The Lie of Systemic Racism: The Technology of Socio-Spatial Marginalization
The civil rights movement in the United States was an organic reaction to racial discrimination and segregation. The movement was active in the 1950s and 60s and its social agenda was to secure new protections under federal law for the civil rights of all Americans. This in turn was a reaction to the Reconstruction Era discrimination and violence by Southerners. This rewrote segregation laws that marginalized and discriminated against African Americans. Today these laws have be removed yet the material day to day experience of many African Americans has not substantially improved. In response to this lack of empowerment of the African American community various theories have been proposed as to the cause. One such theory is ‘systemic racism’. It posits that the material conditions of African Americans are based on institutional racism embedded in laws, regulations, and social organizations. In the 1960s this was true, but today the continuation of this theory obscures the real problem and stops the development of real solutions.
Systemic racism, as it is understood today, is a lie. It places the problem on racist ‘white supremacists’, entitled white elite, and people who have subconscious biases that discriminate against ‘black and brown’ people. Prejudice exists in all people, but this is not the root problem. Blaming individuals and social groups for being ‘racist’ passes the blame from institutions to people. This is not ‘systemic’ racism just common prejudice. ‘Systemic’ means it is part of a system of power. There are social mechanisms that enact this agenda. It is built into laws, government agencies, and social institutions. To understand systemic racism, we must understand systems of power and their execution in society. There is a social technology behind the marginalization of segments of our society.
The 19th and 20th century saw a new technology of socio-spatial marginalization. It segregates a group of people and makes them foreign to a territory. This Modern conception of space is based on the abstraction of a ‘state’. Instead of grouping people by place, ethnicity, and culture, Modern states created territories of governance. People could freely move between these territories. This required a new social division in society based on territory. It requires a separation between a ‘citizen’ of a territory and a marginalized group. First is to socially marginalize a group, then spatially segregate them.
This was done to indigenous people in the United States. The trail of tears is one such event where the Cherokee people were forcibly removed from their homeland in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee moved to reservations in Oklahoma. It is estimated that 4,000 people died and 125,000 people removed from their lands in the 1830s. This prototype of socio-spatial marginalization was used by the Muslim Turks against the Christian Armenians to systematically destroy their people and identity in 1915. The Turks mass murdered Armenians and forced them into death marches into the Syrian Desert. It is estimated over one million people died and 11 million people forcibly removed from their homeland. From this event the term ‘genocide’ was first used. Hitler used the Armenian Genocide as the prototype for the Jewish Holocaust forcibly removing Jews from their homes into concentration camps. It is estimated that six million Jews were killed between 1941 and 1945. The United States government interned American Japanese during World War II. It is incorrect to assume this is a historical abnormality and we are beyond such barbaric actions. We see this today in war torn areas of the world: Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine.
Socio-spatial marginalization starts with the Modern idea of a territory or state. Ethnic minorities from a place are seen as existing outside the social structure of the territory or state. These people are at first socially marginalized then spatially removed from their homeland. The power of the government is used to wage war on the people of a territory. The technique of socio-spatial marginalization consists of the following:
1. Segregate a minority of the population of a place. This includes minimizing their ethnic history and treating them separately than the majority of the population.
2. Using mechanisms of the state to take away the minorities’ land rights, or ownership of their places of living and working.
3. Force migration from their ethnic or historical lands.
4. Force them onto reservations, internment camps, or ghettos.
5. Perpetually limit economic access and capital.
The twentieth century can be seen as discovery and implementing of new technologies. One of the most powerful is the implementation of socio-spatial marginalization. The application of technologies over time develops making them more powerful, less energy intensive, and fully integrated into society. With socio-spatial marginalization this comes in the form of abstracting the techniques to be incorporated into laws, education, media, and economic institutions. These techniques are not as violent as forcing Native Americans onto reservations, but they exist none-the-less. Today, economic techniques are used to create socio-spatial marginalization in the United States.
After the Civil War many mandates were created to give land to former slaves. Land ownership peaked for African Americans around 1910 where they owned about 14% of farms in the United States. Jim Crowe laws in the South and ‘Redlining’ practices in the North socio-spatially marginalized African Americans creating ‘separate but equal’ spaces in the United States. Laws and limiting loans made it difficult for African Americans to buy homes and land.
Most of the laws and policies that created segregation for African Americans in the United States are gone, eliminated by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, but they have never been remedied and their effects continue. Once socio-spatial segregated infrastructure is built it continues until dismantled. In many cities ‘Projects’, African American ghettos, were demolished and replaced with more integrated housing for welfare recipients. Yet no process for giving back property rights or the wealth that comes with them was restored to African Americans. They were forced to be renters and limited access to ownership.
