Sounds perfect, have a good night! I think for the most part we agree, we have some disagreement of course, but agree on the necessity to help people and aren’t too far off on how to do it.

Okay!

1. "form of racism that is embedded as normal practice within society or an organization" - I don't agree with this because I don't see how racism is embedded in normal practice. Just because disparate outcomes exist doesn't mean there is racism in the institution, the existence of racism in normal practice has to be proven.
2. "It can lead to such issues as discrimination in criminal justice, employment, housing, health care, political power, and education, among other issues" - This is the causal link I keep talking about.

Thanks for the link on the trial topic!

For the cops case, I agree with you, we’re slightly different in our view of it, but for the most part agree that cops have too much power.

I do agree the POC make up a disproportionate amount of poor people, which can be attributed to a wide variety of reasons. My view is we should be focusing on uplifting poor people, instead of focusing on race.

Your points about trials and voter ID are more closely related to being poor than being a certain race.

Trials: Honestly, I don't want to get too caught up in this discussion, because trials are so complicated and based upon centuries of case law. A lot of things affect whether a prosecutor pursues a case, such as priors and socioeconomic status of the defendant (I think we can agree that a prosecutor will more likely come down harsher on a poor white man than a rich black man because the poor white man will have fewer resources to defend himself). Also, different jurisdictions having different rules make this discussion even more difficult.

Cops case: A lot goes into these traffic stops. I've had friends (who are South Asian) talk their way out of multiple tickets because they have a nice interaction when pulled over. I agree that it's an issue cops can decide vastly different outcomes and that it is ripe for abuse; that's more of a police system issue than a systemic racism issue. Also, one can say pullovers are sexist because it's a common trope that it's easier for women to talk their way out of tickets compared to men, but imo that doesn't mean there is systemic sexism.

Voter ID: Again, this seems to be more of an issue harming poor people. If we say this is systemic racism, then we aren't really answering the underlying issue of poor people not being able to get IDs to vote.

Systemic racism means that the disparity we see is caused by racism by systems, so we are debating 1) whether that cause is true and 2) whether systems are racist, which they are not.

Do you have a different definition of systemic racism?

They seem to be similar. Racism by outcome seems to capture the essence of SR better, but I still reject it.

Your example misses a lot. What if a child who has never seen a rainbow sees the same thing you saw. Would they automatically know it is a rainbow? You know it is a rainbow because your subconscious does all the thinking for you, and what it does is hypothesize that what you see is a rainbow AND that it is not something other than a rainbow. I wish I could expand more on this point, but then we'd get into a discussion on how thoughts and the subconscious work, and I'm not a psychologist or neuroscientist.

Also, the rainbow example talks about seeing something, whereas SR talks about causality. SR states that there are disproportionate outcomes based on race and the outcomes are caused by systematic racism. I agree there are disproportionate outcomes, I can see that from the data, but to declare that something is the cause of something else there has to be evidence to prove that relationship. Just because you see something occur does not show a causal relationship.

To make my point clear: racism is real, I've seen it and experienced it many times. I don't know if systemic racism is real or not, it is advocating for a causal link so there has to be evidence showing that the link exists, which has not been shown by anybody.

I disagree that SR does not need to be proven to exist. Any assertion that says one thing causes another needs to be proved in order to gain acceptance, otherwise it is just an opinion.

"Racism by outcome" would be a better description because Systemic Racism charges that the system is actively causing and supporting racism. However, can we state outright that an outcome is racist? Or could the outcome instead be discriminatory to poor people, which black and Hispanic people are disproportionately more likely to be; if the outcome harms poor people, then it would make sense that it harms black and Hispanics more because they constitute a higher portion of poor people. This is a very important distinction because if we tackle a problem based upon race when the underlying cause was economic status, then we will never solve the issue we want to solve.

Let me try to engage this in a different way. Heads up, I have a busy week, so I'll apologize in advance for the slow responses, but I think some of the other comments are missing a very important aspect of proving something is real.

To determine if something is SR we only need to prove it has worse outcomes for POC.

This is wrong, it covers only 1 leg of proving whether something is true or not. The other leg is that the person who put forth the hypothesis must also DISPROVE that the worse outcomes are not due to SR.

Let me give an example from a finance study I recently read. I will try my best to keep it simple. The authors of a study hypothesized that ANNOUNCEMENTS (caps to show emphasis) by the Fed Committee (FOMC) caused long-term interest rates to rise. They had data showing that long-term rates rose following announcements going back to the late 90s.

However, just showing an effect is not enough (this is analogous to your point of just proving a worse outcome for POC). The authors must also show the outcome cannot be attributed to something different. For example, when the FOMC gives an announcement, they also release a lot of macroeconomic data, so maybe it's the release of macroeconomic data that caused the change in long-term interest rates, not the FOMC announcement itself. In order to disprove this, the authors assumed macroeconomic data is released whenever it becomes available and is not tied to the FOMC announcement (a very valid assumption). They then compared interest rate changes from when macroeconomic data is continuously released versus when the FOMC announcement occurs and found that interest rates change more with the FOMC announcement. So not only did the authors prove that FOMC announcements affect interest rates, but they also DISPROVED that this change could be attributed to something else.

Going back to SR, we cannot say SR exists just because it leads to a worse outcome for POC, we must also disprove that the worse outcomes cannot be attributed to something else. Take incarceration for example. Black people have a disproportionately higher incarceration rate, so one possibility to describe this is SR. But, this could also be attributed to something else, such as black people committing more crimes, black kids being more likely to grow up in single-mother households, etc. I don't know what the cause is, but in order to say that SR is the cause, then we must first show that other variables cannot be the cause.