By Susan Letterman White
Running a training program or a group facilitation that is part of a comprehensive plan to improve a culture of equity and inclusion, is an opportunity to distinguish between structure and system and discuss both systemic racism and structural racism. A system is a collection of interconnected things that interact and work together to create the whole. A structure is how two things are connected.
An person is a human system operating within groups and organizations, larger systems, that operate within a nation on earth within an even larger universe. How a nation or organization is structured refers to who is connected to power, opportunities, and resources and who is disconnected. The closer to connection, the closer the control.
Systems have cultures - values, beliefs, and assumptions that motivate decision-making and the distribution of power and how empowered people distribute resources and opportunities. Cultures are evidence by the existence and display of artifacts and symbols, which message values, beliefs, and assumptions. For example, portraits on the Capitol walls of both Charles Sumner, an abolitionist, and John C. Calhoun, a proponent of slavery. Cultures affect the decisions on the design of structures.
Examples of structures include how law enforcement distributes justice unequally, consciously or unconsciously is irrelevant. Where systems that distribute resources, opportunities, and experiences are lopsided, they need to be restructured so that power and its use are managed with fairness and equity. When power is not used that way, accountability necessary.
Systemic justice would hold accountable those on the ground in the Capital riot and those empowering it with false narratives of what is fact and what a fact is. Systemic justice requires an agreed-upon set of facts, that are no based on conspiracy theories untethered to reality.
