This is an unpublished piece.
Two opponents have entered the ring to fight over the word “systemic.” The issue is whether the United States “suffers” from systemic racism, or not. Yes, we’ve got racism, everyone agrees, but is it embedded in the fabric of our society and culture, as the word “systemic” implies? One side, representing liberals and the majority (but not all) of non-White Americans, claims that the U.S is systemically racist. The other side, representing conservatives and the majority (but not all) of White Americans, claims that the country is not.
The liberal argument has largely been advanced by those we refer to as “people of color:” African-Americans, Asians, Native Americans, and Latinos. The evidence backing up their claim comes from personal experience of prejudice and the sad history of how their ancestors met racism full on — slavery, immigration exclusion, Jim Crow laws, redlining, forced segregation, and so on. The otherness implied by the term “people of color” (that is, “not white”) and the presence on our census of questions related to race may be an argument in itself that as a nation we put people into racial categories and that we do so for reasons that are not clearly spelled out. Why is racial data necessary? Why don’t we just get rid of that question on the census forms we fill out every ten years? If the answer is that we do need the question, then we should ask why?
The question of why your skin color matters on the census form suggests that there must be some reason it’s important for at least our government to know. By our government I mean the battling groups we elect to the Executive branch, Congress, state and local legislatures, and in some states even the courts. The two main political groups in government, the Democrats and the Republicans, direct the operations of the Census Bureau. Which of these two groups would you think would be less willing to get rid of the race question on census forms? This is another way of asking which political party needs that information more? It’s not an easy question to answer.
For instance, both parties use the racial data from the census to understand where their constituents live. Republican voters are overwhelmingly White (81% in the 2020 election) and Democratic voters less so (59%). So if you’re a Republican politician you know, statistically speaking, that locations which have voted in large percentages for your candidates in the past are likely to vote that way again in the future and that they are predominantly White.
Now since on average each of our 435 congressional districts includes about 700,000 people and you know the racial makeup of those people and where they live down to the street level, you can shuffle the people in your state to settle on district boundaries which would pretty well predict how any hypothetical arrangement of districts would tend to vote. Would any particular district you conceive be more likely to elect a Republican or a Democratic representative? Computers make this relatively simple. You can even ask the computer to predict what set of area boundaries will give you the maximum number of representatives for your party. This is gerrymandering and it’s done by both Democrats and Republicans.
Without accurate information on the racial identity of voters, gerrymandering would be a lot harder to do. It might even stump the computers because programmers would have to come up with other indicators to predict racial identity; for example, which households subscribe to Spanish language TV programming. This is data that the Census doesn’t ask for, so it would be expensive to acquire it. Census data is relatively cheap by contrast.
But gerrymandering is only one example of where racial information is useful. It comes up in business hiring decisions, educational choice, law enforcement, water rights distribution, defense rosters, housing availability, and on and on.
Racial identification is used everywhere in our country and on that score alone we can fairly call it systemic. But the real question buried in the term is whether our particular systemic racism is harmful, discriminatory, and unfair. I think everyone agrees in theory that it certainly can be all of that, but Republicans deny that it is not that in practice, and Democrats tend to largely agree that in the daily experience of people subjected to racism it is personally painful. On a larger scale it is also destructive of the cohesion necessary to sustain healthy communities. They call it un-American, even as they admit that it is very-American.
The evidence is certainly there of many racially motivated actions taken against “people of color,” but Republicans attribute that to “bad actors” and have even asserted that White people are the victims of “reverse racism” directed at them. But If that’s the case, then wouldn’t Republicans have to admit too that racism is systemic in the country?
You can probably agree that 250 years of our country quarreling over people’s skin color has necessarily left scars. History and culture are passed from generation to generation, not by genes of course, but like genetic information, racial awareness and the biases that attend on it, has become ingrained and culturally transmitted.
If we desire to stop transmitting it, shouldn’t we be forthright and honest about its existence now and in the past, and not just assert on scant evidence that “we’re better than that?” Shouldn’t we include in the education of our kids books and ideas that make them uncomfortable with looking at all those scars? Shielding the youth of today from the facts and emotions of people who have faced down racism in their lives just passes the problem onto the adults they will become. Acknowledging systemic racism in order to rid ourselves of it is a way to realize the promise of e pluribus unum on a human scale. You can bet on it with the money that motto is written on.