THBT Systemic Racism is a Significant Problem in the US

Undefeatable's summary of my vote is pretty much on target. I agree with him on this resolution, but I tried my best to divorce myself of my personal opinion.

TBH I think blacks have disproportionate political power as a race because the black vote is the most unified of all the races. Last election the black vote changed the outcome of pretty much everything.

Whiteflame felt that I attributed too much to authority and their competing definitions on individual vs systemic racism caused my argument to fall apart. Despite having 20+ experts supporting my case, it became arbitrary which one was only individual and which one was systemic.

I invite a re-read of
Forum: 1293-was-brown-vs-board-of-education-a-mistake
my post #36:

As James Madison once said, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”[1] But men are not angels, and, being imperfect, in spite of legislation, in spite of a documented, systemic policy, some people will ignore the system and act by their own, reimagined, anecdotal volition. But such individual and sub-group action cannot ever be blamed on the systemic construct. Blame the one or the few who violate the system. As the author, Richard Bach, wrote, “Argue for your limitations; they’re yours.”[2]
A scholastically-sourced definition of racism by the OED is, “beliefs that members of a particular racial or ethnic group possess innate characteristics or qualities, or that some racial or ethnic groups are superior to others; an ideology based on such beliefs.” 
By this scholastically-accepted definition, even a phrase like “Black Lives Matter” must be cast in suspicious light, particularly in light of the following statement as a policy of BlackLivesMatter.com: “We are working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically targeted for demise.”[3]
The quoted statement above, let alone the movement’s title, represents a policy of singling out Blacks as an unprotected class, specifically, as if to say the other racial entities do not matter, and declaring, without evidence provided, that Blacks are “systematically targeted,” and not just for generic prejudice, but for specific “demise.” Alleged systematic targeting is a claim made without properly interpreting the definition of systemic. There are proper, scholastically-accepted definitions, and there are re-imagined, wish-balloon definitions. The former prevails, or, rather, it should but apparently does not.
If Blacks are “systemically targeted,” by definition, it must be demonstrated by those advocates that the U.S. Government has, by legislation and policy, demonstrated a denial of at least the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment [1868], which declares the Equal Protection Clause: “..nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” It follows that every federal, state, and local statute must be in accordance with this Clause, or it is unconstitutional.
I offer from a list of 10 Supreme Court cases directly concerned with the Equal Protection Clause [EPC] of the 14thAmendment the following three cases having race as a substantive issue demonstrating the Court’s consistency in compliance with the 14th:
1.     Plessy v. Ferguson [1896]  found that there was systemic discrimination against Blacks in Louisiana by that state’s enforcement of a rule marking trolley cars with signs, “for blacks only,” and “for whites only,” because the signs, themselves, demonstrated unconstitutional violation.
 
2.     Brown v. Board of Education [1954]  based on a proper interpretation of Plessy, the Court found that some States had incorrectly applied Plessyto allow segregation of schools if the school facilities were “equal.” Brown overturned unconstitutional state laws, applying the notion in Plessythat “separate but equal” was not even equal just because the facilities were “equal,” but that even by signage, alone, segregated facilities are unconstitutional.
 
3.    Loving v. Virginia [1967] overturned Virginia’s state law prohibiting interracial marriage. Virginia argued that their case did not violate the EPC because their argument applied penalty to both marriage partners, the Lovings. The Court determined that the EPC required strict scrutiny to race-based classifications where a ruling was a consequence by racial discrimination.
 
These cases demonstrate evidence of the negating argument, that impose a disclaimer on the Black Lives Matter policy quoted above.
These cases also demonstrate that even in the apparent innocuous effort to achieve racial equality, an organization declaring that one race matters at the exclusion of others [i.e., Black Lives Matter] may be found to be in violation of the EPC. Whereas, given a total of 10 Supreme Court cases over the 230-plus years of the Court’s existence, in cases specifically concerned with racial issues, the three cases highlighted demonstrate the consistency of the Court’s [part of the system, after all] compliance and protection of the EPC, and all citizens’ rights to expect equal protection by the system.

