DK : "What does "systemic racism" mean? Well, it is quite true that the condition of black Americans today is related to their original status within the United States, which was usually that of a slave. When slavery was abolished after a war that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, constitutional amendments immediately proclaimed them to be full citizens, but many white Americans spent the next hundred years trying to stop that promise from being fulfilled. Meanwhile, despite the creation of a black middle class, the great migration northward, and the expansion of opportunities in industrial work, black people remained much poorer than white ones. The civil rights movement made great gains from the 1940s through the 1960s, ending legal segregation and discrimination, but that was followed by the "war on crime" and the "war on drugs," which led to the mass incarceration of black people (as well as the incarceration of a great many white ones.) Meanwhile, de-industrialization hurt everyone in the lower half of the economy very badly, including black Americans."
Because of the Civil War, emancipation, and its aftermath, but long after the fact, what was once called Southern Racism, for which the South was held to be solely to blame, and for which the Civil War was ostensibly fought, has now, since the mid 20th Century, finally become Systemic Racism.
It is no longer Southern Racism, what most Americans, especially in the North, were quite comfortable calling it, so long as the blacks, slave or free, stayed South of the Mason Dixon Line, and East of the Mississippi.
Now, low and behold, it is Systemic Racism.
It is now, all confess, ubiquitous. It is, everyone admits, everywhere at once.
Why? Because, finally, after almost 100 years after 1865, large numbers of black Americans finally moved North and West from the South.
This has been an outcome no one in the North even remotely contemplated at the time of the Civil War.
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