Systemic Racism Explained

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Brian Lehrer: It is The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We often recognize racism when it's expressed or acted on explicitly by an individual, but we don't always see systemic racism, like just how much it's ingrained in the fabric of American society and what drives it. So joining us now is Tricia Rose, Chancellor's Professor of Africana Studies and Director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University.

Tricia Rose has a new book, Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives―and How We Break Free. She attempts to explain the interlocking and mutually reinforcing policies that disadvantage Black Americans even if they're invisible to other Americans. Professor Rose, it's always great to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

Tricia Rose: Thank you. Thank you, Brian. It's great to be back.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with the title of your book. What does Metaracism mean?

Tricia Rose: Yes. Well, before I give you a definition, let me just say that I understand this is the kind of term that some people might get anxious about because it sounds like it's impossible to get over and get beyond because meta seems perpetually beyond us, but it is not intended to provoke that, that sort of worry. It is, in fact, the use of meta is a systems term that is incredibly helpful for seeing precisely some of the interlocking ways that meta and systemic racism work.

Metaracism are the dynamic and compounding patterns of racial disadvantage and discrimination. Those compounding patterns are produced not by one single policy or by even a legacy of one policy, but by the interconnections that various policies have to one another that produce effects that are greater than the sum of those policies put together. If you have broken windows policing and you also have maximum minimum sentencing, you have stand-your-ground policies that impact Black people distinctively and extremely and so on, these policies work in relation to one another to create effects that are more devastating than simply adding them up.

You can't see them as individual policies and try to fix this problem that way. You have to see how they have created really meta effects, effects that are greater than the sum of the parts.

Brian Lehrer: Let's talk about one of the examples in your book that you spend a lot of time on, a lot of ink on, and that you just referred to when you said stand your ground. The killing of Trayvon Martin, which I think of a lot of Americans came to conclude was an act of racism on the part of George Zimmerman, whether he was convicted of the crime or not, but it was seen as that individual conflict, George Zimmerman versus Trayvon Martin, who instigated their conflict and how that wound up rather than something more systemic. That's one of the points of the book, right?

Tricia Rose: Yes. It is a really central point as you identify. Yes, I too was very upset as many other people were of all backgrounds around the world, that this young teenage boy could be walking in the rain, getting some candy and be so frightening to this self-appointed neighborhood watch captain that he would just shoot him for not doing what he told him to do when the man had no authority to tell Trayvon what to do in the first place. What happens is that we get so caught up in the individual story, not only because those stories are more riveting in some ways, because we're telling it about individuals, but because of the larger umbrella myth that society has ended racism that derives from the way society is organized.

That's the myth we operate under. That racism and systemic racism has ended because we are no longer organized in a way to produce it. That is a myth. It is literally untrue because the definition we use for improving it is too often about explicit laws. Blacks can't go here, colored versus whites, things like that, but the systemic forces that are operating in the past 40 or 50 years do not require that. What happens is we start the story with Trayvon being about the moment he comes into contact with George Zimmerman but I wanted to ask questions about, well, why was Trayvon there? Why was he even at his father's house in Sanford, Florida? Why was he suspended, and what's the impact of suspensions and how is suspensions a racial issue?

Well, Black men are, and especially disabled Black men who have either emotional issues or other matters, are highly disproportionately not just suspended, but expelled from schools, which is extremely emotionally disturbing. There's tremendous data to show how that works to really impair them going forward, but he was also in a home neighborhood in Miami Gardens where the police were known to be extraordinarily stop and frisk-oriented. They even called it themselves stop and frisk on steroids.

He was leaving an environment where he was constantly under surveillance by the police, which you can see in that chapters extraordinary way to live, to wander around an occupied environment, and a lot of fear and terror, a lot of suspensions for things that were not suspendable, a misappropriation of the punishment rules. Then he runs into Zimmerman. Now, I'm just capturing a few of the ways that the society was organized in a way to bring Trayvon right to the table. It's not about one Trayvon, it's about so many other Trayvon's as well. That's what I want people to see.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, any calls with experiences connecting explicit racism with systemic racism or anything else for Tricia Rose from Brown and her new book, Metaracism, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Would you tell our listeners some of this other incredible story in your book? Because I think of the cases that you focus on people certainly will have heard of Trayvon Martin. People certainly will have heard the Kevin Brown story but may not be familiar with Kelley Williams-Bolar, a Black woman imprisoned for what you call "stealing education". Would you tell people about Kelley Williams-Bolar?

