In listening to various Anti-Critical-Race-Theory folks, one thing that stands out is the degree to which they think “implicit bias” & “systemic” are basically synonyms.
“Systemic” isn’t a fancy word for “stuff people do without thinking about it.” It’s Robert Moses shit.
“Roads can’t be racist, they’re inanimate objects! They’re ROADS!” has been a point of derision this week, but a couple generations ago Robert Moses literally designed a city’s roads and bridges with the intent of keeping poor blacks residents out of the “good” areas.
Lowering bridges so busses (aka ‘low income’ transport) couldn’t move from area to area is a classic example. Once those bridges were built, individual bus drivers didn’t have to be racist—heck, they could be actively fighting racism in every spare minute!
…But even if they didn’t know it, they beame part of a system that was racist by design and outcome. No animus necessary, just the invisible landscape of bus routes shaping itself around a dead man’s idea of who should be able to enjoy the resources of “better” neighborhoods.
Moses’ case is significant because it was deliberate and intentional, but “systemic” doesn’t have to flow directly from human animus. What matters is that it anchors the mechanisms and outcomes of racism even after individuals have forgotten—even grown to oppose!— the ideas.
It’s just “the way things work,” and changing it becomes an expensive, over-the-top “special request” from a group whose concerns are easy to dismiss. “No one wants to harm you, but we can’t just let you dictate new infrastructure because you don’t like it!”
Critical Race Theory’s origins in legal theory aren’t coincidence: our laws, the policies of the police forces that enforce them, and the established precedents of the legal system that metes out punishment? Those are systems too, with their own embedded histories.
Obviously there are waves of bad-faith ideologues using the CRT label, and broad confusion about it, to push back against almost ANYTHING they find uncomfortable or disagreeable about our culture’s ongoing engagement with race.
But there are also a lot of folks who simply haven’t chewed on the complex ways that systems reproduce the assumptions that formed them; they see the injustices that result as “outrages that should be corrected” but struggle, frustrated, at the slipperiness of the solutions.
These people are being told that CRT blames them for individual racist acts when in fact its entire analytical framework is focused on explaining how systems can produce racist outcomes in the absence of individual racist acts.
Obvs, that doesn’t mean they’d agree with everything CRT scholars say if they simply understood it. People would find its implications just as troubling. But the campaign to deliberately obscure its meaning says a lot about the motivations of the campaigners.