With the massive June 6th Black Lives Matter demonstration in front of city hall, I think it might be useful to spend some time trying to talk about what the term "systemic racism" really means.
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| The biggest demo I've ever seen in Guelph---- in the middle of a pandemic! Photo by Bill Hulet |
What follows is an extended meditation about what the phrase "systemic racism" means. I've spent a lot of time thinking and researching this topic, with a lot of blind alleys. Here are some of the things I've considered and rejected:
- At one point I considered giving up because who cares what an old, white man thinks of "systemic racism"? But I've come across several black commentators who opined that they were sick of having white friends ask them for "lessons on being woke". They said that they thought it was up to white people to get their act together on their own and black people have no responsibility to keep explaining things to them.
- I've tried to frame this issue in a lot of different ways and wrestled with whether or not to include some pieces of evidence. For example, I kept in a reference to things like "oreos", "apples", "bananas", and, "coconuts" because I see this as evidence that race is culturally constructed. I thought about putting in a clip from the show The Wire that illustrated the other side of this, (the whole "wh*gg*r" phenomenon), but decided that probably some readers would find it really offensive (as I do on at least some level), so I decided to not bother. If you honestly don't know what I'm talking about here, you can look at this clip---but don't say I didn't warn you about it!
- I originally thought I'd build it around a video clip of the RCMP commissioner trying to wrestle with, and getting totally flummoxed by trying to figure out "systemic racism". But I dropped that frame, as I thought that I could do a better job just discussing the ideas on their own. Moreover, I was a bit concerned about copyright infringement because I don't have my own footage of an interview with the commissioner, and I'm not about to get any any time soon.
A quick check of Wikipedia came up with the following quote from a British judge who led an inquiry into a police killing. William Macpherson wrote the following definition of "systemic racism":
The collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour that amount to discrimination through prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.
I find this definition particularly useful because it expands the terms of reference somewhat beyond a simple focus on race. Macpherson says that it's not just the colour of a person's skin, but but also their "culture, or ethnic origin" that can be used to identify a person for discrimination.
This first point deserves some emphasis. It is true that there are plenty of people who overtly and consciously discriminate against people specifically because of the colour of their skin. And these folks can do some catastrophically bad things. But I suspect that the majority of problems created under the banner of "systemic racism" are done unconsciously by people who would be mortally offended if you suggested that they were racist in any way, shape, or, form.
I think that this is an important consideration, because it brings into play the relationship between a person's skin tone and their culture as a defining characteristic of race. People often talk as if "race" is a very specific thing. But in actual fact, the consensus among scientists is that race is something that has to be constructed by a specific culture.
To understand this point, consider the following situation. I know a guy who's mother was a Mohawk woman who "looked white" but was so afraid of having her children taken away from her during the "sixties scoop" that she decided to tell everyone that she was actually was "white". Moreover, she moved heaven-and-earth to live as "white" as she possibly could in order to remove any chance that she might be found out. As he tells it, she went to the point of joining and eventually becoming the president of a local horticultural group that bred a specific type of ornamental flower---because that was the most "white" thing she could think of doing. Indeed, she went to such lengths to hide her identity as a member of a First Nation that my acquaintance didn't even know about his heritage until he was in his 60s and she was near the end of her life. At that point he found that he had an entire extended family that lived on a reserve near where he grew up---but knew nothing about!
Of course, what I'm talking about is the phenomenon of "passing" that has always been part of every race group. If you doubt this as a possibility, consider the following photos. Ask yourself, what would you think if you met one of these people on the street and had to decide which particular race they belonged to? (I got these photos from this Huffpost article. I'm using them under the "Fair Dealing" copyright provision.)
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| This woman is of German/Ethiopian extraction. |
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| Asian/Black |
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| Mixed extraction from Cape Verde. |
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| African American with vitiligo. |
Looking at these photos you should be able to see why the consensus among modern scientists is that "race" is something of an artificial construct. The reason why they say this is because there are no "hard and fast" boundaries between different races---they blend into each other at the edges.
We should be able to all understand this point if we could look at the people we meet without labouring under preconceived notions. In my own case, while at university I shared a house with a guy who's skin was so white that he looked like something from a vampire movie. But he had a fuzzy blonde afro. Eventually it came up in a conversation that he was part black, which was what explained the hair thing. I also had a "significant other" for a time who came from Bombay and was of Goan extraction. She had very dark skin like a lot of Southern Indians, but also very frizzy hair---which meant that lots of people thought she was of African background. Moreover, she had vitiligo, which upset her a bit, but she used to kid me about by saying "see---I'm turning white, just like you!"
Having made the above point, it is important to understand that saying "race is an artificial construct" doesn't exactly mean that there is no such thing as race, or, that people can pick and choose whether they identify with one race or another. Indeed, there was a lot of idiotic talk after Barack Obama got elected US president to the effect that he could pick and choose to identify as black or white because he had a parent of each race. The point of race in a racist society isn't what the person in question calls themselves, it's what the racist dicks call them. In the US the ultimate decider are jerks like the Klueless Klucks Klan. No matter what Obama might have thought or said about himself---to these guys he was black.
