On Systemic Racism

In May 2020, the killing of George Floyd sparked global protests over the use of excessive force by police officers. As these protests continued throughout the year, conversations about systemic racism again entered mainstream discourse. Despite an ever-growing body of evidence, critics still contest whether or not systemic racism (also called institutional racism) even exists in the first place. This article discusses systemic racism: its definition, the evidence we have that it exists, and the effects it has on minority lives.

(Note: As a white man, I can never fully comprehend the actual experiences people of color go through daily. The intent behind this article is not to speak for their experiences, but rather to share the scientific evidence we have that systemic racism exists. I approach this as a scientist sharing scientific evidence, not as a white person speaking for the experiences of others.)

First, let us briefly discuss what the term ‘systemic racism’ actually means. An all-too-common response is “systemic racism cannot exist, there are no racist laws.” Unfortunately, this critique fails to acknowledge what the term actually means. “Systemic racism” refers to a form of racism that is built in as a normal practice in society and is embedded in many societal institutions.

While individual racism is easy to see due to its overt nature, systemic racism is far more subtle and often imperceptible on an individual scale. That is, an individual might be affected by systemic racism but we do not see it unless we look at the aggregate. A victim of systemic racism may not have been the victim of an overtly, explicitly racist action, but experienced a negative outcome because of their race.

We know (and have known for decades, since at least the 60s) that systemic racism exists. We know it exists in a variety of institutions. We know that minorities (especially blacks) experience systemic racism in numerous ways, in areas like criminal justice, education, health care, housing, employment, etc. The goal of this article (which itself is a very brief introduction to the topic) is to discuss the evidence of the existence of systemic racism in each of these areas and hopefully inform the larger discussions about its role in society and how we might combat it.

(Note: Much of the evidence and discussion presented here explicitly mentions blacks. This should not be taken to mean other racial minorities do not experience systemic racism, but simply that the evidence predominantly focuses on blacks given their unique racial history in the U.S. and that they usually suffer the most from systemic racism.)

Criminal Justice

Perhaps the most common topic that appears in conversations about systemic racism is that of criminal justice. The criminal justice system in the U.S. regularly and routinely discriminates against blacks, from arrests to convictions to sentencing. It discriminates against youths and adults, men and women. None of these require explicitly racist acts on the part of individual actors in the criminal justice system; much of this is the result of laws and practices that are color-blind on the surface but produce markedly disparate impacts.

Consider the example of crack versus powder cocaine. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 introduced a sentencing disparity between the two forms of cocaine. A person found with five grams of crack cocaine faced a mandatory minimum sentence of five years. To face the same mandatory minimum, a person found with powder cocaine would need to possess five hundred grams. That is a 100:1 disparity (see here). This disparity had little to no basis in evidence or fact, but instead was the result of panic at the crack epidemic.

The data shows that the cocaine sentencing disparity disproportionately impacted black defendants. “According to U.S. Sentencing Commission figures, no class of drug is as racially skewed as crack in terms of numbers of offenses. According to the commission, 79 percent of 5,669 sentenced crack offenders in 2009 were black, versus 10 percent who were white and 10 percent who were Hispanic. The figures for the 6,020 powder cocaine cases are far less skewed: 17 percent of these offenders were white, 28 percent were black, and 53 percent were Hispanic” (see here). This is due largely to differences in consumption rates between the two forms of cocaine: “[C]rack cocaine is disproportionately consumed by African Americans as compared to Caucasians, and the low cost of crack cocaine makes crack cocaine much more prevalent in inner cities” (see here). The Anti-Drug Abuse Act was indeed color-blind, yet produced harsh racial disparities.

The sentencing disparity is just one example. A Stanford University study of 100 million traffic stops found that black drivers were 20% more likely to be pulled over, even controlling for demographics, gender, and reason for the traffic stop (see here). The ACLU found that blacks were 3.7 more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites, even though marijuana use rates are comparable across those groups (see here). Data also shows that drug-free school zone laws, which mandate sentencing enhancements for people caught selling drugs in school zones, disproportionately affects black and Latinx people due to the combination of expansive school zone drawing and high urban density (see here).

