What is Path-Dependency and How Does It Help Explain Systemic Racism in America?

Since the most recent social justice uprising in response to police brutality even in the midst of a global pandemic in May 2020, activism from many groups who have been in the space for years have become amplified at protests, on mainstream news channels such as CNN and NBC, and on Instagram and other media sites. Words such as “white privilege”/”white fragility”, “marginalization”, and “mass incarceration” have been utilized in efforts to reveal the barriers that marginalized communities face. One of these words is “systemic racism.”

At its core, systemic racism is exactly what it sounds like it is: it is racism that has been institutionalized into systems which perpetuate racial disparities at every moment in time.

Addressing systemic racism, however, is much more complicated than just addressing the “systems” that have been put into place. Addressing systemic racism begins with digging into when the systems were created, how long they’ve been at work, and what other systems have been built on top of them to intentionally exclude marginalized groups.

Addressing systemic racism continues with not only acknowledging and altering these systems, but actually dismantling these systems.

This dismantling is important if marginalized communities are to share in the same life chances that white people benefit from.

Many, if not all, nations in this world have racial hierarchies of one sort or another, but racial hierarchy and racial capitalism is particularly acute in the United States. This is because marginalization has been encoded into America’s legacy since its very inception, and systems of oppression have been at work for more than 400 years. The land that metropolises such as New York and San Francisco were built on was stolen from sovereign indigenous nations; many of these cities were erected by enslaved BIPOC. Marginalization was necessary in order for America to launch to the success that it did in the post-war era because it provided free land and labor to white colonists.

The first slave boat arrived on America's shores in 1619 and for more than 200 years, America’s prosperity was built on and enabled through the unfettered marginalization of certain communities. A key word is unfettered. Although slavery was abolished on June 14, 1863, the systemic oppression of Black people and BIPOC didn’t vanish. It just changed shapes.

Slavery continued to manifest in the form of Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration, discriminatory lending strategies, and many more insidious structures which systematically left out marginalized communities from the opportunity that white Americans benefitted from socially and economically, especially in the post-war era. A regular argument “against” the presence of systemic racism is that “slavery was abolished more than 150 years ago, there’s no way that slavery still has an impact on holding BIPOC back.” (Note, I use the word “against” in quotes here because there is no way to argue against systemic racism. The presence of systemic racism in America is a fact that can’t be argued against, and most arguments “against” systemic racism are from WP who are 1) under-educated on the systems of oppression that have been created through years and years of institutionalization, and/or 2) lack personal experience of these systems of oppression because of their positionality in this system. )

This comment exemplifies a basic misunderstanding of something known as path dependencies.

A scholar by the name of Albert Hirschman was the first to apply path dependency to the history of countries. At its core, path dependency is the theory that “institutions change less than might be expected and constrain advancement. The reason for the lack of change is that policymakers make assumptions, make cautious decisions, and fail to learn from experience.” (1) In essence, institutions are resistant to change. Albert Hircshman took this concept, which is usually applied to technology adoption in companies and applied it to the history of countries, arguing that the history of a country generates possibilities and constraints which affect theory. Determining how to address racism in America involves first a steady examination of the past.

In Daria Roithmayr’s book “Reproducing Racism”, she applies Albert Hirschman’s theory of path dependency to the United States’ condition, arguing that “white advantage functions as a powerful self-reinforcing monopoly, reproducing itself automatically from generation to generation even in the absence of intentional discrimination” (2) Roithmayr’s book addresses both race-neutral policies (formal institutions) and “social mechanisms that generate and reproduce inequality” (informal institutions). (3) Roithmayr’s book is a 158 page examination of just how “locked-in” racism is in America, lacking the need for even intentional discrimination to perpetuate white advantage. This independence from intentional discrimination is exactly what makes systemic racism “systemic”. Systemic racism exists whether the individual acts overtly racist or not and this is why simply addressing racism at the individual level is not enough.

A key term in the effort to understand path dependencies is the term “institutions”. When people hear the word “institution”, they may think of the higher education institution or a mental hospital which may be referred to as a mental institution, but the term institution when used in the context of path dependencies is much less tangible. As explained by economist David North, institutions refer to rules, procedures, or norms that constrain behavior. These rules may be formal such as policies and/or informal such as behavior codes or social norms. America has many “institutions” which fit this definition that perpetuate racial inequality. Red-lining policies and Jim Crow laws are historical examples of formal institutions, while the War on Drugs and abortion laws are both modern examples of formal institutions which disproportionately impact marginalized communities. White exceptionalism, microaggressions, and derogatory stereotypes against BIPOC are examples of informal institutions which have been created through years and years of reinforcement which also exacerbate racial inequality.

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The Mass Incarceration System: A Case Study of a Path Dependency

The reason that slavery was integral in building America was because it provided free labor to white colonials. In a capitalist nation, capitalists are dependent on free or cheap labor that can be captured from the working class in order to generate wealth. Slave labor was a capitalist’s dream. Free labor coupled with heinously long work days allowed the capitalist to squeeze as much free labor as possible from the slave without ever allowing the slave to share in any of the economic fruits of their labor.

