How Scholars and Activists Have Reinvented Our Understanding of Racism

“In short, we have dogma, and from dogma, cognitive errors in reasoning inevitably ensue.”

Editor’s note: This essay is adapted from a talk given by the author at the online Counterweight conference in September of 2022.

In the summer of 2020, at the height of race protests, I wrote in an article for The Agonist:

“In the last few decades, the academy as well as the world of ‘social justice’ activism, has undergone a revolution in how it views the nature of racism and how to solve it. Racism is no longer about consciously, or even unconsciously, held attitudes and beliefs that result in explicit discriminatory behavior at the individual level or at the institutional level of legislation, courts, and university curricula. No, racism is society itself. That is, racism is viewed as a defect in the DNA of society itself, perpetually self-replicating like a dangerous cancer.

In other words, it is systemic. Not simply, and accurately, in the sense that there are deep structural inequalities that have resulted in black Americans dying of COVID-19 at three times the rate of white people, and whites enjoying lower unemployment rates or higher median income than blacks. All of this is categorically and incontrovertibly true. But while the academy and the activists rightly and consistently point to these disparities in outcomes, they also claim that we will never make progress in reducing these inequalities if we do not address the “systemic” ideologies and discourses of Whiteness.”

This new way of thinking is what I call the reification of systemic racism. It is a particular way in which racism has been reinvented and redefined in recent decades by race scholars and activists in fields such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), Critical Whiteness Studies, and sociology. The notion of systemic racism, then, is our focal point for examining what I call the reification of racism. In my article for The Agonist, I described how scholars and activists have come to think about systemic racism in terms of ideologies and discourses of a dominant culture, identified as “Whiteness,” that stand as pillars holding up the scaffold of systemic racism.