When America’s officials desert any standards for public or personal behavior, expect violence.
America’s leaders, right up to the president, claim that George Floyd died as a result of ‘systemic racism’. They make this claim without saying what they mean when they make this charge. When you say a definition would help clarify an accusation this serious, members of the in group are likely to reply, “You don’t need a definition when you have the murder of George Floyd right in front of you.”
Sorry, but when I see what Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd, I don’t see systemic racism, whatever meaning you want to give to that term. I see extreme cruelty, wanton use of force in place of policing. One observer asked the question we all ask inside: why didn’t Chauvin let up? Why did he keep the pressure on Floyd’s neck, even after his victim stopped breathing? Chauvin practiced the casual cruelty of an adolescent boy who thinks, “What would happen if I put this frog in a microwave, and turned it on?” A wise woman I knew said the first pathology of the criminal reveals itself as cruelty to animals. George Floyd, and all victims of police force, are human beings.
The with-it leader will say, “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. Chauvin exhibited the same kind of cruelty that a master visits on a slave. Whether it’s the whip, the knife, the rope, or a knee on the neck, it is all evidence of systemic racism.” The problem with this argument is that police departments do not regard people of color as slaves, nor are all police officers racists. If you were to ask Medaria Arradondo, chief of police in Minneapolis, whether his department shows evidence of systemic racism, I think he would give a thoughtful answer, and it wouldn’t be yes.
If you want an example of systemic racism, you might look at the Great Society’s urban renewal programs of the 1960s. These programs resulted in housing projects, or simply projects as people called them, where city governments cooperated with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to remove black families from their neighborhoods, and warehouse them in huge buildings that were totally unfit for communal, and therefore human life. In some ways, they were worse than prisons, since prisons have far lower crime rates. The government tore down the projects after a decade or two. Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago were two of the most infamous.
We could spend some time on why these programs failed so abjectly, but the comments above suggest the root cause: government agencies yanked families from where they wanted to be, and forced them to live where they did not want to be. Only black families suffered from this treatment. No other group, no matter its living situation in any city, was subject to this kind of coercion and degradation.* If segregating people of one race in huge, prison-like structures against their will is not systemic racism, I cannot think of a better example.
I also do not see similarities between the ways in which police culture has developed, and the systemic racism of slavery or housing projects. Without a doubt, police practices in the United States result in disparate treatment of different groups. Black people, as a group, rightly fear unknown police officers as a group. One can make the same observation in the other direction: police officers, as a group, fear unknown black people. Note I did not say police officers rightly fear black people. If you fear the people in your community you are supposed to protect, you should not be a police officer.
Police departments should not train their officers to be warriors rather than guardians. They should not train their officers to put self-protection before protection of those they police. They should not train their officers to use lethal force, when lethal force is not necessary. They should not train officers who implicitly profile people at every turn, or who draw their weapons at the first sign of trouble. They need to throw these practices on the rubbish heap, for they serve no purpose except to create distrust and ill will between police and their constituents.
These practices do not, however, show evidence of systemic racism, however you interpret the meaning of that phrase. They show evidence of police departments and leaders who took several wrong turns in the distant past, did not recognize their error, and therefore let the hidden consequences of their new direction fester. These consequences were not hidden from their constituents, but police did not understand how deeply harmful these new practices would be for their ability to serve people who need their protection.
Most critically, police departments did not know how to correct their mistakes. Mistakes of institutional practice do not yield to simple correction, especially if leaders believe new practices and policies result in small costs compared to their efficacy. Such leaders do not believe occasional errors arise from evil attitudes among their officers. You may be able to point to individual police officers who regard people of color as inferior to white people, or who regard people of color as lacking in moral restraint. These are standard definitions of racism. Individual examples of bad police officers do not tell you anything about systemic phenomena.
What you cannot point to is an undefined condition of systemic racism that fits whatever example you have in front of you. An undefined condition does not yield a statement of the problem, or a plan of action, or any kind of effective prescription. Undefined conditions like systemic racism qualify only as shibboleths - catchphrases that identify you with certain groups. These groups think their answers - abolish police departments, for example - will work. They will not. As for unqualified practitioners who consistently misinterpret data to fit their preconceptions, poor diagnoses typically result in poor remedies.
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* Only Native Americans, beginning in the nineteenth century, suffered similar treatment when the federal government forced them onto reservations. That too was systemic racism.