When slavery was abolished in 1863, the capitalist class suddenly lost all of their free labor. In an effort to recapture this labor, white people (WP) created laws which made it possible to incarcerate African-Americans without due trial, and then made it legal to enscript labor from prisoners.

Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th notes a catch in the 13th amendment (the amendment which outlawed slavery). It allowed slavery if used as ““punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” (4) White capitalists seized on this nuance. According to research, “after the Civil War, there was a significant rise in imprisonment of former slaves in the U.S.” (5) Prior to 1850, America’s prison population was predominantly white, but after the emancipation proclamation, the imprisonment of Black folks began to rise.

Jim Crow laws enabled this rise in Black incarceration by creating laws which specifically targeted Black people. It was illegal to be unemployed. Misdemeanors and trivial sentences were treated as felonies with harsher and longer sentences. (6) Instead of slaves, Black people had a new name: “convicts”, but the mechanism was the same. Convicts were shackled, they had no choice in whether or not they were to perform the labor they were told to do, no self-determination in whether or not they could walk off the job, and they were leased to perform free labor for capitalists who then reaped all of the profits from the labor they were usurping from Black and Brown bodies. (The term "leased” is particularly significant here as it is important to bring attention to the language that was used surrounding incarcerated individuals. “Leasing” is a term reserved for property. “Contracting” would be an appropriate term for temporary labor. The use of “leasing” from 1870 to 1900 when referring to mandated prison labor reveals that objectification & dehumanization of BIPOC that was still blatant during this time period.)

From 1870 to 1900 convicts of color did essentially the exact same labor they had done since before they were free: they worked in the fields. (7) Ending the convict leasing program was difficult for governments and prisons alike because the convict leasing program was extremely profitable for them. (8)The argument against ending convict leasing sounds exactly like the argument against ending slavery: if we end this free labor program, it will cost the capitalists free money.

Regardless, throughout the early 20th century, convict leasing programs were gradually phased, reaching their peak in 1888 and then declining thereafter. The practice was officially abolished in 1841 but this did not mean an end to the “new slavery”. (9) Yet again, prison slavery changed its tune. America entered the era of what scholar Michelle Alexander calls “another trickier, evolved, version of slavery, and Jim Crow” in her book “The New Jim Crow,” a redesigned version of the racial caste.

Prison labor is still a modern phenomenon. What’s worse, prisoners are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act (9) making it legal to pay prisoners less than the minimum wage. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, as recently as 2010, a federal court held that “prisoners have no enforceable right to be paid for their work under the Constitution.” (10) Many prisoners make between 2 cents to $2 an hour. Over the years, they have worked in “mining, agriculture, and all manner of manufacturing from making military weapons to sewing garments for Victoria’s Secret.” (11) In 2017, “a Louisiana sheriff gave a press conference railing against a new prisoner release program because it cost him free labor from “some good [inmates] that we use every day to wash cars, to change oil in the cars, to cook in the kitchen.” (9) Yet again, the underlying issue is revealed. Releasing convicts costs capitalists in positions of privilege access to free or cheap labor.

Other issues exacerbate the problem of mass incarceration and prison labor. Many policies disproportionately affect marginalized communities by targeting poverty, drugs & addiction, and abortion.(12 | 13) More aggressive policing patterns in communities that are predominantly BIPOC also play into this issue. Just Mercy, a book by Bryan Stevenson, demonstrates another one of these many nuances by revealing how many incarcerated people of color may have never even committed the crime they were imprisoned for. White skepticism of BIPOC and pressure on police to find a criminal create a perfect storm to persecute the innocent.

Over the years, the nature of prison labor has changed, but what hasn’t changed is the fundamentals. A disparate percentage of the prison population is still Black and Brown, and a large majority are still put to work for the capitalist class. This is a stark demonstration of exactly how path-dependencies work. Although the formal structure, the structure that the individual sees on a tangible basis may change, the underlying fundamentals, the institutions, the norms and codes which construct this structure remain the same and perpetuate distinctly racist structures in the American society. It is for this reason that it is necessary to dismantle institutions such as the mass incarceration system before any re-building can occur.

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An analogy that is helpful when attempting to understand why dismantling institutions is the first step in addressing systemic racism is this: you are building a house, but when you start to build the foundation, you realize the land is sinking because you built the house on unstable land. Then as you continue to build, you realize the wood on the first story is rotten. Would you continue to build the second story on top of this house, with its sinking foundation and its rotting first story? No. You would dismantle these first two layers, anchor your foundation until you hit bedrock, and buy new wood that will provide a strong layer for the second story of your home. The same needs to be done in America. To try to continue to build on a rotten foundation for prosperity is misguided, and historical experience proves this to be true. Since the Civil Rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s, some work has been done in efforts to include BIPOC in the prosperity that the American Dream claims to provide, but without any effort to dismantle the systems that have excluded marginalized individuals for centuries, there is simply a delay of the inevitable collapse. Until these systems are dismantled there will continue to be work to build only on a sinking foundation and a rotting first story.