Ah--now I understand your perspective much better; thank you for such a long exposition!

I see now that we were using different definitions of the word "racism". I typically assume that the word follows the individual definition that seems to have taken hold in the 70s (for a discussion of the more recent history, in addition to personal experience, I use https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/racism-concept-change/594526/). In contrast, you seem to favor the repopularized version that specifically refers to racial hierarchy (as in the definition from the Anti-Defamation League: https://www.adl.org/racism).

I have no particular emotional attachment to either definition; I tend to assume the former because it is more prevalent and because the intense pejorative affect developed around the individual definition and it is a conceptual error to apply it thoughtlessly to the other definition. (Perhaps racial hierarchy should evoke even more revulsion; it's hard sometimes to tell when you pit evils against each other which is the more malevolent.) But there's also a solid historical argument that racial hierarchy was the idea that gave rise to the whole mess, and that racism (and anti-racism) should refer to ideas of racial hierarchy rather than how those ideas might be expressed in individuals. I think it's non-ideal pedagogy to use without clarification one definition when you another definition is in wider use, but you've now described the distinction quite clearly.

I think there's a very worthwhile discussion to have regarding which terms are the best ones to use to mean what--what choice of terms best serves the aims of clear communication? Of emotional saliency? Of historical accuracy? But for now that can be deferred; we can address the meaning behind the words rather than the words themselves once everyone is clear on what they mean. I'll return to how I would view vocabulary towards the end.

When you say, " What this means is that racist behavior at the individual level corresponds with or reflects a specific identity. It is an identity imbued with the manufactured social construct of a Racial Hierarchy that enables the patterned behavior." I think I understand what you mean, and I agree--the individual behavior, at least to a large extent, follows the identity. But it's a peculiarly American thing to have such a strong, clear, emphasized hierarchy. If you look in, say, South Africa, the power hierarchy has flipped (though the economic hierarchy has not entirely), and it renders everything more muddled. But we're speaking of the U.S., not South Africa.

So, okay--we used different terms, and it wasn't as obvious to me as perhaps it should have been, so now your comments seem much more comprehensible.

The general gist of what you're saying makes a lot of sense: the racial hierarchy that was established in various ways (including the pseudoscience of racial differences) is not something that can be easily reconstructed in a different hierarchy. It is the thing it has always been: the attitude and institutions that the white race (whatever that is defined as at the time) is superior to the non-white races (whichever are selected at the time, but always including blacks).

However, I think you're overlooking another very important aspects to the situation that, while it doesn't negate what you say about racial hierarchy, is such an important caveat that any discussion of the present situation is incomplete without it. (This is not to say that I'm not also overlooking important aspects of the situation--I rather suspect that I am.) This involves the source of the ongoing disparities between people of different racial identity, and circles back around to racial hierarchy in the end.

If you'll permit me the lengthy explanation (I've been meaning to write most of this stuff down for a while anyway):

I have two legs. If I wear a concrete boot on my left foot to establish a right-side hierarchy, my right leg will assuredly have better outcomes with endurance and strength and so on than my left leg. A right-supremacy has been established. If I take the boot off, equity is restored. But suppose instead I stab a knife into my left leg. Again right-supremacy is established. But if I decide that this was a stupid thing to do, and remove the knife from my left leg, the disparity remains even though no additional damage as being done. I have to heal, and what I need to do to aid healing may be wholly unlike removing a boot or viewing my left and right sides equally instead of with right-side hierarchy.

In the case of the knife, the mechanism of damage is clear. Is there a corresponding long-lasting impact that can be had on human societies? I think so.

First, there is economic heritage. The United States prides the "self-made man" and yet compared to most first-world countries it has rather lousy social mobility which is essentially the quantification of how easy it is to make yourself. (See, for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_United_States#Intragenerational_mobility.) Thus, policies and attitudes that resulted in economic disadvantage decades ago can continue to cause disadvantage today, even if the policies and attitudes have been entirely reversed. (They have not been entirely reversed, but even if they had, the effects would linger.) In the U.S., about half of your outcome is determined by the economic condition you were born into (on average).

Second, there is culture. Cultures that are adaptive for, or the consequence of, surviving oppression and bigotry are not necessarily ideal for thriving in times of opportunity and freedom. Cultures that worked well in history do not necessarily work well in modern times. The clearest example of the profound benefit of some cultures in the United States is the incredibly high educational attainment, and correspondingly high economic attainment, found among many Asians in the United States. You can see reflections of it being cultural if you compare, for instance, immigrants of different generations, assuming that over time the culture will become more like the average in the United States. And indeed you do see drops (e.g. https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/22991/413239-Immigrant-Youth-Outcomes-Patterns-by-Generation-and-Race-and-Ethnicity.PDF, page 12, "Youth Attending School" (ages 19 to 22)). Of course, the culture could just be the culture of racial hierarchy--then it's just another way of saying the same thing. But culture could make a difference in other ways too.

Because of these two things, it is entirely plausible that even if, right now, "blacks are equal to whites in terms of the social construct of race" you could still have a substantial sustained group disparity for reasons other than genetics. Perhaps this would eventually heal--the social mobility side of things would eventually average out. Perhaps not--culture can be self-sustaining for arbitrarily long, provided that categories persist enough to maintain any distinct culture. It hasn't been that long enough to tell. Title VII wasn't passed until 1991!

