Retired Black players say NFL brain-injury payouts show bias

[Belsnickel]

(05-18-2021, 02:20 PM)Mickeypoo Wrote: When I hear "systemic racism" I think of the USA is all a bunch of racists.  Everybody is against blacks.  Remember, anybody can be a racist.  Are there racist people out there of all colors?  yes. 

Systemic racism means that racism is baked into the systems of our nation. It means the systems in place are designed to provide certain people with a disadvantage. For example, following the abolition of slavery for all but those convicted of crimes, the Southern states were suddenly faced with a labor shortage. In addition, now all of these people that were once enslaved could vote and run for office. We even saw some of them elected to office and gain serious support with things like the Readjuster Party in Virginia.

Then the wealthy (white) elites decided they'd had enough and used their power to pass laws targeting the black community that would result in them being incarcerated at higher rates (poor white people were also swept up, but the wealthy admitted that they didn't care about them, either). This had the effect of providing a labor pool of newly enslaved criminals that also could not vote. Double win!

This is the criminal justice system as designed in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Notice how I'm saying this is the system. It's systemic racism, and it's still how our criminal justice system is designed today. It's why even though white people and black people are just as likely to be drug users, the rate at which black people are incarcerated for drugs is much higher for their proportion of the population.

The criminal justice system is just one example, and possibly the most overt. The minutes of the General Assembly in Virginia upon passing some of these laws literally talk about their intention in targeting the black population for these reasons. But, our education system, land use laws, and so many other things have systemic racism built into them. In fact, this topic discusses the systemic racism in our healthcare system. In 2016 there was a study conducted that found that...well, let me share the abstract:

Quote:Black Americans are systematically undertreated for pain relative to white Americans. We examine whether this racial bias is related to false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites (e.g., “black people’s skin is thicker than white people’s skin”). Study 1 documented these beliefs among white laypersons and revealed that participants who more strongly endorsed false beliefs about biological differences reported lower pain ratings for a black (vs. white) target. Study 2 extended these findings to the medical context and found that half of a sample of white medical students and residents endorsed these beliefs. Moreover, participants who endorsed these beliefs rated the black (vs. white) patient’s pain as lower and made less accurate treatment recommendations. Participants who did not endorse these beliefs rated the black (vs. white) patient’s pain as higher, but showed no bias in treatment recommendations. These findings suggest that individuals with at least some medical training hold and may use false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites to inform medical judgments, which may contribute to racial disparities in pain assessment and treatment.

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/16/4296

This creates a systemically racist issue in healthcare, one we can see on display in the original article. The systems are in place against black and brown people in this country and favor white people. Individuals of any race can have racial prejudice against any race, but racism is the systemic problems that exist, and racism against white people is not a thing in this country. That is the difference between these things.