I keep pointing out the Civil Rights act was passed back in 1964 when they bring up systemic racism.
"So you're saying all racism ended."
These people don't actually know what the term means, so there's no discussion to really be had there. I will preface this and damn myself by saying that racism does exist, its just increasingly more and more rare and pretty openly ostracized (sans maybe progressive racism).
Systemic racism is a term coined by Stokely Carmichael. In the 60s, his argument with people within the crowd that supported MLK was that it didn't matter if you changed the character of individual people, and that you could replace the NYPD with a group of choirs boys, and it would change nothing- because it was not the character of individual people that mattered, it was the rules that they were forced to follow which caused racial discrimination. When examining that, consider rules such as forced segregation, and other things that the civil rights act essentially solved. The point being, that systemic racism is when an individual person's own views on race do not factor into the equation, and instead, they are forced to act in a discriminatory way regardless of their own discretion.
I've tried actually going into the history of the term with liberal friends before, who don't bother to actually look into theories or do their research, and it just comes down to "lalala not listening, the term has been redefined". Or "police go into black neighborhoods more often than white ones, this is discriminatory".
Are there any rules that force police officers, administrators, or anyone to act in a racist way? Frankly, no. If someone is racist, it's largely going to be their own choice at this point. Maybe we should address that should it appear, but instead we have a pseudo-intellectual "muh systemic racism", when people don't even understand what the term even means.
So, you want to redefine terms, and say that systemic racism= racism from a group of individuals at a high level. Define high, define how it differs from normal racism, what would it be if 12 people in a police department choose to personally be racist, would that be systemic, or normal racism? Etc. These people like to play with definitions that they don't even understand, and it goes everywhere from "POC can't be racist because racism=prejudice + power" or something stupid like that. It just frustrates me to no end, because these people want to feign moral and intellectual superiority and don't have a fucking clue or insight into the ideology they have all but sucked dick for (or in some cases actually sucked dick for, I guess).
And then they have the gall to claim that they’re not racist for claiming that blacks are too dumb to get ID at all (which, even broke ass mother fuckers can still get). Also at the same time they think vaccine passports should be enforced, which is a form of ID.
Ironically, its things like this that actually do reveal more of an internal racial bias.
