Are there many potential explanations as to why our justice system has racist outcomes? Absolutely. Does that change whether the outcomes are racist or not? Absolutely not.
There seems to be a lot of confusion over racism where one group seems to think racism only exists when it involves white hoods and hurling racial epitaphs and the other group is more concerned about large societal trends and documented evidence of disparities in outcomes based on race.
Machine learning algorithms are a perfect example. If you build an ML algorithm for approving home loans using historical data, the outcomes of that algorithm will likely have a strong racial bias due to the history of housing segregation. If a company were to use that algorithm, they would be participating in systemic racism even if not a single person in that company was racist. It's racist because the outcomes are, not because of individual racists within the system trying to explicitly hurt black folk.
The term "racist outcomes" is an example of the problem we're talking about. A racial disparity is not racist. Correlation is not the same thing as causation.
Racism could very much be one of the factors, but painting the entire disparity as racism pretty much guarantees we will make no progress on zeroing in on, and ultimately eliminating, the actual racism.
Conflating racial disparities with racism is really harmful and counterproductive.
It wasn't racist in my country at any point, as we never had any slavery (we did enslave and genocide each other, but we're all white so no one cares) or racial minorities even, besides maybe some Turks or whatever. And I was still told by some people that I benefit from white privilege.
There seems to be a lot of confusion over racism where one group seems to think racism only exists when it involves white hoods and hurling racial epitaphs and the other group is more concerned about large societal trends and documented evidence of disparities in outcomes based on race.
Machine learning algorithms are a perfect example. If you build an ML algorithm for approving home loans using historical data, the outcomes of that algorithm will likely have a strong racial bias due to the history of housing segregation. If a company were to use that algorithm, they would be participating in systemic racism even if not a single person in that company was racist. It's racist because the outcomes are, not because of individual racists within the system trying to explicitly hurt black folk.