But, of course, there are still inequalities in the social construct of race. And yet, the other factors are still factors. You cannot just look at the outcome and infer the proximal cause, and even if you know the ultimate cause, that's not very helpful in deciding what to do. If I have removed the knife from my leg, exploratory surgery is not the answer; if the blade has broken off in my leg, surgery is the only answer.

Reality is complicated. Lots of factors can be at play at the same time. But we can sometimes get a sense of the scale of each type of problem. If we look at economic mobility across race, stratified by the household income percentile of parents, we find two things: one, the curves aren't very flat (flat = perfect mobility) and two, they're offset from each other with blacks below whites (lower = suppression due to racial hierarchy + any cultural effects + any other effects). (See the summary graph in the first figure in https://www2.census.gov/ces/opportunity/race_and_econ_opp_executive_summary.pdf.)

What the graph shows is that (1) your household income percentile is boosted by about 30% if your parents are wealthy vs. poor regardless of whether you're black or white, and (2) your household income percentile is suppressed by about 15% if you're black. If you take the average difference in percentiles between black and white households (~20%, not the 80% difference between rich and poor) then you discover that, very roughly, about 1/3 of the economic disadvantage comes from economic heritage, and 2/3 from other factors.

If you dig in deeper to the data, you find that the numbers are for "households" but that there is a disparity in household structure between black and white individuals. If you look it at the individual level (https://www2.census.gov/ces/opportunity/race_and_econ_opp_slides.pdf, slides 34-36), you find that black and white women have basically identical economic outcomes whereas black men fall about 10% below white men. So now we have decomposed the disparity as follows:

* 1/3 of the economic disadvantage comes from economic heritage

* 1/6 of the economic disadvantage comes from unidentified forces (possibly racial hierarchy) on black males

* 1/2 of the economic disadvantage comes from differences in household structure (since it only shows up in household not individual income).

* 0 economic disadvantage comes from non-economic-heritage forces on black females

Economic attainment is not the only measure of relevance. If one group has to struggle to achieve what another group achieves by relaxing, it's hardly a mark of fairness, even if the outcomes are the same. If some careers are off limits while others of equal income potential are available, this too is not fair. Yet it appears that black women are no longer gravely economically affected by the racial hierarchy. (Incidentally, it also pretty much torpedos any idea that genetics is a significant explanation: black women have the same genes as black men.) They *are* badly affected by economic heritage.

So, here we have a direct example of long-lasting (if not perpetually maintained) disparity that doesn't seem to have much to do with racial hierarchy or with genetics, only economic heritage plus lack of social mobility. (There are still substantial differences in test scores between black and white women--maybe the tests are biased, or maybe they are fair but the testing disparity is in areas that are not important for economic attainment.)

What's going on with black men? It's not clear to me. There's a slightly more extensive set of slides that claims that income disparties on the neighborhood tract level for white and black men are diminished if there is "greater father presence" or "less racial bias". But the data show small effect sizes (at https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/race_slides.pptx); not nearly enough to explain the disparity. (Also: the measure of racial bias is pretty lousy.)

You said, "[Racial hierarchy] is a construct specifically created for the sole purpose of extracting wealth by legislating free-labor from and dehumanization of a group of people distinguished by skin color in order to protect aristocratic wealth." That seems like a fair assessment from everything I've seen, and I'm sure you've seen a lot more than I have.

But just because this was very intentionally created for the purpose, it no longer follows--after extensive albeit quite incomplete dismantling of the hierarchy--that this is the proximal explanation for "why aren't the groups socially, economically, financially, residentially, educationally and resourcefully equivalent?".

You asked me if I agree that the "social construct of a Racial Hierarchy remains well intact". Yes, I think so. There is no other explanation for a (properly-executed) implicit association test; there is no other explanation for the scale of difference in interview offers to identical resumes where only the name has changed between a white-sounding and a black-sounding name (even though black-sounding names may sound "foreign" and there is also a foreign name effect; it's just smaller). I think the evidence leads us to conclude that it's not the only factor. I'm not even sure it's the largest one any longer, though it's certainly big enough (and foul enough) to want to dismantle as quickly as possible. But is it driving everything, is it the sole evil beside which all else pale even now? Or has that evil been weakened to the point where its historical consequences remain, but its power to effect change is only moderate? I think the evidence more strongly supports the latter. And because of this lack of simplicity of cause, I think the considerations surrounding everything, including terminology, need re-examination.

So, back to terminology. There have been and is plenty of mutual ethnic animosity all around the world, from Greeks vs Turks in Cypress through Hutus vs Tutsis in Rwanda to Bodos vs. Adviasi (and many other paired conflicts) in Assam, India. Sometimes there are strong power dynamics; sometimes not. Yet there is, usually, strong personal animosity. Lots of bigotry, prejudice--"ethnism", let's call it. Sometimes discrimination is legislated, sometimes not. These things don't happen when people view themselves as all belonging to one country--or all belonging to humanity. The views that lead to these conflicts should quite rightly be demonized.

