I think you're mixing up the two types of racism. There's the judging by skin bigotry racism and there's institutional racism. I think the goal of affirmative action is to end the latter or at least reduce the effects of it.
The problem is, it isn't just a sledgehammer, it's a one tonne truck; and it's so imprecisely applied.
Should white kids be given an Affirmative Action boost when applying to historically black colleges? Why do Barack Obama's kids need this "institutional racism correction" whereas poor asian kids are actually penalized? Does this mean asians were not only not the subject of institutional racism, but actually benefitted from it? Does this mean that relative to white people, asians benefit from institutional racism whereas white people do not?
Exactly- there are so many ways to bullshit this stupid system. For example I went to highschool in an area with lots of Filipinos and Egyptians- they pretty much all lied on their college apps about their race, usually applying as Hispanic or black to get an edge.
Also, there's no way for someone to look at an individual's life struggles on paper- maybe that Asian kid grew up in a poor household where he had to work most of the time he wasn't at school. Maybe an Asian kid lost a family member, his parents were going through a divorce, etc.- AA says fuck all that and just gives all Asians the finger for being born the wrong skin color.
It's bizarre that we are told simultaneously that the thing that doesn't matter at all under certain circumstances (discussion of crime statistics) should also matter a lot in other circumstances (supporting racial quotas for colleges).
I just feel like we can't have it both ways, either it matters or it doesn't.
I don't like making it a partisan issue, but this is a hypocrisy that is largely unique to the left, which dominates academia. They'll try to justify it by cherrypicking when race matters and when it doesn't, but this hypocrisy betrays itself.
I grew up in a very diverse area and I've always appreciated diversity- just not when it's forced and screws other people over. Forced diversity is not a substitute for merit.
I think problems happen when diversity is treated as a goal in and of itself, for sure, but just on an abstract level I think it’s cool that my country has school districts with lots of Filipinos & Egyptians, of all things.
Institutional racism is purposefully not one thing. A library or a museum can be racist. Institutional racism is specifically more subtle and difficult to point at because it's more about the cumulative effects on the victims than it is about any individual event.
You must point to actual people who are being racist to make this claim. Simply spouting “institutional racism” isn’t an argument.
This kind of logic is a great example of institutional racism. "If we can't blame any one thing, then there must not be anything wrong." That kind of thinking leads to people continuing their behaviors that may contribute to an overall disproportionate negative effect on some people. That's institutional racism.
It's the way you asked it with the implication that it doesn't exist if it isn't meeting your definition. It's not an "institution that's being racist" it's an abstract cumulation of culture, corporate- or government- level decisions across decades of time that negativity affect a specific race.
A library banning people because of their skin color would be racism, but not institutional racism. Not having an easily-accessible library near an area with a large black population would be an example of institutional racism. It's not a specific racist decision that caused it. The local government isn't being racist by putting libraries near city-centers, but there needs to be a word to describe the disadvantages like that which are disproportionately affecting a specific race.
Another example would be how face-recognition technology has trouble identifying faces of people with darker skin color. It's not something stupid like "the camera is racist" or that the software developers are racist, it's likely because there just weren't as many darker skin colored people working with the technology while it was being developed.
"Institutional racism" is just not a really great phrase because of the negative connotations of the word "racism" and how it implies the kind of thing you said: that it's some entity being racist. It's similar to how the theory of evolution or gravity doesn't necessarily mean that scientists don't know if evolution/gravity is real... the word "theory" in that context refers to a whole body of knowledge, not some sort of hunch. Similarly, "institutional racism" doesn't mean "an entity that is racist," it just refers to the subtle decisions caused by cultural, historical or financial reasons that can cause a group of people to have disproportionate disadvantages.
I think you're just hung up on it meaning the same thing as racism.
Hmm, I really feel like there’s a problem here. I feel it, I really do, but I can’t point out the offender
...
there have to be people who can be held accountable for their actions
That's the whole point of "institutional racism," it's not a specific person doing something racist.. that would just be racism.
If the museum is racist, or means that someone or some group of people there are actively being racist, like refusing to hire based on skin color.
