There went two minutes of my life I'd like to have back.

As a Corrections officer, can I ask you; does the established fact that blacks are more likely to get prison time for the exact same crime than whites, and serve out more of their sentence before getting parole, point to a systemic racism? Even when accounting for juvenile criminal history, judges are more likely to sentence a black defendant to prison time than to probation.

I'm not saying this is necessarily a conscious bias, even, on the part of a judge. Rather, it's the way the system is set up (hence a systemic bias). It's assumed that certain factors make a defendant a successful candidate for probation or parole; growing up in a two parent home; a stable employment history; extended family support. All things that are more likely coming from a middle class white background than from an impoverished black background. And once someone has been to prison, it makes it that much harder to get or keep a job once they get out.

I'm by no means an apologist for anyone who breaks the law. But the Constitution promises equal protection of the laws, and we've done a rotten job living up to that phrase.

"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." - Fyodor Dostoevsky

@Paul4747 It doesn't take a corrections officer to ask or answer the question. The system, any system, ideally operates on the basis of it's design and rules of operation within it. Those are the only things that I think can be called 'systemic'. Human elements in systems are where culpabilities lie for inequities and almost always are acted out with personal biases and prejudices. Those on the receiving ends of actions also judge them from biased points of view. This is what I referred to in the last sentence.

To have compassion for others based on familiarity, instead of contrived prevalent steriotypes alone, requires familiarity. That state of experience cannot be acquired in a society wherein groups are alienated and suspicious of one another; in societies like ours where those sentiments are exploited and purposely intensified for political objectives.

There is no such thing as a rule that can force a biased person to make decisions free of bias whenever they have latitude within the 'rules' to exercise discretion. This is why judges, parole board members and police officers make personal decisions that are not only preferential within their discretion but often over-reaching it. A system design can't read minds. All over-reaching of authority isn't, incidentally, race or culture based. There are also internal politics in play based on other reasons for bias such as sex, favors owed, familial connections and other preferential behaviors within bounds of individual authority. Governmental and corporate 'systems' are rife with them but hardly responsible for them.

The more people from differing cultural and racial groups associate, work together and especially marry and form families, the less suspicion and prejudice we'll have. We can';t blame it on institutions that by their very designs are intended to mitigate effects of biased treatment.

We could recognize the html tag <satire>this is satire</satire>.

@Detritus (link not working)

Maybe I need to update Windows 10, again....

It's been actively illegal to discriminate for years, and yet it's still happening. The old conservative canard is that "you can't legislate people's attitudes". But those attitudes express themselves in law, like ending Affirmative Action programs, because supposedly there's been so much progress that they're now unneccesary.

"Systemic racism" expresses itself in many, many subtle ways. For example, let's say the admissions officer at an Ivy League school has two students to choose from when filling one available spot. Are they more likely to choose the kid who worked their way up from an inner-city background, while working after school and helping raise their siblings because both parents have full-time jobs.... or the child of the guy they went through the fraternity with and toilet-papered the Dean's house on Halloween, not to mention going on skiing holidays together every summer in Aspen, and also they're on the board of two different companies, and don't forget they donated that building last year...

That's not a far-fetched example. George W. Bush, an entirely mediocre student (who also showed up drunk to his interview for Yale, according to legend), was the grandson of a United States senator from Connecticut who had recently served as a member of the Yale Corporation. So he was accepted-- unlike 49 percent of all alumni sons who applied that year. He was a legacy among legacies.

Of course, it's unlikely for most white kids applying to college to have these advantages. But almost no minority kids do.

You could need to very carefully define “written into law” to make your statement true. The tax cut giveaway to the rich totally ignored and left out people of color. Was it racist?

@Detritus The tax cuts (and the Bush tax cuts as well) left out almost everybody from the greatest part of the benefits. But since people of color are disproportionately also poor and lower middle class, they got disproportionately less benefit from the tax cuts. This was especially egregious in the case of the Bush tax cuts, when he lied outright and said ""By far the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum"; fully 1/3 went to the top 1%.

@Paul4747 Thanks for the robust response, but did you not read that this is not my interpretation?

@indirect76 I didn't say you did agree with it.

I was hoping to persuade you by rhetoric that it is an unreasonable definition ("racism necessarily written into law" ), in that it's so narrow it doesn't cover the practical experience of any American since the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

For that matter, there are still many laws being passed even today that, while not overtly racist, effectively target minorities. Voter ID laws, for instance, disproportionately affect minorities, who are less likely to have driver's licenses or state ID cards, thus keeping them away from the polls. And the people passing these laws know it.

@Paul4747 I see, well I’m not sure how it being too narrow to apply to the situation in the US makes it any less of a reasonable interpretation. It seems like all the discussion is about what words mean instead of the ideas.

Ultimately the article is saying that racism is not written directly into the law. I’d say this is a fairly vapid point regardless of what any one thinks ‘systemic racism’ means.