Posted by 
Glenn Harris, President of Race Forward, said systemic racism creates disparities in many “success indicators” including wealth, the criminal justice system, employment, housing, health care, politics and education. He said that although the concept dates back to work done by scholar and civil rights pioneer W. E. B. Du Bois, the concept was first named during the civil rights movement of the 1960s and was further refined in the 1980s. Systemic Racism differs from “racism” in that it is not based on the attitudes of a group of people, but the results of years of institutional practice.
Racial relations, particularly between African-Americans and white Americans, have a long and complicated history, beginning with slavery, continuing through the Civil War, the abolition of slavery, and the Reconstruction of the Southern states. I have neither the time nor the expertise to tell that story. However, beginning with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 (abolishing slavery), the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866 (making ex-slaves citizens of the U.S. and confers upon them equal protection under the law), and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869 (establishing the right to vote for people of all colors), and continuing with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations and schools), the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (suspended literacy tests and creating federal powers to enforce the fifteenth amendment), and two Fair Housing Acts (1968 and 1988), the legal basis for racial equality has been established.
However, every action had an equal and opposite reaction, and despite cases like Brown v. Board of Education, in recent years conservatives have used the Supreme Court to limit the sway of this legislation. For example, in the 2013 Shelby County v Holder case, the court swept away a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In 2020, the Court decided a series of cases which made it difficult to expand the franchise.
Thus, while the 1860’s amendments and the 1960’s laws reduced legal discrimination, governments and the courts still were able to chip away at laws which opposed racial discrimination. Moreover, many problems of discrimination were not dealt with by these laws. In order to understand institutional racism we must look at key racial outcomes. A more comprehensive examination of these outcomes than that presented here can be found at Business Insider, which presents 26 charts which demonstrate that systemic racism is still a problem in America.
Health. According to the CDC, the life expectancy at birth for the white non-Hispanic population of the United States in 2017 was 78.5, while the life expectancy at birth for the black non-Hispanic population was 74.9, a shortfall of 4.5%. For Non-Hispanic white men the life expectancy rate was 76.1, while for non-Hispanic black men their life expectancy was 71.5, a 6% shortfall.
Digging more deeply, we find that the infant gestational age, which is an important predictor of morbidity and infant mortality, differs among racial and ethnic groups. The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) reports that in 2014, African American women had the highest percentage of preterm singleton births at 11.1 percent of all racial groups and in 2013, infants born to African American mothers experienced the highest rates of infant mortality (11.11 infant deaths per 1,000 births) of all groups.
Heart disease and cancer are the leading causes of death across race, ethnicity, and gender. African Americans were 30 percent more likely than whites to die prematurely from heart disease in 2010, and African American men are twice as likely as whites to die prematurely from stroke. Homicide-related deaths, another instance of health disparities, are highest for African American men (4.5 percent)
Of course, this year’s experiences with COVID-19 demonstrates the vulnerability of the African American population. Black Americans make up 13% of the US population, yet they make up 23% of COVID-19 deaths. The chart below shows the difference in COVID-19 deaths by age and race.
African American death rates are higher than whites in every age group: They are 6.6 times as likely to die from COVID-19 as whites in the 25-34 age group, 6.2 times as likely to die in the 45-54 age group, and 2.7 times as likely in the 65-74 age group.
Income and wealth. One picture is indeed worth a thousand words. In this case, the picture is a graph (presented below) from the U.S. Census Bureau that charts racial disparities in median income from 1967 to 2017. As can be seen, in 2017 white non-Hispanic median household income was $68,145 in 2018 dollars, while Black median household income was $40,258. In other words. the median household income for Blacks was 59% of that of whites, a slight improvement from 1973 when it was 57%. As unequal as income is, the racial disparity in wealth is even greater. The net worth of the average Black family in 2016 was $17,150, while the net worth of the average white family $171,000, approximately ten times greater.
Education. To get at the racial disparities in education in the United States we will look at three separate issues: 1) inequities in school financing, 2) inequities in institutional treatment in schools, and 3) inequities in educational outcomes.
