It wasn't explained to me that way, and although I don't really know all that much about it I can see that if that's what you think it is, then I get that you might not like it. Do you also think that systemic racism as a concept also requires white people to feel personal guilt for the racism of their ancestors?
People who make a living pushing racism as a continuing and serious issue have run into a problem: The Jim Crow laws and policies of "structural racism" have been almost completely eliminated. Yet, there continues to be disparities between races, particularly the poor showing among many black people. They are calling this social disparity "systemic racism."
Certainly, there are disparities, and certainly an obvious characteristic of the disparities is race. But is it race-
ism? And I think we have to look at conditions prior to 2000, because racial acerbations have occurred since then, some deliberate.
There are issues among black people that don't get widely discussed, mostly because black people fear what the white majority will do with the information...although a lot of it is visible in black social media.
One thing, for instance, is that there has always been multiple distinct black cultures for hundreds of years, although the mass media concentrates only on the ghetto black culture.
Two hundred years ago, there was a Freedman culture established in the North East and a black slave culture on the southern Atlantic coast. These were distinct (there was also the tiny Geechee-Gullah culture that remains distinct to this day). As slavery along the Gulf Coast states the slave culture bifurcated: The Atlantic Coast slave culture was slightly but different from the Gulf Coast slave culture. That was because the
slave owners were themselves of different cultures and managed their slaves differently. Bluntly, the South Atlantic coast slaveholders were more aristocratic than the Gulf Coast slaveholders, and that was reflected in the cultures of their slaves.
A parenthetical point: Black people who can trace their linages though Atlantic Coast slavery are often able to track those lineages all the way back to the point their first African ancestors arrived in America. That was because those slaveholders often kept careful breeding records (as they did with horses). And for that same reason, there is much less Caucasian admixture among those black Americans.
OTOH, black people of the Gulf Coast culture are rarely able to track their lineage prior to the Civil War. And the Caucasian admixture is much more frequent among those blacks because careful breeding was of less concern and rape of black women by slaveholders was much more common.
One hundred years ago, the situation changed again as the Great Northern Migration began and black people--mostly descendances of the Gulf Coast slave culture--moved northward. They swallowed up the pre-existing Freedman culture in the north.
In the meantime, the Atlantic Coast black culture remained distinctive. Have you seen the movie "Hidden Figures?" That movie depicted the Atlantic Coast black culture. That is a view
rarely seen in American media, particularly today. However, that culture was the engine behind the Civil Rights Movement.
I personally noted the clash between those cultures myself as a young boy in the early 60s. I had been raised in the Atlantic Coast culture (which wasn't completely confined to the coast...culture is a choice). When we visited some distant relatives in south Chicago, I underwent an extreme cultural shock probably barely less than if I'd been white and dropped into that neighborhood. Compared to the way I was raised, that culture was vulgar, violent, and chaotic.
White media had mostly ignored black people until the mid-60s. When I was a boy, there were scores of magazines, practically every city of any size had a black newspaper, all by blacks for blacks. We managed our own image. After the Civil Rights Act, white corporations had "cover" to market to black consumers without being labeled a "black company." White media goes where advertising goes, so white media in NYC and LA also suddenly discovered black people existed in America.
The problem, though, is that they didn't look any further than their own ghettos for examples of black people. What they saw in their ghettos was the Gulf Coast slave culture that had migrated to the north....and that image has been broadcast so widely since the 60s that the culture you saw in "Hidden Figures" is hard to see.
