Systemic Racism Explained: For U.S. Senator John Cornyn and Others
In the U.S. Senate, on June 16, there was a debate about what “systemic racism” means. It ended with Senator John Cornyn concluding that a civil rights leader was saying that all Americans are racist. “You lost me when you want to take the acts of a few misguided, perhaps malicious individuals and subscribe that to all Americans,” Cornyn said with resignation.
Cornyn presented a very common misunderstanding of racism as solely emerging from misguided and malicious individuals. This view radically minimizes the extent and impact of racism in American society.
Many social scientists, like myself, argue for a much more expansive view. First, we like using the term “prejudice” to refer to negative ideas and feelings directed toward a racial group, and “discrimination” to refer to the act of denying rights, resources, and opportunities based on race. These terms pull apart two distinct things — ideas and actions — that are often merged together in the popular discussion of racism.
People like Cornyn often see racially discriminatory actions as the result of the misguided and malicious ideas of individuals. When people are concerned about racial discrimination at the institutional, structural, or systemic level, however, they are not focused on individuals. Institutional discrimination focuses on the racial inequalities produced by the normal, day-to-day operations of organizations and institutions. Structural discrimination focuses on the broad organizational architecture that produces racial disparities. Systemic discrimination focuses on the large social systems that organize the racially unequal distribution of opportunities and resources in society. These terms have slightly different emphases, but they all move the focus away from the individual and toward larger macro-sociological processes.
For this discussion, we can treat these terms — institutional discrimination, structural discrimination, and systemic discrimination — as synonyms. Institutional discrimination is far more important and more pervasive than discrimination emerging from misguided and malicious individuals. Institutional discrimination does not require prejudiced individuals; it requires laws and policies. Institutional discrimination is not focused on ideas, but on actions.
It is useful to look in more detail at examples of systemic discrimination. An important form of institutional discrimination that is partially responsible for the black-white racial wealth gap in society today is the practice of redlining. Before I define redlining, note that redlining was built upon the structural discrimination of residential racial segregation. The point of racial segregation is to facilitate the unequal distribution of opportunities and resources by race. With redlining the federal government used its power to restrict access to affordable mortgages to white neighborhoods thereby reducing African American access to homeownership and wealth building. It did not matter whether an individual banker felt prejudice or did not feel prejudice toward African Americans. Once the government redlined black neighborhoods, it became a bad business decision to lend to black people for the prejudiced and unprejudiced alike. In other words, we can see the policy of redlining as suppressing black homeownership, not individual bankers.
Because of redlining and other forms of systemic discrimination in our economy, African Americans have less wealth than white Americans. Nonetheless, we have structured our educational system so that it relies heavily on local community economic resources like property taxes for funding. Since white communities have greater economic resources than black communities, we guarantee that the average white school has more resources to provide a higher quality education than the average black school. In this way, we have institutionalized racial inequality in our educational system. Americans are not actively and maliciously voting every year to underfund black schools, but our educational system automatically does that because of the policies that have been enacted in the past.
Today, there is a great deal of attention on the forms of institutional discrimination in the criminal justice system. A particularly egregious example of this discrimination was the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. For many years, the punishment for being caught with five grams of crack cocaine was the same as being caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine. The racial disparity comes in because black people were more likely to use crack cocaine, and white people were more likely to use powder cocaine. Although both forms of the drug are equivalent, the punishment for black users was much more severe. With this disparity written into law, it did not matter whether a prosecutor or a judge as individuals were prejudiced against black people or not. The law imposed a system for anti-black discrimination and anti-black discrimination was the result. (The crack-versus-powder sentencing disparity has been reduced but not eliminated.)
Perhaps the clearest way to see that racial discrimination can occur without misguided and malicious individuals is in medical care. Medical care providers use specialized calculators, formulas and algorithms to give results for medical tests and to determine the allocation of medical resources. For most of the individuals using these tools, they are black boxes — the user does not know exactly what the calculator, formula or algorithm is doing — they simply use it. It is like an app on your smartphone. You may use it every day, but you probably cannot explain all of the steps it takes to produce a result. It turns out that some tools used in medicine require black people to be sicker than white people to be prescribed the same treatment or given the same resources. In the case of one algorithm, the hospitals that purchased and used the algorithm did not know that the algorithm was discriminatory. Once the hospitals were made aware of the discriminatory impact of the algorithm, many stopped using the system. If these hospitals wanted to discriminate, they would have continued to use the discriminatory system. Although they did not want to discriminate, they had nonetheless done so because the system they used was discriminatory.
These examples are only a small, partial view of systemic discrimination. Most, if not all, of the institutions in our society are, to varying degrees, systemically discriminating against black people. While discrimination by individuals is very serious and very important — and it is more pervasive than Senator Cornyn might believe — it should not cause us to overlook or diminish the even more important issue of systemic discrimination. Systemic discrimination is affecting many millions of African Americans every day from the moment they are born to the day they die.
As individuals, we react very strongly to seeing egregious acts of interpersonal discrimination. But if we wish to eliminate racism, we have to go beyond the interpersonal and eradicate the institutions, structures, and systems of racial discrimination in our society. Only when we do that will we have a society with equal opportunity for all.
