Systemic Racism

Posted On July 4, 2020

I was having a fairly heated conversation with someone one night.  It started off as a topic on sexism.  Because sexism seems to be a difficult idea for people to understand (as far as where the disadvantages are and what the big deal is with using derogatory slurs) I compared it to racism.  In my experience, people can understand things better in terms of race than they can in terms of sex.  Unfortunately, my point didn’t land because he was just as adamant that racism doesn’t exist today as he was that sexism doesn’t exist today.     

He thought, and probably still thinks, that poverty was the result of someone who didn’t work hard enough, of someone being lazy.  And, in his defense, it’s understandable why he might think that.  He grew up with little to nothing.  He dropped out of high school.  But he worked his ass off his whole life, and now he lives in a nice house and has nice things.  He earned it, for sure.  In his mind, if he can do it, anyone can. 

Regrettably, just because hard work saved him, doesn’t mean it will save others.  And it certainly helps that the opportunities he had – and the lucky breaks he had – were, in all likelihood, profoundly greater than that of any non-white person.  

He was 50% more likely to get a call-back for an interview.  He was more likely to be forgiven for behavioral problems at school, less likely to get pulled over by the police, less likely to get his car searched, less likely to get incarcerated for weed possession (for anything, actually), more likely to survive if he had an altercation with the police, more likely to be taken seriously when at a hospital – leading to better medication and quicker healing times (meaning less time off work), – more likely to be given sympathy, more likely to be trusted, more likely to be promoted, more likely to buy a house for less, and the list goes on and on and on.  (And I haven’t even hit on the gender disparities yet.)

None of that should diminish all the work he’s put in to become the man he is today.  Rather it should encourage him, and everyone, to be more aware of the racial disparities that keep minorities from getting an equal opportunity.  It should encourage us to be more welcoming of proposed solutions to those known problems.  And it should make us check ourselves to continuously put forth every effort to not be a part of the problem by setting counter measures and making sure we’re self-aware.

Homes:

Take, for instance, 8000 testers (actors) of differing races acted to rent or buy homes. For people renting homes, black people were 11% less likely to be told about units and 4% less likely to be shown units. Hispanics were 12% and 4% less likely to be told and shown units. And Asians were 9% and 6% less likely for the same. Meanwhile, for people buying homes, black people were 17% less likely to be told about homes and 17% less likely to be shown homes. Hispanics had no difference between white people in this regard. Asians were 15% and 18% less likely to be told and shown homes to buy.

Employment:

Countless studies have proven that when submitting identical resumes with only the name differing, white-sounding names are 50% more likely to get a call-back than black-sounding names. That means that people with black-sounding names have to send in 5 more resumes than a people with a white-sounding name in order to receive the same chance at a call-back. This gives people with a white-sounding name an equivalency of having an additional 8 years of experience due to their white-person qualities alone (with each year of experience upping the likelihood of callbacks by .4 percentage points).

It’s also true that a white-sounding name with a high-quality resume has a 30% raise in call-backs than that of a low-quality resume with a white-sounding name. This is not true for high-quality resumes with black-sounding names, which makes “it harder not only for African Americans to find a job but also to improve their employability.”

It is worth noting that employers who are bound by Affirmative Action laws are not any better at avoiding discriminations and neither are employers who explicitly state that they are an “Equal Opportunity Employer.” Additionally, employers who are educated (prosecutors, doctors, principals, etc.) are just as likely to discriminate.

Education:

Even in places we take to be the among the more aware of systemic racism and sexism, college professors are guilty of discrimination. In a study of over 6,500 professors from more than 250 different institutions, identical emails from prospective doctoral students were distributed with (again) only the name being different. Names were made to be distinctly white, black, Hispanic, Indian, and Chinese and male or female. The emails were sent indiscriminately for one group and then included the same porportion of black, Hispanic, Indian, and Chinese teachers to better represent the population.

The study found that regardless of the race or sex of the professors, they discriminated against all the minority categories and women by not providing a response as often as was provided for white men or, if responded to, by being less likely to provide a positive response. Chinese and Indian students were discriminated against the most.

Private schools were more severe in their discrimination. And there was less discrimination in the humanities departments, more in the sciences, and the most in the business departments.

Criminal Justice:

In 2000 there was a study in which 348 jury-eligible participants individually viewed one of four identical versions of a staged capital penalty trial that varied only by the race of the defendant and the victim.

Let me restate that last sentence: the participants watched a staged capital penalty trial that was the exact same in crime, evidence, refutation, and mitigating factors.

And it found that black people were 4 times more likely to be sentenced to death than the white defendant, especially in cases in which there were cross-racial conditions (black defendant with a white victim). This same study was done again in 2009 and again in 2011, both times with 500 participants.

We put 4 times the worth of a white life over a black life, especially in cases in which a black person has victimized a white person. This is the most cut and dry evidence of whose right to life we value the most.

Police Brutality:

A researcher from the University of Colorado – Boulder developed a game that puts the player in the position of being a police officer who randomly encounters men of different races, some armed and others holding objects like wallets, sodas, and cellphones.  The player is given a short amount of time to shoot. 

Regardless of whether the participants were white, black, young, or old, black people were shot the most often. However, it should be noted that when police played this game, they were significantly better than civilians at avoiding the shooting of unarmed men. Therefore, their likelihood of shooting an unarmed person was less than that of a civilian (as anyone would hope). At the same time, they were still more likely to shoot an unarmed black man than they were to shoot an unarmed white man. Also, their reaction time to shoot an armed black man was quicker than an armed white man, while their reaction time to not shoot an unarmed black man was slower than an unarmed white man.

You can play the game and see how you fair!
I got 550 points, and I was 10 milliseconds (ms) slower to shoot an armed white man than I was an armed black man (683ms vs 673ms) and 12 ms faster to refrain from shooting an unarmed white man than I was an unarmed black man (672ms vs 684ms). I shot 1 unarmed white man and didn’t shoot 1 armed white man.

Please scroll down, under the social media icons, in order to click for the next page to see my own bias and the rest of the studies I have to share. (There’s also a TL;DR at the end of the next page.)