How I Discovered Systemic Racism is Real
Throughout my adult life, I have had a long-standing assumption that there is no such thing as systemic racism — that there is no racism specifically written in law. There may be individual racists who act racially or share racist opinions, but no law or regulation is holding back African-Americans here in the United States.
However, with Black Lives Matter gaining ascendency, the deaths of some at the hands of police officers, the riots of 2020, and while reading a variety of articles from both progressive and conservative authors, I have pursued a deep-dive thought experiment into racism itself. This process was an attempt for me — a middle-aged, white, Christian, married heterosexual, to better understand how all of us could be talking past one another on this issue.
What I have found is that there are two branches of large-scale racism. One is institutional racism, the other is systemic racism. The former is largely gone from American society, and if there is an example of it, it is quickly fixed. There are simply no laws on the books that discriminate based on race. That fight for justice is over. However, systemic racism is a bit more complicated. After pondering deeply on this matter, I discovered systemic racism in my own history. And this discovery has helped me better understand the idea of systemic racism and why so many reasonable intellectuals suggest it is happening. Let me explain.
I grew up in rural southern Virginia. Our one high school covered our entire county. My town’s population was 1,000. We lived in the country and many of our citizens worked in small industrial plants, farmed, or supported those occupations. Very few blacks lived in my county. I am a teenager of the eighties, a true Gen Xer. I played on my high school’s varsity basketball team. We weren’t very good — mainly because our competition was much better. Our conference was comprised of high schools in larger surrounding towns with a slightly higher percentage of black folks. I was the best player on a bad team, but basketball was a black man’s sport in our region of Virginia. We were the only team in our conference with a majority of white players. All of the schools in the conference had a couple of white kids sitting on the end of the bench, only playing when the outcome was already decided.
We generally were not good enough to beat our competition on most nights. We lived at the bottom of the standings in the conference. The best team in our conference was actually ranked in the newly minted USA Today High School Top 25 and their only loss that year was to #1 ranked Oak Hill Academy in overtime.
We were no match for them. But I was a decent player with some potential. I averaged 15 points per game, about a half a dozen rebounds, and nearly as many assists, which was pretty good for a game with 8-minute quarters. At the end of the season, the conference selected their all-conference team. Ten players received all-conference honors. Nine of them were black and then there was me.
At first it was an honor. I was a junior and I had made the all-conference team. But quickly things changed for me emotionally. I was too young to understand at the time but looking back it is amazing what occurred. I had seemingly gotten out of my “swim lane” and needed to be nudged back. I thought my friends at school would have congratulated me but instead many thought it was funny and mocked me, perhaps out of jealousy or some other motivation that only the mind of a teenager can fully understand. During the conference tournament, the black players in the conference gave me the nickname “token” and trash talked me the entire tournament about how I didn’t deserve to be on the all-star team and that I was only there because I was white. Our league’s best team that was ranked nationally had 4 of their 5 starters on the conference team. They held me personally responsible for kicking off their fifth player.
Now, I knew I wasn’t the best player in the conference, but I also knew I wasn’t the worst player on that all-conference team either. Though there was racial tension in southern Virginia in the 1980s, I didn’t look at this as racism. It is only in hindsight with some wisdom and experience that I can now see how some of this was more than mere gamesmanship. I wasn’t supposed to be good at basketball. My white friends held this opinion just as loudly as my black teammates and my black competitors.
I started looking at whether my experience was unique or common in the world of basketball. Unfortunately, the statistics suggest that my experience is common. When I was in high school, Magic and Bird ruled American basketball; but Jordan was the shiny new object — a high-flying, physical masterpiece of basketball perfection. This image permeated basketball for decades. Coaches would simply look at a black player and a white player and intuitively know that the black player could play better. “White Men Can’t Jump” made perfect sense for a title to a movie. (Don’t tell Jordan Kilganon.) Sportcasters try to hide their bias but struggle — frequently referring to one team or a player as more “athletic” than another. We all get it. Blacks are generally better at basketball than whites. So where is the systemic racism? No one is keeping whites from playing ball, right?
My premise is that there is systemic racism occurring against whites in American basketball programs throughout the US at the high school and junior high school levels. Here is my proof: Over the past 30 years, white Europeans have steadily replaced Americans on NBA rosters.
The first Dream Team had three white professionals on the team (Larry Bird, John Stockton, and Chris Mullin). Now, one could make the argument that there were more deserving players in 1992 to be on this team, but clearly these three were quite legitimate in their inclusion. In 1996, we had only one white player, John Stockton. How many white players have played on the US Men’s Basketball team since then? One, Kevin Love in 2012. How many would play on the 2020 team? Only Gordon Hayward would have a remote shot at that team. However, if we looked at the top 12 players in the NBA to form a superteam in 2021, two white players would absolutely be on it. Neither are American — Luka Doncic of the Mavericks and Nikola Jokic of the Nuggets.