The idea of reparations was proposed in 1969 by James Forman, and since then various government policies were enacted including President Barack Obama authorizing the payment of 1.25 billion dollars to the USDA to assist African American farmers. Even after significant policy changes African Americans today are more segregated, own less land and housing, and have less wealth than the general population.
African Americans continue to be segregated in many communities in the United States by the control of wealth and high housing costs in predominately white neighborhoods. Whites may not be racist or even prejudiced, but every parent wants their child to go to the best schools they can afford. In many communities, white affluent people are self-segregating based on good school systems. There has been white flight from dysfunctional cities to the suburbs. The less wealthy are stuck in areas that have poor school systems. Laws and prejudice have been removed, but the economic reality remains and is structurally built into the infrastructure of urban environments.
In addition to schools, predominately African American neighborhood have fewer social services, hospitals, healthy grocery stores, parks, and other amenities. African Americans neighborhoods simply do not have the same level of infrastructure as non-African Americans. There is unequal development due to the restriction of capital to these neighborhoods.
Working class families often require mothers to work outside the home causing some level of emotional deprivation and neglect on babies. This can cause symptoms of autism and anxiety in children that can affect them for life. Women working outside the home is normalized and encouraged. Good childcare becomes another expense for families, with the poor unable to pay for emotionally nourishing care. Psychologically deprived children in the United States have become the norm. As anxiety and depression increases the poor have less resources to deal with emotionally and learning-disabled children. This creates generations of poor, low performing children unable to be productive. What is often viewed as low I.Q. or learning disabilities are often emotional deprivation in the early years of life. In other cultures, where extended family lives with the young, grandparents or other family members can mitigate deprivation and neglect in children. In the United States housing for extended families does not exist.
Housing in the United States since the 1950s has been designed around the nuclear family. Single family housing in the suburbs does not contribute to intergenerational childcare. One-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments and condominiums in cities also do not allow grandparents to live with their adult children. Here the type of housing built under capitalist forces contributes to the emotional alienation of children. Housing for extended families prevalent in other countries around the world do not exist in the United States.
Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and low-income residents are among the least responsible for causing climate change, yet the most vulnerable to its harms, including heat stress, flooding in low-lying neighborhoods, and housing and food insecurity. When data is analyzed by race, the results of discriminatory policies are evident across every social indicator, including unemployment, health, household income, education, housing, displacement, criminal justice, and police violence.
-San Francisco 2021 Climate Action Plan
Discriminatory policies based on race are often cited for a host of problems from unemployment to the effects of climate change. The symptom is confused for the disease. Historically laws and policies did segregate and disenfranchise by race. Today, these laws have been systematically eliminated, and reverse laws written. California Senate Bill 1000 requires ‘environmental justice’ of local land use planning. It requires the state to identify disadvantaged communities to address environmental justice in their planning and implementation of policies. This identifies the problem as discriminatory laws and rewriting of the laws should solve the problem. The real problem is the implementation of socio-spatial marginalization through economic means. City planning will not address the root cause of the problem.
Reparations for segregation would solve many economic issues. Certainly, reparations are due for the historic violation of African American’s 14th Amendment rights. Reparations should come in two forms: housing credits and educational credits. Housing credits should be used to help African Americans buy houses in the community of their choice. Educational credits should be used to help African Americans attend public schools that they have been denied by being excluded from affluent neighborhoods.
Reparations for housing should come in the form of no money down, no interest, home and education loans backed by the government. These could be provided by HUD, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the U.S. Department of Education. This straightforward solution to many of the problems plaguing the African American community also addresses the problem of wealth inequality in the community. Without wealth individuals cannot escape socio-spatial segregation.
The American idea that people do not need a hand-out but a hand-up is contingent on upward mobility and the ability to amass wealth. This worked to some extent when there was a vibrant middle and working class in the United States. As the middle class has been decimated by the destruction of factory jobs, cheap labor from foreign immigration, and the shipping of working-class jobs overseas, there is limited upward mobility. A hand-up is no longer enough. A hand-out is needed to address the wealth inequity in the United States.
The lie of systemic racism allows our leaders to pass the blame of their inaction to the subconscious prejudice of the masses of deplorables. The problem is not prejudice, it is socio-spatial marginalization produced and sustained by wealth inequality. Laws that segregate based on race have been eliminated in the last 50 years. Today segregation occurs through the abstraction of wealth and access to capital. As the wealth gap increases in the United States, so too does socio-spatial marginalization. The lie of ‘racism’ obscures the fact that segregation is perpetuated by economic institutions and the distribution of capital. Systemic racism is not perpetuated by white supremacists, but rather by capitalist institutions and their lackeys: corporate media, academia, and political leaders. Instead of addressing wealth inequality in the United States, we are tricked into further socio-spatial marginalization. This is the truth behind systemic racism.
