I'm very familiar with this concept of structural racism. In fact, I discussed it 110 days ago on Hubski by what its actually called: "Second Generation Bias." I would expect a major professor at a well-known college also knows this term especially due to him dealing in issues of sexism and racism in his understanding of philosophy, which leads me to believe that his use of the term racism is damaging to his case.

Yancy asks me to believe that I am racist because I live in a system which has second generation bias. He absurdly calls this racism and me a racist simply due to my membership within a group advantaged by this system. The huge and glaring error in this assumption is that racism is a choice and bias is more subtle. I am no more a racist for being a part of this system than the Asian man who out earns me by the same measure. If we're just going by the measure that some system gives me a leg up over someone else, I'm a disadvantaged young man. By the same measure, black people are racist because they make more than Hispanic men in the same data.

Even moreso, this argument where everyone is expected to be within some homogeneous group, which I think I well showed in my first post, makes it so black people can never be seen as advantaged, white people can never be seen as disadvantaged, and everyone is set in their own little cultural prison. This is the kind of thinking that stops white guys from liking rap music, black guys from 'talking white', and everyone being whoever the hell they want to be without race being in the back of their mind forever. This is racism!

The problem with examining a system for second generation bias is that it is hard to find examples where someone is not actually still making racially motivated decisions. To be honest it took me a long time to make a single credible example for that other post, and even now I can pull that one apart easily.

If black guys get paid less for the same work, that's because HR is making racially motivated decisions. There's one single person who signs the line with their pay on it, that's the racist. It's not bias, it's racism, and that person's actions make them a racist. When Jennifer Lawrence found out she was getting paid less and realized that her co-stars negotiated harder and she didn't, she confessed to not negotiating harder to be liked. Women are well-known for this and it is a well observed partial explanation for the pay gap. She was the sexist oppressing herself there and she admits it! There are surely outside pressures which made her feel that was an appropriate response to the situation, but at the end of the day she made the decision. HR makes the decision. The guy who comments to his neighbor about the black family moving in ruining the neighborhood is the racist.

I am not a racist. Telling me that my skin color makes me a party to racism is racist. Telling me that a black man has no identity other than disadvantaged in a terrible system when you are a respected professor at a big university and another black man is the President of the United States of America, and another black man was Attorney General, and a black woman was Secretary of State, and a black people of all nations have summited so many peaks, telling me that black people are only the poor downtrodden stepped upon masses and that whites are their systematic oppressors, that's racist.

I will not apologize for being white. I will not pretend that I have no heritage. I will not accept that I am crushing my neighbors for my own benefit. I'm not the person that he asks me to be, and black people aren't one mass of the same person either. This is racism, and I won't be a part of it just because it has somehow become a progressive talking point.