When Discussing Racism, Are You Missing the Systemic Forest for the Individual Trees?

The national debate over systemic racism — whether it exists, and if so, how much blame it deserves for ongoing racial inequity — is one made more contentious by the way we’ve been taught to understand racism as a subject.

In addition to typically thinking of racism solely as a matter of personal prejudice, as opposed to an institutional force, most of our discussions of racism have been confined to particular historical time capsules. So, for instance, there was enslavement, but then it ended; and then there was segregation, which also ended.

By teaching history linearly (as opposed to thematically), we reinforce the idea that racism has a limited shelf life. It works its damage in particular periods, and then the slate is wiped clean by good people who get together to make it so. Yes, there might have been some lingering injustice, or a somewhat lesser form of oppression than the one before, but good people worked on it once again and made things better. Progress, on this account, is as inevitable as tomorrow’s sunrise, and has been the story of America when it comes to race.

But nowhere is there a clear recognition of inertia as a property that attaches to history, such that what happens in one generation affects the next and the next, on down the line, until — as with any object in motion — it is met by an equal or greater power capable of halting its forward trajectory.

Without this understanding, recognizing racism as a lingering and systemic force is made more difficult, even when it has shaped everything from the neighborhoods in which we were raised to the people we knew (and didn’t) growing up.

On dozens of occasions when I’ve traveled to overwhelmingly white communities to discuss racism, I’ve met those who insist upon its absence from their towns. When I’ve asked how they can be sure, they have answered, with no sense of irony or misgiving, that “there aren’t many Black people here,” or other people of color. As such, there can be no racism because there isn’t anyone around to hate.

That they can’t imagine how racism at a systemic level might explain who does and doesn’t live around them speaks volumes. It’s as if they think local racial demographics are a coincidence, owing to no history worth contemplating, let alone one tied to injustice.

So, if there aren’t many Black people in Eastern Oregon, Northern Minnesota, or most of Vermont or Maine, many whites in those places assume that to be nothing other than a strange twist of fate. But it’s about quite a bit more than that.

Threatened with public lashings, Black folks were ordered to vacate the Oregon territory in the 1840s — and then subjected to any number of additional racist restrictions thereafter.

Black men were brutally lynched in Duluth in 1920. Even in Minneapolis, despite a more significant Black presence, the extensive use of restrictive covenants in housing contributed to hyper-segregation at the neighborhood level — a pattern that continues to contribute to racial disparities there today.

Although Vermont outlawed enslavement, the state legislature endorsed the American Colonization Society, which advocated for the complete removal of Blacks from North America. Indeed, the first state-level colonization group was founded in Montpelier in 1818. Later, when Frederick Douglass came to speak in the state, papers referred to him by racial slurs and as an “impertinent vagabond.” Though most Vermonters opposed the institution of slavery in the states where it existed, their reaction to Douglass and other abolitionists suggested a less than urgent disposition towards Black freedom and those seeking it.

Maine was more racially diverse 150 years ago than today, in no small part due to racism. In the latter half of the 19th century, Blacks who had played a significant role in shipbuilding were displaced as the industry shifted from wood to steel. They were then barred from newly-developing sectors, like textiles. Then, in 1912, after a thriving interracial community had formed on Malaga Island, just off the coast of the mainland, state officials — seeing it as an unwanted Black enclave — razed it to the ground.

Sundown towns existed all over America — and mostly not in the South, where racism is often believed to be headquartered and maintain most of its branch offices. Yet this figures not at all in most people’s understanding of how certain places came to look as they do. It’s as if having been told for generations “not to let the sun set on you” in fill-in-the-blank, Illinois (and there were dozens of such places in that state alone) had no effect on the prevailing racial mix to come.

Importantly, all of this thinking rests on the assumption that only present-day, in-your-face mistreatment constitutes racism worth thinking about. What’s past is past — something to let go of — even if it hasn’t let go of us. So the current distribution of racial groups in a community isn’t seen as a product of past injustices meant to bring about such ends; instead, it’s just the way things are. If there are no Black people on the block, there can be no racism, even if the reason there are no Black people on the block is racism.

Sometimes, even persons of color can fall into this trap. Several years ago, during a visit to Saginaw, Michigan, I facilitated a small group discussion over lunch at the local University. During the conversation, a young Black woman who was originally from Detroit talked about the racism she’d experienced since coming to Saginaw. Sometimes it was overt, while other times, it was more subtle. But whether obvious or sublimated, it had been a pretty consistent problem during the few years she had been there.

However, what struck me was when she contrasted her experience in Saginaw with her upbringing in Detroit. There, she insisted, she had never experienced racism at all. It was only after her move North that the specter of racial mistreatment had reared its head. Back home, she explained, she had never had a white person verbally abuse her in school or her community. Essentially, she said, she had been insulated from racism because she had lived in a virtually all-Black community where she had limited contact with white folks.

In both cases, those who make this kind of argument — whether a Black woman from Detroit or a white guy from Billings, Montana — assume racism is only present if overt acts of prejudice are manifesting around them. And in both cases, they overlook the way that growing up in such racially isolated spaces was itself a symptom of racism at the systemic level.

In the case of Detroit, for instance, there is a reason neighborhoods came to be so racially distinct. And that reason was neither a coincidence nor the result of Black people simply opting to live among themselves. It was directly the result of racism.

Little known to most, Michigan was a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity in the 1920s, with tens of thousands of members throughout the state. Among these was one Julius McKinney — a mechanic in the early days of the auto industry who had moved to Detroit from Tennessee, and who also happened to be my great-grandfather.

In 1924, the Klan in Detroit was so powerful it nearly elected the city’s Mayor. The following year, when Dr. Ossian Sweet, an accomplished Black physician, bought a home in an all-white neighborhood, hundreds of whites — including, quite likely, Julius McKinney, who lived only a mile or so away — led an assault on his house and family. In the melee that followed, one of Sweet’s family members fired a shotgun in self-defense, killing one white man and wounding another. Dr. Sweet and several of his family were tried for murder, though ultimately, charges were dropped against most. Meanwhile, Dr. Sweet’s brother was acquitted thanks to the lawyering of famed attorney, Clarence Darrow.

Despite the outcome of the Sweet trials, however, neighborhood “improvement” associations, restrictive covenants and overt violence would combine to limit Black access to most neighborhoods for several decades to come. And once that access began to open, white flight to outlying suburbs reinforced racial isolation within the city once again.

Meanwhile, neighboring Dearborn, where Ford is headquartered, effectively blocked Blacks from living there for most of the mid-20th century, thanks in large part to a Mayor who was so infamously racist he would actually travel South to give pointers on how to maintain white dominance.

Similar stories of violence against Blacks seeking to live in white spaces abound in every state. So too, the nation is replete with tales of bank redlining and government lending programs predicated on maintaining neighborhood racial homogeneity. And of course there was the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave whites, and pretty much only whites, access to cheap acreage in places Blacks were not, by and large, allowed to reside.

To honestly examine racism today, we must first acknowledge that everything has a predicate, and rarely are these predicates random. Instead, they are the end product of deliberate and institutional forces, combining to produce systemic and structured results. Unless we develop the sociological imagination needed to explore the why of what we see and learn the history required to make sense of it, we will continue, far too often, to miss the systemic racist forest for the individually bigoted trees.

And we will do so at great cost to our country’s future and our ability to make right the crooked branches of our past (and present).

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Previously Published on timjwise

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