Systemic racism: Is it real?

A horrifying video of George Floyd’s death has proven to most Americans that police racism is real, said Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. But we have no video showing us the “structural racism” that has left African-Americans still living in a separate country from whites. Generations of systemic discrimination and oppression have left an enduring mark: The net worth of the average black household is just 10 percent that of whites’—an even greater gulf than in 1968. Today, a black newborn is twice as likely to die in infancy, and those born in poor Southern states have a shorter life expectancy than children born in Bangladesh. Though the Jim Crow era is supposedly over, black children are “systematically shunted” to largely segregated schools that receive a fraction of the funding enjoyed by schools in wealthy white suburbs. The problem isn’t the character flaws of “a few bad apples,” but the racism that infects “every major institution in this country,” said Leonard Pitts Jr. in the Miami Herald. “We have a rotten tree.”

Systemic racism is a “canard,” said Andrew McCarthy in NationalReview.com. Liberals love to cherry-pick statistics to support their “tunnel vision” about race, but many of the institutions deemed irredeemably racist, such as academia and journalism, “overflow with political progressives.” Many African-Americans do succeed in our supposedly racist society; for those who still struggle, it’s the paternalistic progressive agenda, not racism, that keeps them trapped in victimhood and dependency. Leftist radicals use the term “systemic racism” to justify overthrowing our institutions and remaking society, said John Hirschauer, also in NationalReview.com. “Capitalism is white supremacy,” they insist. Immigration enforcement is “racist,” and so is patriotism. In short, “the entire Republican agenda is a species of racism.”

Republicans, meanwhile, barely concede that racism exists, said Ronald Brownstein in CNN.com. One of the modern GOP’s “core convictions” is that “widespread racism is no longer a problem.” Indeed, support for Donald Trump is highly correlated with the belief that it’s whites who suffer from racial prejudice. But Floyd’s death has triggered a sea change in public attitudes. The coalition of people who see racism as real and requiring major structural change is strikingly broad and diverse. As Trump attacks protesters as radicals and thugs, he is betting his presidency that most Americans agree that systemic racism is a myth.