The word in the context I'm referring to is defined as being a foundational or fundamental procedure or practice to the operation or existence of an institution.
When the woke refer to "systemic racism" it is not literally meant to be taken as an outright premeditated explicit conspiracy to oppress minorities. It is referring to a subtle, clandestine, unspoken, nearly-imperceptible form of oppression or opposition to minority well-being or minority success.
When asked for examples of this the woke might point to something like banks refusing loans to black people to purchase a home, vehicle, or start a business. Or they might perhaps point to over-policing of predominantly black neighborhoods, water supplies being undrinkable in predominantly black population centers, expulsion/suspension of black students in public schools, longer sentencing of black defendants in court, etc. There are a litany of examples that are often used.
If there was such a profound and pervasive conspiracy against black people then obviously that means it must favor the majority race, namely white people. Right?
right?
As it turns out, Asian people, on average, earn a higher annual income than white people. They have higher test scores, are more likely to graduate, have higher literacy, more rates of legitimacy (father remaining with the mother), higher credit ratings. They are also convicted of fewer crimes per instance of being on trial than white people, and are arrested less often than white people. But how can this be? Despite the history of oppression of Asian-American first generation immigrants origins, Mao, Pol Pot, the rape of Nanking by the Japanese Occupiers, The Japanese occupation of Korea. All the intergenerational oppression by sexist and misogynist, extremely racist and xenophobic regimes. Intergenerational poverty. Fire bombing and nuclear bombing of two cities. Japanese Internment camps in America. Police refusing to come to aid or rescue the asian businesses being looted and burned in the Rodney King riots of the 90's.
It couldn't possibly be that Asians are smarter, more rational, less violent, and harder-working than white people, could it?
could it?
It's a real conundrum.
If we say yes, Asians are just less violent and more financially responsible than Whites, then we must necessarily infer that it's because of some kind of reverse version of systemic racism. A type of racism that shows preference for Asians over Whites.
Hmmmm...
Well that just doesn't make any sense.
If we look at world wide IQ tests, it seems than Japanese and Koreans score higher than Europeans. Breaking down the test scores by race, Asians are, on average, a few points smarter than whites.
It just begs the question, if the reason many of the nations of Africa are still struggling to reach their first stage of the Industrial Revolution (while all of the British Empire and America are in the late stages of their Information Age or in the beginning of their Artificial Intelligence Age) is due to "systemic oppression", then is the rapid success of predominantly Asian countries like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, due to "systemic propulsion?"
Are white countries, at great cost to themselves, propelling Asians to succeed and have lower crime rates, lower poverty rates, lower teen pregnancy, higher literacy, higher education, higher median income than they do?
Of course, many Asian countries lag behind South Korea and Japan.
Obviously Communist China, despite being a first-world nation with a large middle class (though not as large as America's) still has huge issues of poverty, though that can be chalked up to the bizarre economic philosophy of their semi-planned semi-free market socialist economy.
Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Laos, Indonesia, Polynesia and the other South Pacific Islands, Vietnam, Nepal, India, all are Asian Countries (although the ethnicity of Fijian, Samoan, Indian, and Nepali people departs significantly from what is considered "Asian" we'll still include them in this treatise) have high poverty in their native lands, but also when they immigrate to the USA they still often live at or below the 'poverty line.'
For about one generation.
And then their kids grow up to be doctors, engineers, lawyers, tradesmen/women, scientists, programmers, or otherwise gain a lot of material and personal success.
So while the counter argument of the "model minority" trope is that these other Asian groups are still struggling like black people, they tend to conveniently ignore that these are first generation immigrants and that the children of these first generations still grow up to find a greater degree of financial success than Whites.
"BUT THE SPIKE IN ANTI-ASIAN HATE CRIMES THOUGH!" is something the woke identitarian progressive might say.
28% of the violence against Asian victims is perpetrated by Black assailants (despite only being about 13% of the total population). That's a higher percentage than Whites, Latinos, and other Asians.
Mentioning this seems to immediately end anything the woke has to say on that matter, but there is still much to say.
"But Asians weren't enslaved for 400 years!"
Right, They were enslaved for thousands of years. Although throughout the centuries the percentage of the total population that was enslaved would vary widely, being uncommon at times to being very common in other times, and it was mostly indigenous enslavement (Asians enslaving other Asians), it was still a thing.
Slavery was a thing for every group of people at one time or another.
In fact, there were even instances of Westerners (including Arabs and Whites) being enslaved by the dynastic Chinese.
Not to diminish the crime of enslaving (which I personally consider a higher crime than murder or rape) that went on in the US from the establishment of the original colonies and on until the end of Indentured Servitude for hundreds of years, but the distinction between chattel slavery and the type of forced labor that goes on in current-day China is immaterial. Not to mention that taxation, I would argue, is a kind of slavery. So it kinda doesn't matter who was enslaved when and by who or how long ago.
