Thread by @jrforasteros

Systematic Racism as explained by Monopoly:

Let's imagine I host a game of Monopoly, but for some reason in this game, I make all of the black players skip two turns for every 1 they take, while all the white players get to play every turn.

Let that game play out in your head. It's not hard to imagine that, an hour into play, the game is going to be wildly unfair. Now, is it possible that some of the white players will be doing poorly? Yeah, you can be bad at Monopoly even if the rules are in your favor.

And is it possible that a black player might end up with a lot of money and property? Sure. It's not against the rules for a black player to do well, but it's gong to be really hard.

And above all, the game isn't fair.

Now, imagine that halfway through the game, I realize how unfair it is (maybe because of the repeated protestations of the black players, for instance). I change the rules back to the original rules of Monopoly and tell everyone to finish the game.

We don't restart the game. We just keep playing by the normal rules from the halfway point forward.

Someone coming into the game just after this would shrug and say, "I guess white players are just, as a rule, better at Monopoly." But that's not true... and what we have now isn't fair either, even though we're playing by the fair rules.

(Of course in real Monopoly, we can just restart the game. But in life we can't, so in this Monopoly we can't either.)

So we make some new rules. We maybe redistribute some of the properties, or give the black players a break on house/hotel prices. Or we start letting them take 2 or 3 turns for every one the white players get.

Again, a person who comes in at this point is going to say, "Hey, that's not fair! You're rewarding inferior players! This is discrimination!" But it's not... it's an attempt to redress past injustices in the present.

And there's no way to do it that is going to make everyone happy, unless the white players recognize they've been benefiting from an unfair rule set and all agree.

Now imagine a white person playing the game is a kind, nice guy. He is genuinely friends with the black player to his right (they were best men in each others' weddings!). He doesn't bear his friend any ill will.

But he also doesn't speak up to change the rules of the game, even when his friend protests. (He doesn't oppose the rule changes, but he doesn't say anything either. He doesn't like to cause conflict.)

If his friend is that one exceptional (or lucky) black player, he might even comment, in private, to his friend that he's not like all those other black players, even that his success is proof that anyone can win this game if they just play by the rules.

But none of that is true. And that white guy is still participating in, and benefiting from a racist system.

NOW imagine this is a new legacy version of Monopoly (the legacy board games are the ones that you play over and over as one long story, and the results of one game inform how the next game starts, like chapters in a book).

Say you are playing the Legacy Monopoly and instead of changing the old (racist) rules halfway through one game, you play 50 games with that set of rules. And then you change the rules.

And let's say you're done with the game, but you pass it on to your kids, so now they're all playing what they inherited from their parents. o THEY didn't make any choices about how to play, and when they take over, they start playing by normal Monopoly rules.

You can see how the same problems still apply. They've inherited an unjust game, and just playing by 'fair' rules in the present doesn't make the game fair. And certainly this is going to be a lot harder to fix (because again you can't just scrap this game and start over).

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try! And it means white people have to get a lot more comfortable with what feels like injustice and losing. It's not that... but it feels like that. Because we've been winning for way too long.