Abstract

The concept of systemic racism is often referenced in the face of statistical anomalies that show racial disparities, but these only provide prima facie evidence of it. The challenge is to show its operation in the concrete. To show how that challenge can be met, we take the case of Robert Moses, the notorious powerbroker who dominated Manhattan from behind the scenes for much of the twentieth century. Understanding how he did so involves going beyond Moses the man to show how his every move, even when it appeared to be most innovative, was to a large degree determined by a material social structure within which a long-standing racism was already deeply embedded in systemic form. Social systems have their own dynamic, but what remains intact across radical change serves to characterize any such system. It is in that sense that we can talk of systemic racism.