Systematic/Institutionalized Racism

We have to all begin to truly understand how we human beings work. It’s about you and it’s about me - it's all of us. It has partly to do with culture as culture is an implementation side of human nature. But skin color has absolutely nothing to do with human nature - other than its tie to the social construct called race, and the resulting historical socioeconomic, social, and cultural disparity - all a byproduct of human nature we all share.

Regarding race, there is no race gene. More genes are involved in the differences between siblings than what dictates the color of your skin (like how my dad Chuck would get darker in the summer than some people I know who identify as a POC - person of color). I’d just get freckles and burn. Also, migration genetics revealed my (white) genes are as likely to be more similar to a black stranger than the next white stranger, as vice versa (freckles and all).

But this isn’t really about truth. It’s about the political narrative we’re bombarded with and our response to it. We play so well into the hands of the narrative’s authors, and we need to stop that. We simply cannot let political narratives dictate our views. Narratives making sense does not evidence they are true. And neither does them being popular.

But we are wired in such a way we are prone to believing them, especially if they are public. When we blindly believe them, we give complete control in what we believe to someone else - usually without vetting what they are saying or looking for a second opinion. People - even educated people, will often choose a popular narrative over one with evidential support. Do you know why would anyone do that?

(FYI, when I refer to educated people, I am referring to people who graduated high school or earned their GEDs.)

Many of the narratives we’ve assimilated are fabrications, spins, misinterpretation of facts or evidence. Some of it is inadvertent because of human nature. But much of the effects of those narratives are intentional.

With regards to race, the narrative further divides rather than solves. Generating awareness of a false problem does nothing other than contribute to and even originate, the problem. In this case, racial division. How do you fix a problem? You have to know everything true about that problem you can, right? If the problem statement is wrong, will any solution based on it work? (It may seem so if the narrative tells you it did.) And if racial divide is a major plank in a political platform, how likely is that party motivated to actually solve the problem? Can you trust their narratives?

The false narrative also silences the voices of those who have a more accurate problem statement - people who truly care, and any solution based on their problem statement never sees the light of day. Sometimes those people are attacked, and their characters assassinated. Such not only intimidates those who might attempt the same in the future, but it also further inoculates the public from considering any other problem statement. Then, all it takes is one criminal cop here and there to hurt a black person to solidify the narrative and the divide.

Here’s a news flash. Bad cops are not a new phenomenon, and blacks aren’t the only victims. It’s just that today we have instant access to news of incidents and the only incidents in news headlines and go viral on social media involve black victims. And the fallibilities in human nature, such as the representative heuristic and anchoring (you can Google these terms), further solidifies the narrative in the public mind. This is not a Mark Graybill opinion. I’m just sharing scientific evidence - don’t shoot the messenger - especially by accusing me of pushing white supremacy language. Such is a crock of shit.

Black lives do matter as much as any other life regardless of demographic group. But focusing on racism in these incidents instead of investigating the true and comprehensive causation, is effectively saying only black lives matter. I strongly believe such is not the intent of those behind the Black Lives Matter movement. Black people do have a different experience than white people, as well as males and females, Latino, Asian, etc. Those experiences have different origins. In general, it’s in our nature to prefer people who look like us (what some researchers call phenotypical kinship) so it depends on the context and culture. The good news is that in the way we are wired, such nature and thus racial division, is weak - it is easily overcome. It requires the political narrative to keep it going so to protect the political platform.

We usually demonstrate immediate cognitive switches from us and them to all us once we start overriding those automatic implicit associations. But the implicit associations are simply immediate reactions. They do not reveal racism or prejudice. As a case and point, the famous Harvard Project Implicit revealed that most participants preferred white faces in the test - even blacks preferred white faces. How does that happen? Can’t be systematic racism because the evidence is not consistent with the definition.

After working as a leader in the diversity industry for many years, and also volunteering in programs that attempt to keep our youth out of gangs, because I care about finding actual solutions from an accurate problem statement, I delved deeply and completely into studying in graduate school and doctoral school such topics, both what’s popular and possible root causes. I have grown to understand how screwed up the narratives are and how they’ve propagating rather than solving the problem.

I remember an executive director (ED) who wasn’t interested in learning anything new. All she cared about was pushing the popular narrative. She was in essence pushing a belief system and those who didn’t believe were simply those who couldn’t be reached and who continue to be the problem. Even if people believed, how do they implement such beliefs in their daily lives and change, whether the problem statement is accurate or not? No one seemed to care about that, except the White Privilege Conference or WPC (more on that below).

Those (like me) who were stupid enough to call out the wrong problem statement were called biased and bigots, and they were stereotyped with attitudes of low regard against them. Sound familiar? I’ve found many diversity leaders were not interested in knowing if everything they were doing was correct or even right to do. And that particular ED certainly wasn’t going to hear it from me, an older white male.

The biggest problem is the narrative about institutionalized racism, which is defined as, “the systematic distribution of resources, power and opportunity in our society to the benefit of people who are white and the exclusion of people of color.” To quote an old Saturday Night Live script, “What the hell is that?”  Simply put, it was fabricated from mere statistics. A more accurate definition that has evidence behind it would be something along the lines of, “the lack of understanding of human nature and the dividing narratives have resulted in the distribution of resources, power and opportunity in our society to benefit white people more than people of color.”

