.
It’s the de facto stuff that’s harder to pin down. Policies that may seem on the surface to be as compellingly obvious in their matter-of-fact fairness as “Employers may refrain from hiring people who cannot perform the job” may turn out to be as loaded as the hypothetical “clean person” provisions I just tossed out as an example. Restrictions and prerequisites need to be carefully examined to verify that they really are essential and appropriate to what they apply to and are not being used to narrow the access path for the benefit of one or another population.
In the UK, we have the term “institutional racism”(arising from the report of an inquiry into the unsuccessful police investigation of a racist murder) to mean any sort of institutional policy, practice or organisational/group culture that may not be overtly or even consciously racist, but rests on all sorts of assumptions and behaviours in relation to ethnic and other minorities which, however unintentionally, tend to their disadvantage.
(I remember there was a similar report on social care services, which highlighted the issue by using the title “They Look After Their Own, Don’t They?”; and for years BBC radio had a programme by and for the disabled, for which they adopted the title “Does He Take Sugar?”)
A lot of it comes down to “They” thinking, and othering, rather than thinking “What if this were your son/brother/wife, etc?”
Oh, yes, I agree. I was very deliberate about my wording “doesn’t have to be.” It certainly can have been created with racist intent.
A system is a set of policies, processes, rules, laws, regulations, and procedures. Individuals simply execute the system. If you replace all the bigots with non-bigots, they will still be following all the steps that result in racist results, even though any one individual may not even realize that. That’s what makes it systemic.
To eliminate systemic racism, you have to overhaul the system.
Since magic is not yet an option, what is the best way forward? More diversity in the C suite? Less tolerance of questionable views? Education, time and cultural diffusion? With more decisions made by algorithm, it may not be possible to know how they were made (although considerable skepticism applies here - plausible deniability is often much less plausible than some suppose).
Guess no one really knows, no?
I think it’s true that no one really knows the best way forward, but I think many of the best ways forward are about changing systems so that the worst-case scenario is a lot less bad.
For example, it’s definitely a problem that there’s a major wealth disparity predicated on a history of racism in this country, but it wouldn’t be nearly as big a problem if the bottom of the wealth distribution weren’t grinding poverty. A social safety net is a good way forward.
It’s a problem that police disproportionately encounter/arrest/enact violence on people of color, but it would be a much smaller problem if we got rid of the violence part!
As a matter of policy, focusing on the people who are the worst off is also going to lessen the systemic discrimination you don’t even know exists, or that society doesn’t acknowledge. You don’t have to know if society is biased against redheads or left-handed fiddle players. If you help the people who are the worst off, you will necessarily be reducing systemic discrimination.
This article goes too far… there is a big difference between legal precedent and a revised definition. But along those lines…