Racism without Racists: What is “Systemic Racism” and is it a Problem in America?

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” 

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. 

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, “I Have a Dream,” 1963 (Source)

 

The more I listen to the Black members of our community and study the sociological issues surrounding Blacks in America, the more I’m coming to understand that racism, “prejudice and discrimination” on the basis of skin color (Merriam-Webster, Source), was not abolished with the 13^th amendment nor the Civil Rights Movement. Racism is still very much alive in America today, and we have a constitutional obligation to address and correct it (e.g., “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”).

Color Blindness Won't Eliminate Systemic Racism

One of the main calls to action I keep hearing about racism in America is that the only way to get rid of it is to stop talking about it. And…I agree with the sentiment: in an ideal world, everyone in the United States would be treated equally regardless of skin color, as Dr. King proclaimed in 1963 (i.e., “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”).

We should be careful, however, that we aren’t using the end goal as our proposed solution. In effect, ignoring skin color in our current social environment won’t help us eliminate a lot of the barriers Blacks face in America that Whites don’t because (you guessed it) the racism we’re facing is systemic, or a result (perhaps unintentionally) of the social and economic systems we’ve built in the United States.

Simply ignoring skin color would probably work if the racism we were trying to solve was the result of a bunch of individual racists. But it’s not (at least, not so much anymore) – the racism we’re attempting to address now is the result of the systems we built when we, as a community, were collectively racist. Despite many White (personal) opinions about Blacks having shifted favorably over the last 50 years, the effects of the systems we built in the past are still negatively impacting our Black brothers and sisters, and simply ignoring them won’t make them disappear.

This is to what “systemic racism” is referring – the discrimination against Blacks (and other minorities) because of the way they’re affected by our systems, not necessarily by the individual contributors to those systems.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge advocate of people improving their personal attitude and behavior so they can contribute to their greater society in a positive way – and I think that’s helpful even here as we’re discussing treating Blacks with the same dignity and respect that Whites offer people of their own race – but the racism we’re facing now is a different problem and will require a more comprehensive societal and political renovation to solve.

Indeed, before we can eliminate the barriers Blacks are facing in America, we must first accept that they exist and understand how they present.  

Black People Really Are Incarcerated at Higher Rates Than Whites

According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Whites make up 58% of the incarcerated population in the United States, while Blacks make up 38% (13 June 2020, Source).

At first glance, one might be tempted to think, “There are more Whites in prison than Blacks, so if there’s any racism problem here it’s against Whites. But it’s not racist because there are more Whites in America than Blacks, so it makes perfect sense that there are more Whites in prison. And you don’t see me – a White person – going around yelling about racism.”

Without considering the full picture, one might be forgiven for thinking this way. In fact, the nod to the difference in population size highlights an imperative factor here. According to the United States Census Bureau, Whites make up 76.5% of the American population, while Blacks make up 13.4% (2019, Source).

When we compare the percentage of incarcerated Whites against the total American White population to the percentage of incarcerated Blacks against the total American Black population, we illuminate the stunning reality:

Whites make up 76.5% of the American population and 58% of the incarcerated population, so the incarcerated population of Whites is less than the total population of Whites by a factor of less than one – i.e., the incarcerated population of Whites in America is less than the total representative population of Whites in America.

Blacks, on the other hand, make up only 13.4% of the American population, but account for 38% of the incarcerated population, nearly three times the total representative population of Blacks in America.

Are we to believe, then, that Blacks are inherently more criminal than Whites? Because that’s what the data shows: Blacks are incarcerated at three times the rate Whites are. How can we account for this discrepancy, if it's not because of racism, other than to conclude that Blacks are inherently more criminal than Whites?

Single-Parent Households Don't Account For The Discrepancy in Incarceration Rates between Blacks and Whites

There are obviously some correlation factors here that we either aren’t aware of or aren’t doing a good job illuminating, but one statistic of particular interest keeps surfacing during this debate: Blacks have higher rates of single-parent households than Whites. According to the United States Census Bureau, 57% of Black families in America today are single-parent households, compared to 25% of White families (2019, Source).

Now, anyone who has talked to me about social issues already knows that I am a huge advocate for protecting the nuclear family. The more research I do about sociology and social issues, the more convinced I am that we can solve a whole host of behavioral and societal problems by building strong, nuclear, two-parent households and raising our children in those environments.

If it’s the case, however, that single-parent households are to blame for people going to prison – regardless of race – we would expect that the percentage of Blacks and Whites in prison would be proportional to the percentage of Blacks and Whites with single-parent households.

In other words, we know from the incarcerated population rates that Blacks are imprisoned three times more than Whites (based on their respective population sizes), so we would also expect the Black single-parent households in America to be three times greater than White single-parent households.

But, of course, that’s not the case. For Black single-parent households to be three times the White single-parent households in the United States, 75% of Black families would need to have single-parent households – an 18% inflation from the actual figure (57%; United States Census Bureau, Source).

Clearly, there’s something else going on here.

When the 13h Amendment Abolished Free Slave Labor, The Prison System Offered a Solution

President Abraham Lincoln declared that all slaves in the United States would be “henceforth and forever free” during his renowned Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 (Source). Following the end of the Civil War and the subsequent eradication of slavery in the United States, the 13^th amendment was added to the Constitution of the United States of America in 1865 to solidify this promise. The amendment reads:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to Jurisdiction” (Source).