School Financing. The Brookings Institute found that educational experiences for minority students have continued to be substantially separate and unequal. Two-thirds of minority students still attend schools that are predominantly minority, most of them located in central cities and funded well below those in neighboring suburban districts. Recent analyses of data prepared for school finance cases in Alabama, New Jersey, New York, Louisiana, and Texas have found that on every tangible measure—from qualified teachers to curriculum offerings—schools serving greater numbers of students of color had significantly fewer resources than schools serving mostly white students. An analysis by the nonprofit EdBuild found that schools in mainly white neighborhoods received $2,200 more per student than nonwhite schools in the school year 2015-2016.
Within School Discrimination. Another Brookings Report examined the issue of the way students are treated within a school. This includes suspension, placement in special education and/or placement in gifted programs, grade retention, and placement in Advanced Placement courses. After taking account of socioeconomic factors, the authors find that assignment to these categories is systematically demarcated by students’ race. This shown in the chart below.
Educational Outcomes. Given the results above, no one should be surprised that the educational attainment of Blacks is lower than that of whites (see chart below). Since we believe that education is an important key to success in life, an unequal education system leads to a host of unequal outcomes.
The chart below presents the average results for The SAT tests in 2019 by race. On the average whites do 20% better than blacks.
Of greater importance perhaps, is the racial gap in completing college (shown in the chart below). Only 17% of Black men and 25% of Black women have 4+ years of college, compared to 36% of white men and 44% of white women.
Justice System. The United States has the largest prison population in the world, and the highest per-capita incarceration rate. In 2018 in the US, there were 698 people incarcerated per 100,000. Prison, parole, and probation operations generate an $81 billion annual cost to U.S. taxpayers. The racial breakdown of the incarcerated population is presented in the chart below.
Marie Gottschalk, writing in The Atlantic, says “Ta-Nehisi Coates mournfully excavates how the carceral state is deeply entangled in the racial DNA of the United States, and convincingly demonstrates that, for all the talk of a Kumbaya moment in penal reform between the left and the right, the carceral state remains largely intact with barely a nick.” According to another Atlantic article,“The carceral state has, in effect, become a credentialing institution as significant as the military, public schools, or universities—but the credentialing that prison or jail offers is negative. In her book, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration, Devah Pager, the Harvard sociologist, notes that most employers say that they would not hire a job applicant with a criminal record.”
While the record drop in crime rates since the 1990s is a major achievement, crime is increasingly distributed in unequal ways, and unacceptably high rates of violent crime persist in certain urban neighborhoods. Since the early 1990s, the homicide victimization rate for African Americans has fallen by more than half, but it remains extraordinarily high.
Finally, we must talk about police conduct. NBC Boston has published data on “Police Brutality in America. Here are the most significant findings:
- Black Americans are more likely to be shot by police than any other group
- Police rarely face charges for on the job shooting.
- 99% of fatal shootings by police since 2013 have not resulted in officers being charged with a crime.
- That’s 7,562 cases that have resulted in no known charges.
Conclusions. I have outlined a number of indicators that demonstrate that black Americans have worse health, income, wealth, education and justice outcomes. The questions is why. I can see only two possible answers: 1) there is a “racist system” which leads to these outcomes or 2) the outcomes are there because in some way Black Americans, as a group, are behaviorally or genetically inferior to white Americans. Modern geneticists consider “race” as a social construct, not a biological one.
Today, scientists prefer to use the term “ancestry” to describe human diversity. “Ancestry” reflects the fact that human variations do have a connection to the geographical origins of our ancestors—with enough information about a person’s DNA, scientists can make a reasonable guess about their ancestry. However, unlike the term “race,” it focuses on understanding how a person’s history unfolded, not how they fit into one category and not another. In a clinical setting, for instance, scientists would say that diseases such as sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis are common in those of “sub-Saharan African” or “Northern European” descent, respectively, rather than in those who are “black” or “white”.
Americans, as a whole, are more likely to blame discrimination as an obstacle to blacks getting ahead, although 51% hold that “lack of motivation to work hard.” as a major or minor reason Blacks are at a disadvantage (see chart below).
Americans believe that currently civil rights for Blacks have been deteriorating. According to Gallup the proportion of Americans who believe that civil rights for Blacks have improved in their lifetime now stands at 59%, the lowest it has been since 1993. The same poll shows that 82% of blacks and 59% of whites believe that new civil rights laws to reduce discrimination are needed, a sharp increase since 1993. Which laws need to be enacted, and whether they can be enacted in this very divisive era will be determined over the next four years.
