Systemic Racism: Two Views

"Systemic racism" might mean different things to different people. Nonetheless, I offer a simple and seemingly common take on it. As a point of departure, start with the concept of individual racism. What individual racism highlights is that individuals sometimes have racist attitudes (conscious or otherwise) and that they are capable of behaving in racist ways. More strongly, individuals can be racist. The concept of systemic racism is meant to highlight a parallel phenomenon about society: the different parts of society (norms, attitudes, practices, institutions, background distributions, etc.) can manifest racism. More strongly, society–-or "the system"––itself can be racist. 

Very roughly, when people talk about "the system" (or the structure of society), they often have in mind the interconnected policies, practices and attitudes that guide our lives, shape our institutions, determine our opportunities, and influence socio-economic outcomes.¹ For simplicity, I'll talk about three aspects of a social system: "policies, practices, and attitudes." These things are at play in areas of society like education, housing, media, criminal justice, government, the labor market, and so on.²

With that in mind, here is a very vague take on systemic racism that will serve as a point of departure for further elaboration:

"Systemic Racism" refers to a society with widespread racist policies, practices, attitudes and outcomes.

Notice two things about this definition. First, "systemic racism" does not refer to a society where each and every policy, practice, attitude and outcome is racist. Instead, systemic racism might refer to a society with enough racist polices, practices, attitudes and outcomes––enough to create widespread inequalities and adversities for, say, people of Color. The general idea is that a social system can vary in the extent to which it embodies racism. Second, while this is a helpful starting point, this definition raises an obvious question: when do policies, practices, attitudes and outcomes count as racist? A more helpful definition of systemic racism should fill in the details.

This leads to an important debate in philosophy: structuralism vs. agentialism

View 1: Structuralism

A popular view known as structuralism says the following: roughly, when policies, attitudes and practices lead to widespread racial adversities and inequalities, that is enough for those policies, attitudes, and practices to count as racist. That is, the outcome of a policy or practice determines whether it is racist or not. A popular example of this view comes from Ibram X. Kendi: "A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups." 

Now, structuralism is not necessarily committed to saying that just any racial inequity is an instance of racism. For some structuralists (as with agentialists below), it matters how inequitable outcomes arise. Generally, structuralists maintain that racial inequities and adversities count as racist when they stem from the governing prolicies/norms, practices, and attitudes within society. 

With this in mind, a structuralist might be sympathetic to a simple definition of systemic racism like this ³:

The structuralist view: "systemic racism" refers to a society with widespread policies, practices, and attitudes that are responsible for creating chronic inequalities and adversities for a particular racial group.⁴

On some versions of structuralism, the focus is on the unequal power dynamics or oppressive relations between racial groups. As philosopher Sally Haslanger argues, some types of social systems are inherently unjust due to illegitimate imbalances in power, even if those systems are introduced with good intentions, and even if the individuals with the most power are good-willed. For example, a benevolent Monarchy is still an unjust social system. Hence, on some versions of structuralism, societies (or polices/practices) that sustain unjust power balances between Black and white people are racist, even if they are comprised of good-willed whites (or even if they––the policies and practices––are introduced with good intentions). The focus for these sorts of structuralists is not on just any type of inequality. Nor is the focus on just any policy or practice that leads to inequality. Rather, the focus is on inequalities, policies, and practices that are implicated in oppressive relations and imbalances of power (see Dustin Crummett's really helpful essay on systemic racism for a closer look at all this). 

This leads to an important point about structuralism: structuralists deny that racist intentions are necessary for racist policies, practices and outcomes. Well-intentioned policies can still be racist. Here's an example that structuralists might cite. Consider homeownership and mortgage loans. Permitted by State and Federal policies, and guided by their own set of best practices, many banks and credit unions routinely disadvantage Black Americans. Part of the reason is that many banks and credit unions don't offer feasible mortgage loans for low-income Americans, a disproportionate number of whom are African Americans. Hence, a disproportionate number of African Americans fail to qualify for the right sorts of mortgage loans that would allow them to buy a house. These practices likely perpetuate inequalities in homeownership between Black and white individuals and hurt Black social mobility. Still, many of these banks, credit unions and online lenders may have no racial animosity or ill-will motivating their practices. They may be interested in maximizing profits, in taking care of their investors, and in providing a service to the general public. Moreover, Federal policies aimed at helping citizens build assets (e.g., homeownership subsidies) disproportionately benefit white individuals as compared to Black and Hispanic individuals. For the structuralist, the disadvantaging impact of these political and institutional practices may count as a form of racism (and contribute to making the U.S. systemically racist), whether or not the institutions and persons implementing these practices have racist intentions. 