Indeed, a legal definition of "black" was developed in several American states as used in various laws, such as denying marriage between whites and blacks, who sat at the back of the bus, which school you went to, etc. (This list is illustrative, not definitive, as things changed in the legal codes, and, various definitions applied differently to different laws):
- in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, and, Oklahoma, it was whether any single person in one's ancestry was black
- Florida said it was 1/16th or more of one's ancestry
- Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee, and, Texas it was 1/8th
These definitions meant that someone could look as white as me, and still be legally defined as being "black" and therefore subject to various regulations denying her a whole range of civil liberties.
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Beyond the issue of "passing" and the ambiguity that exists at the edges of racial stereotypes, there's another piece of evidence that would suggest that race is a social construct. That's the issue of someone looking like they are a member of one race yet acting like they are a member of another.
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| Nora Loreto, image from her website. Used under the "Fair Dealing" provision of the Copyright Act. |
I got thinking about this because of an exchange I recently heard on a Canadaland Shortcuts podcast where Jesse Brown's guest Nora Loreto came up with an insight based on a conversation about Corey Hurren, the guy who drove his vehicle into Rideau Hall presumably so he could hunt down Justin Trudeau and shoot him with one of the many guns he brought along. As she puts it, the problem with mainstream media coverage of this incident is that it focuses on what a "nice guy" Hurren is, how surprising it is that he would do anything bad. But as she points out, here's a guy who took hours and hours to drive across the country---which means that he had ample opportunity to change his mind and not follow through with his deranged notions. "Nice guys" sometimes get dumb ideas into their heads---but they don't follow through once they've had some time to cool off and think things through.
Moreover, from what I've read it seems to be clear that Corey Hurren is a member of that deranged group of people who see the whole Covid-19 shutdown as being an attempt by the elite to take away people's freedoms. The reason why regular reporters find it impossible to see this guy as a dangerous terrorist instead of being a nice guy (who, moreover, makes tasty sausages!) is because the reporter's first instincts is to identify with him instead of seeing him as "the Other". And that's the thing about systemic racism. People tend to separate the people around them into two groups: people just like them, and, "the Other".
Beyond skin colour, the "Other" is easily recognized by other cues: immigrant, urban, non-Christian, left wing, non-average sexual orientation, etc. If reporters had been able to check off these background items about Corey Hurren, you can bet that they wouldn't be writing about what a "nice guy" he is, how tasty his sausages are, and, how much people in the community liked him. And if the media constantly frames stories in such a way that it adamantly refuses to call someone a "terrorist" if he is too easily identified as being "just like" the white, middle-class, mainstream guys who work in the newsroom, that is an example of "systemic racism".
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I put a lot of work into this article. I'm pretty happy with the result, but it was still a real slog. I've spent most of my life doing physical labour of one type or another, and I can honestly say I get just as tired writing these articles as I used to get pounding a beat, mixing concrete, banging nails, moving furniture, shoveling manure, picking fruit, etc. So if you can afford it, why not subscribe so you can help keep this sort of thing available for anyone via the Web? (Thanks Stan for being so awesome!) It's not hard to do using either Patreon or Pay Pal.
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Next, take a look at this short excerpt from a You Tube clip. (Generally, when I put in a video clip, I add a link to the original. But there are so many half-truths, misleading statements, lies, etc, being spouted in that one that I don't want to help propagate the nonsense.)
The fast-talking, weasly young white man in this clip---Ben Shapiro---is using a high-school debating team tactic to beat the other panelists into submission. What he's doing is very quickly asking "Explain to me" questions about very complex issues that no one else can answer in the very short amount of time that the moderator allots to each person on the panel. These are:
- why black children aren't graduating from high school
- why black youth are shooting each other in higher rates
- why 13% of people (presumably black people) do 50% of the murders
- why the percentage of black people in prison is so high
- why the black single mother rate jumped from 20% to 70% after civil rights reforms were enacted
There are several potential responses to these questions. For example, you could say that the behaviours he is referencing are the results of poverty caused by racism, not the causes of it. You could also argue that during the period of time he references wealth stratification has dramatically diminished upward mobility in American society---freezing different parts of society at the economic place where they were in the early 1970s. But both of these arguments are pretty much impossible to give in the short, snappy soundbites that the rules of the discussion require. Moreover, Shapiro has taken the initiative by demanding that people respond to his questions, which are probably very well-rehearsed because debating is what he does for a living. It is pretty much impossible for most people to immediately come up with the sort of response that would be required to shut him down. (I've spent a lot of hours thinking about this little clip of video before writing this commentary.)
And that's the point of these sorts of debates. At a university scholars have discussions that are based on the assumption that everyone involved is honestly looking for the objective truth. But people like Shapiro are only interested in "winning", and tailor their statements accordingly. Is it any wonder that someone who comes to a knife fight seeking to build a consensus with the other person ends up in the dust bleeding out?