Tricia Rose: Sure. It'd be my pleasure.

Brian Lehrer: Oh my, I said Kevin Brown. Michael Brown, obviously.

Tricia Rose: I knew who you meant. Yes, Michael Brown. Yes, which was the catalyst for the Ferguson riots/police occupation, but Kelley Williams-Bolar is less talked about for a few reasons. One, she didn't die. We only really get too engaged with this kind of a story when the person is murdered or the question of murder is on the table. That's one thing. The second thing is that legally she did disobey the rules that were set-up at the time. Those rules, however, were set up to avoid the kind of educational equity that the Ohio Supreme Court had been for many, many years trying to force the legislature to institutionalize.

This is a quick case of laws being designed to thwart equal access and equal opportunity, but what made it so really interesting was the layered ways that her effort to have her girls go to better schools, and she being in West Akron, Ohio, really was about having access to the-- literally less than a mile away, really amazing schools that were highly ranked within the top 10 to 15% of all schools in the state.

Her father, meaning Kelley's father, lived in that town, it was called Copley Township, and he was in many ways a grandfather, partial parent. She's a single mom working relatively incredibly low wages, and she didn't have a lot of support to watch these girls. The schools were tough, really, really underperforming in her area, and yet these districts, and this is where it gets, as I said, it's less visible, as you pointed out in your call to your callers. It's not something you can see, but the district basically decided to opt out of open enrollment.

The state of Ohio said, "Look, we can't remedy equal access to good schools unless anyone can go drive themselves to any school in the state they want." Of course, very rich homogeneous, mostly white districts were like, "Well, this isn't going to benefit us because our property taxes give us more of a budget than these schools are otherwise working with." They created a loophole for themselves called the opt-out option. That's what Copley Township did.

Here she is, less than a mile from an excellent school that the state of Ohio and the Supreme Court of Ohio says, you should be able to take your kids to with no difficulty and because they have the power and leverage to opt out and to maintain not only racial hierarchy, but bad access to worse schools and limitations to have to go to worse schools is something that she actually pays for with the venom of the prosecutor for the state. This is the kind of context where it looks like she's just breaking the rules, but when you look at it, it's basically rules written to maintain a profound injustice, which is breaking the rules of egalitarianism and fairness in the first place.

Brian Lehrer: You have three primary methods by which systemic racism disadvantages Black people, containment, extraction, and punishment. I guess that was an example of containment, yes?

Tricia Rose: It's actually all three. What happened was I started looking at these policies and practices, meaning how people do, how people exercise a policy, and sometimes how they discriminate inside of unspoken policy. What I discovered was no matter what the policy actually said its purpose was, it actually produced forms of containment, extraction, and punishment. That's a systems insight. Systems thinkers will say, what is the outcome? I'm not sure I want to know they say what the system, or in this case, the creator of the system wants it to do. I want to say what continually happens.

That's when I started noticing how much containment, punishment, and extraction go on. Let's take Kelley. Containment was, definitely, as you pointed out, Brian, going on, she was forced to live in the neighborhood that was the legacy of redlining. That neighborhood had economic problems related to all of that history. There's that containment, and then there's the containment in the school that is attached to that neighborhood.

Then there's the extraction of resources because she gets punished and then is basically threatened with a fee, which is another really big part of this kind of systemic racism, using fines and fees to criminalize poverty at a level that a normal middle-class person would never have to face because they'd write a check, and then they get punished for this. There's the punishment for it, the economic extraction, which is punishing through fines and fees, and then there's the extraction of the education.