A Harvard Law study found that “[a]mong those sentenced to incarceration, black and Latinx people sentenced to incarceration receive longer sentences than their white counterparts, with black people receiving sentences that are an average of 168 days longer and Latinx people receiving sentences that are an average of 148 days longer.” These differences also persist when controlling for criminal history, initial criminal charge, etc (see here). The same study also found that black/Latinx people charged with drug offenses and weapons offenses were more likely to be incarcerated and have longer sentences than white people charged with similar offenses and that black/Latinx people who carried mandatory minimum sentences were more likely to receive longer sentences than similar white people.

A 2018 study found that law enforcement officers in Texas who could charge shoplifters with two different types of crimes (one more serious, one less so) due to a vaguely worded statute were more likely to charge blacks and Hispanics with the more serious crime (see here). A 2019 study by the NIST found that facial-recognition systems were substantially more likely to misidentify the faces of racial minorities. Some ethnic groups, such as Asian-Americans and African-Americans, were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men (see here; see the Wikipedia article for more examples.)

An exhaustive collection of relevant data-driven examples is well beyond the scope of this article. For criminal justice alone there exists a veritable mountain of evidence in favor of systemic racism. Ignoring these racial disparities does nothing to remedy the issues at hand. Steps that can be taken to remedy these ills include ending the war on drugs, eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, and reducing the use of cash bail.

Education

Normatively, we might expect that the education system would be a refuge from discrimination. Students, regardless of race or ethnic identity, should have access to high-quality educations. Even some 75 years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v Board, systemic racism is still prevalent across the education system.

A 2014 APA study shows that black boys as young as 10 are “more likely to be mistaken as older, be perceived as guilty and face police violence if accused of a crime” compared to similar white boys. “Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent,” said author Phillip Atiba Goff, Ph.D. (see here). When black students and white students commit similar infractions, black students are suspended and expelled three times more often than white students (see here). Teachers are also more likely to underrate black students’ math skills compared to white students, even when they have identical scores (see here).

There is also a great deal of evidence that predominantly-black schools tend to be habitually underfunded than majority-white schools. (See these articles in The Atlantic). Public schools in the U.S. rely on local property taxes as a significant source of their funding. School districts with successful businesses and high property values enjoy greater public school resources than those with few businesses and low property values. Historical issues like redlining and economic segregation exacerbate these disparities. As a result, racial minorities in poorer areas tend to receive lower-quality educations.

Health

Health care is as susceptible to systemic racism as anything else. We have known that overt racism poses physiological risks; perception of discrimination and racism are linked to cardiovascular disease, accelerated aging, impede vascular and renal function, and numerous other health issues. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed many of these racial disparities as well; black Americans have been dying at a rate almost 2.5 times higher than white Americans. While some argue that blacks are genetically or genomically predisposed to disparate health outcomes, the evidence suggests that observed racial disparities are the result of systemic racism.

For example, medical studies routinely underrepresent black people (see here and here) and medical texts often fail to document how certain symptoms appear on darker skin tones (see here and here). Even data-based analyses can miss the mark (see here). An algorithm meant to predict high-needs patients undervalued black needs. That algorithm used health care spending as a proxy for gravity of illness, not accounting for the fact that disparities in access lead to less spending on black patients. We also know that black patients are more likely to trust racially concordant doctors and to seek more preventative care after meeting with such doctors, but that black patients are less able to find racially concordant doctors than white or Asian patients (see here for more discussion on these points.)

There exists a well-documented racial disparity in pain management. One study shows that “white laypeople and medical students and residents hold false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites” and that “participants who endorsed these beliefs rated the black (vs. white) patient’s pain as lower and made less accurate treatment recommendations” (see here). Furthermore, a large-scale meta-analysis of 20 years of medical data found that black patients were much less likely than white patients to receive any pain medication (see here). Another study showed that white participants perceive pain on white faces more readily than on black faces and are less likely to suggest pain medications to black patients (see here).

Wealth and Housing

The history of slavery and legal racial discrimination in the U.S. deprived blacks generations of wealth-building opportunities. However, despite the removal of these legal barriers, systemic racism continues to deprive blacks of the same opportunities that white people have. Because wealth and housing are so intrinsically linked in society, we will examine these topics together.