[1]James Madison, Federalist Papers #51
[2]Richard Bach, Illusions, The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, Dell, 1977
[3]https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/

Regarding your #25
Your initial point that gov’t/industry perpetuate systemic racism is apparently, on net judgment in two debates, not true. Remeber, my challenge to Pro in both debates was to show the evidence of that perpetuation by current statutory law, or by current government or industry policy [documented by publication] that such systemic racism is still a problem. My argument was that unless you have current law or policy to demonstrate, the issue is individual racism and not systemic. Pro failed, in both debates, to provide that proof.

I know something of manufacturing in the auto industry; I spent 12 years in it, both for GM and Ford as a process engineer, then manager. Your offered situation was once an issue, but in my 12 years, I watched the industry take great strides to avoid the very conditions you described. You ignore that there are two basic root cause factors of quality issues with any product, from cars to toothpicks. You either have a design issue, which requires design change to resolve, or you have manufacturing process issues, which are a little more difficult to resolve, simply because of the factors feeding manufacturing process: Method [or process], Material, Environment, Equipment, Manpower. All five have issues beyond design, and must be changed to correct/prevent issues. If the design is flawed, that could impact all five process issues. Root cause cannot have multiple factors, whereas there may be many cross-factor non-root issues, but, ultimately, there is but one root of them all, and that is what must be discovered to not only correct an issue, but prevent its recurrence. I will tell you, for nothing, that root issue is seldom manpower-related. It’s not impossible, but other issues are generally the cause, which, themselves, make manpower alter the process just to try to make things work. It is why a famous Japanese industrialist in the 80s was man enough to admit to his workers, “I’m sorry my process failed you.”

Then you are free to engage the third debate on this subject. I have passed on it, having drawn a draw and a win in the first two. I also perceive, however, a distinct disinterest in voting on the subject, drawing as single voter in 2 debates. Maybe "is not difficult' is a greater challenge than voters are willing to admit.

Showing that systemic racism exists and that it's a "significant problem" is not difficult. Is there a TLDR version of how this was lost?

I think I just didn’t use enough sources and that’s why I lost. There’s a bunch of more layman’s videos that explain more simply and concisely along with helpful graphs. The controversy among the top level was probably too muddled for research papers to win this one.

Voting will be over tomorrow, after that almost any type of discussion will be fair game.

I'd like to respond to your #25 post, but during the voting phase, I don't want to say anything that might be influential to potential voters, even though they should not let comments influence their vote, but it's always a possibility, even subconsciously, so I'll wait until voting has timed out.

thanks for voting

well, bravo on getting whiteflame's vote and winning (unless someone else votes). You did well. But I won't lose the next time!

What I read from your impacts were the various explanations for why racism has impacts and broad-scale racism, in particular, is damaging. The impacts I'm seeing aren't tied to the existence of systemic racism, they're tied to the existence of racism that affects many people, which is what Con preyed upon. I think examining why we need to define it as systemic racism in order to address it (e.g. we can't just punish bad actors and hope to fix the problem) would have done a lot to further your point. You have a lot of the link story to get there, but you spend most of your time focused on those links rather than examining why it matters to uphold your particular view of systemic racism and why the semantic argument is actually damaging to the wellbeing of so many in society. Essentially, while you certainly talked about why it was frustrating to face a semantic argument, I think you could have done more to explain what it does to perceptions of racism as a result, and how it hinders our capacity to both recognize and address causes of persistent racist tendencies in society.

in addition, I feel like I exhausted every single source possible and analyzed to the biggest extent I possibly could. I told of the history and the explanation for why systemic racism stems from the past from R3. Is the pro side of the debate just not possible with semantic arguments?

well I'll be damned. I feel like I tried my best to step back in R3 and succinctly prove my point in R4, despite my inability to waive the final round. What could I have done better in? I thought for sure I had the impacts with every source agreeing with the wording of "Systemic racism". I made sure to point out that there was individual racism, but once you get rid of that, there's still the large wave of laws and problems caused by government, healthcare, education, so on and so forth. I feel like I did reasonably well with linking the problems in the institutions to the problems in the system. How could I have won this?

