A spontaneous (only partial) short essay about systemic racism and the West's distinct problems
The parallelism of aspects thing about this seems to be: Yes, probably, in real* racist systems there is a a lot of denial** by people who ignore the injustice to be able to live with it. To not have to rebel/criticise it publicly, which would be risky. There seems to be no such systemic/institutional and no big cultural-societal risk in the West today with criticising racism. In at least 'common' racist systems (like other group-based injust systems) the more unethcial the system and societal relations get, the more people look away, don't want to think about it. That is because they (or some aspects within their human conglomerate, ethics and others) don't like this situation. In the metaphor: Their heartbeat isn't in rhythm with the heartbeat of the racist system. And so they have to spend energy to ignore this dissonance. Energy that probably hampers such societies from doing other things. Racist societies therefore are less productive in some sense, probably economically as well as ethically and culturally. They are less plural (in one earnest sense of „diverse“). And the West, especially the US, is quite plural in many areas of life. Which, then again, has costs, to uphold the societal connectivity. But this seems to me to be a distinctly (structurally, ethically, culturally, etc.) different problem from the one racist systems societies have.
* There then could be a 'soft' or underneath kind of racism, that let people criticise it and still uphold an institutionally and economically racist system. But there are so many other factors than race in the West, especially in the US, that this seems not to be the major factor in US societal relations.
** Interestingly, many of the public self-accusations of racism or racist complicity by self-feeling “progressive“ White people in the US is not an evidence for systemic racism but for denying the plural of problems and factors and reducing it to a self-accusation-self-aggrandising mono-topic. Which, if it dominates the public discourse and institutional reactions, rather distracts from really working and debating the different problems that amongst others the “ethnic communities“ and the other group categories have to face in the West. Which are again, distinctively different from the problems in a systemically racist society. And partly different from other kinds of group-based inequality systems in different non-Western countries.