Systemic?

A picture is said to be worth a thousand words. But who can fully gauge the impact of a single word? As descriptors, identifiers, and motivators, words create images in our minds and shape the boundaries in which we think. Once coined, they have a life of their own, yet their existence depends on our voices, our writings and our symbols. For it is in our keeping that words can become influence peddlers or reputation killers. Words pass into and out of usage according to the ebb and flow of human culture, their connotations a mirror of our ever-changing values and political temperaments. Words may deify or denigrate, catapult or castigate, their potency transforming the few or the many, the living or the dead.  Words are powerful.

Few words have done more to arouse our passions or stoke our fears than the “r” word that has become one of the most divisive labels du jour of the 21st century: racism. By itself it denotes “a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” (so Merriam-Webster). Now any of our beliefs may be true or they may be false, or they may lie somewhere in between. And our beliefs about other people inevitably find expression in our preferences, perspectives, predispositions and prejudices. When they make us rigid and unwavering they cast us in the role of the bigot. When they open us to acceptance and tolerance, they portray us as liberal (which may or may not have any bearing on our political affiliations).

Our beliefs and feelings about race often remain private and unexpressed. Racism’s most devastating impact occurs when we engage in “the oppression of a racial group” which typically results in “the social, economic, and political advantage of another.” It is the inequality and injustice of uneven playing fields that most often provokes us to characterize individuals, groups, political parties or governments as racist.

Racism and racist are powerful words, words that touch each of our lives. For whether we admit it or not, whether conscious of it or not, we all harbor attitudes about people based on those racial identifiers that make them appear like us or quite different from ourselves. Yet only some of us act on these attitudes in ways that discriminate or intimidate in gaining an advantage over them. Delineating where any of us may be on this continuum of racial consciousness is never simple nor obvious. Like Jesus’ image of specks and beams that cloud our judgment of others, racist attitudes are much easier for me to spot in you than to recognize in myself. Yet given how easy it is any of us to be labeled a racist, the word has become a clichéd, overused ad hominem epithet used by some to call out their opponents and turn so many into racially divided adversaries. 

I first became aware of racism as a child growing up in the segregated South of the 1950s. “Colored” facilities and signage were part of that landscape. Like all baby-boomers I have witnessed a sea change in our attitudes towards and acceptance of racial differences over my lifetime. This transformation has taken many hands, many courageous acts, untold hardship and sacrifice to accomplish. While racial equality is not a dream yet fulfilled for everyone in our country, it is no longer a dream deferred either. Protesters (both non-violent and aggressive ones), civil rights leaders, politicians and judges, athletes, entertainers, the media, officers and soldiers in our military—all have played a role in changing the landscape of race relations and opportunities in America. They have been joined and supported by teachers and coaches in neighborhood schools and universities, everyday citizens in our cities and small town neighborhoods. The faithful in American churches, synagogues and temples have also participated, as have our kids—kids now allowed to rub shoulders, eat lunches, sing in choirs and play on teams with those brought to their schools by buses and desegregation programs. And none of us should forget the police. Even though they have borne more blame than praise of late, the vast majority of them have carried the burden of protecting the young, the elderly, the poor and the powerless from those intent on exploiting and terrorizing them, regardless of race.

When loud and prominent voices now declare that America is a racist nation—from top to bottom, from beginning to end—they often qualify that charge by calling it “systemic.” While ear-catching and trendy, the term itself seems too grossly oversimplified and generalized to warrant such facile invocation. Systemic is most often used in medicine to describe chronic or system-wide conditions affecting the entire body. And I’ve run into it when purchasing fertilizers or pest repellants that work through a plant’s internal vascular system. Coupling systemic with racism conveys the idea that our very systems of government and society are infused with bigotry, discriminatory policies and procedures in which race is the driving force. Is that really the case in and across America, from sea to shining sea? Having observed and experienced American life for seven decades in small towns, big cities, and a military base; in the South, north-East, mid-Atlantic and Western states; in public and private schools, in colleges and theological schools—I just don’t see this being an accurate depiction of who we are—at least not today.

Admittedly, slavery based on race can be traced back to our beginnings in the early 1600s. And with the adoption of our Constitution it extended the legal protection for slavery first negotiated in the Articles of Confederation, adding the provision that Africans in bondage would be counted as 3/5 of a human for congressional representation. Racism remained systemic as a result of fugitive slave laws, representational compromises meant to balance slave and free states in Congress, and in Supreme Court decisions (Dred Scott of 1857 being the most telling). Yet at no time did racism meet with universal acceptance or advocacy among our citizens. If it had, would our country have risked everything in the worst bloodletting of our history to settle the matter of our most peculiar institution upon which racism depended? And if racism was as inbred in our system and spirit as is now portrayed, would our Constitution have been changed through post-war amendments that ended slavery and granted citizenship to those born here or naturalized, irrespective of race. Abolishing the systemic racism of our first 170 years has been easier to legislate than mandate, requiring no less than 16 additional Acts of Congress to elaborate and reinforce, the most recent just 15 years ago.

When I look back over our nation’s history I keep trying to understand who we have been, and why. I regret our predecessors flaws and missteps, and grieve over those injustices and cruelties that continue to cast a shadow over our own times. But I resist the temptation to sanitize our past or strike from memory those whose values we no longer admire or embrace. America has been and continues to be an amalgam of people whose interests, convictions, prejudices and passions—many of them influenced by race—make our country different from our more mono-racial and xenophobic neighbors in the 21st Century global neighborhood.

Now don’t get me wrong. Racism is real, and it has played—and continues to play—a defining role in our collective lives. It is an unavoidable part of the way Native Americans as well as people of African, Asian and Hispanic descent have been treated by those wielding economic and political power. Racism also hides behind the well-meaning rhetoric and policies of those who ironically turn racist exclusions for one minority into disqualifications for others, simply because their skin now types them as congenital oppressors. But is racism systemic? Is it part of the marrow of our American ethos that forever pits white against black, brown, red or yellow? Our history may be pockmarked with stories of segregation, intimidation and violence, yet it also resounds with the heroic legacy of abolitionists, reformers, civil rights pioneers and millions of everyday Americans--of all races—who have learned how to live and work respectfully with each other. It is these Americans who accept the founders’ premise of equality and justice as self-evident and inalienable rights, these fellow citizens who give me hope that racism has never yet, nor ever will, define all that we are and all that we may ever become.

Is America systemically racist? I don’t see it. Has racism helped write our historical, cultural, economic, political and personal stories as Americans? I can’t deny it. It will take more than revisionist history and name-calling to eradicate racism from our land, for it resides in the minds and hearts of every person who fears the stranger and who looks at life through the lens of me and my more than us and ours. The road to freedom and equality has been a long and hard one so far, and it promises to stretch yet into a future in which both angels of our nature will continue to be tried and tested.