Systems and Symptoms
Diagnosing the political systems we inhabit, even when they aren't inherently visible. Commentary on systemic racism.
Writing from Durham, a thought sparked by an especially lively public policy discussion from the previous semester.
When we talk about politics (or business or economics or really anything), one common framework we lean on, whether we realize it or not, centers on the differentiation between systems and symptoms. Systems refer to the inherent forces that shape the world around us, and symptoms refer to the surface-level manifestations of those systems (eg. racism as a system, and incarceration disparities as a symptom). Much of your political orientation can be reflected in the extent to which you believe in the existence of systems.
Woah, that’s a strong claim! To explain my reasoning, I ask you to humor me for a second as I go down a bit of a semantic rabbit hole — why do we use the particular word “symptoms?” What do you think of when you hear the word “symptom?”
I think of the role of a doctor.
When you / your doctor diagnoses a disease, they are really making their best, scientifically-corroborated guess based on the symptoms that they can observe. Sore throat and runny nose? You could just have a common cold, but you could also have COVID-19. Either could be the underlying cause of your symptoms. To be more confident, you might take a rapid test to confirm or deny your suspicions (with a certain degree of confidence; they are not perfect).
It’s an unfortunate reality that misdiagnosis is a big problem in healthcare. It is almost inevitable that you or someone in your family will be misdiagnosed at some point in your lifetimes. Your disease is the underlying mechanism for your visible, surface-level symptoms, and our incredible advancements in sciences, placed in the context of misdiagnosis as a huge problem in healthcare, highlight how incredibly difficult (or if we’re being philosophical, impossible) it is to identify disease with 100% accuracy.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t trust your doctor! Luckily, there are many diseases for which the evidence is so overwhelming that our level of confidence in diagnosis is easily high enough, thanks to advances in science.
So how do we diagnose systems of oppression in politics, when oftentimes only their symptomatic effects are visible? Is there a COVID-19 test analog for racism as a system?
Those who are unbelieving of structural racism and see it as a fallacy might ask how we actually know that racism exists in a systemic form when that form is often unconscious, implicit, or invisible, and all we have to show for it are a hodgepodge of symptoms. How do we know that other factors weren’t the root of the cause?
Take this segment from a Heritage Foundation commentary: “The causal chain between the intentional racism of our forefathers and present-day disparities in household wealth (and other disparities, besides) is long, blurry, and frequently interrupted by other causes that likely cut the thread.”
Using the language of my first post, this argument asserts that it is reductive and one-dimensional to frame racism’s symptoms as caused by an inherent system rather than some random combination of circumstances. Fortunately, our rhetorical disease analogy can reframe this argument to expose its blind spots.
Even if it is epistemically impossible to prove the existence of a system of racism as the underlying disease, we have overwhelming evidence to support such a conclusion: “residential segregation, unfair lending practices and other barriers to home ownership and accumulating wealth, schools’ dependence on local property taxes, environmental injustice, biased policing and sentencing of men and boys of color, and voter suppression policies.” There are so many more symptoms drawing the same correlation, and each of them deserves their own post; some will in fact receive their own post on this series.
When a patient is suffering from what a doctor has diagnosed as multiple diseases, the common sense response is to treat each of the diseases instead of doing nothing at all. Allowing causal complexity to become an excuse for inaction feels disingenuous when we nonetheless have strong evidence supporting a need to act.
We have a term for this in the medical world. When doctors neglect or mistreat a patient to the harm of that patient, we call that medical malpractice. You can sue over it, and individual patients often do.
But when our society downplays and undersells the existence of systemic racism, that’s called a viable political strategy. This system kills millions, lawsuits be damned.
We need a more progressive cure.
The longer that people in power frame out the existence of the systems of racism, sexism, discrimination, and more, to serve their epistemic ignorance, is the more people for whom the corresponding symptoms become terminal.
There is so much more we could talk about, but I tried to refine this specific commentary on systemic race to focus on the rhetorical/framing dimension of systems and symptoms. I’m well aware the topic deserves much more discussion and I will be posting more on it, but for now, I would love to hear your thoughts!
Your authorial voice really comes through clear in how you write these posts...truly a joy to read.
I'm in the process of reading _Biased_ by Jennifer Eberhardt, which is a large compilation of evidence (much of it from experiments in the lab that are quite well controlled to show causation) for all the ways people's implicit biases exist--would definitely recommend giving it a read at some point if you haven't heard of it. I suppose most of it isn't surprising per se, but it is one of those books that just gives you solid example after solid example of the ways that systemic racism plays out, both related to implicit bias and otherwise.
(Note: the next paragraph describes one of the experiments that pertains to racism and has the potential to be distressing).
One of the sets of experiments that I found particularly disturbing has to do with an implicit association that people tend to hold between Black people and gorillas (the people who hold this association will earnestly deny it, that's why it's implicit). When people are primed with a split second image of a gorilla (for a short enough time period to not explicitly realise it--the book goes a whole lot more into why this is a valid and sound scientific approach) prior to watching a video of a police officer beating a Black person, they are more likely to say the beating was deserved compared to if the split second image is not shown beforehand. This and a host of other studies reveal that this racist association is alive and well today and has an impact on how people handle situations in their lives and the policies they support.
I guess this experiment could be considered more "priming" than "framing"...but either way it underscores how inaccurate it is to frame all systemic inequalities as deriving solely from chance, long ago racism, etc. and not at all because of the explicit or implicit bias present in people and the systems they build. Also, I think that people who deny the existence and importance of racism today outside "a few bad apples" exercise both a lack of humility and a fundamental failure to understand that their human body and mind is much more complicated than what they're consciously aware of.