Dear Editor,

William Barr says racism is not systemic.

He doesn’t understand systems.

Every system is perfectly designed for its outputs--both desirable outputs and undesirable outputs. Our system is so highly touted because it outputs millionaires and billionaires and also outputs poverty, violence, unfairness, environmental disasters, and mistreatment of women and people of color.

Barr says it’s not systemic because he says these things aren’t demonstrably “built into” the system.

However, the fact that these outputs consistently result from the system is evidence that these results are systemically driven and produced. They aren’t output by accident. This fact is often overshadowed by a celebration of the wealth produced.

We have a system that outputs poverty, violence, unfairness, environmental disasters and mistreatment of women and people of color. Sadly, the system is a stable one. We can expect these outputs to continue from this system, as it is effectively designed to produce these outputs. Better results cannot be expected until the design of the system is fundamentally changed (or abandoned).

To illustrate the point about every system being perfectly designed for its outputs, consider a manufacturing system—a series of processes outputting widgets. Say we measure performance of this system to discover it operates at 90% effectiveness. Given 100 inputs, this system of processes consistently outputs 90 good widgets. As currently designed, the system is stable at 90% effectiveness.

  So, of the next 100 inputs, 10 can be expected to be bad ones. These 10 bad ones are as fully the result of the system as are the 90 good ones. The system is effectively designed to fail, or result in bad widgets, 10% of the time.

  If the manufacturer is satisfied with 90% effectiveness, the system will continue to operate as designed and implemented. If improvement becomes an objective, actual performance won’t improve until effort is expended to change the existing design and operation of the system. Expecting better performance without accepting that the system needs to change in order to result in better performance is akin to the Einsteinian definition of insanity. So blaming the workers or brow beating them to work harder won’t work because the system is effectively designed to fail 10% of the time. It fails by design.

  Notice nowhere in the operations planning do we find a plan to fail 10% of the time. We don’t find an objective or a documented strategy for failing 10% of the time. It may not be intentionally “built into” the system, but effectively it IS built into the system—even if the system planning that resulted in current performance levels isn’t recognized as a plan to fail 10% of the time—systemically.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/barr-attorney-general-racism-antifa-1.5710304

Dan Nelson
Rollinsville