The belief that systemic racism is non-existent in contemporary America hinges on the fact that there are no longer any official laws on the books with punitive outcomes based on skin color, race isn't even mentioned. But looking at the specific moment in history when our laws became "color-blind" reveals how systemic racism can remain intentional policy without having to formally acknowledge race at all.
That inequality between black and white American's exist is an immutable fact. No pundit, no matter the ideological stripe, can deny this. The view on the left that I've always thought most convincing is that systemic racism - racism embedded into various systems and institutions rather than the racism of personal interaction - is largely the cause of these inequalities.
Systemic racism can be seen in current systems; black Americans are disproportionately targeted in traffic stops which is a variable in why they are disproportionately incarcerated, which is a variable of racial inequality. It can also be seen in systems in the past; the federal government's policy of redlining being used to deny black Americans access to quality housing in the suburbs being coupled with discrimination in education and the employment sector causing the wealth and opportunities garnered from homeownership to be severely stunted or non-existent, which is also a variable for current inequalities.
The arguments against the view that systemic racism can be used to explain racial inequalities most often emanate from the right (but not always) and usually take two forms with one core premise. The first form is that systemic racism does not currently exist because there are no laws on the books that specifically delineate skin color. The second is that, while systemic racism was existent in the past (only real sickos deny the existence of Jim Crow) it has little to no bearing on current inequalities because....there are no laws on the books that delineate skin color anymore.
To demonstrate we're going to use prominent right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro taking on a video about systemic racism from ActTV. Shapiro is one of only a few commentators I've ever seen attempting to take on redlining and systemic racism in such an accessible way. As we'll see, his argument against the impacts of historic redlining and higher-ed admission discrimination hinges largely on the fact that those two policies are now illegal (3:34):
The move conservatives like to pull from here is to suggest that any current examples of racism are actually other factors not having to do with race at all. Here Shapiro rejects the possibility of modern redlining because the example of redlining cited in the video wasn't using race as a factor, it was using "liabilities, employment history, credit history, and other variables" (7:50):This Race Blind Theory becomes the favored rhetorical move of the racism-skeptical because it evokes a simple truth to reject two powerful arguments. You saw Shapiro use this with housing in the above clips, but if you watch the whole video, he will use this same move for mass incarceration, school funding, and unemployment. There are, objectively, no laws, rules, or policies that specifically mention race, once this premise is accepted you have no choice but to acknowledge that inequalities stemming from these systems are from "other variables", as Shapiro does.
Fortunately, we don't have to accept the premise of Race Blind Theory. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for History. She is also the best living writer who tackles Race Blind Theory. Her book From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation was a look at why mass incarceration and the legal system treats black Americans unfairly despite our criminal laws having no mention of race. Taylor's most recent undertaking is Race for Profit, where she takes a specific look at the moment in history the racist federal policy of redlining was made illegal. Not only does KYT demonstrate that once redlining was made illegal the ramifications didn't magically go away as Shapiro asserts, but she also shows that the ramifications were used to perpetuate systemic racism under cover of being race-blind.
The thrust of KYT's argument in Race for Profit is that once racial segregation was created and brutally enforced through a combination of state policy and violence from the white community at large, simply making the policy go away wasn't going to get rid of the segregation. In fact, as KYT goes on to show, there were many private actors in real estate and finance that profited from the existence of segregation. As she notes in the introduction:
"Racial real estate practices, then, represented the political economy generated out of residential segregation. The real estate industry wielded the magical ability to transform race into profit within the racially bifurcated housing market. The sustenance and spatial integrity of residential segregation, along with its apparent imperviousness to civil right rules and regulations, stemmed from its profitability in white as well as African American communities - even as dramatically different outcomes were produced. In the strange mathematics of racial real estate, Black people paid more for the inferior condition of their housing. They referred to this costly differential as a 'race tax'. Real estate operatives confined each group to its own section of a single housing market to preseve the allure of exclusivity for whites, while satisfying the demand of housing for African Americans. This was evidence not of a dual housing market but of a single American housing market that tied race to risk, linking both to the rise and fall of property vlues and generating proits that grew into the sinew binding it all together"
In other words, redlining continued after it was made formally illegal, but it was under the guise of being "race-blind" and even more dastardly, in the name of housing equality and free markets.
