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During our first week back on campus, many students protested NC State’s decision to not fire Office of Information Technology employee Chadwick Seagraves after an investigation could not substantiate various allegations claiming Seagraves as part of the Proud Boys. While I am not surprised to see that Seagraves was not punished, I am happy to see many students protesting this decision. To my shock, I even saw some Facebook comments outraged over the University’s decision.
But then I ask myself, why are people so eager to call out racism in this case but hesitant in cases like in education, jobs or policing? But then it hit me: This was a case of intentions and not consequences. I have come to the conclusion that for some white people, there needs to be obvious intent for racism to occur. That is why they will show outrage to the Ku Klux Klan but not racial profiling by the police.
This discrepancy is even more obvious when you look at political discourse. Ben Shapiro, a notorious conservative pundit, puts this way of thinking notably: “Show me a law that is racist in intent,” Shapiro said. “Show me a police officer who commits a racist act.”
While I could point to several incidents of laws and officers reinforcing racist practices, it is hard to determine if every incident of racism was intentional or not. The problem lies with how people define racism. According to my race and ethnic relations class, racism refers to systems that create unequal outcomes for different groups of people, and that people who participate in these systems can be unaware of its consequences.
Of course, people like to think of themselves as good samaritans. Most college students like to joke that they’re trash, but for the most part, they think they are decent people. As such, when someone brings up white privilege or systemic racism, they are hesitant to acknowledge its existence, or they blame it solely on other external and thinly-veiled racial arguments, such as culture or making poor decisions.
Think of intentions and consequences as accidentally breaking your friend’s vase. Sure, it was an accident, but you still broke someone else’s property. Your friend might forgive you and say it’s not a big deal, but you might as well buy them a replacement. Sure, it was an accident and not in malice, but you still broke a vase.
Think about the vase, but on a bigger scale. Most people are unaware of implicit biases. These people could unconsciously clutch their purse near a BIPOC, look over an application because they have a foreign-sounding name or arrest someone based on the color of their skin. These implicit biases have contributed to systemic racism that has resulted in generations of educational and economic inequality.
While I do agree that intentions do matter, especially in many social and legal scenarios, racism is not that simple, especially in institutional and systemic terms. We could eliminate the “bad apples,” but when the orchard is rotten to its core, there needs to be drastic changes.
Obviously there is no clear solution to solve these problems. But a way to talk about these issues is not to ask if there was intent, but rather, how the outcomes are impacting certain groups of people. That way, we can come up with potential solutions and debate on how effective they could be. And who knows, maybe we could discover some of those “bad apples.”