Every morning, I pray the Church’s Office of Readings and Morning Prayer. Before beginning, I recite a few prayers, including one composed by St. John Paul II in 2001: “Prayer for Peace, To Mary, the Light of Hope.” It is a prayer for protection against the evils plaguing our world. One line stands out: “Help us with the power of the Holy Spirit conquer all sin: individual sin and the ‘sin of the world,’ sin in all its manifestations.”
We are only too familiar with individual sin, but what does John Paul II mean by the “sin of the world?” In his 1987 encyclical “On Social Concern,” he describes “structural sin,” sins that “grow stronger, spread, and become the source of other sins, and so influence people’s behavior.” (36) Although the sin of the world is not entirely separate from individual sins, it refers to sinful practices built into the structures, institutions and customs of ordinary life and culture. These constructs of social life make individual sins more likely.
Systemic racism is one such “sin of the world.” This commentary is an attempt by an older white male to understand systemic racism, particularly racism in policing and criminal justice.
Our divided and hyper-partisan culture makes it difficult to think clearly about structural sins such as systemic racism. So, it helps me to begin by thinking instead about virtuous structures. Take for example, systemic loyalty, systemic courage, or systemic holiness.
Think about the practices of military training – boot camp, ranks and salutes, drills, and training exercises. These exist to teach skills, such as marksmanship, first aid, hiking with a heavy pack. More fundamentally, however, these practices create structures of military life that teach, reinforce and evoke systemic behaviors like courage in battle and loyalty to fellow soldiers. For us Catholics, the Mass, prayers like the rosary, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, and faith formation classes teach specific knowledge. More fundamentally, they form holy lives. We grow in holiness by following such practices daily and weekly.
When good systems work well, they create forms of life that gradually draw people into practices and actions embodying virtues like charity, humility, chastity and faith. All successful institutions work most effectively at the unconscious level to evoke behaviors that mirror the principles and mission of the organization. Ordinary people can do extraordinary things when formed well by virtuous systems.
Evil structures work the same way. Take systemically corrupt nations – the former Soviet Union or modern Russia, for example. Bribes, lies and secrecy become a way of life. They suffuse both high offices and the ordinary encounters of daily life. They permeate all sectors of society, each mutually reinforcing the others. Even people of good intention cannot avoid corruption. If your child is sick, you pay a bribe to see a doctor. Registering your car requires another small act of corruption. And so on, until gradually and systemically, good people become at least a little corrupt. They become sucked in or burned out or hardened. Resistance to such evil requires heroic virtue that few possess. Ordinary people do extraordinarily terrible things when formed by vicious systems.
“Thus sin makes men accomplices of one another and causes concupiscence, violence, and injustice to reign among them…. ‘Structures of sin’…. lead their victims to do evil in their turn. In an analogous sense, they constitute a ‘social sin.’” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1869)
Systemic racism in the United States is precisely this kind of corrupt system. Like a virus it spreads rapidly and silently, until symptoms burst forth in racist words or deeds. Built on conscious biases and prejudices, racism created slavery and then the Jim Crow system. It produced armed slave patrols, lynching and prison farms to keep slaves and, afterward, freed persons “in line.” It formed segregated hospitals, schools, parishes and churches, neighborhoods, and jobs, even cemeteries, to create an elaborate system of political, economic, social, cultural and legal oppression and inequality. Most radically, systemic racism imprinted assumptions, images, stereotypes and cultural practices that built an intricate structure of sin primarily on subconscious biases and perceptions. Therefore, when legal racial discrimination disappeared, racism remained – embedded in organizations permeated by structural sin.
In general, white Americans think of racism as explicit beliefs about white superiority held by a few evil individuals. Racism exists in a few “bad apples.” Black Americans, however, perceive racism as “racism in the world,” discrimination and oppression rooted in the customary behaviors and practices of ordinary life.
In policing, systemic racism does not mean that there are large numbers of police officers with consciously racist attitudes and behaviors. Rather, police forces created at some point in the past by enough racist persons with political and economic power created a culture of policing. This culture continues autonomously as a structure of oppression – in conjunction with other institutions infused with racism: schools, health care, housing and employment. Just as ordinary people are formed by systems of holiness or systems of corruption, so systems gradually drag “good cops” into practices that reinforce negative stereotypes and differential law enforcement by race.
Speaking to the International Association of Penal Law in 2014, Pope Francis put it this way: “Scapegoats are not only sought to pay, with their freedom and with their life, for all social ills such as was typical in primitive societies, but over and beyond this, there is at times a tendency to deliberately fabricate enemies: stereotyped figures who represent all the characteristics that society perceives or interprets as threatening. The mechanisms that form these images are the same that allowed the spread of racist ideas in their time.”
How about an example? I lived almost 50 years in Lubbock, Texas, and still follow the news there. In June, the local Lubbock Avalanche-Journal published data on traffic stops. Here are the key findings:
“The Lubbock Police Department’s annual report detailing traffic stops shows black drivers are stopped, searched and arrested at higher rates than white and Hispanic drivers…. Of those traffic stops, a search was conducted 9% of the time when the driver of the vehicle was black. A search was conducted 6.3% of the time when the driver was Hispanic and 2.41% of the time when the driver was white.
“LPD searched nearly as many vehicles driven by black drivers as white drivers in 2019, despite there being four times more white residents involved in traffic stops, and five times more white residents as a whole in Lubbock.”
Now, here is the kicker: “Contraband was discovered in 33% of the searches conducted with black drivers, compared to 41% of the time with white drivers and 38.5% of the time with Hispanic drivers. In 2019, 5.4% of traffic stops involving a black driver resulted in an arrest, which is nearly double the 2.8% average. In traffic stops involving white drivers, 1.44% resulted in an arrest.”
In short, although white drivers were the most likely to be engaged in illegal activity, black drivers were more often arrested.
The year 2019 was not an aberration. Data from the prior four years showed the same pattern, the newspaper reported. Indeed, the same pattern of disproportionate policing of minority drivers has been documented for decades in localities all over the United States. The structure of systemic racism built into traffic stops just as a matter of course and without overt racism creates unjust law enforcement outcomes. The higher ratio of traffic stops of black drivers thus gives the impression, contrary to the evidence, that black citizens are more crime-prone than white ones.
This, in turn, produces more fraught encounters with police, more arrests and imprisonments, and reinforced stereotypes. Systemic racism (“sin of the world”) builds systemically racist policing.
What might it take to eliminate systemic racism? This is the topic for my next commentary, “Responding as Catholics to systemic racism.”
Deacon Clarke E. Cochran, PhD, serves at St. Peter Church in Charlotte.