The strongest versions of structuralism reserve the concept of "racism" for systems alone (call this view "strong structuralism"). The idea, according to strong structuralism, is that, while individuals may have race-based prejudice, only systems count as racist. Robin DiAngelo expresses this view when she writes: "Racism is a system....Racism differs from individual racial prejudice and racial discrimination in the historical accumulation and ongoing use of institutional power and authority to support the prejudice and to systematically enforce discriminatory behaviors..." ⁵

View 2: Agentialism

On a contrasting view known as agentialism, policies, practices, and outcomes are racist only if they "express" the racism of individual agents (or groups of agents). Compare: racist attitudes are often expressed through actions. A hiring committee passes over Sam's application because they harbor racist beliefs about her. The committee's decision expresses their racism. The agentialist is saying something similar about policies, practices, and the outcomes they create: racist attitudes can find expression in each of these things. For example, if racist attitudes (unconscious or otherwise) lead law makers to craft policies that disadvantage people of Color, or if racist attitudes lead law makers to overlook the needs of people of Color, those policies and their outcomes express the racism of the policy makers. Alternatively, if unconscious racist attitudes lead voters to be indifferent about policies and outcomes that harm people of Color, the endurance of those harmful policies and outcomes is an expression of racist indifference in society. Yet the agentialist goes further: these types of cases represent the only way for policies and practices to count as racist. Put loosely, systems become racist when (and only when) the racism of individuals "infects" the policies, outcomes, and practices of the system (for more on this, see philosopher Tommie Shelby on racism). Racism must trickle up from individuals to institutions and systems.

To be clear, agentialists aren't saying that this is the only way for systems to become inequitable or disadvantaging. The agentialist recognizes that policies can create inequity and disadvantage. However, unlike the structuralist, the agentialist is saying that inequitable, disadvantaging policies are not sufficient for racism (though they still might be bad policies). Agentialists are making a conceptual claim: the concept of racism should only apply to systems that have been "infected" with the racism of individuals. That is, agentialists think we should reserve the concept of racism for things that can be traced back to racist agents––specifically, we should reserve the concept of racism for things that can be traced back to racial indifference, racial bias, racist ideology, or, more strongly, racial animosity. Without the influence or support of racist attitudes or ideas, a racially unequal system might be unfair, but it would not, as a matter of conceptual fact, be racist. 

With this in mind, an agentialist might offer a definition of systemic racism like this:

The agentialist view: "systemic racism" refers to a society with widespread norms, practices, and racist attitudes that are responsible for creating chronic inequalities and adversities for a particular racial group (e.g., people of Color) and the relevant norms and practices have their genesis in racist attitudes or are sustained/legitimized by racist attitudes.

Importantly, agentialists claim that norms, practices and inequalities themselves can continue to embody the racism of agents even after the original agents who put them in place or supported them are no longer around. So long as racist decisions were key in shaping disadvantaging policies and outcomes, the racism of the original agents continues to infect the system. For example, consider Black-white inequalities in wealth and homeownership. To a large degree, these inequalities can be traced to intentionally racist housing policies implemented by Federal and State governments throughout the 20th century. ⁶  Even though the Fair Housing Act of 1969 put an end to these discriminatory housing policies, the adverse outcomes linger. For agentialists, these sorts of unequal outcomes bear the mark of racism and thereby contribute to making the U.S. a systemically racist society. 

Two Final Points

First, even if agentialists deny that a policy or outcome is racist merely because of its unequal and adverse impact, they might nevertheless agree that some policies and outcomes of that sort are morally problematic, harmful, or unjust, and, hence, worth undoing. Something doesn't have to be racist in order to be morally and politically unacceptable, the agentialist could say. Second, structuralists do not necessarily deny that individuals can be racists. Some structuralists are pluralists about the concept: individuals can be racist and systems can be racist.7 As noted earlier, this stands in contrast with the most extreme version of structuralism according to which only systems count as "racist." 

Conclusion

To wrap things up, Structuralists emphasize outcome in their definition of systemic racism. Agentialists emphasize etiology. Structuralists link their definition to inequitable impact or oppressive relations. Agentialists link their definition to individuals that "infect." Agentialists ask, "was this inequitable policy crafted with racist intent?" Structuralists ask, "does this policy have an adverse and inequitable impact?" Agentialists might ask, "are these Black-white inequalities legitimized and overlooked because of unconscious bias and white indifference?" Structuralists, on the other hand, do not anchor the concept of systemic racism in the bias, racism, or indifference of white people, though they agree that white bias and indifference adds to the problem. 

A structuralist might ask an agentialist: "Why does it matter whether inequitable policies and outcomes can be traced to white bias, racist ideology, or white indifference? Such policies and outcomes are chronically disadvantaging to Black people. What better language to convey both the badness and the systemic nature of this race-based disadvantage than 'systemic racism'?" An agentialists might ask a structuralist: "If we apply the concept 'racism' to any type of racially disadvantaging policy, practice, or outcome, aren't we implying that inadvertent and unintentional disadvantage could be a form of injustice? If so, that seems wrong. Tornadoes inadvertently and unintentionally create disadvantage, but they don't create injustice. Also, how do we distinguish between different kinds of racial disadvantage if the structuralist view is right? Policies that are intentionally crafted to subordinate Black people (or are left in place because of white indifference toward Black people) are morally egregious in a manner that accidentally harmful policies aren't. We need our language to convey that distinction, no?"