Do you see the difference? The first definition is wrong simply in the fact “exclusion of people of color” is not true based on the very statistics the definition was fabricated from. But it is also wrong because “systematic” can be an intimidating term, and it is defined as, “acting according to a fixed plan or system; methodical.”

So where is that plan? Has anyone seen it? Who’s in charge of it? Where are the documents and teaching? What is the methodology? Oh, it’s our language? Where did that come from? Oh, white culture you say? How did such “systematic” plan ubiquitously appear in all white culture everywhere? Wow, I wasn’t aware my culture was identical to other white people’s cultures on the other side of the country or globe. So how did white families in the hills of Tennessee (which I’m from biologically), grow up in cahoots with the white rich people in Hollywood, or the white ranchers in Wyoming - or oil field white families in Texas? Did some ancient aliens insert something in only white people’s DNA that would unfurl at the time this country started? Well, the latter can’t be true because the skin of my ancestors may not have been white.

If I keep asking such questions, in the end, the only thing left is, either the narrative is wrong, or it is because white people are white. Accusing white people of being racists because they are white is itself an act of racism.

If I were to write a paper in college about systematic or institutionalized racism, and the only evidence I had was statistics, it wouldn’t do well. It’d likely be handed back to me with instructions to support the unsupported claims. Why? Because “the systematic distribution” or “institutionalized racism” claim and any narrative supporting it has no evidence. It is an induction, the result of synthesizing a cause from statistics and honing it post-hoc by twisting actual evidence found elsewhere. In case you weren’t aware, mere statistics do not by nature have any component of causation. To use a simile, the phrase “systematic distribution”, though sounding brainier, and “the tornado is proof the gods are angry”, are pretty much the same thing. They stem from the same faulty human reasoning.

The White Privilege Conference (WPC) came out and said they found language in laws that would cause systemic racism. But wouldn’t the same language have to exist in every law and in every case, everywhere? Most of us view legalese as mysterious and requiring an attorney to interpret as if it wasn’t English. So it's easy to buy into.

Did you know that legal writing doesn’t produce the same opinion in every attorney? If legal documents are that clear, why does it almost always take mediation or a court to settle on their meaning? Every court everywhere has differences in culture, jurisprudence, history, case law. So then how can a couple of people extract legalese from a couple of documents and say what they found is proof of systematic racism everywhere in America, in every political, socioeconomic, corporate, communal, entertainment, recreational and legal venue? And how can such permeate white people’s behavior, attitudes and beliefs everywhere?

The answer is, because it’s behind the narrative and people believe the narrative. Does it matter if something is true or false if enough of the public believes its true and never sees anything or ignores anything to the contrary? The media has so much power in this regard - power that is not checked.

This is where in my view the duty of every American who votes is to look around and don’t trust the narrative. And maybe enough of us can rise up and collect the kind of evidence worthy of a class-action lawsuit to sue the media interfering with our civil rights, our safety, and the national election.

Back to racism, I did as would any person truly caring about equity, fairness and equality in diversity: I studied it. In fact, I studied the entire library of the WPC and found it to fall short of pseudoscience. I found in it striking problems with method and interpretation of evidence. It screamed bias and it was not peer reviewed.

I also discovered in the WPC journal a misinterpretation of social psychological evidence, such as the Race Implicit Association Test (IAT). Let me put it this way. The IAT is interpreted by those without a psychology background with the intent to produce and propagate a narrative. And the scientists who invented the IAT disagree with such misinterpretation. I had personally corresponded with several of them individually.

What those people did who used such evidence to build the narrative is much like me disagreeing with my daughter about certain aspects of biochemistry because it doesn’t fit my narrative (her bachelor’s degree is in biochemistry mine is not). But if I’m good at pushing the narrative and have the ability to push it through say a news house that likes me, then people will believe me instead of her (or any other biochemist). This is especially true if I include attitude inoculations in my narrative, such as accusing those biochemists of being political or their claims are just a distraction or getting in the way of solving the problem. I may need to find a biochemist who offers verbiage I can take out of context and partially quote or misquote so I can offer the appearance of empirical support. It is that easy to win with the viewers/readers who listen only to the news houses spewing the same narrative.

With regards to the “systematic racism” via legalese, there is no empirical support at all. One would have to be looking specifically for it and stretch it through several layers of inference an induction for the purpose of seeing it in the legalese. Problem is, what they claimed doesn’t account for the racism that occurs outside the purported socioeconomic contexts of the systematic racism they referred to. Nice try, wrong problem statement. And no, we do not need to know a different “whiteness”. We all could learn how to be better humans - to know a different “humanness”.

We need to learn and understand the human nature in all of us and begin to override that nature. We must approach the problem as one people, one species and one citizenry. We must dump the political narratives and the other narratives that are bogus and then embrace the real evidence together. And we need to sever our intimate connections with the news headlines.

The moral of my story? Take an interest in what I’m talking about with human nature – and all the fallacies you might be prone to. And for Pete’s sake (not you Pete), dump the narratives. Do your homework (which is easier than 5^th grade math) and develop your own narrative.