According to NBA labor statistics, 64 American-born white players participated in the NBA during the 1996 season. Twenty years later, in 2016, that number was 39. And in 2016, only Hayward and Love were considered more than simple role players for their teams. Prior to Larry Bird there were a variety of white, high-impact players in the NBA — Jerry West, Pete Maravich, John Havlicek, Bill Walton, Rick Barry, Gail Goodrich, Jerry Sloan, and so on. Today? Well…
Now, I am not suggesting that the NBA is racist. In fact, it is clear that they want the best players they can get regardless of who they are, where they come from or what they look like — a true meritocracy. Unfortunately, it is the talent pipeline in America that is systemically racist.
Basketball is a sport. And like any sport its guiding parameter is simple while its proper execution can be extremely complex. Basketball’s parameter is to score more points than your opponent. How a team does that becomes critical to its success. White Europeans have developed their own way to succeed at basketball without having to worry about how African-Americans play this same game. They emphasize their strengths and deemphasize their weaknesses. The average white ballplayer is not going to have the wingspan, the quickness, or the jumping ability of the average black ballplayer. But can he still figure out a way to add value and be successful at basketball’s guiding parameter?
Europeans have influenced American basketball in many ways, from the “euro step” to more efficient offensive rotations and by stressing fundamentals. Europeans are figuring out how to compete with Americans by thinking outside the box. And they have largely succeeded with nearly all white impact players from the last 20 years coming from outside the United States.
So, it doesn’t appear that white people simply cannot succeed at basketball at the highest levels, but that here in the United States the pipeline that delivers players ready for the NBA does not look to foster any talent outside a specific stereotype. Here is a place where profiling actually helps black players, call it “black privilege.” The AAU program in particular seems to accentuate the divide — promoting raw athletic talent over skill. In 2015, Kobe Bryant was interviewed by ESPN and said, “Horrible, terrible AAU basketball. It’s stupid. It doesn’t teach our kids how to play the game…so you wind up having players that are big and they bring it up and they do all of this fancy crap and they don’t know how to post. They don’t know the fundamentals of the game. It’s stupid.” He went on to say that “European players are just way more skillful. They are taught the game the right way at an early age.”
AAU teams are focused on getting the biggest, strongest, most athletic talent and then playing street ball against another team with a similar composition. When I played AAU in the 80s, our actual high school coach could not be involved. Our AAU coach had no incentive to make sure we spent the summer improving as a team. Street ball, fast breaks, and basic chaos ensued. At the time, I loved it. Some games I would score over 30 points. But our team didn’t improve.
So with white kids having to play a game that is dominated by the athleticism of black athletes, most simply find another sport to play or pastime to enjoy.
The good news is that they have that option — another sport to pursue. But what if basketball is your true passion? What if you, as a white father, have a young, promising 13 year-old son who has some talent and thinks of nothing but basketball day and night. What should you do?
The best idea might be to move to Europe and enroll him in a basketball program there. Give him a chance to develop among kids who are more similar to him. There, he could build on his confidence and not be constantly compared with a more “athletic” competitor. But if Europe is out of the question? Try Iowa or rural Indiana.
As I did my research, I found that nearly all of the recent white American NBA players were raised and played ball in predominately white, rural settings. Several current NBA players are from small towns in Iowa. Basically, many white basketball players have been playing the wrong game — a game we most often lose. It appears that some separation from black basketball culture is important in the development of young, white basketball talent.
Now, I personally hate that I am discovering these facts and making these conclusions. First, I have never been a fan of conspiracy theories and this feels like one. And second, I have no interest in portraying myself or others as victims. I believe that in a free country nearly anything is possible to those who believe in themselves and who put their heart, mind and soul into an endeavor. That color of skin doesn’t and shouldn’t matter regardless of the situation. And that the idea of separating kids based on skin color is immoral. Also, things like “microaggressions”, “privilege”, “patriarchy”…these are constructs that I have spent the last several years of my life debunking, calling BS on all of it.
And yet, here we are. I see all of these concepts alive and well in my own life experience. I am beginning to understand the declarations of those woke warriors, that the system of success in America is built around a model that many African-Americans feel they cannot access. I recognize that what I endured with basketball is a small slice of what many blacks experience in the larger world. I can understand much better how the black child struggling to get ahead in school feels. How a black woman trying to work up a corporate ladder must feel the deck stacked against her. Do white work colleagues unconsciously exercise white privilege in the workplace? Do we automatically assume the white engineer will be better solving a problem than the black one? There may be no institutional racism, but there is a still a systemic one, and it is much worse than overt personal racism, like having a bigot attack an individual with a racial slur. Having a competitor talking trash to me about how I can’t jump because I’m a honkey is much less destructive than a white coach assuming I can’t play because I “look” slow and I don’t fit his mental projection of a quality basketball player.