The preservation of segregated housing was still deeply intentional and it was actually the decision to make the language of housing policy at the time race-neutral that demonstrates why. The new, purportedly fair, housing policy was not about "redress, restitution, or repair", if it had been it would have specifically tried to address the harm that redlining caused, the effects it still had. "Instead, by ignoring race, new practices that were intended to facilitate inclusion reinforced existing patterns of inequality and discrimination". KYT points out that African American neighborhoods were given a racially neutral descriptor like "subprime", which served the purpose of making them uniquely distinguishable from white neighborhoods (keep Shapiro's "other variables" comment in mind here) without any mention of race. Of course these neighborhoods weren't prime, they had been segregated and brutalized for decades, but a race-blind law won't recognize this because doing so would have to acknowledge race as a determinant in the value of these homes.
This can be seen in a variety of housing programs and policies at the time. When the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was removing racist language from underwriting manuals and orders of operations and promising to expand homeownership to African Americans, it was, at the same time, crafting a new language to institute a "Separate but Equal" policy in housing lending. Even where middle-income black families did receive loans for housing in the suburbs after the legal abolition of redlining, Race for Profit is full of stories about the violence these families faced from white communities. Fire bombings, rioting, pipe bombs, and segregation policy passed at the municipal level in the name of protecting property values (such policy was held to be lawful in courts around the country exactly because they never mentioned race, only determinants like income or homeownership longevity or credit scores that had an effect on perceived value). Even though race was absent from the letter of the law, much of white America still practiced segregation by any means necessary well after 1968. It's ludicrous to pretend this wouldn't have ramifications only 50 years later.
It's also true that just because something is illegal it doesn't still happen. Laws banning discrimination, like laws banning anything, are only so good as the body of government tasked with enforcing them. KYT points to the number of mortgage lending organizations that "simply ignor[ed] federal rules against housing discrimination". And the ones that adhered to the anti-discrimination rules could get around them by using, as Ben Shapiro would call them, "other variables"; "the lenders could limit loans based on their location and the requirements that the homes or buildings to be purchased had to remain in the 'city core'". This meant that all of the loans these organizations had to cut to black Americans could easily be given exclusively for housing in predominately black areas without ever having to evoke the racial identity of their borrowers or the locations they were marketing them to.
Conservatives like Shapiro, after claiming wildly that the illegality of systemic racism effectively ends it, will then move to say that racial disparity exists because of personal choices. As KYT puts it, it is a belief that "the systems and institutions of the country [are] strong enough to bestow the political, economic, and social riches of American society onto all who [are] willing to work hard and commit themselves to a better future". While the systems and institutions offer a colorblind market where economic fitness reigns the ultimate indicator for access to those choices, the problem is that systemic racism has already impacted that economic fitness, and so what is then created is a cycle of racism without the acknowledgment of race.
And the cycle continues with real ramifications. If systemic racism continued after it was made illegal, when did it stop? The answer is never. To quote KYT at length:
"The quality of life in US society depends on the personal accumulation of wealth, and homeownership is the single largest investment that most families make to accrue this wealth. But when the housing market is fully formbed by racial discrimination, there is deep, abiding inequality. There has not been an instance in the last 100 years when the housing market has operated fairly, without racial discrimination. From racial zoning to restricted convants to LICS to FHA-backed morgages to the subprime mortage loan, the US housing industry has sought to extort and financially benefit from the public perceptions of racial difference. This has meant that even when no discernable discrimination is detected, the fact that black communities and neighborhoods are perceived as inferior means that African Americans must rely on inherently devalued 'asset' for maintenance of their quality of life. This has created a permanent disadvantage. And when homeownership is promoted as a key to economic freedom and advancement, this economic inequality is reinforced, legitimized and ultimately accepted"
A collaboration between Reveal and the Center for Investigative Reporting showed that there were was still, in 2018, discrimination in lending happening in Michigan among other areas. Even now that lending eligibility is largely determined by algorithms, mathematical equations with no perceived threat of implicit human biases, the host of "other variables" that have been cultivated by years of legal and compounding, below-board discrimination are still impacting disparity in homeownership and wealth between black and white Americans. This is the definition of systemic racism.
