A Critical Race Approach to Systemic Inequity

This book explores and explains the cognitive basis of American systemic inequity and demonstrates that across all human societies and throughout human history systemic inequity has always existed. Humans are evolutionarily wired to create hierarchies in society, whether based on race, like in America, or on the caste system, as in India. These hierarchies exist because humans involuntarily reframe reality and this reframing not only prevents permanent depression but it renders systemic inequity invisible and results in the inequity presenting as moral, desirable, and just.

This book illustrates this reality by carefully dismantling the cognitive illusions that undergird American exceptionalism and meritocracy. The result is a disorienting and painful reveal of an American reality based almost entirely on systemic inequity. The dilemma the book develops and explores is that the identical reframing mechanisms that render systemic inequity normative and moral are also essential for human societies to exist and for our position as an apex species on the planet.

Dismantling systemic inequity therefore is a much more difficult task than most currently understand. It has nothing to do with changing individual attitudes but rather it requires a complete and disruptive revision of what we currently understand as humanity.

Rory Bahadur's A Critical Race Approach to Systemic Inequality is an honest, uncomfortable, and insightful blend of theory, history, critical analysis, and just good, old-fashioned deep thinking that forces readers to confront the most painful truths about inequality in our country, our religions, and our world. Bahadur helps readers understand that our challenges reflect issues inherent in humans and societies everywhere while also forcing readers to confront the harm caused by systemic inequality. Delivered with Bahadur's characteristic incisiveness, the book also bleeds with his love for the United States and its promises. Perhaps the book's most important contribution is its convincing argument why change on an individual level, while admirable, is meaningless, and only significant systemic change can produce a just society.
— Michael Hunter Schwartz, Dean of the McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific