Yes, there are one or two haters, but if we are basically decent white folk, how is it bad things keep happening to black people?
The best solutions “fix the problem, not the person”. When it comes to bad things happening to black people, the problem is "Systemic Racism".
What IS systemic racism, and how do we fix it? It's actually quite simple.
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About Sets and Systems
A set is a number of things that belong together, or are thought of as a groupAll sorts of stuff belongs in groups or sets – sets of drawers, chess sets, sets of teeth and so on.
One of the significant things about a set of stuff is that it doesn’t do much except just sit around existing.
What would happen if we put more than one set of stuff together? For example, leave a chess set on top of a set of drawers for eternity? The answer is, the chess set would probably get dusty and covered in cobwebs.
The elements of a set never really change: Unless someone interferes or there is a dramatic intervention like maybe an earthquake, sets tend to remain static.
Here is a diagram of a set of Hydrogen atoms and another diagram of a set of Oxygen atoms at a party. The Hydrogen atoms are outside hanging around the barbecue. The Oxygen atoms are inside watching something on the TV in the lounge room. They are not interacting. It’s a boring party. Both sets of atoms are static.
A system, on the other hand, is not static, it is dynamic.
A system is what results if two or more sets of stuff change when you put them together.
The chess set and the set of drawers did not become dynamic when we put them together, but if we put all the Hydrogen and Oxygen together in the same room at the party… something changes.
No, I did not consciously set this up so I could make strained jokes about atoms meeting at a party and creating puddles – I was just trying to find a simple example of a few atoms existing statically at a micro level, staying with their own set, minding their own business and not making a conscious decision to change, like the H and O in the first diagram.
At a macro level, when they were required to co-exist in the same space and interact, something bigger than themselves caused the H and the O atoms to combine in a dynamic way to create molecules of water.
Water is H2O - Hydrogen two parts, Oxygen one, but there is also a third thing that makes it water and for a long time nobody knew what it was. The answer is the electrical charges of the atoms causes them to combine. There was more to the story than was first obvious.
You’ve heard someone – many someones – say “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” or, more correctly,
the whole is OTHER than the sum of its parts
When we put two or more sets of certain variables together, something changes.
Ordinary, well-meaning white people go about their business not wanting to harm black people…
so how is it when white and black people are together we can end up with negative outcomes of various kinds against black people?
The answer is "Systemic Racism". No one has changed. The white people are still mostly well-meaning people.
But the whole is other than the sum of its parts.
Something more than the intentions of the individual white people is influencing what happens when the white and the black people come close together.
Here are two sets: White people and Black people. Separate and apart and at a micro level they are fine. No, I am not proposing Apartheid.
Just as with Hydrogen and Oxygen, where a third thing (electrical charges) caused the two sets to change into something else altogether and become water, when we put white people and black people together in most countries of the world we get a result called
systemic racism
1) historical events and
2) the questionable attitudes of one or two coalholes.
With Systemic Racism, the mostly historical bits that make the whole other than the sum of its parts are numerous and go way beyond any individual conscience or any single moment in time –
systemic racism does not care about
the number of chill people in a room
This is why it will take more than chill attitudes to fix. Hence the saying, in some Quality System Engineering circles, "Fix the Problem, not the Person".
The only way to fix Systemic Racism is to fix
- The results of history, not just
- Bad attitudes.
ANTI-Racism is needed which means things like fixing bad laws, or correcting myths, or spotting where we went wrong and learning from our mistakes, changing unconscious bad habits - anything but assuming there is nothing to fix but racist attitudes.
Non-racism is not a moral position. Being indifferent enough to do nothing is not an action.
No one important is saying it's not OK to be white - that's just nonsense put about by stirrers. No one is saying white Australians today need to feel guilty about the past (though it is hardly cause for celebration) and no one is saying anybody has to hate anybody else.
No one is asking for blood in the streets revolution (all the bridge marches were peaceful) - but there is a lot we can do and need to do because we should feel bad about what is happening today.
This is adapted from a longer post in my other blog. If you want to read more about how we know White Privilege is real (though the word "privilege" is a huge PR mistake) and listen to me get really wound up and rant about a whole heap of related stuff, please visit
Cheers