Look, young people, when you really destroy their opportunities and their capacity to really learn, you are extracting potential. It is not a neutral process. You're putting them in a negative relationship to learning. I see that as extraction of resources. You see how these things could all work very powerfully in a compounding meta way when you think about the ways in which they interconnect.

Brian Lehrer: If you're just joining us, Tricia Rose from Brown University is our guest. She's a professor of Africana Studies and the director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and author of the new book, Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives―and How We Break A Free. Joseph in Poughkeepsie, you're on WNYC with Professor Rose. Hi Joseph.

Joseph: Hello. Thank you very much. Quickly here, I believe that the word racism in any title gets attention. Now, I'm a Black guy from West Africa. When I make the statement that I have never experienced racism in the country, I've been here for 35 years, it gets attention. Because the word racism in itself stops the conversation. It creates a lot of tension and it stops the conversation. Say, for example, let's say Donald Trump is racist. Okay, so it stops the conversation. We have to redefine it.

What I think racism is ignorance, greed, and fear. If we discuss ignorance, greed, and fear, we will see that we're getting to the foundation of racism. Those three words, we can add more to it, but those three words would get us discussing the real issue. Where's the fear coming from of Black people? It's based on ignorance.This ignorance is based on greed. Brian, it's so easy to understand if there are 10 guys who are 6 feet tall and were all getting $1 million between us, and another guy comes in and says he's going to join the group. We're all happy about that, but we're going to split the million dollars between 11 of us and we say, "Oh, no, I'd like to keep my share." The guy's maybe 5'3"--

Brian Lehrer: That's greed, you're saying?

Joseph: Yes. If this guy is 5'3", they would say that we hate people who are short. It's not because he's short. It's because he's sharing our income.

Brian Lehrer: Wants to share the income. Joseph, thank you very much. I really appreciate your call. I think you understand his point. Professor Rose, what do you say to it?

Tricia Rose: I think the basis of his point, I'm not sure I totally agree with, which is that, basically, racism is about naming people as racist or not racist. He gives the example of Trump. I'm actually really trying to do the opposite. If he says he's not experienced any acts of racism in 35 years, I'd want to ask him what his actual definition of experiencing racism is, because it's possible, that's totally possible what he says true, but then there are all of these networks that I'd only discovered were going on by doing research, which meant that I was very likely to have been subjected to those very same kinds of extractions or home appraisals that reduced the value of Black property, even when it's in white neighborhoods.

The studies are showing that when they send different appraisers, that people immediately get parody equity with the homes around them. Who would know that unless you were in such a study? I think that the really issue is that his notion of racism as a personal attitude is what I'm actually not focusing on.

Brian Lehrer: The distinction that he's making almost drives home your point, it seems to me, because when he hears racism, when a lot of people hear racism, they think of a person or a group of people being motivated by hate.

Tricia Rose: Exactly. True.

Brian Lehrer: As opposed to-- you know how they say, and you probably as a professor of Africana studies have a take on this, one way or another. Did racism beget slavery, or really did slavery beget racism because the plantation owners were so greedy that they were willing to enslave other human beings to maximize their profits? If we focus on the hate and use the same word racism to describe the systemic things that you're describing in our book, maybe it leaves a lot of people who could be allies, alienated.

Tricia Rose: That's a really interesting question because there's no question that there's always a tussle about which comes first. Do the ideas that drive the notion of whiteness as more valuable than everything else during colonialism, is that the thing that comes first? Then when they see other groups of people, they automatically reduce them on a scale because they're not white and European, or is it that they only learn their own kinds of racism when they're confronted with difference? I actually think it's a combination.

Brian Lehrer: Probably both. Yes.

Tricia Rose: I don't think it's a chicken or egg. When you put it in the context of how people are behaving now, the issue is really much more about what do people do when they're confronted with the fact that they have access to resources that they have, in a sense, not earned at the level they think they've earned it, no matter what their politics are. They could be super duple, radical activists, white members of Black Lives Matter, or whatever.

