, Columnist
The Phrase ‘Systemic Racism’ Clouds Productive Debate
We can’t discuss issues usefully if we shout each other down even when we agree.
Distorting the view of what our disagreements are.
Photographer: Mike Comer/Getty Images
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“It’s past time for America to discard the left-wing myth of systemic racism,” former Vice President Mike Pence said on a recent visit to New Hampshire. We should go a little further than that. Let’s discard the phrase “systemic racism” altogether.
The chief function of that phrase is to make our political disagreements, already large, seem even larger than they are. The people who insist systemic racism is real and the people who deny it exists generally have different things in mind.