A Bluff and a Bludgeon

It's time to stop blaming "systemic racism"

Earlier this week, Bari Weiss published an excellent symposium, “What Is Systemic Racism?,” on her Substack Common Sense. She asked a number of illustrious writers and thinkers to contribute their thoughts on the term, including yours truly.

You may not be surprised to learn that I don’t think the term “systemic racism” has much explanatory power. It obscures more than it reveals about racial disparities in the U.S. Yet “systemic racism” is purported to be the hidden cause behind any and all failures in the Black community. This just isn’t so.

You can read the entire symposium here—it’s well worth your time. I repost my own contribution below.

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A Bluff and a Bludgeon

By Glenn Loury

The invocation of “systemic racism” in political arguments is both a bluff and a bludgeon. 

When a person says, for example, “over-representation of black Americans in prison in the United States is due to systemic racism,” he is daring the listener to say: “No. It’s really because there are so many blacks who are breaking the laws.” And who would risk responding that way these days? The phrase effectively bullies the listener into silence.

Users of the phrase seldom offer any evidence beyond citing a fact about racial disparity while asserting shadowy structural causes that are never fully specified. We are all simply supposed to know how “systemic racism,” abetted by “white privilege” and furthered by “white supremacy,” conspire to leave blacks lagging behind.

American history is rather more subtle and more interesting. Such disparities have multiple, interacting causes, ranging from culture to politics to economics and, yes, to nefarious doings of institutions and individuals who may well have been racist. But acknowledging this complexity is too much nuance for those alleging “systemic racism.”

They ignore the following truth: that America has basically achieved equal opportunity in terms of race. We have chased away the Jim Crow bugaboo, not just with laws but also by widespread social customs, practices, and norms. When Democrats call a Georgia voter integrity law a resurgence of Jim Crow, it is nothing more than a lie. Everybody knows there is no real Jim Crow to be found anywhere in America. 

The phrase also does a grave disservice to blacks and to the country. Here we are now, well into the 21st century. (Have you heard of China?) Our lives are being remade every decade by technology, globalization, communication, and innovation, and yet all we seem to hear about is race.

My deep suspicion is that these charges of “systemic racism” have proliferated and grown so hysterical because black people — with full citizenship and equal opportunity in the most dynamic country on Earth — are failing to measure up.  Violent crime is one dimension of this. The disorder and chaos in our family lives is another. Denouncing “systemic racism” and invoking “white supremacy,” and shouting “black lives matter,” while 8,000 black homicides a year go unmentioned — these are maneuvers of avoidance and blame-shifting. 

The irony is that so many of us decry “systemic racism,” even as we simultaneously demand that this very same “system” deliver us. 

This essay originally appeared in "What Is Systemic Racism?” on Common Sense.

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