Though technically, slavery is still legal in the US, just not chattel slavery. Prison labor is still a huge problem as it's ostensibly involuntary labor/servitude, and it's perfectly legal. The US's 13th amendment permits slavery as a punishment for a crime. It sets up a strange incentive structure for judges, police, and policy-makers to collude with prison labor contractors to increase sentencing, increase arrests, and increase mandatory minimum sentencing for crimes that might be a first-time offense.
Yes, that spells bad news for the black population, who, for whatever reason it might be, are arrested for and convicted of crime at a higher rate than whites.
And it's also bad news for the white population, who, for whatever reason it might be, are arrested for and convicted of crime at a higher rate than Asians.
Whatever reason it is, we can be rest-assured it's not 'systemic racism.'
So if the cloud of slavery that hangs over the historical head of the Black American cannot be singularly blamed for the outcomes not meeting the exact same outcomes for Whites or Asians (since all races and ethnicities were enslaved or are to some arguable extent currently enslaved) then what is to blame?
I'd say, thinking of this abstractly, that most problems facing humanity, or most of the complaints we have about society, are really just part of the larger problem of Statism in general. Which is to say, the existence of State monopoly on violence, and the insanity therein, is the root problem.
But, since we're focusing on this nebulous idea of "systemic" racism, which is not an intrinsic quality of The State itself since according to The Woke there can supposedly be something they call "good governance" (a gigantic contradiction but let's move on), if we take an objective approach it becomes apparent that this is unfalsifiable to begin with. Epistemologically a non-starter.
You can't contend with a problem that you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of.
It's like Alien Abduction. Is there a non-trivial segment of the human population that complain of intruders abducting them and extracting biological samples from them and even administering rectal probes? It's undeniable at this point. And there is some serious effort, even at government level, to examine the problem.
But is it even real? Are there actually aliens picking people up and putting needles in their nose and probes in their anuses? There is absolutely no empirical evidence of it and plenty of excuses for why, despite living in an age of cheap personal and home security, wide prevalence of guns (in the USA), and ubiquitous cheap convenient point-and-shoot cameras, there can be no evidence.
The victims/participants of these alien abductions experience real suffering regardless. It is undeniable that they are suffering. Just like how schizophrenics experience real suffering despite the torment being totally hallucinatory.
Now, I'm not saying that the experience of racism or racial discrimination/hatred is a hallucination. I'll go as far to admit that everyone is, to varying degrees, guilty of prejudice. But there are rationalizations and reasons, even if they might be fallacious, for what people prefer and what people are repelled by.
Some people just don't like mustard. Or they only like mustard in very specific circumstances.
In the hay day of the Soviet Union, whether or not people demanded mustard, factories were going to produce a certain quota of mustard production, come hell or high water. It meant there might be shelves loaded with mustard but no bread to spread it on.
The bottom line is, why do we expect or need everyone to accept and love everyone else unconditionally?
Why do we expect outcomes to be fully and exactly equal unconditionally, even after opportunity is perfectly fair and exactly equal (at least to the letter of the law)?
It's like the gender wage gap. Women still make 0.77 USD for every 1.00 USD a man makes.
But only if we don't factor total hours worked, occupation, experience, and qualifications.
Women graduate from higher education at a higher rate than men, but the complaint isn't that "men are being kept out of college because they are only good for physical labor", the complaint is "women have more debt than men."
lol *shrug*
Men are more willing to work overnight shifts. Armed security, military, law enforcement. Men are the ones willing to work 100 hours a week. Men are the ones willing to work in a coal mine or on freighter boats or offshore oil platforms or fighting forest fires. These are dangerous, high injury and fatality, physically arduous, unhealthy, jobs that men just apply for when they have few other options. So it's not at all a matter of "staffers are refusing to hire women", it's just that women refuse to apply.
What are the jobs women apply for when they have few other options?
onlyfans, twitch streamer/cosplayer/model, exotic dancer, sugar babies, escort service, flight attendant, hooters server, bar tender
at worst they might have to become a babysitter or nanny. Maybe even get a 3 month course in home nursing and have to change adult diapers and catheters.
At the very bottom of the barrel they do contact sex work.
Oh no! Someone is paying to have sex with me?!
Which side really has it worse when it comes to unskilled labor job options?
The gender wage gap is real. It's not a myth. It's just really deceptive as to how the problem is framed.
Circling back to "systemic." If we accept that systemic oppression of Black people is real, we must necessarily accept that system propulsion of Asian and Jewish people is real too.
-ooh, wait, did I say "Jewish people?"
Yikes...
Yeah, I guess we're not supposed to talk about how Jewish people are, on average, higher earners than non-Jewish white people. Yeah, because THAT would be a "conspiracy theory."
Let's get back to focusing on Systemic Racism. Not Israel's occupation of Gaza and their treatment of the Palestinians.
...oohhhh
hmmmm....
...yeah....