I'm not excluding anybody from being a part of this conversation. In fact, I'm trying to include everybody by saying that even if you are yourself the most radical, pro-social justice person, you are going to benefit from systemic racism which benefits whites no matter what their political disposition is. That we can work together because you don't have to be hateful or not hateful for us to talk about racism. You just have to be a person who's concerned about these effects and the ways in which it's destroying our potential and reducing our overall access to the genius and talent and creativity of all the people who live here in this country.

That, to me, brings us together. How else can we solve the problem? If I rename it, if I get rid of the word racism, everybody knows it's racism, then we'll just stop being able to say that word. It's just a word-chasing game for me. I want to say, look, let's not make it such a hard thing to talk about. People have stigmatized it so that we stay silent, and they want that silence, in many cases, because that paralyzes us from really seeing the very thing I'm drawing our attention to.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Amy in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Tricia Rose. Hi, Amy.

Amy: Hi there. Hi. Oops. Here's my question. I want to know whether the concept of Meta is similar to Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

Tricia Rose: Thank you for that question. Not really. Caste is more about a fixed hierarchy that places people in a permanent kind of position in relationship to other groups in society. It's organized, usually explicitly with that in mind. Meta is a term that is really referring to how systems of any type, whether it's a healthcare system or an orbiting planetary system. It's not related just to race or people, but the way that things can be arranged in such a way that they have much more powerful and complex effects than they look like they might have.

Now, a caste system can have complex effects. Of course, it does, but the requirements for what makes something a system and a meta impact are very different than you would have with caste. Now, what I love about the caste concept that she's doing now is that she's saying, look, this is how caste works after it looks like the caste is gone. That is similar. Is that what you're partly saying? I mean, that's what you're connecting. Am I hearing you properly?

Brian Lehrer: Let's assume yes. She's gone.

Tricia Rose: If that's what the connection is, then yes, there are similarities. Some people are being kept down and in their place, very forcefully. In a caste system, it's much more explicit. This is obviously not too explicit. It's just going on as if it makes sense for there to be massive residential segregation and all the other things we know. Thank you for that.

Brian Lehrer: It's that invisibility of it that makes it so insidious.

Tricia Rose: Absolutely. It's not only invisibility, but how we render it invisible, Brian, is by telling stories where racism is the product of bad values, character, and personal belief. It's a one-on-one phenomenon. That everything else is race neutral. If things don't work out for you, it's just on you, unless someone called you a name.

Brian Lehrer: Last question, and it'll come from a listener. We've spent our time going through your descriptions of systemic racism, meta-racism as the book title calls it. Part of the subtitle is How We Break Free. A listener writes, "This is an exciting segment about systemic racism. Thank you. Please give us some solutions."

Tricia Rose: Absolutely. Okay, so, if I thought I had the solution for ending systemic racism, I'd be happy. I'd be the happiest camper on earth. Here's what I do have. I have a belief that the reason we struggle so much with really confronting racism, systemic racism, and embedded significant racial inequality, is because we have been very encouraged to talk about racism in individual stories, which is what we've been doing here. Those individual stories are a paradigm, and as a paradigm, as a way of organizing the world, you can come to conclusions based on that paradigm that make no sense whatsoever. We see it all the time.

We just ignore incredible information right in front of us and come up with very strange explanations for it because our paradigm can't account for it. Part of this is about having the courage and the creativity to really figure out what are the paradigms that you operate with, and what are they doing to shape your point of view? For example, if I tell someone about the data, they might say, "Well, aren't things getting better?" That's a paradigm moment because they're basically saying, "I don't want things to change, and I'm not racist, so I want to focus on them getting better."

My answer to that is, yes, it's getting better, but it's also not getting better at all, and it's not getting close. The people with a lot of resources have more resources than ever in the 20th, 21st century. What do you mean it's getting better? I get the discomfort, but that paradigm shift gives us some freedom to not be responsible for every aspect of the system but to be responsible for changing it.

Brian Lehrer: Tricia Rose, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University and author now of her latest book, Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives―and How We Break Free. Thank you so much.

Tricia Rose: My pleasure, Brian.

 

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