Systems aren’t inherently white or black, but when the people building the system are white or black, then the system is white or black. In America, white men unequivocally built the system. In the South, to protect their ability to own slaves, they kept the principles of autocracy in laws approved by the King, a “tyrant” as democracy believers called him in the Declaration of Independence, where the said he made them live under “the oppressions.” That’s the same language found in the 1649 constitution made by the Puritan Separatists after they cut the king’s head off. In states like South Carolina the kept the laws made under and approved by the tyrant, like the Negro law of 1740, and based all their laws on that, really importing them wholesale so their autocratically system constructed of laws based around maintaining a pro-slave system of tiered government could be kept. That is exactly why they wrote a state constitution based on autocratic principles in 1776, then updating it to exclude even moderately rich whites in 1778, so that only those legislators who could be elected came from the slave-holding top 3 percent. Thier legislature, which appointed the governor rather than vote for him, and assigned US Senators based on loyalty, like Calhoun, continued to revise their “Negro Laws”, in 1787, 1801, 1823, 1831 and 41 and so on, to make those laws more white systemically racist. I’ve read a bunch and can you, make were they openly white racist. Those were some draconian laws that under some conditions allowed or empowered whites to kill black slaves with impunity, as long as they reported the killing properly.
Meanwhile, back in Boston, after they clean up the tea, they enacted a state constitution that embodied the principles of democracy and inalienable rights, ratifying it in 1780, and then a slave sue for her freedom in 1781 based on that new constitution and won her case in court, along with a few other blacks who sued and won in court under this new democracy constitution. That constitution is still in effect today as a system of democracy. The white supremacist South Carolina constitution got ripped up to shreds and thrown in the trash, along with every state in the Confederate States of America a result of their autocracies being brutally defeated in the Civil War. Of course, confederate rich whites weren’t eradicated as a species, and they wrote new white systemic laws to set up systemically racist institutions, call “black codes” or “Jim crow laws.” I just call them laws, since they were passed by white supremacy legislatures explicitly dividing people under the law by race, restricting the rights of black Americans to marry whites, use the white entrance to a circus (true one), travel freely using the same seats and railcars whites could, or a host of other laws the legislatures passed and approved by the white male governors to build these systemically bigoted white systems on a state by state basis. I read Kentucky’s laws, a state that passed 72 explicitly racist laws all the way up to the 1950s, and Florida’s, whose last white racist law was passed in 1967.
This created two Americas, or perhaps three. It’s easy to see the systemic white racism when you look at just the laws for education in 1950 on a state by state basis. What will you will see is above the Mason-Dixon Line, the states all are “green” (just the color I’m assigning, like a green light), because they all make it illegal by law to segregate schools. Below the Mason-Dixon Line all states are colored red (again, for the red on a traffic signal, meaning stop right here democracy), because their explicitly written laws make it illegal to integrate schools. It’s a very sharp line even though the laws are made on a state by state basis. So yes Santa, white systemic racism does exist! You just gotta read the laws.