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Comment by hellomyguys | Hacker News Reader

Would you agree at some point this country was systemically racist?

Surely you would agree during slavery it was?

I'm going to assume you agree, so then can you explain when systemic racism ended? And what caused it to end? Can you also help me understand how you are so sure that the negative impact to Black people while this country was systematically racist does not still hurt people today?

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The logic of your argument seems to be: "There was slavery, so there was systemic racism." Am I right? Then you extruded that argument into: "Because there was slavery, there is also systemic racism today." This is quite a leap, especially considering that slavery was ended on a particular date due to a civil war. Since then, several settlements has been made with racism (systemic or otherwise), some of the most important ones being during the 60's. These settlements have come both in the form of physical changes to the law, but also in the form of a change to the general zeitgeist and in the attitude of most people towards racism. What is happening today, however, is purely the widspread misunderstanding and politization of facts and statistics. On the whole, crime is going down, but if you look at this table from the FBI, the bias does in fact seem to be biased towards whites and not blacks.[1] What do you think about that?

[1]: FBI murder statistics by race from 2018, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-... 2018 was the latest year I could find such data on.

No I'm asking for you to tell me when systemic racism ended in this country because the crux of your argument is that it has ended and the effects of it historically don't linger today. Can you explain the fact the net worth of a typical white family is $171,000 and the typical net worth of a Black family is $17,150? Are Black people in this country inherently predisposed to making less money or are there systemic reasons for that?

It's odd you continue to focus on crime statistics, something I haven't mentioned at all, as a way to push back on the narrative of systemic racism. For anyone who is Black or a person of color, we know first hand systemic racism is much more than that.

[1]: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining...

> Can you explain the fact the net worth of a typical white family is $171,000 and the typical net worth of a Black family is $17,150?

how many young poor black mothers have children too early (16) with gang members who end up dying from gang violence? isn’t that a modern day common black narrative?

how is a poor white person any worse off than a poor black person? they have same access to all resources. it’s systemic poverty for poor people. it has nothing to do with blacks.

some blacks bootstrap themselves out and make it, most don’t. how broken is the system for those that make it out? not very.

>it’s systemic poverty for poor people. it has nothing to do with blacks.

This is a good point imo. Are they poor because they're black or because their family was poor before them?

I agree people put too much emphasis on more visible bias (ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation) and blame a lot of things which arguably may have originated from these bias, but are furthered by other factors (e.g. slow social mobility - all bias accounted for).

you have to adjust those FBI stats for the fact that black people are 13% of the US population

I agree that per capita numbers always tell a more accurate story. Anyway here's a great resource to make those adjustments: https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?d=ACS%205-Year%20Estima...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the person you're responding to is in opposition to you.

Maybe I'm wrong but wouldn't their interpretation of chattel slavery in America be that it wasn't the beginning of systemic racism in this country, but purely oppressive system that was exploited by racists? It seems like an odd distinction to make even if I agree that there exists systematic oppression against many groups in addition to systemic racism.

>In other words, the problem is not that there are racist people in the system, but that we have these systems that give racist individuals the perfect excuse to achieve their nefarious ends.

Even this just doesn't fully explain away systemic oppression that impacts people on a day-to-day basic like Black people not getting job interviews due to their name sounding Black or job offers because the interviewers have unconscious bias.

> Even this just doesn't fully explain away systemic oppression that impacts people on a day-to-day basic like Black people not getting job interviews due to their name sounding Black or job offers because the interviewers have unconscious bias.

In this scenario, is it not the racist individual (the interviewer) impacting minority success, rather than the system itself?

(I take no position here as to the existence of systemic racism. I'm just not certain the example you have brought supports your argument.)

good question. The individual is racist, but he/she is probably just racist in the same way that almost everyone is: the society that they grew up in created associations in his nervous system that black people are more likely to be incompetent, unprofessional, untrustworthy, or whatever. Furthermore, the individual may be conditioned by society to believe that certain innocuous elements of black culture or mannerisms somehow indicate an inferiority - they may consider black speech mannerisms as a sign of lower intelligence, or they may consider black styles of hair to be unprofessional. These are all part of a cultural system that stigmatizes blackness and black people. It's not the same kind of systemic racism as racist rules/bureaucracy, but it's still part of a system of racist beliefs and customs.

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