What Systemic Racism Is — and Isn’t
Good people can perpetuate unequal opportunity, when they are tasked to work in flawed systems.
Last week, Jeffrey H. Anderson wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Biden, Claiming ‘Systemic Racism’ in Policing, Defies Science.” In it, Anderson claims that charges of systemic racism “in American police forces is contrary to the best data we have on the subject.” In reality, the best data we have show widespread systemic racism in policing throughout the United States. That is not an indictment of our police officers, but the policies they implement.
Systemic racism refers to racially disparate or concentrated deleterious outcomes that follow from policies in a system, not systems full of racist people, as Anderson’s piece seems to suggest. In the abstract, it’s an easy mistake to make, given the traditional concept of racism as hatred or animus toward a race or group of races, but it’s not one a professional should make in an op-ed in one of America’s largest newspapers.
Whatever one thinks of academia or the left-leaning commentariat, the term “systemic racism” is not at all new to conversations about race and public policy. Because “racism” is a clumsy overbroad word that can describe anything from a woman clutching her purse when a Black person steps into the same elevator car to a lynching, academics and advocates have developed different terms to describe different aspects of race-influenced harm that manifest in our culture and society. Systemic racism is one of those terms.
Describing something as systemic racism is not an accusation that everyone in that system or profession is racist, but that these systems cause harm along racial lines, regardless of the intent of its participants. In many ways, systemic racism is a way to explain how non-racist people can inflict racial harms even when they have good intent. Whatever one thinks of the concept, this is a rough sketch of what systemic racism means. My former colleague Mike Tanner, a committed libertarian and longtime policy scholar, has a nice primer on systemic racism at his personal blog.
Given this more common understanding of what systemic racism means, then, Anderson’s mistake is hard to overlook. In his piece, he attempts to disprove the claim, made by President Biden and others, that there is “absolutely…systemic racism in law enforcement.” Anderson cites federally collected crime and victimization datasets to this end:
The new [Bureau of Justice Statistics] report took victims’ responses on the 2018 [National Crime Victimization Survey] and compared them with arrest rates by police, supplied by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. It found that for nonfatal violent crimes that victims said were reported to police, whites accounted for 48% of offenders and 46% of arrestees. Blacks accounted for 35% of offenders and 33% of arrestees. Asians accounted for 2% of offenders and 1% of arrestees. None of these differences between the percentage of offenders and the percentage of arrestees of a given race were statistically significant.
Even if we assume that these data are accurate and his interpretation of them is also accurate, this does not disprove what President Biden and many others have claimed. It might undermine a different (but unfortunately undefined) understanding of systemic racism, but not the one accepted by the people who most often cite it as a social and public policy problem. Indeed, even if we took an “all cops are racist” definition, there are myriad other ways in which those cops could express that racism wholly separate and unrelated to the particular victimization and arrest numbers he cited. In short, Anderson’s is a specious argument no matter what definition one uses.
But we have plenty of data that show that systemic racism, as properly understood, is quite prevalent in law enforcement. Police-generated data from around the country repeatedly and consistently show that investigatory stops (like New York City’s notorious Stop-and-Frisk program) and vehicular consent searches treat Black and Hispanic residents with more scrutiny and aggression than white residents, despite the fact that most people who are stopped and searched are innocent of any crime. This is systemic racism in a nutshell. Such policies can be implemented by Black police officers, in cities run or dominated by Black politicians, and they can still be accurately described as systemic racism because of the harm done to Black community members.
A few years ago, I testified before the Arkansas Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, discussing how policing can contribute to racial disparities in mass incarceration. An excerpt discussing a Little Rock Police Department policy of investigatory stops in Black neighborhoods in response to a crime spike:
The drivers are often right to think that their race — or their neighborhood — is a determining factor in the stop. That does not mean, however, that the officer who makes the stop is acting out of any racial animus. Indeed, the officer is likely under instruction to be vigilant and to be on the lookout in a given neighborhood and, in our country, many of our neighborhoods continue to be racially segregated in fact, if not in law, so definitionally race and neighborhood will play a role when trying to curb crime this way. This lack of animus doesn’t make the investigatory stops OK, but it does explain them in a way that doesn’t impugn the officer’s personal motives — or the department’s motives, for that matter — for what happens there.
One of the Republican committee members asked me, (paraphrasing) “Isn’t what you described systemic racism?” The answer is, emphatically, “yes!” But I know that the term can be off-putting, so I refrained from using it and instead described how and why people resented the investigatory stop policy. One can use different language to explain the same phenomena, but the policy problems are real and they must be addressed.
Op-eds like Anderson’s feed the misunderstanding of what advocates and activists mean by systemic racism. Many on the right may take issue with the term because it conflicts with their more traditional understanding of animus-based racism, and that’s fine. But negligently or deliberately misunderstanding what other people mean is not a constructive way to approach public policy.
The fact remains: data support President Biden’s claim about systemic racism in policing. The solution is changing police policy, not denying the obvious.
