I am against institutional racism. Not just the concept itself, although I’m against that too. It’s the phrase, and related phrases, that seem to represent an issue pervading people that should know better.

This week, the Madison City Council voted against a recovery program to aid businesses on State Street recover from damage incurred during protests. It’s not the decision itself that bothers me—the offered rationale is poisonous.

Former Madison mayor Dave Cieslewicz criticised the decision, accusing the council of sacrificing useful policy to make an “abstract point about institutional racism”. City Alder Rebecca Kemble responded in her own Isthmus article, reaffirming her justifications against the recovery program.

The background is simple: Kemble, among others, claims that State Street relief would be “institutional racism”. Kemble does not have kind words for Cieslewicz’s mayoralty in her article: “Cieslewicz is just one in a long line of mayors who championed the investment of an inordinate amount of public resources into the downtown area while predominantly black and brown neighborhoods languished from neglect.”

For State Street businesses that are feeling the covid-19 pinch, with windows boarded up, it may grate to hear that any help would be racist. Kemble does not respond to the point that 62% of the businesses in question are themselves minority or women owned, nor does she talk about why it’s impossible to both help Madison’s black community and downtown

Thought-terminating clichés

A thought-terminating cliché is a phrase that stops a debate or discussion. Whether blaming the ills of the world on capricious gods, or blaming the problems of a nation on vague foreign threats, they carry no real explanatory power, nor allow for solutions.

Sometimes, I think the phrase institutional racism acts like that. It’s not that institutions cannot have biased outcomes. They can, and do. Nor is it that one institution’s biased outcome cannot interact with another’s in ways that society should worry about. It seems impossible for that not to be the case. The solution to these problems is to fix the issue at its core.

To do this, it’s important to maintain a correct causal model of the concrete problems at hand. As an example, consider the relative lack of black physicists in graduate programs. This could be because of:

• graduate admissions committees disproportionately rejecting applications by black students of equal qualifications to other applicants.
• university faculty discouraging black undergraduates in physics from applying to graduate programs.
• high school teachers discouraging black students from getting undergraduate degrees in physics.
• black students being disproportionately enrolled in schools that failed to prepare interested students for a physics degree.

Note that these are all mutually independent. At least one does not stand up to the evidence (if it’s unclear which one, then you need to actually do the data analysis). It seems to me that all four count in some way as “institutional racism”, but they all have radically different solutions. It’s also critically important to know which solutions are worth implementing, because there will be little to no benefit in fixing a process that isn’t a significant source of bias.

Manipulating a cliché

In our example with the Madison City Council, I don’t think such a causal model exists. Given Kemble’s misstatement that downtown was the “whitest” part of Madison, I’m not even sure she has an accurate picture of the problem she claims to be solving.

The problem with a thought-terminating cliché is that it, well, terminates thoughts. Working with an abstract concept like institutional racism is hard, because there is no single cause, and solving the more concrete problems of unequally distributed wealth or disparate qualities of life takes careful thought.

The protests after George Floyd’s killing were about anger, and feelings of helplessness. For black Madisonians who look at the quality of life indicators Kemble mentions, that anger and helplessness seems justified. And in expressing their anger, protesters were trying to point out the existence of a problem. At no point in the protests, or in any part of America’s recent history, did anyone claim that these were easy problems to solve. It makes sense, in the context of widespread protests about a set of related but distinct grievances, to collect them under a broad term, like institutional racism. Unequal treatment of black Americans hurts America as a nation, so it makes sense for protesters to clamour for those in power to fix the problems.

It’s not a protester’s job to try to tease out the underlying problems from the data; that’s a question for a good statistician. Nor is it a protester’s job to try to construct the model that accurately captures the actual sources of inequality, as a good social scientist should. For a policy maker, it is their job to understand the statistics and the social science, and to react accordingly, and that’s why it’s a problem for the Madison City Council to make decisions without proper justification.

Injustice takes time to fix, longer than the two year term of a Madison aldership. No one will care about Kemble’s tenure enough to rigourously study whether her actions did in fact contribute to improving Madison’s racial inequality. A cynic might say that Kemble is deliberate, using the claim of institutional racism to shame potential opposition and prevent discussion. They might say that it’s offensive to assume that pandering would work, that it’s offensive to say that it’s racist to help non-black minorities. I think that it’s likelier that she genuinely cares about social justice. The outcome is the same either way if she, and others on the Madison City Council, don’t actually try to find evidence-based reasons for their votes.