While this was a noble (and, I believe, morally correct) political move in an important social direction, the United States quickly realized that a significant part of their economy relied on free slave labor – which was no longer available after the ratification of the 13^th amendment.

It’s been alleged that politicians, economists, and entrepreneurs in the 1800’s quickly identified a loophole in the amendment that could allow them to solve this problem: Blacks in America were now free “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” In other words, “if we imprison Blacks, we can legally use them – as inmates – to continue our free labor.”

As compelling as this logic seems out-the-gate, I was interested to see what the history about incarceration in the United States could tell us about the possibility of this theory holding weight.

(If you’re unaware, we still do this today – use inmates for free labor. And I don’t even fundamentally disagree with the practice, but that’s not to excuse it from the possibility of having racist roots.)

It Looks Rather Possible That The Racism in America in The 1860s Could Have Influenced the Development of the Criminal Justice System

As it turns out, the data in this area from the 1800's is a little spotty. But we can definitely learn some interesting and (I think) helpful things from the reports that are available. 

The first report in U.S. history on national government correction statistics was recorded in 1850 (eleven years before the start of the Civil War). In 1870 (five years after the 13^th amendment was ratified), information about race of prisoners was obtained and recorded for the first time (United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States, 1850-1984, p. 1, Source).

Notably, between 1890 and 1984, 8,516 people were executed via the death penalty, and 3,543 were lynched (“the number of illegal lynchings outnumbered legal executions until after 1900”; pg. 9, Source). 73% of the people legally lynched between 1980 and 1962 (the date of the last recorded lynching) were Black. As is custom with forcing social change via legislation, we can see from this data that racism was still alive and well in America even after the slaves were legally freed in 1865. This is to be expected, and provides some credibility to the theory that a lot of Americans had maintained a racist mindset, which may have perhaps encouraged them to devise the possibility of using incarcerated Blacks for free labor.

Concurrently, around the same time of the abolition of slavery in the United States, “it is somewhat known that [the period between 1850 and 1870] was a period in which many States were establishing State prisons and reformatories” (pg. 27, Source).

Long story short, the incarcerated population in the United States grew 1,569% between 1850 (26,679 people) and 1984 (445,381 people; Source). And although we don’t have data during all of those years about how many of those individuals are Black versus White, we can assume it’s not less than we see today – an ostensibly less racist period in time.

In 2018, the most recent available information from the U.S. Department of Justice, the number of “prisoners under jurisdiction of state or federal correctional authorities” was 1,465,158 people. Importantly, the imprisonment rate of black males was 5.8 times that of white males, and black females was 1.8 times the rate of white females (Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, pg. 3, Source).

All this to say – incarceration rates have increased dramatically since the abolition of slavery in the United States (whether as a result of 1860's racism or not). Because we currently see blacks incarcerated more frequently than Whites, we can confidently assume that the incarceration of Blacks in the United States is less dramatic today than it was in the 1800's, if anything (despite early reporting being a little spotty). And finally, whether it was racially-motivated or not, the rise of the prison system in the United States happened during a time in U.S. history where racism was running rampant, and we would be fools to believe that the formation of those systems wasn’t at all influenced by those societal factors.

Acknowledging That We Haven't Solved This Problem Means We've Failed Our Black Brothers and Sisters for Decades – That Doesn't Mean We Should Avoid Correcting it Now

The incarceration rates of Blacks versus Whites is barely scratching the surface of how we see systemic racism presenting in America today. There are a whole host of societal factors that we haven’t even touched on about the history of racism in the United States and how that history has affected the prison system, criminal justice system, and everyday racism of America. We undoubtedly still observe systemic racism showcased in our society today – for example:

·        Blacks being incarcerated more than Whites, and then never being allowed to vote (i.e., enact political change for their benefit) for thereon being labeled “felon”

·        For every nine people who have been executed in the U.S., one person on death row has been proven innocent and released, a significant number of them Black

·        Higher rates of wrongful convictions for Blacks than for Whites

·        A justice system that’s set up to exonerate rich White people (sometimes guilty) but inhibit poor Black people (sometimes innocent), both legally

Racism is alive in America. As with any personal or social problem, we really start to see the effects of the problem only after we’ve acknowledged that the problem exists. And whether intentional or not, Blacks are still receiving the short end of the societal stick as a result of a lot of our systems that were built during a time when racism in America was alive and well. It’s imperative that we understand the way racism presents today, so we know how to address it at a systematic level.

Acknowledging that racism still exists in the United States is difficult for a lot of White people to do, because it means admitting that we’ve failed our Black brothers and Sisters. It means that we’ve had the power (as the uninhibited majority) to change these circumstances, but we’ve ignored them, or misunderstood them, or not recognized them for what they were (systemic racism instead of individual or isolated cases of discrimination) – and we’ve allowed our systems to keep hurting our Black brothers and sisters for decades.

And that can be painful for Whites to admit. But we owe it to our Black brothers and sisters to accept that we haven’t yet done enough to rid the systems of our country of the cultures, practices, and policies that continue to hurt our Black community. In the words of American lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson:

“Hope allows us to push forward, even when the truth is distorted by the people in power. … Through [my] work, I’ve learned that…the character of our nation isn’t reflected in how we treat the rich and the privileged, but how we treat the poor, the disfavored, and condemned. … Our [legal] system takes more from [innocent men] than it has the power to give back.”

It’s not too late to acknowledge our shortcomings so we can address and correct the systemic racism that continues to hurt our Black community. It’s time for us to give back what we can, and refuse to give up until we've done all we can to make this right.