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Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Systemic Racism

One of the myths of our time is that our culture is shot through with systemic racism. Actual racism has been so difficult to document in the twenty first century that in order to keep alive the dogma that we live in an inveterately racist country, those who profit from the dogma have had to invent "systemic racism."

This is the claim that racism permeates all of our institutions, but is so subtly diabolical that it's very hard to detect. Indeed, the inability to detect it is sometimes considered proof of how insidious it is.

To the extent that the existence of systemic racism is argued for, the argument is usually based on disparities - disparities in prison populations, wealth distribution, education achievement, etc. In order for the disparity argument to work, however, systemic racism has to be the only possible explanation for disparities.

If it's possible that disparities could have other causes besides racism then the systemic racism explanation loses its force for all but those who desperately want it to be true.

Anyway, there's a short video put out by Prager U. that features a woman, a convert from the left, who argues that systemic racism does indeed exist, but it's not what you might think it is.

Check it out.