Notes from Upstream: "Systemic Racism" Is a New Phlogiston

Except this is not a harmless contrivance

Whenever I run into the phrase “systemic racism,” my mind jumps to the word “phlogiston.” I can’t help it.

A few centuries ago, when European thinkers were inventing science, they wanted to explain why wood and coal burn and iron rusts. They came up with the theory of phlogiston (pronounced “phlojiston”).

They described phlogiston as an invisible, odorless and tasteless substance which lurks inside anything flammable. They theorized that burning a piece of wood or coal releases the phlogiston.

For the century from about 1670 until the late 1700s the theory of phlogiston was chemistry’s “standard model.” Textbooks explained it. Students studied it. Chemists promoted it. In elaborating the theory, phlogistonists invented new terms like phlogistication, dephlogistication, and Terra Pinguis (fatty earth).

But difficulties multiplied. For example, rusted iron weighs more than unrusted iron. Where does the additional mass come from? Inconsistencies like that and new evidence eventually led to accurate theories which explain combustion and corrosion.

Since then, not only phlogiston theory but the word phlogiston itself have disappeared. The word no longer appears in science or in everyday conversation. My wife Susan is a famous columnist who recognizes as many words as anyone I know, but she had never heard of phlogiston.

Have you? (There is one regular reader I think has, and you know who you are.)

But the incessant compulsion to invent terminology marches on. In fact, as Cary Grant says about insanity in the classic farce Arsenic And Old Lace, “it practically gallops.”

The recently coined phrase “systemic racism” serves as specimen. The theory of systemic racism is the standard model in our schools from Kindergarten through PhD. Textbooks explain it. Students study it. The Academy promotes it and indeed never shuts up about it.

No one should confuse systemic racism with systematic racism. As opposed to systemic racism, systematic racism has existed for centuries, not only against people of African descent, but among all races, as Tom Lehrer sang:

Passed Away This Year at Age 97—Shows What a Sense of Humor Can Do For You!

(Not a digression, at least for anyone who hosts a late night talk show or works as a hip comedian: Tom Lehrer stopped performing after 1972. Why?)

“My purpose was to make people laugh and not applaud. If the audience applauds they’re just showing they agree with me. But that’s not humor.”

The original target of systematic racism wasn’t black people. Racism started out aimed at Jews.

In 1492, the year Ferdinand and Isabella dispatched Columbus on his famous voyage, they also issued the Alhambra Decree, which expelled all Jews from Spain. To remain, Jews had to convert to Christianity.

Most did not; some did convert and became Christians.

For the next two centuries, Spain discriminated among its Christians by Limpieza de Sangre, which means “purity of blood.” Christians who descended from previous Christian generations carried “pure” blood; Spaniards descended from Jews or Muslims did not.

Over the following centuries of empire, it was an easy transition for Spain and other Europeans to extend its notions of hereditary superiority beyond Jews to Africans, American Indians and other supposed inferiors they conquered and bought and sold.

The 16 Hereditary Castes of Colonial Mexico: The Sort of Caste System the CRT Advocates Seek to Impose in the U.S.

Like phlogiston, systemic racism cannot be seen, tasted, smelled or even located anywhere specific. It is “embedded” in institutions. Its operations are “not personal” but “structural”; that is, it operates regardless of any individual’s lack of intent to be racist. It is self-reinforcing and self-sustaining.

Like phlogistonists, proponents employ their pet phrase systemic racism to explain certain things. But there are also a lot of things they avoid explaining.

If you press any proponent of the theory for specific examples of systemic racism, the proponent invariably reverts to undeniable historic examples of systematic racism, like chattel slavery and Jim Crow.

Their primary concern is disparate outcomes. For example, compared to white people, black people are more likely to be “justice involved” (another spurious phrase), to grow up poorly educated, and to be stuck in lower-paying jobs. And so on.

On the other hand, compared to their share of the population, black people do disproportionately well in fields like entertainment, athletics and politics.

Of course some groups tend to do better than other groups in different fields and at different times. Nowadays, Latin players dominate major league baseball. In the 19^th century, Irish ballplayers like Mike “King” Kelly ruled the diamond.

Mike “King” Kelly

Kelly even had his own hit song:

Slide, Kelly, Slide!

Your running’s a disgrace!

Slide, Kelly, Slide!

Stay there, hold your base!

If someone doesn’t steal you,

And your batting doesn’t fail you,

They’ll take you to Australia!

Slide, Kelly, Slide!

Here’s comedian Gary Gulman on the limitations Jewish kids can face in basketball:

The theory of systemic racism is choking the dictionaries with its flow of new terminology. In particular, rhetorical style and the inevitable competition among identity groups have led to a proliferation of insufferable abbreviations, each a grab for primacy from some competitor in the grievance sweepstakes. Here are a few:

• POC (People of Color, not to be confused with colored people)

• BIPOC (Black and Indigenous People of Color)

• AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander)

• BAME (Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic)

• WOC (Women of Color)

• QTBIPOC (Queer and Trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Color)

• SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African)

• BIPOC+ (Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and others)

• IBPOC (a variant of BIPOC which puts indigenous people ahead of black people)

• NBPOC (non-Black People of Color)

• ALAANA (an arts and culture-focused umbrella term for non-white groups praised for including Arabs)

• 2S (Indigenous gender and sexual identities “outside Western binaries”)— sometimes you’ll see these two new characters overloading another already overloaded abbreviation, as in 2SLGBTQIA+

The list will not be complete without the abbreviation ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards), proclaimed at their riots by both Antifa and Nazis, a fact which reveals the close kinship between these two brands of revolutionaries.

That’s no coincidence. The socialist Marx framed the driving force in history as the struggle among classes. The socialist Hitler came along and reframed it as the struggle between races.

After the western working class refused to perform its “historically inevitable” role of overthrowing capitalism, contemporary revolutionaries gave up on the Marx view and switched to the Hitler view that there’s an ongoing struggle among races.

Hence all the competing identity groups, and hence the keffiyeh-clad thugs assailing Jews on campus and in the streets.

I’m not oversimplifying. That’s not just another insult or rhetorical flourish. It’s analytic.

It’s difficult to distinguish race-based Nazism from race-based CRT. Maybe some commenter can do it. I can’t.

Every new leftist word or phrase is a crime against the mind. One must view it with the same suspicion he would view a vial of cyanide. Don’t put it in your mouth. If someone else happens to put it there, spit it out, and whatever else you do, don’t bite.

Max Cossack is an author, attorney, composer, and software architect (he can code). His most recent novel is High Jingo. He lives with his wife in a dusty little village in Arizona in a house beset by a flock of ever-fatter feral felines.