[munchbunny]

> So you're basically saying black people should just accept racism is a thing and move on?

Personal opinion: yes, but also no. I think this is a false dichotomy.

As an individual, day to day, what can you do about the systemic issues? Not much. Maybe confront someone every now and then to improve things for a friend or coworker. But, for yourself, the only thing you can do is to accept that you have a shitty hand and do the best you can with it. The hand you have is the hand you have, arguing that it should be better won't make it better.

However, year by year, the reality is that there is a systemic problem, and when a whole population all have a shitty hand to play, statistically you're going to expect worse outcomes.

If you let yourself get crushed by the weight of the systemic issues, you're not going to be in any condition to help others, but if you don't do anything about the systemic problem, then future success stories of people like you will continue to be statistical anomalies. So take care of yourself, and then try your best to help the people that come after you.

[tomjakubowski]

> As an individual, day to day, what can you do about the systemic issues? Not much.

This is precisely why activists organize groups of people: so that they may act together and stand a chance of effecting change. Historically, with large enough organization, it has worked pretty well at times.

[munchbunny]

I completely agree, and I'm grateful there are activists to organize these efforts.

Since this is such a sensitive topic, I think I need to elaborate a bit more on the individual vs. systemic perspective. When I was growing up, I was told that the game is rigged against me, and I was going to have to dig deep. I had to make peace with the idea that, for example, I needed better SAT scores for the same college applications. (I didn't pick the example for its severity, I picked it because it's a measured phenomenon.) That's just the reality of racism/sexism/ageism/whatever. That's the individual perspective: game's rigged against you, deal with it.

But where this line of thinking becomes racist is when, for example, one of the Chinese immigrant parents in my community asks "why don't black people just work harder?" How do you know how hard they work? If it was just about working harder, the problem would be solved by now. In that case saying that black people should work harder comes from a place of ignorance of the real problems, which proves the point that it's important to make noise about systemic problems. That's the systemic perspective.

I don't think either point has to invalidate the other, but I've personally experienced both people saying "work harder" as a form of victim-blaming out of ignorance as well as people blaming personal failings on the system holding them down, and everything in between including real role models who are just venting. So I tend to just keep my mouth shut about it in my personal life.