When people talk about the “system” of racism they don’t just mean “The System” — judges, politicians, cops, whatever — is full of racially bigoted individuals, though that is absolutely a contributing component.
They’re talking about the millions of mechanisms baked into law, practices that are normed through repetition, processes that are accepted because the harm they cause is out-of-mind for The Right People until it amps up too high, like feedback turning into a deafening squeal
Some of those are absolutely intentional, like robert moses literally engineering roads and bridges to keep poor minorities out of civic areas built on land that had been seized from them. Others are individually “just shitty” but cumulative in their effect on othered groups.
Some things are both. But once something’s in the system — written in law, poured in the foundations of infrastructure, normed as “a reasonable expectation,” codified as “approved policy” — nobody NEEDS to carry personal hate towards a black kid in their heart.
The system just does what it does, and it marches on because it does what systems are supposed to do — handle the things we don’t want to handle and do so invisibly.
That doesn’t mean individual people aren’t racially biased, or acting with personal animosity or racial hatred. They’re sure as fuck out there, pushing on the levers they’ve got and Getting Theirs.
But it’s the system that takes all the pieces — racial and class hatred that led to the creation of modern policing, the militarization of those polices forces, the financialization of every aspect of life, Warmaker Training that teaches cops they’re sheepdogs hunting wolves…
…laws that put kids into debt for getting caught with a joint, laws that recriminalize them when it goes to collections, laws that codify that cops can kill if they’re scared.
Laws that were written independently but combine in a way that’s predictable to any society that isn’t TRYING to squint it away. A society that says it’s perfectly reasonable for a group of armed, legally immune representatives of the state to taze a kid for a late fee.
A society that says the problem with the combination and the confluence of all these things is that the armed legally immune state representatives might have accidentally used their killing-gun instead of their electricity gun to shoot the kid with the late fee.
A society that, statistically, is perfectly willing to accept “we were scared of him” from the group of armed, legally immune state law enforcers as long as the Scary Person was some kind of other but, honestly, usually black.
The system is just the boring shit doing what it was designed to do, one boring little detail at a time, until the boring details line up like a slot machine and the damage is too sudden and too egregious to ignore.
Pretending that it’s possible to fix a system in a “neutral” way — poring over zoning laws and training courses and sentencing guidelines and HOA board bylaws and licensing reqs and all the boring shit — in a ‘neutral’ way, without directly admitting the problems they have…
The horrifying racial disparities in who they harm and who they protect… Trying to pretend that can be fixed from first principles is like unfixing vegas by tweaking the odds of one slot machine’s third reel coming up with a cherry.