Over time, our inescapable, systemic, fundamentally human impurity gives us the capacity to do what has not been done before: to make creative leaps in our biology, in the diseases we can resist and the foods we can digest. And in our thinking and culture and politics, too.
If the National Football League, an organization notoriously known for not standing behind their athletes of color, can come out to make a statement to condemn racism and their systemic oppression and admit they were wrong for not listening in the past, then the ‘Bachelor’ franchise can most certainly follow suit.
Implicit bias – our subconscious associations of race – permeates everything that we do. And we must pursue systemic accountability to fix it.
#MeToo shows this bias is systemic, that people get away with violence against women, get away with discrimination – whether in work or society in general – because, for too long, silence has been the answer.
Systemic racism is something that diminishes all of us. Of course its worst effects are for its victims, but our entire country is held back through the inequality and the mistrust that it creates.
We need to address the systemic structural issues within the VA – the misallocation of resources, the interminably long waiting lists, the bureaucratic inefficiencies – to ensure that our American heroes are properly protected the second they return home from war.
While the One Child Policy has been effective in drastically reducing Chinese birth rates, the measures adopted in its name have required exhaustive, violent, insidious and systemic violations of human rights.
In the first years after the systemic transition, our screens showed American entertainment that had not been available before, or had been available only sporadically.
The same way I’m not afraid of calling out systemic discrimination, I’m also not afraid of calling out inequality and the fact that inequality is growing in society and that affects everybody, regardless of race.
For all of the continued awareness of systemic violence and oppression, there isn’t a lot of talk about that psychological toll of racism, at least in white circles and white media.
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