I wonder how does that black urban teenager feel trying to make his way in the world. He has a real capacity for math. He loves computers and designing software. He wants to be a video game developer but he isn’t sure if he can compete with white and Asian programmers. In fact, his world doesn’t intersect at all with the software development world. He sees it, he understands the concept, but he can’t really feel it. It is largely foreign to him because he doesn’t have role models from which to draw. His friends make fun of him for doing his homework. They call him Poindexter when he wins a local math competition and try to tear him down. His inner-city teachers spend most of their time keeping students in line and safe and very little time teaching and mentoring.
He needs a charter or a private school to develop his gifts but his parents know little of that world and besides, they are pre-occupied with their own lives. He is from a broken home, rarely sees his dad and his mom has two jobs and is overwhelmed with responsibility, struggling to stay sober, to act productively for her children.
Now, the more I contemplate the life of this hopeful mathematician, the more I ask, is this really racism? I mean it is systemic, and I guess if you only see things through the prism of race, it is an easy conclusion to make. But when you stop to really think about it — perhaps it is something a little different. Perhaps the more accurate phrase would be “systemic stereotyping” or “systemic erosion.”
Perhaps the system is working to erode him rather than helping him flourish and excel because the system can’t process the idea that he has real talent in math. His friends, his parents, and probably most of his teachers are black, are they racist for being a part of the system holding him back? The term racism in this context is too limiting and not entirely useful. In my high school basketball career, I didn’t feel like anyone was being racist towards me. But they were a part of a system designed to nudge me away from basketball.
Now, if an improved system can help get our mathematician to work hard and earn that master’s degree and he is designing solid software programs, Google or Microsoft or Oracle will gladly hire him. Just like the NBA, they are not racist, they are looking for talent regardless of color. But it is hard to ask a company that is in a brutally competitive industry to hire subpar talent to fulfill a quota — just like we shouldn’t ask an NBA team to sign a certain percentage of redheads.
The key is to play a different style of game. As Europe figured out how to compete at basketball with less athleticism, black students with real potential need to learn how to compete academically with less resources. I am defining resources broadly here. It is much more than money and it covers areas beyond what government programs can provide.
For a time, Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs) were considered out of fashion and not needed because talented black students could easily get into Ivy league schools or other top-tier universities. However, if these schools will focus on true academics (vs. grievance studies) — helping their students excel in medicine, law, math, engineering, and so forth then they can be a tremendous resource for our country.
In Malcom Gladwell’s book, David and Goliath, the author posits a controversial concept centered on the idea that just because one can get into a prestigious school, doesn’t mean one should, and that attending a less renowned school often produces a better outcome for the student. In the case of African-Americans, HBCUs produce an additional benefit — students can simply get down to academic business and stop worrying about white classmates and white professors. Often well-meaning whites want to play the role of white savior and foster a “soft bigotry of low expectations” among black students. They often either tear down black students by treating them as tokens, due to affirmative action quotas (whether real or perceived) or they virtue signal to the point of letting the black student slide academically without being challenged. A black student crying to her black professor about how the injustices of racism are keeping her from getting an A in class will most likely fall on deaf ears.
So like how those European ballplayers creating distance from black basketball culture seems to be important to their success, black students skipping Harvard and attending Howard or Stillman might be the best thing they can do for their career.
Of course, this is only one area of systemic erosion that society can help fix. There are many challenging stories across all races, ethnicities, and cultures. The important thing for a just society is providing equal opportunities as best as it can while the individuals looking for these opportunities take full advantage of them when they arise, without excuses.
To date, we have not discovered the lesson of European basketball. And instead, special interests with the federal government are moving down the path of trying to change the rules of free market economics. Instead of encouraging the disadvantaged to play the game differently, our elites are wanting to change the game. It would be like white players demanding to lower the rim to 9 feet just for them since they cannot jump as high. If we could somehow do that how would it help the game? The players? Would we suddenly become convinced that white players could jump as high as black players?
This thought journey helped me finally understand what so many Americans define as systemic racism, but it has also shown me that this systemic racism, or systemic erosion, is shaped as much by blacks as it is by whites. And we can all act guilty or we can get busy solving the problem. But the income redistribution solutions to the problem of systemic racism currently being promoted by these special interests aren’t going to make any of us healthier, wealthier, happier, or more fulfilled.
For the record, I have no delusion that I was kept out of the NBA because a white coach didn’t take me seriously or my white friends made fun of me for playing basketball or a black ballplayer called me “token.” I was kept of the NBA because of my choices and the fact that God gave me a body better suited for other lines of work, where I have found happiness.