Examples of structuralists include:

In philosophy: Sally Haslanger and Andrew Peirce .⁸ In activist literature: Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo.

Examples of agentialists include:

In philosophy: Tommie Shelby,  J. L. A. Garcia, and Megan Mitchell. In activist literature: I seriously don't know...Structuralism is in vogue amongst activists.

1. FOOTNOTE ^↩ When talking about systemic racism, its important to think about the nature of norms. Norms usually come in two varieties: legal-political norms + social norms. Legal-political norms are things like educational policy, tax policy, criminal law, public assistance policies, housing ordinances, health-care policy, and so on. Social norms, on the other hand, are not like legal or political norms because they do not have the backing of legal sanctions from the State. Still, social norms are powerful. They are upheld by social mechanisms that reward and punish people depending on how well they conform to these norms. Social norms are things like implicit assumptions and expectations regarding the gendered division of labor, regarding which kinds of groups are best fit for certain kinds of jobs (e.g., men for politics, women for caretaking), regarding beauty standards, regarding how to do good business (e.g., maximize profits), regarding the value and structure of the family, regarding the sorts of people that are trustworthy and would make good neighbors, regarding whose futures matter (e.g., "criminal futures don't matter"), regarding proper social etiquette (leading many minorities to "code switch" regularly), and so on. I also include institutional practices in the category of "social norms," though nothing major turns on this. Importantly, the authority of political and social norms does not apply to individuals alone. Their authority also governs corporations and institutions like schools, universities, banks, families, businesses, courts, public services, local neighborhoods, and so on. 

2. FOOTNOTE ^↩ See the Brown Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. 

3. FOOTNOTE^↩  Compare this to the definition offer by the Brown Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America: "[Systemic racism is] the normalized and legitimized range of policies, practices, and attitudes that routinely produce cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color, especially black people." I think the reference to "cumulative and chronic" adversity is interesting, but it narrows the structuralist view in a way that doesn't capture everything structuralists generally care about. Plausibly, some structural harms are not cumulative. Some are discrete and directly connected to a narrow set of policies (rather than the aggregate effect of the whole system). It seems like a mark against any structuralist definition of "systemic racism" that it excludes policies, practices, and attitudes that create harms in that way. Moreover, there's another source of narrowness: this definition claims that the relevant policies, practices, and attitudes are "normalized and legitimized." Aside form the fact that calling a policy "normalized" seems redundant, it seems to me that a hypothetical society in which the vast majority of the citizens do not support its racist policies, practices, and attitudes could nevertheless be systemically racist. The actions of certain racist individuals or certain racist policies might be so binding and powerful as to override the will of its citizens. These actions and policies might lack public "legitimization" but they might nevertheless create racial inequalities and adversities. So even though systemically racist societies usually have "normalized and legitimized" policies and practices that create racial inequality/adversity, that fact isn't essential to the concept of systemic racism. 

^{4 FOOTNOTE↩ On the other hand, some structuralists might take issue with this definition. It suggests, some will argue, that certain policies could be neutral as far as racism goes. According to Ibram X. Kendi: "There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups." So maybe we can distinguish between strong structuralists and moderate structuralists. Moderate structuralists think that a policy or practice is racist only when it plays a crucial role in causing racial adversity and inequality. Strong structuralists think that a policy is racist when it plays even some role in causing racial adversity and inequality, however little it might contribute to those outcomes.} 

5. FOOTNOTE^↩ See DiAngelo, White Fragility. For a related view, see Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? 

6 FOOTNOTE^↩ See Rothstein, The Color of Law, and Massey and Denton, American Apartheid. 

7. FOOTNOTE^↩ See Haslanger, "Oppressions: Racial and Other," and Lichtenberg, "Racism in the Head, Racism in the World."

8 FOOTNOTE^↩ It's worth noting that the structuralist view fits nicely with distributive theories of justice like John Rawls' (see Justice as Fairness). Distributive theories of justice are often said to concern the "end-state patterns" of society. Roughly, justice is evaluated by taking a birds-eye-view of society and examining whether people have enough of a certain good or whether important social goods are "spread out" in a fair way across society. For a critique of the distributive paradigm, see Young, The Politics of Difference (though, to be clear, Young is a type of structuralist herself. She just wouldn't think of structural/systemic racism the way distributivists do). Moreover, for additional philosophical theories and work on the nature of systemic injustice, see Young, The Politics of Difference, and, Responsibility for Justice. Those doing work on distributive justice, egalitarianism, or systemic injustice don't always draw connections to race issues, but it is easy to see how the connections could be made (again, see this essay by philosopher Dustin Crummett for a peak at how this might go). What's more, this work has been developing for most of the 20th century. I raise this point in order to counteract a now common claim arising in certain communities, to wit: the claim that "systemic racism" is a concept developed by Critical Race Theory and (in some sense I don't fully understand) a concept that "belongs" to CRT. Taking a look at developments in political philosophy in the 20th century ought to lead us away from that type of thinking. 

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