RFD, Pt. 1

This debate is really frustrating because it's not really about whether this is a significant problem. It's the aim of so much of Pro's arguments, which focus on impacts, to establish its significance, yet much of that argumentation is either outright conceded or ignored because it's not pertinent to Con's argument. In fact, the only words that are pertinent are "systemic racism," and I get two very different views of what is required to meet the standard for systemic. I'm going to go ahead and quote the definition in the description:

"Systemic racism includes the complex array of antiblack practices, the unjustly gained political-economic power of whites, the continuing economic and other resource inequalities along racial lines, and the white racist ideologies and attitudes created to maintain and rationalize white privilege and power. Systemic here means that the core racist realities are manifested in each of society’s major parts [...] each major part of U.S. society—the economy, politics, education, religion, the family—reflects the fundamental reality of systemic racism."

RFD, Pt. 2

What's missing from this definition, and where Con puts the vast majority of his energies, is a clear comparison between what is systemic and what is individual racism. Part of the problem here is that there is a complex array of policies, and that it's not simple to disentangle what is the result of choices on a local level and what is systemic. When do we cross that line? Does a single city doing this become systemic? A single district? A handful? A state? I can understand that we must eventually reach that point of being systemic, but I don't know what it takes to reach it. Moreover, I'm kind of unclear about what makes a policy racist, which shouldn't really be this unclear by the end. If it causes harm to a given group of people without directly stating them in the policy, is it racist? Moreover, if a government decides to ignore the effects of a policy that was not intended to be racist, but clearly has an undue and excessive effect on certain races, is that society engaging in systemic racism?

RFD, Pt. 3

I feel like both sides try to engage with these questions, but I never get a clear answer as to why systemic racism must represent a given view. From Pro, I keep wondering what the cost is of failing to recognize these issues as systemic. I could buy a lot of Con's arguments about semantics and still find a plausible reason to support you if you explained what makes systemic racism so much more insidious or more important to address. Instead of trying to work against Con's game, play it: he keeps telling you that all the obvious examples are in the past, so explain why and how things have changed and why it matters. If you can't separate the concept of systemic from individual by definition alone, then you need to give me a reason that engages with why your experts see systemic and individual racism as a necessary distinction. Con keeps wielding that against you, but you could have used it to your advantage if you had forced him to engage with an argument that isn't semantic.

As for Con, I feel like you could be doing more to address this issue of a lack of action as a form of racism. That's a point Pro makes quite a bit, and while it is harder to define in that same light (as it's more the actions of individuals with the government effectively just allowing it to occur), I don't see you doing much to counter this point except to say that these policies don't specifically target race, which I think treads a thin line. It could easily have been argued that that is the new vogue for systemic racism since the days of Jim Crow: providing implicit consent to further a policy that chiefly doesn't solely target a race or set of races, but does clearly cause outsized harms to people in those groups. Simply being more complex and undirected doesn't automatically means it fails to meet the standard of being racist, yet I see much of your argument as very much to the letter. I can see ways in which that perspective could be problematic, some of which I mentioned in my feedback to Pro, to which I think your argument is vulnerable.

RFD, Pt. 4

All this being said, while I'm not particularly fond of semantic arguments, in a debate where the entire focus is semantics (it would have been on the word "significant" in most instances), the words play a pivotal role. As I see it, Con did a lot more work here, examining the discrepancies between the positions of Pro's experts and their own definitions of both individual and systemic racism. I may not be fond of it, but he does an incredibly thorough job of it. However, it's not so much the subject of the debate that has me making this decision, but rather the framing of the debate around experts. Pro makes a big point of stating up front how essential experts are to this debate, but is largely losing the debate on his experts and how they demarcate between individual and systemic racism. That reliance works against Pro, since any case he could have made for why it's important to establish that distinction and to recognize examples that fall into the systemic category are lost in the effort to just show that racism happens on a large scale. That ends up being reason enough for Con to carry the day.

