“Systemic” definition: “relating to a system, especially as opposed to a particular part.”
Systemic racism is woke-America’s heartburn-issue du jour. From Time Magazine (June, 2020), “America’s Long Overdue Awakening to Systemic Racism.” Riots, arson, looting and goodbye cops, hello social workers make for quite the wakeup call. Yes, and “Welcome to my nightmare… I hope I didn’t scare you.” No, Alice, I’m pretty scared.
The Mrs. must have lured Joe Biden away from his afternoon reruns of Mister Ed and Gilligan’s Island. This gent’s better days? Clearly, behind him. Yet, he gathered some shards left from the wreckage of his cognitive powers, and: “Biden unveils plan to combat systemic racism and economic inequity.” You should worry about what economic equity will look like when this is done. But that’s a nightmare a bit further down the road, somewhere on the other side of the former Magnificent Mile.
Ok, Joe has got my hopes up. But first, I need a better handle on the “systemic” part of “systemic racism.” You see, I still remember when racism used to be … well, just “racism.” It was a simpler thing in a simpler time before guys who wanted to be gals became civil rights martyrs rather than psychiatric patients, before an incorrectly chosen pronoun was a hanging offense. Meanwhile, if you follow the “progress” of racism over, say, the last sixty years, what should hit you like a runaway train is the pathological career-course this “ism” has taken. Pat Moynihan’s “defining deviancy down,” deviancy in this case being racism, captures perfectly this disastrous dumpster dive.
Thus: sixty years ago, a racist was Bull Connor turning the police dogs loose on black-kid protestors. Back then, racists rather stood out – you don’t argue with a cattle prod or a firehose. Today, a racist is a deviant of a different sort, a white person with the temerity to post “All lives matter” on his Facebook page or a white, woke, suburban soccer mom who tearfully resists the struggle-session facilitators and pleads: “But I’m not a racist, really!” A raging white supremacist is some guy with a “White lives matter” bumper sticker on his Jeep Cherokee. Racism – “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” – down. Down to micro-manifestations: when an “ism” “micros” itself, as in “racist microaggressions,” you begin to suspect that desperation or dementia has set in.
Defining “racism” down at some point took a grammatical turn. It became a noun in a promiscuous search of adjectives. The trickle turned into a flood: “institutional racism,” “structural racism,” “institutional racism,” “economic racism,” “overt racism,” “covert racism,” “hipster racism,” for those inclined toward the exotic. These are just a sampling. “Systemic racism” now tops the list. That makes sense given the definition above. Efforts to raise the horror of racism to a hysterical pitch have been frustrated by those annoying, limiting-adjectives. “Systemic” means we must pull out all the stops against racism – it’s everywhere, it’s everywhere; no halfhearted measures allowed. The sky is falling, Chicken Little Comrade.
But, but, but … as the definition notes, “systemic” relates “to a system.” Help, please. What systems are infected?
Let’s attempt an inventory – those systems that shape American society and influence so many aspects of daily life. I’ll limit my search to a couple for reasons of time and space.
Start with Mr. Big, Uncle Sam’s government system. Since at least the late 1940s Mr. Big has been on a tear to eliminate racial discrimination here, there, everywhere: the military, government, schools, universities, housing, employment, business, voting. President Truman ordered the military to desegregate in 1948. The Supreme Court struck down segregated schools in 1954. President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock to force-integrate Central High School in 1957. In 1963, President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and ultimately compelled Governor George Wallace to integrate the University of Alabama. Then came the civil rights movement and the Great Society. In stepped Congress and a tsunami of legislation – from Affirmative Action, the Voting Rights Act to Section Eight housing – all aimed at ending racism in America. The Federal courts followed suit enforcing compliance with its racism-dismantling orders. Remember, school children force-bussed during the 1970s? Black Americans eventually got to be Congressmen, President, Secretary of State, Attorney General, and occupy an assortment of Presidential cabinet posts and other high government offices.
I’d say that Uncle Sam in the combating-racism arena acquitted himself well. What more, I might ask, should he have done? What other governments in big, multi-racial countries have done more? From “whites only” to the White House in a generation. If that’s systemic racism at work, then, as Ricky Ricardo scolded Lucy, someone’s “got some splainin to do.”
Does racism rule our educational system? From one of our most prestigious public universities, the University of Michigan: the Dean of the School of Education, Elizabeth Moje, sent a message to her colleagues, “The SOE must commit to anti-racist action” (June, 2020).
“[V]iolence against transgender Black people continues to fly under the radar. Once again, white fragility and fear has led to Black men and women being assaulted and imprisoned in parks and other community spaces. Despite the constant reminders we see in these repeated racist actions, many of us who benefit from white privilege continue to deny the existence or pervasiveness of racism. As a white woman, I have to denounce these atrocities and take action because neutrality is complicity. I must commit to being anti-racist.”
“Under the radar”? This is the standard “take action” agitprop future teachers get force-fed in university education schools before they are launched to shame white kids with unemployed dads about how privileged they are. “Neutrality is complicity,” a succinct rip off of Eldridge Cleaver’s “You either have to be part of the solution, or you’re going to be part of the problem.” The deviance of “racism” has been defined down to be your deficient display of theatrical outrage as determined by some social justice warrior fresh out of a “white privilege” seminar. To avoid the future-cancelling label of “racist” white folks must publicly self-flagellate, that is, virtue signal their guilt to a fevered pitch that leaves no doubt as to the sincerity of their self-loathing. To be an “anti-racist,” as Dean Lizzy tells us, you must tote around your personal megaphone and “denounce” the work of white racists everywhere, yourself included. Being a certified anti-racist is guaranteed to make you a preening, supremely obnoxious scold.
This failed search for systemic racism in government and education, I wager, would replicate itself in almost every venue of American life. What then to make of “systemic racism?” It rages as a religious contagion with an impressive “system” of forced-pretending. Today’s white racist is a pretend-entity like the witch in seventeenth-century Salem was a pretend-witch. What exists through pretending endures only as long as it serves someone’s purpose. Ask yourself: who benefits most from “systemic racism?”
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Stephen Paul Foster's newly published novel
