I am not ascribing blame, but, yeah, I suspect it could be harder for you to succeed due to the extra challenge of fitting in with culture and customs.
Would it be easier/harder/same for you to succeed at your current work environment if you (a) had a facial tattoo, (b) carried an odor, (c) wore dreads in your hair?
Well, I can’t answer the question for your job, but my sense is that those attributes would make it more challenging in most professional spaces in the US.
But logically and objectively should it?
And would you say that someone having those attributes (assuming they were permanent whether by choice or some other) has the same “opportunity” as someone that doesn’t?
Time is your friend. Impulse is your enemy. -John Bogle
Racism is a motive, an intent. Racism supplies animus to an action. Systemic racism is an unseen, lingering intent that does not provide animus to a SPECIFIC ACTION. The theory relies solely on otherwise unexplained outcomes to prove its existence.
Disparate outcomes (redlining in lending, high incarceration rates) either point to racist actions or they don't. Redlining does, and is thus illegal. I don't believe high incarceration rates point to racism, at least not substantially. When outcomes point to observable racist actions, it's racism. When they don't, they're deemed systemic racism.
The specifics are the whole point. Systemic racism can only point to specific OUTCOMES. The actions are unable to be observed, otherwise its regular old racism that we can all agree is wrong.
You seem to be distracting yourself with terminology. “Systemic racism” is a different concept than your garden variety bigotry racism. Sure there are some similarities, but the same rules don’t apply to both concepts.
You seem to be ignoring what I write. The terminology is largely the point.
Saying "black people are generally less well off, hold less positions of power, and are incarcerated more often" implicates multiple possible causes, one of which may be culture. Racism is by definition a system of beliefs. "Systemic Racism" ascribes a motive to these outcomes, even if it's 200 years ago.
Without the charge of racism, the problem becomes "inequality of outcomes".
I'll use the article cited in the first page to define it:
SYSTEMIC RACISM INCLUDES THE COMPLEX ARRAY OF AnTIBLACK PRACTICES, THE UNJUSTLY GAINED POLITICAL-ECONOMIC POWER OF WHITES, THE CONTINUING ECONOMIC AND OTHER RESOURCE INEQUALITIES ALONG RACIAL LINES, AND THE WHITE RACIST IDEOLOGIES AND ATTITUDES CREATED TO MAINTAIN AND RATIONALIZE WHITE PRIVILEGE AND POWER.
"...the white racist ideologies and attitudes created to maintain and rationalize white privilege and power." How do you maintain and rationalize white power (intentionally or not) without a belief system?
What I suppose you must be getting at is that systemic racism preys on unintentional, implicit bias ingrained through generations of actual racist policy. Go take some of the tests - I've done quite a few, even though I'm not too well-read on anything. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
Does being implicitly/unintentionally biased against blacks make you any more or less racist than someone who joins the KKK? Either way, it's an animus to marginalize another race, is it not?
Point being: Without a racist belief system at some point in history underlying it, the theory of Systemic Racism could just as easily have been conjured up by Marx and applied to any desired division of the proletariat.
Yeah, I have done the implicit bias tests on that site. Oddly, I favor Jews over other religions despite having minimal exposure to Jewish people.
But, yes, I do think implicit bias plays into it. I think that is what the resume studies show.
But I think there are structural aspects as well, relics of our past, that are ingrained in our public and private institutions that further disempower black points of view and further white power. “Institutional racism” which I suppose is a subset of systemic racism.