On “Systemic Racism”

The term “racism” does not at present have a definite, shared public meaning. But many people associate it with individual wrongful attitudes and behavior toward racial others. However, both the COVID-19 pandemic and the world-wide “Black Lives Matter” protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd have contributed to a tectonic shift in popular discourse, toward “systemic (or institutional) racism” as the preferred framework for thinking about racism. The “systemic racism” formulation reminds us of the big picture—how racial groups are disadvantaged in large ways rendered invisible when focusing only on individual forms of racial wrongfulness.

However, the form of “systemic racism” caused and revealed by COVID-19 is not the same as the one predominant in the Black Lives Matter protests. The COVID-19-related concept points to the disproportionate incidence and deaths from COVID-19 among Black and Brown people. There are many processes contributing to these disparities. To mention just two, Blacks and Latinxs are more likely than whites to work in jobs that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, put their health and lives in greater danger (for example, as front-line health workers). Second, lower-income persons, and thus disproportionately Blacks and Latinxs, are (in the U.S.) less likely to have adequate health care. Both these conditions are class- or occupation-related. An individual Black front-line health worker is subject to greater risk because of their occupation or income, not simply because of their race.

So the “systemic racism” formulation recognizes that processes not directly racial in character often contribute to harming racially-defined groups and to unjust disparities in harm. Racial discrimination and oppression have consigned Black and Brown people to more dangerous jobs and less adequate health care. But once they occupy those socio-economic positions, they are then further endangered in the COVID-19 era, and they share that vulnerability and disadvantage with members of other racial groups, including whites, who also occupy those jobs or income levels. Thus Black and Brown health workers suffer from two distinct injustices in the COVID-19 era. One is that they are subject to particular COVID-19-related dangers not faced by other workers; this injustice is shared with non-Black-or-Brown workers in the same situation. The other is that their racial group is disproportionately subject to those dangers (compared, say, to whites), and this injustice is suffered only by Black and Brown health workers. “Systemic racism” should be understood to encompass both these dimensions of injustice.

Recognizing the (aspect of) injustice that is shared with whites, within a “systemic racism” framework, carries both moral/political and strategic advantages. Strategically it encourages recognizing a common situation that members of all groups have reason to protest, as has in fact happened in job actions (sometimes linked to unions, sometimes not) encompassing workers from all racial groups—for example, protesting not being provided with adequate protective equipment, or working in remediable unsafe conditions. Apart from recognizing this strength in greater numbers, it is also morally and politically important not to allow racial difference to blunt a sense of shared condition of harm and injustice.

But sometimes the “systemic racism” framework is narrowed to refer only to the disproportionate racial impact aspect. For example, for several years Amazon warehouse workers have been protesting and complaining about unsafe working conditions. The proportion of such warehouse workers who are Black is significantly greater than the population at large, or the proportion of top leadership at Amazon. These disproportions are unjust and wrong. However, if the goal sought is only to reduce the proportion of Black workers subject to those unsafe conditions, but not to change those conditions themselves for all workers subject to them (including the remaining Black workers), this is too narrow a view of systemic racism.

A different notion of “systemic racism” has arisen in response to the killing of George Floyd and the focus on police violence against Black people. (Latinxs have also suffered disproportionate police violence, though not at the level of Blacks.) Here it refers to the production of racially disparate harm but solely by race-targeted processes, such as racial discrimination (intentional and unintentional), stereotyping, and racial animus, on the part of a social institution, such as a particular police department, or the criminal justice system more generally. It is plausibly claimed that the disproportionate killing of Blacks by U.S. police is driven by such purely race-targeted processes—indeed, not by a general racism but a specific antiblack form of it.

With respect to the Amazon case, this form of “systemic racism” picks up on a different aspect of the treatment of black workers than the COVID-19-related form just discussed. For example it names widespread discrimination against black workers, both with respect to promotion (as mentioned above) but also, for example, racist graffiti in the workplace, or firing a Black employee because he complained about such racist graffiti or other forms of racially discriminatory treatment.

Sometimes unjust treatment or racial disparities are caused by purely race-targeted forms of behavior. Sometimes they are caused by intertwined race- and class- (or occupation-) based processes, where trying to tease out the purely race-based processes would either be impossible, or would mask aspects of the injustice suffered by Blacks. (In addition it might also mask aspects of injustice suffered by non-Blacks.)

Both types of “systemic racism”—disparities caused by purely race-based processes, and by interacting race- and class-based ones—are operating now (and in the past). In analyzing racism and racial disparities we should not think we have to choose between them. The assertion that Black lives matter should apply both to victims of police violence and (disproportionate) death from COVID-19. There must be room to examine whether the best approach to combating systemic racism lies in pressing for unionization and collective bargaining rights for Amazon warehouse workers, or for pressing for more Blacks to be hired in senior leadership positions—or for a combination of both. At least in my reading of the public face of the protests as I write this in August 2020, the COVID-19, class-related form has tended to take a backseat to the purely race-focused version in the police protests. This is partly a product of a perceived false choice of thinking that to emphasize purely race-related processes means minimizing class-based factors in Black people’s lives; or the reverse, thinking that emphasizing class-based factors requires minimizing the purely race-related factors and processes. Instead we need to give both race and class factors their due in analyzing racial injustice, and in doing so promote the more encompassing understanding of “systemic racism” involving both forms.

Lawrence Blum

Lawrence Blum is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is the author of "I’m Not a Racist, But…:” The Moral Quandary of Race (Cornell University Press, 2002), chosen as the Best Social Philosophy Book of the Year by the North American Society of Social Philosophy.