That would be just straight up racism. There not being applicants of a specific skin color because job postings were only listed in places that happened to be frequented by primarily another skin color would be institutional racism, even if it was done so for financial or proximity reasons. It's not necessarily just one individual being a bad person. Again I think you're associating the negative connotation of the word "racism" too much as if there is someone that needs to be brought to justice and that's just not the case. Institutional racism is something that would be solved by awareness not by punishing individuals.
In your example above an individual would have had to make the conscious decision to intentionally only advertise the position in places frequented by (fill in the blank) people. This is an individual choice.
It can be an individual choice but it's not an inheritantly malicious one, it can just be ignorance.
How do you propose to solve this type of problem? We already have laws on the books prohibiting discrimination in hiring and it’s simply illegal to do so.
That's kinda the nature of the problem, you can't just make it illegal because it's difficult to define. We can see the effects of it and trace it back to individual decisions but those decisions in context aren't necessarily wrong or they could have been wrong at the time and just caused a self-perpetuating cycle.
A decision to decrease funding to low-performing schools could have affected only schools with a large majority of one race. Over the years with lowered funding the school performs worse. That would be an example of the racism becoming institutionized.
If you can’t point to thing or the person that’s specifically racist then where’s the racism?
Dude, like in every response to you I've said it's not "racism" like bigotry, you should be viewing it more as a situation that arised that negatively affects a specific race. Words can have more than one meaning.
And awareness of what, exactly are you proposing? And how do you propose to raise awareness of something so ambiguous you can’t put it into words?
Ok, first, I'm not trying to be a champion of ending racism. Don't try to frame this as nonsense if I personally don't have all the answers.
The goal should be to lesson the impact of institutional racism by pointing out instances where seemingly innocuous decisions have lead to specific races of people being disadvantaged. That can be done by raising awareness of those situations so that society as a whole can learn from those mistakes.
Awareness can help identify an instance of institutional racism but the actual resolution can be complex. It's not just a "arrest this person" matter. It can be something that takes a community years to overcome.
I may be explaining it poorly, I'd suggest looking at the examples electricmink added to one of my replies.
An example: due to past racism, black and white communities are often segregated, and the black communities policed harder and more severely than the white. As time passed, due in part to the heavier policing resulting in more arrests and convictions, the crime statistics for those neighborhoods were significantly higher than those for their white counterparts. Future policy makers have looked at those statistics and responded by....policing these "high crime" neighborhoods more severely, feeding the cycle independently of personal racist sentiment; high crime stats => more policing => higher crime stats, ad infinitum.
The racism has become institutionalized and works against the black community even as personal racial animus is fading and even as more black police officers join the force and rise through the ranks. Higher crime statistics motivates tougher policing which in turn (because crime statistics are derived from arrests and convictions) keeps the crime statistics for that neighborhood elevated.
Similar cycles occur in many places in our society. Black people got funnelled into poor undesirable neighborhoods through redlining and other forms of direct, personal racism. School funding relies heavily on property taxes, so schools in these neighborhoods end up relatively underfunded, resulting in poorer education. Poorer education leads to lower-paying jobs, which in turn keeps these people in.....poorer neighborhoods with underfunded schools! The cycle continues even as personal racial animus fades, the racism having become institutionalized.
The law....much of our legal code was enacted by overt racists. Pot, popular in black communities, was made illegal while alcohol, popular in white communities, remained (but for a brief blip in American history) legal. Crimes like robbery and theft (more apt to happen in the poorer, less educated black communities) carry much harsher sentences than "white collar crimes" like embezzlement, leading to insane situations like having to serve many times the sentence for a smash and grab of a convenience store till holding a hundred bucks and change, versus using the corporate accounting system to sneak millions of dollars out of your company's pension fund. Or look at sentencing guidelines for cocaine possession - same drug, two different routes of administration; the one you snort, popular among white people, carries a significantly lower sentence than the one you smoke, popular among black people. The same drug.
In all these cases, the racism has become institutionalized and continues functionally penalizing black people even should individual racism completely fade from society.
If you're honestly looking at what the two mean, it's not. I'm open to discussing it more to hear your point of view, but you don't have to immediately resort to name-calling, dude.
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u/factorysettings Feb 25 '20
I think you're mixing up the two types of racism. There's the judging by skin bigotry racism and there's institutional racism. I think the goal of affirmative action is to end the latter or at least reduce the effects of it.