Governor Ron DeSantis and Republican lawmakers in Florida do not believe systemic racism exists in the United States. It is one reason they have passed laws censoring African-American and American history. They are also censoring books on these topics to continue to conceal the country’s real history on race matters.
However, DeSantis and the GOP legislators in Florida claiming that systemic racism does not exist are lying. This is not an opinion anymore. The evidence is widely available, and this is old news.
America was founded upon systemic racism (i.e., white supremacy, its’ underlying ideology). The entire justification for the founding of the country is white supremacy. Stokley Carmichael and Floyd Hamilton differentiated racism and systemic racism in their 1966 book, Black Power.
Carmichael and Hamilton wrote that “racism is both overt and covert. It takes two closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community.” The first is “individual racism,” but the second is “institutional racism,” the most destructive and insidious type because it “originates in the operation of established…forces in society…”
Camara Phyllis Jones breaks it down even more succinctly. Jones asserts that “racism is a system” and not an “individual character flaw” or “personal moral failing,” and certainly not “a psychiatric illness.” According to Jones, “a system (consisting structures, policies, practices, and norms) that structures opportunity and assigns value based on phenotype, or the way people look.” Most destructively, it “unfairly disadvantages some individuals and communities.”
According to Jones, the system not only disadvantages “some individuals and communities” but also provides advantages to “other individuals and communities” based on the way they look. This is “white privilege.” It is so entrenched it runs on automatic pilot at this point, with non-White Americans helping it work and denying that systemic racism exists.
Okay, how about the evidence?
Financial
The banking industry and the real estate industry are systemically racist. The period of redlining, racially restrictive covenants, and outright exclusionary housing policies were embedded in the nation’s financial system. For most of the 20th century, most African Americans, regardless of their creditworthiness, did not receive fair treatment by the financial industry.
White Americans, on the other hand, were not only provided with assistance, but they received government-backed mortgages that helped them purchase housing and accumulate generational wealth for their families. This is the major reason the enormous racial wealth gap between Whites and African Americans exists.
This matters because African Americans, unless restorative justice is invoked to fix this gap, will always find it challenging to gain access to wealth-generating neighborhoods or opportunities because they have been systemically put at a disadvantage. And while some of these racist financial practices are illegal now, the effects remain. It is like declaring a certain kind of toxic waste illegal after allowing it to be dumped in a community for 75 years.
Systemic racism in lending also has changed over time.
During the housing bubble crash of 2007–2008, African Americans were no longer completely excluded from mortgages. However, they were intentionally targeted by the mortgage lending industry with bad, foreclosure-prone loan products and deals. African Americans were sold bad loans and loans designed to default despite having very good credit and income. Recent lawsuits in various parts of the country again confirm these racist practices by some of the largest financial institutions in the world. The lending industry intentionally used “equity stripping practices” toward African-American customers. This is systemic racism, not independent bad actors.
Criminal Justice
African Americans are disproportionately incarcerated in prison because of systemic racism. According to an F.B.I. report in 2015, after years of study, African Americans are twice as likely to be arrested for violations of drug laws, even though drug use is roughly the same across the population’s demographics. African Americans and Latinos comprise 30 percent of the population but more than half the prison population. In other words, African Americans and Latinos are much more likely to be arrested, convicted, and incarcerated not because they commit more crimes but because the system targets them.
The Vera Institute states that “racial disparities in the criminal justice system are no accident” but “are rooted in a history of oppression and discriminatory decision-making that have deliberately targeted black people.” This is why the average American believes in “an inaccurate picture of crime” in this country. This is systemic racism.
Health Care
Health care is another area where systemic racism runs the system. African Americans are at the mercy of a morally bankrupt system of premature death and shorter life spans. Systemic racism is rooted in the system.
One obvious example of the system was back in April 2020 when the results of the COVID-19 virus came back, and 40 percent of the deaths were amongst African Americans in many cities. This is when President Trump ordered the country to open back up immediately. The message was obvious: The virus is killing Blacks, so who cares? Let’s get back to our lives.
As for the healthcare system, the inequities exist throughout every aspect of it. African Americans disproportionately lack adequate access to health care systems and are discriminated against in treatment and in the insurance marketplace for services. African Americans also disproportionately die from major diseases because of lack of access to care, usually related to poverty. Black newborns also died at a rate of 250 percent more than White newborns. These statistical outcomes are built into the system by design.
Final Notes
These are just three examples of systemic racism in society in the nation’s institutions. This is why Florida’s legislators and their governor (other states are doing this as well) are against teaching the truth about American history regarding white supremacy and systemic racism. American history might be heroic for white Americans, but for African Americans, it is a history of a constant battle against institutional racism. This is why the Florida approach is, itself, systemic racism. The governor and the legislature want to keep the system in place as it is by not talking about it and claiming it does not exist.
Yet, evidence shows they are caretakers of systemic racism and are quite proud of their roles—those of us who know better need to continue to push back.
Sources
Institutional racism in the United States, Terry Jones, Social Work, MARCH 1974, Vol. 19, №2, pp. 218–225
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This post was previously published on Momentum.
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