“Systemic injustice” is both one of the most important words in the lexicon around hot button issues like race relations and one of the most misunderstood. Many people confuse it with “systematic injustice,” as if the purpose is to depict this injustice as particularly widespread.
But that’s not the point at all. Systemic injustice is instead contrasted with personal injustice. With systemic injustice, the source of the injustice is not primarily caused by individuals holding racist views, but rather in the laws, institutions, infrastructure and so on — the systems, for short — that govern society.
When I think about systemic injustice, I think about my three years running an online competition called the Dominion League. We encountered a very small number of problematic players or personal conflicts between players, but most of my effort at reform sought to make the system as a whole fairer and better for players.
To me, then, identifying some injustice as systemic is actually great news. That means that we don’t have a bunch of people on the other side! We just need to change the laws; we don’t need to change public opinion. That’s why something like criminal justice reform can happen even with Trump in the White House.
More generally, confronting systemic injustice ultimately requires different tactics. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s largely succeeded by engineering conflicts with the racists holding public office throughout the South, highlighting their brutality. Even the George Floyd protests of 2020 had at their core a moment of police brutality with a clear bad actor. Meanwhile, systemic injustice deals with charts and legislation. It’s never going to pack as big a punch.
But the good news is that the solutions to systemic injustice are often also low enough salience that reforms can actually happen. Status quo bias is real, but it’s not an adversary working strategically to frustrate reform efforts.
Systemic Injustice is Not a Matter of Degree
To make a point that is on-topic to the post though... There's these two sentences from your post: "To me, then, identifying some injustice as systemic is actually great news. That means that we don’t have a bunch of people on the other side! We just need to change the laws; we don’t need to change public opinion."
That assumes (almost) everyone agrees with your morality, or at least an allied morality (allied, in the sense that it agrees with judging the system-in-question as injustice). But is that really the case? It depends on the specific issue, but in general I'd be skeptical. This assumption is further complicated for people who are bound to a morality by personal intuition, in which case agreement with a declaration of injustice isn't a binary yes/no but a sliding scale of emotion.
I suppose one could turn around and classify dissent from, or even insufficiently enthusiastic support for, one's moral judgments as "personal injustice". But well... it's not hard to see why that won't go over well with those who aren't already on one's side.
Hi Sam. If I may give my own take... I think it's a mistake to think of "systemic injustice" as a one-system "game" (i.e. the system being called 'unjust'). Instead, I think of it as a two-system game:
1) The system being called unjust
2) The system condemning 1) as unjust
1) is, as you say, typically a law, institution, infrastructure, etc.
2) on the other hand, is a morality
and "systemic injustice" is the phrase that 2) uses when it disapproves of 1)