Michael Everett wrote:The E wrote:Systemic racism "not a problem", according to area white man
I think E is trying to say that Racism
is the problem, but Racism is a two-way highway which is most certainly not limited to the majority.
Kinda?
My main point here is that Imaginos, as a white man, lives in a world in which racism is not a problem. He doesn't see it, doesn't experience it; For him (and people like smr and TFLY), "racist" is something evil lefty people like me call people like him because we "don't have anything else to say". Sure, there are
some racists out there, but those are easy to see and censure, right? They aren't whatever passes for normal; they're distinctly abnormal and thus easy to dismiss.
But that's not the whole story. Yes, there's very little outright racism out there these days (although, looking at the sort of people Trump dragged out of the shadows, I wouldn't be so sure about that), but that doesn't mean that racism as a whole is a solved problem. For Imaginos, people living in poverty do so because they're somehow defective, because they made wrong decisions or live in a culture that, to him, is dysfunctional. That, to him, is enough: No further inquiry is necessary. It's their fault, and only their fault, since (as he himself can attest to), you can easily make it in America if you put in the work.
What we're dealing with a lot these days (and what Imaginos et al are refusing to see because acknowledging it would require them to question the lies they built their world view around) is
institutional racism and its effects. Racism operates on many levels, some more subtle than others. You see a moron in the streets ranting about how all the brown people are subhuman and should be killed, or how the Jews control everything and need to be extinguished, you know what that dude's about. You can dismiss him, he's not representative of you or the community you live in (one hopes, anyway).
But that's the easy part. The next part, the internalized racism that we all carry around within us, is harder to deal with; We all get slightly more wary when we're in a neighbourhood where there are lots of foreign accents, where things don't smell right and people don't look like us. To call that racism, one would feel, would overstate matters, surely, if the crime rate in this neighbourhood is high, being a bit on guard is good, yes? Nothing to do with any one person you come across there, just good practice.
But those prejudices, which you may not even be aware of and which, if they are pointed out to you, you'll definitely not see as racism, translate into unfair treatments in everyday situations. People living in the wrong 'hoods have a harder time getting loans; People with the wrong name have a harder time passing HR preselection for job candidates, the old effect of members of a minority having to do work above and beyond what a representative of the majority has to do to be accepted as equal.
And then there's institutional effects: The wiki page linked to above describes institutional racism as
"The collective failure of an organisation 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 which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people."
That's the things that lead to minority neighbourhoods getting low priority for infrastructure projects. It's the thing where police forces train their officers to be just that little bit more strict when in a minority neighbourhood or when dealing with members of a minority.
Policy decisions like those are rarely made by one individual. There's not a single person or committee in charge you can point to and say "that person was racist!", there's usually a bunch of statistics and very thorough reasoning behind these things that are carefully scrubbed of anything that smells of racial biases, but the end result is a country that espouses egalitarianism but is in actuality strongly stratified and where the circumstances of your birth dictate a lot about how difficult your later life will be.