As recently as a year ago I was a systemic racism skeptic. I wanted racism to be personal, because it made me feel more accountable. I didn’t want racism to be abstract, and “systemic” felt abstract to me.
Then I began to see that the personal is the cause of the systemic, like a dirty rumor. Rumors start with someone, of course, but suddenly they become communal lies, and lies become convictions. So it is with systemic racism.
If you need an illustration, take a look at the ballot question called “Clean Missouri,” which Missouri already passed in 2019. The problem was that Republicans could see a big swipe at their representation under the new Clean Missouri referendum. The voting districts were to be drawn by a “nonpartisan demographer,” who would assign voters to districts drawn with straight lines or lines that didn’t strategically make some districts more partisan than others.
You can tell who drew the maps of voting districts when you look at the zig-zagging lines that make a voting district look like an amoeba. In the map above Districts 2 and 5 look like they were drawn by a shaking hand. District 1 looks like the “salamander” shape that the Massachusetts governor used two centuries ago. The skill of drawing these maps has been honed over 208 years, first conceived by a governor of Massachusetts, whose name contributes to the term “gerrymandering:”
The term gerrymandering is named after Elbridge Gerry (pronounced like “Gary”[2]), who, as Governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander. The term has negative connotations and gerrymandering is almost always considered a corruption of the democratic process. The resulting district is known as a gerrymander (/ˈdʒɛriˌmændər,ˈɡɛri-/). The word is also a verb for the process.[6][7]
Why this practice has been honored over two centuries of United States history has always been a mystery to me. It meant that the party in power could always stack the voting districts to its advantage and maintain its dominance. Sounds like a systemic problem, doesn’t it?
“Clean Missouri” (2019) would have put an end to this by allowing a demographer, i.e. someone who understood how populations were distributed, to draw the map of voting districts without regard for political parties. This would finally put an end to the practice of gerrymandering in Missouri. “Clean Missouri” had some anti-racist implications, because it would prevent people of one race from being confined to one district, while two or three neighboring districts would gain the votes of the dominant (white) race.
The revised “Clean Missouri” (2020) bill would not only eliminate the “non-partisan” demographer, it would only count people of voting age in each district. This contradicts the standard of the U.S. Census, which counts every living soul in each district.
The consequences of this method of mapping the districts is systemically racist. Whereas 21% of Missouri’s white population (ages 0-18) would go uncounted, every minority population would lose more: Blacks 28%, Asians 54%, Latinos 54%. Many of these uncounted would turn 18 over the period of time from one census-taking to another, which is ten years. They would not be counted as voters for as long as nine years of their lives. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 9/23/2020)
This is a perfect example of systemic racism, because the district mapping system was created to benefit the Republicans, but the consequences benefited white people in particular. It would perpetuate the benefit for the next ten years, until another census was taken. What appears to be a political strategy ends up as a racist strategy.
So Missourians stand on the threshold of another decision with implications for systemic racism. Amendment 3 would diminish the vote of many minority populations for the next ten years. It would allow district maps to be drawn by the same bipartisan redistricting commissions that designed the funny-looking boundaries in the past. It would also push the criterion of “partisan fairness” lower on the list of criteria the commissions would use to draw the maps. All this benefits white voters and diminishes minority voters.
Systemic racism is subtle, indirect and decisive. It will not be obvious by reading Amendment 3 on the ballot, but it will be just as consequential as if you counted only 3 Black voters out of 4 and 2 Asian and Hispanic voters out of 4. Like a silent scythe it harvests more white votes than minority votes. Silent, invisible, yet surely consequential.
Systemic racism is real and alive in Missouri. The only equitable response is to vote “No” on Amendment 3.