As I referenced above, redlining was a discriminatory practice of literally drawing lines around areas deemed to be ‘poor financial investments,’ which were most commonly black inner-city neighborhoods. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting showed that in the 80s, Atlanta’s banks would lend to low-income whites but not middle- or upper-income blacks (see here). Even though these overtly racist practices do not exist anymore, cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Atlanta are persistently racially segregated, and in many cases these cities even today still see the same neighborhoods that were redlined decades ago.

Data suggests that homes in minority communities are both over-taxed (see here) and under-valued (see here) relative to similar homes in white communities. Data also suggests that black and Hispanic families derive more of their wealth from homeownership than white families (57%, 67%, and 41%, respectively; see here). Taken together, this means that minority families see more difficulty in accumulating wealth and are more vulnerable to economic downturns related to housing, like the Great Recession. Black communities have been systematically undermined when it comes to wealth-building via housing (see here for more discussion).

The racial wealth gap in the U.S. has persisted for centuries. 2016 Federal Reserve data show the following (see here):

1. The median wealth for black households 25 years old and up was less than one-tenth of that for similar white households.
2. Black households have fewer savings accounts than white households and are more likely to experience negative income shocks.
3. Even with a college degree, the median wealth for black households is 70% that of white households.
4. Blacks have fewer assets than whites and are less likely to be homeowners, to own their own business, and to have a retirement account; those assets, when blacks do have them, are worth significantly less than white assets.
5. While blacks typically held less debt than whites, they typically held more high-interest debt and thus carried more expensive debt.

These disparities can be traced often explicitly to past racial discrimination. Slavery meant centuries of white families building wealth off the backs of black families. Even when slavery and legal discrimination ended, white families continued to use that stepping stone to build generational wealth while black families were given no tools to bridge the gap.

It is worth noting here that I have tried to focus on wealth inequality rather than income inequality. While income inequality itself is certainly an issue, wealth is a more comprehensive measure and offers a more complete picture of how widespread and pervasive systemic racism is (again, see here for a thorough discussion).

Employment

As a final topic, but by no means the final topic, let us discuss employment. This is another area where the U.S.’s history of slavery and legal racism created racial disparities that persist through systemic racism. Slavery initially concentrated black workers in undervalued occupations; even when slavery ended, black workers were still encouraged to work the same jobs. Black workers remained overrepresented in low-wage jobs even through the mid-1900s (see here).

Racial discrimination persists in employment and wages even after decades of legislative attempts to rectify these problems. For example, data shows that white applicants to fine-dining positions in D.C. were more likely to be interviewed, and twice as likely to be hired, as similarly-skilled black applicants (see here), and that workers of color were paid 56% less than similarly-qualified white workers (see here). In one 2004 study, researchers mailed equivalent resumes to employers in Boston and Chicago using racially identifiable names to signal race (for example, names like Jamal and Lakisha signaled African Americans, while Brad and Emily were associated with whites). White names triggered a callback rate that was 50% higher than that of equally qualified black applicants (see here; see here for more similar studies). Furthermore, almost all employers conduct criminal background checks when hiring new employees. Because of the aforementioned racial disparities in the criminal justice system, black employees are also disproportionately affected by these background checks. “Even fairly minor felony records have large negative effects on employer callbacks” (see here).

Even within the workplace, racial minorities experience discrimination. One Glassdoor study showed that 42% of U.S. workers said they had seen or experienced racism at work (see here). A workplace report also showed that “men of color make up 10% of corporate C-suite roles, while women of color make up just 4%. White men and white women, meanwhile, respectively make up 68% and 18%.”

Conclusion

No piece of evidence presented here should be taken in a vacuum. As tempting as it might be to take each study on its own, the reality is that these systems interact with each other and compound the effects of systemic racism. The issues presented here do not operate as a series of individual, separate factors that simply add together. They are mutually reinforcing systems that are all infected by the same racism borne from a history of slavery and legal discrimination. There is certainly room for debate about the next steps and best plans for combating systemic racism, but its existence cannot be doubted. The empirical evidence is virtually unanimous: systemic racism exists.

Black. Lives. Matter.

Additional links:
This Google doc and this Reddit post (pardon the subreddit) contain numerous links, some of which are included in this post, to additional information regarding evidence of systemic racism.