[Content Note: Racism.]
"Institutional racism doesn't require the enlisting of individual racists. The machine does the discriminating. ...Yet institutional racism's defenders—or more precisely, its concealers—demand an articulated proof for something that moves in silence. They demand to see chapter and verse for something that is unwritten. They demand to know the names of the individual architects of a structure built subconsciously over time by each member of the vast multitudes adding their own bit, like beavers adding branches to a dam. Institutional racism isn't so much a grand design as it is an accumulation of racial detritus. Symbols are important. Those Confederate flags must come down. That will be a spiritual victory. But we must not stop there. Institutional racism is the real prize on this hunt."—Charles M. Blow, in a terrific piece for the New York Times on how the removal of the Confederate flag from public spaces is just a starting point, not an endpoint.
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