Even granting the long-standing purpose of racial hierarchy, even granting that the ongoing disparity between races in the U.S. is in large part maintained by it, even admitting that individual expressions of bigotry and prejudice are driven in large part by the social construct of racial hierarcy--even granting all that, I am not convinced that it is wise to choose our meanings such that "a person can only be racist if they identify with the social construct of a racial superiority" (where the superiority is actualized in power and economic cloud, not merely imagined--most everyone imagines the moral superiority of whichever group they identify with). This means that only whites can be racist, and it means we only say that whites can be racist. Should we adopt a pejorative term to unleash upon one group of people alone, heightening divisions? If the division is already sky-high, this does no harm. But if the divisions are dwindling, it can make matters worse.

Where is the long-term danger? Is it in the lingering social construct, or is it in the interpersonal animosity? Our choice of terminology depends on which we believe is the more serious threat, from where the evil flows most strongly.

From an international perspective, I think the focus on individual acceptance instead of prejudice is clearly the right way to go. On a national level, I agree it's not so clear, but we have already built a very strong aversion to being individually bigoted and prejudiced and labled that view "racism", so that tips my estimate in favor of leaving that alone rather than trying to recapture it to refer only to the expression of racial hierarchy. I don't think it's a clear call, and I do appreciate your perspective (and your tutorial explaining why the perspective is valid and important). But I'm not fully convinced.

Indeed, your parallels sway me in the opposite direction than I think you intended:

When I think of "holocaust", I think of the organized extermination of Jews by the Germans prior to and during World War II (along with the Roma, homosexuals, and others). But when I think of anti-Semitism, I think of individual attitudes towards Jews that may or may not be part of a social construct of hatred (like the Nazis had) but which are hateful and harmful nonetheless.

When I think of "genocide", I think of the holocaust, I think of Rwanda, I think of Yugoslavia, I think of the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman empire, I think of the slaughter of indigenous people in the Americas by the United States, by the Spanish, and by the other indigenous people in the America; and so on.

When I think of "slavery", I think of something of roughly comparable evil to the holocaust (less in intensity, but more in expanse throughout history), but when I think of "racism", I think of something of roughly comparable evil to anti-Semitism.

I don't think it serves anyone well to say "well, your shop was burned down by people who spraypainted swasticas all over it, but it's not anti-Semitism because the guys who did it don't really understand Nazi ideology and they don't have state power behind them, so yeah, it's just bigotry". No! It's a particular type of common bigotry that is sufficiently widespread that it's worth having a term for that specifically. This is an anti-Semitic hate crime.

And so this suggests to me that racism should be used, as it has been used extensively from the 70s at least, to refer to the individual bigotry, and to use other terms--like racial hierarchy, institutional racism, systemic racism, etc.--to capture the social constructs.

You ask why the concept of "racism" has become so diluted, but I don't think it has at its core. I think it's still very crisp and powerful--it just isn't pointed at what you want.

The dilution in concept has been happening recently when people have been re-emphasizing that there is more at play than simply individual racial bigotry, that while the overt signs of individual racial bigotry have largely if not completely faded, the concept of racial hierarchy is alive and well, and multiple instances exist of systemic disadvantage. The dilution in force has come from over-use in political and social media contexts: the term "racist" is thrown around like candy, with insufficient attention to the distinction between someone who fervently believes that whites are superior and blacks should be subservient, and to someone who kinda feels that standardized testing works fine and so why rock the boat. With very much more of this, the core power of the term will be lost for *any* purpose, individual or broader. But when that happens, it is not certain that the more specialized terms will suffer the same fate: "racism" may become meaningless while "institutional racism", "racial hierarchy", and so on, may retain their meanings.

I think that when we allow "racism" to mean "individual racial bigotry" rather than "only discriminatory thoughts and actions supporting the racial hierarchy", we are more likely to sharpen than dilute the focus of attack. People can scream "racism" at each other until they're blue in the face, and teens can start using "you're so racist" as a term of general mild derision, and it won't matter to how effectively we can attack ideas of racial hierarchy because more specific terms will be spared. And I think when we allow "racism" to mean "indvidiual racial bigotry" of any sort, we covertly reduce the sharpness of racial boundaries set by the racial hierarchy because it emphasizes that we all can be flawed and yet all should be on guard to avoid thoughts and actions that can emphasize these largely arbitrary distinctions and divisions.

So, oddly enough, although I agree with your goal--let's dismantle the racial hierarchy!--I am not totally sold on your choice of terminology to assist in doing that; and I think you may have a slightly too rosy of a picture of how much erasing the idea of the hierarchy would accomplish (and a slightly too bleak picture of how little can be accomplished while it remains). I don't doubt that you have expended a lot more thought than I have on this and related matters, but I have been a keen student of philosophy, psychology, and world affairs for quite some time, and I have extensive training in how to understand the complex systems (including their dynamics). I've shared above reasonable amounts of evidence and reasonably careful argumentation in support of a different view, and in light of that I am not yet willing to completely discount my alternate perspective.

Perhaps you'll find the perspective worth considering.