Systematic vs. Systemic?
Systematic is a set of practices that are comprehensive.
Systemic is a system that has an issue inherent in how it operates.
Systematic issues are relatively easy to fix, if you care to try. Systemic issues require a deeper level of thinking.
Let’s see how this applies to racism, to move from the abstract to the concrete.
What would “systematic racism” in hiring look like?
It might look like this:
- Hiring managers explicitly reject resumes that appear to have “black-sounding” names.
- Recruiters do phone screening and reject people they believe “sound black.”
- Black people get shorter interviews and never get called back for hiring.
Such a hiring program would be offensively racist.
What would “systemic racism” look like in the same context?
It might look like this:
- All the HR staff are white, more likely to hire people they feel comfortable with.
- Recruiters do phone screening and hire people who they feel are most articulate, not realising they are perpetuating their own prejudices in hiring based on their evaluation.
- Screening includes a credit report, which generates bias against less affluent candidates from lower-income families.
- If all of the staff at the company are white, they are likely to receive internal referrals from those they know or have been friends with, a group that is overwhelmingly white.
This system would result in discrimination, even if none of the policies are explicitly racist.
The hiring managers and executives would likely say, “We are not racists, it just turns out that we tend to see and hire white candidates, even though we hire candidates based on merit.”
But regardless of whether the staff are explicitly racist, they have created a racist system.
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