But beyond that, it's questionable that some or even all of the claims on which Shapiro is basing his "tell me why questions" are actually true. For example, let's look at the first---the one about Black teens not graduating from high school. Here's a graph that compares recent American high school graduation rates by race from the National Centre for Education Statistics. As you can see, 79% of Black students do graduate as opposed to 89% of white. Since most public schools in the US are funded locally, which means that poor neighbourhoods tend to have poor schools and vice versa, it wouldn't be hard to understand that poverty might explain that 10 point difference.
Moreover, according to a study done by the PEW research centre, 20% of black dropouts go on to get a "General Educational Development" certificate (GED), which is considered the same as a high school diploma. They do this by going to night school, though. That means that they still get called "high school drop outs". (Strictly speaking, I'm a high school dropout too---even though I have a Master's degree.)
I could go on, but I don't want to make this story about rebutting Ben Shapiro. I'd just like readers to remember that even though he speaks with such absolute confidence about the validity of his arguments, I'd suggest that there is a lot less than meets the eye in this clip.
But having said that, I'd like people to really think about what is going on here. Even though I suspect Shapiro would honestly bristle at this characterization, I would say that he is a racist and what this video boils down to is a less-than-subtle form of systemic racism. That's because---among other things---he's built his brand around refusing to argue in good faith. Instead, he uses his undeniable intelligence and education as a weapon to---among other things---make money off abusing other people based on their race. And this isn't just a question of one "lone wolf" using the Web. Shapiro is part of an entire right-wing media sector that is built around spreading the sort of ridiculous nonsense that is his stock-in-trade.
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There's another side to this thing. Consider the following Venn diagram.
Depending on the group and the context, it's probably true that most racialized people are also lower class, even though most lower class people are non-racialized. Indeed, the fact that a higher percentage of racialized people are lower class than the non-racialized population is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that suggests that we live in a racist society.
But we not only have a racist society, we also have a society that discriminates on the basis of class. I have had people opine to me that Canada is a classless society, so I'll toss out a couple personal anecdotes to illustrate my point.
- Years ago I had a conversation with a police officer who was saying how for years someone had parked a very expensive care illegally in a particular spot. He said he'd wanted to ticket it, but it was such a nice car that he thought it belonged to a big shot and he was afraid of the repercussions if he did. Imagine his chagrin, therefore, when he found out that it just belonged to a "nobody"---the owner of a hair salon.
- How many times have you heard about a person who is very high up in an institution or business being transferred from one department to another or asked to resign because he was caught in something like sexual harassment? In contrast, how often have you heard about this happening to someone much lower in the food chain? They usually just get fired.
- I remember when Elizabeth May stepped into the leadership race for the Green Party and sucked all the air out of the room for everyone else. Indeed, among the gaggle of reporters at the convention there was actually one from the New York Times. They never bother talking to any other potential leader, nor did they ask about anyone else but "Ellie May". It was obvious why this happened because whenever I heard her talk either in public or privately she never ever missed an opportunity to talk about "her buddies" like Mikhail Gorbachev, Bill Clinton, etc. What could the silly rubes who built the party possibly say that was worth listening to? Not much, it would appear.
- For years people complained about what terrible neighbours university students can be in this city. I was one of them. I can remember talking to one of the relevant people on campus about this and they gave me their legal opinion that there was absolutely nothing that the University could do to curb bad behaviour off campus---I was told it would be "double jepardy". But low-and-behold, a very loud party several years later seems to have pissed off a person very important to the university, and it appears that it could do something after all.
(This is where the complaints against the idea of "white privilege" kick in. If you are are a low-class white person in Canada, you've probably had your fair share of humiliations where it was made abundantly clear to you that you really don't count for much in the grand scheme of things. [This kicks into "over-drive" when you have to interface with the bureaucracy, which I talked about in this story.] The problem is that while this sort of thing is very real to the people who experience it, there's a whole other level of humiliation for racialized people beyond this sort of "background" class discrimination---which many poor white people don't understand because they have no direct experience of it.)
I raise this point because there arises the question about systemic racism and class discrimination. If you are low-class because of discrimination due to racism, and then you get treated badly because you are low-class, is this discrimination "racist" or "classist"? The way to think about this is to bring in the term "systemic racism".
At this point I can almost hear people complaining "What!!! It sounds like you are saying that you can't end systemic racism with stopping everyone in society from treating some other people like dirt!!!" To that I say, "Well, yeah".
It might be theoretically possible to treat poor people, immigrants, the mentally ill, the elderly, people from abusive backgrounds, the disabled, etc, all like crap without discriminating against people for racist reasons. But the fact of the matter is that this "background abuse" forms a tremendously good camouflage that racism can hide in. Moreover, a lot of devious politicians have found out that if they can pit some of the poor white folks against the poor people of colour society can divert attention from the fact that both groups are being jerked around. Simple abuse hides and protects racism, and, racism hides and protects simple abuse. They are bound together like conjoined twins.
If we want to build a better world for white poor people, we can't do it without making the world a better place for everyone else at the same time.
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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
Good job on such
ReplyDeletea complicated issue.