Considering what I'm being told about what was agreed by Pro and not adhered to in the debate, I do also award conduct to Con, as Pro apparently agreed to waive the final round and still posted.

I give it 50-50 odds that I get through it. Read through over half of it yesterday.

I don't think anyone's going to be able to vote in only 2 days. Care to open up a 1 round waived debate where voters can vote on this debate?

I'll try to get through it, no promises for this one, though.

4 days left. Up to the challenge, or too long?

Voting closes in 1 week.

Maybe not 30k character limit is ridiculous

Remind me to vote

Nope, I cited, by quote, arguments you never previously argued. I read every word of your arguments, every round. You never made those specific arguments before. Even if you had just repeated, that is not a waiver. Sorry. A waiver is a waiver, and it means exactly what I said it means. You did not waive; therefore, neither did I, for I made no new argument in my R4, as I committed. Not that you forbade that particular protocol.

did you even read the previous rounds? I only repeated what I already said.

The point is that corporations, and in some cases, the government; perpetuates racism on a systemic level - for example: if a factory of some sort, pretend its a car factory (the specific thing doesn't matter, just for ease of communication). That car factory 3 different models and 2 of the models work great, but 1 model continuously bugs out, it never passes safety inspections, all of that. Why does it do this? Are the specific parts or workers who program and construct the cars creating this issue? Well, not likely, considering the preponderance of models that fail this continuously. An obvious next question is if the model itself is faulty, but all the blueprints and the models themselves are pretty similar to the other two models, with only differences in asthetics. Why then do they continue like this? This would continue to circle, and the most likely answer seems to be the workers or programmers who make the cars... but for such a large amount of cars of the same model to be constructed incorrectly? That must mean that all or at least most of the workers and programs constructing this car are making the same mistakes, but why then is the factory letting these workers stay? If they perform so obviously wrong? The answer? The factory management itself is under the impression that the workers are making the car correctly.

Yeah, I definitely agree that there are no current laws that can be considered racist (well besides affirmative action...). But what I found interesting was that he said we need to give more control to the government so that corporations can't create racist policies like Jim Crow laws. The irony being corporations don't legislate. But I think you identified the overarching problem: the idea that corporations and government should be categorized as personal agents, thus separating them from the individuals they are comprised of. Or in general, corporations are always evil greedy entities that need to be controlled, and government is the benevolent savior that will take control and provide all our needs. But there is a failure to recognize that both entities are made up of individual humans, capable of both great benefit and great harm to others.

vote if you have time. I think my round 1's the most effort I've spent so far, and I'd hate for it to go to waste.

Now that I've finished the debate [per Pro's request, we have waived round 4] I'll enter your discussion of free speech and such.
1. Edge - your #6 and #8 posts do not acknowledge an unwritten, but very evident factor in the 1A: You have the right to be offended by someone else's speech, but their speech may not necessarily be illegal, and your attempt to censor that speech by some legal backing [I know you did not argue this point, I'm just sayin'] is not necessarily valid. The issue of highest incident in the Supreme Court, looking at all cases they's rendered decisions since 1790 when the Court was established, are 1A issues. Though the Court has been all over the map on the 1A, over the last 50 years, they've become mostly lenient on 1A claims against a plaintiff. They have been more accepting of broad strokes people think are 1A violations. So, there's that. But your #8 claims: "News flash: The constitution already does that, hence why you can't make terroristic threats in an airport." No, you're not citing teh Constitution; you're citing SCOTUS precedent and modern [post 9/11] congressional legislation.

2. Your #8 & #18 claim that corporations are the responsible party in Fruit's #14, show me the corporate policy that actually stipulates in writing that their employees may engage in racist attitudes and actions. That people in corporations, and in every other societal system [education, healthcare, etc] is clearly evident, but they are not given authority to do so by corporate [or other system] authority, because such is illegal. People commit individual racism, even as in groups, by violation of their system's policies and statutes because legislation/policies do not automatically enforce behavior. people do what they want, and that's on. them, nor their corporation, or whatever..

Fruit: Your #14 asked, "Who used their authority to enact and enforce Jim Crow laws?" Answer: "Most modern misguided interpretations of Jim Crow laws had the basis in the Supreme Court precedent, Plessy v Furguson [1898], which established the "separate but equal" doctrine that held until Brown v. Board of Education [1954] abolished Jim Crow, enforcing removal of Jim Crow laws, be they local, state, or federal. over time, since '54, these laws have been removed by appropriate legislatures to the degree that if one has survived, let alone more, I've not found it, and I doubt Pro eve tried.

Classism, heightism, fatism, uglyism, able-ism, age-ism, whateverism, lifes-not-fair-ism, its all a huge problem !

Note to voters: any time I mention pro, except “vote for pro”, I probably meant con

So we should probably just adopt communism so the government has total control, and that will eliminate all the oppression of corporations. That's what your correlation would imply.

Because the source of those things are corporations... and the those corporations are actually causing more damage... the more control the government holds over the corporations the less oppressive they are, which is a direct correlation.

Even if what you were saying was true, you would only be furthering my point. Because now the government is inherently racist and oppressive, AND they are corruptly controlled by outside forces to create oppressive laws. So why should we give this racist oppressive and corrupt government MORE power to create oppressive laws?

No. they typically created the oppurtunity, as in, they made the rule that say: a black person couldn't enter a restaurant, and then the government followed suit because of, mostly, lobbyist. The source, however, is clearly corporations.

Let me make sure I'm understanding what you just said. Corporations were the main party in using their legislative authority to create and enforce laws - in this case Jim Crow laws? That is unless you were trying to dodge the question...

Mostly corporations... in regards of allowing segregation and enforcing segregation, and the government prohibited discriminatory practices in regards to race... so... your point?

Who used their authority to enact and enforce Jim Crow laws?

And you think the government will create more problems than the citizens? If we don't hand over some control of the economy to the government then the only thing they care about is profit, they don't care who gets to work, the workers, or anything like that. It would mean that if a business felt like being discriminate it wouldn't matter. Ever heard of Jim Crow laws? The argument you are using was also used to enforce segregation. I believe that the population will create much more problems than the government will.

Well it should be noted that free speech comes with a duty not to slander a fellow citizen in order to harm their reputation and such. I understand that becomes problematic when you abandon objective truth and morality because then any speech considered offensive by popular opinion becomes illegal. But free speech is not the only issue. The government taking authoritarian control of the economy is another problematic issue.

The point is, the more control we hand over to the government to fix the alleged problems, means the more control the government now has to create more problems in the future. Less control=less ability to create more problems. But again, if a racist government apologizes for abusing human rights, would you immediately give that government near-unlimited authority to legislate in the name of racial equality? If a pedophile apologizes for abusing children, would you put that person in charge of a daycare?

My argument is that the government ought to have some control over what threats or what people can say to harm others, there is a very obvious hurdle that words would have to overcome to achieve that status. Cyberbullying is literally against the law... so... again, this is already a thing.

https://cyberbullying.org/bullying-laws

Is that the argument you are going to use to give the government unlimited authority to decide what you can and cannot say?

News flash: The constitution already does that, hence why you can't make terroristic threats in an airport.

And I suppose you are seeking to abolish the system that guarantees every citizen's right to free speech, for a system where the government determines what is acceptable speech and what is "hate speech"?

Umm... the systems that people want to uphold are systematically flawed, the system we have used to uphold slavery, and then we abolished that - the same things apply here - of course, racism will always exist, but we can mitigate systematic racism.

Crazy thought:

If the government is supposedly responsible for systemic racism and oppression, perhaps the solution is to give them less authority to dictate how we live our lives, not more. If you give them the power to restrict the constitutional rights of those you disagree with (hate speech laws, gun control laws, etc.), what will stop them from then restricting your rights later? After all, they are inherently bigoted and oppressive.

It's kind of like trusting a pedophile with daycare reform.

I forgot to cite Mr. Occupation https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14427591.2020.1810111%40rocc20.2020.27.issue-s1?journalCode=rocc20