I really don't use the term "systemic racism" very often and when I do it's usually to criticize somebody else tossing around the term capriciously. There are a couple of reasons for that. First and foremost, I still stand by the idea that the traditional understanding of racism -- a consciously held belief in the inferiority of a certain race of people or the supremacy of a specific race -- is correct. Moreover, I think it's dangerous to add abstractions to the concept. Finally, I think a lot of people are trying to move us away from the traditional concept of what racism is because they themselves hold those racist beliefs.
Still, I think that the overwhelming number of people who use the term without air quotes have taken the concept on faith. There's a reason why John McWhorter referred to wokeness as a "religion." I think there's some evidence that the people who use the term all the time don't know what they're really talking about in how they handle issues of policing.
The shooting of a Walter Scott by a white police officer was clearly not justified. One could argue that the officer was racist in the traditional sense; but, I can't prove that. He might have just been lazy and figured that shooting Scott would be easier than chasing him. Still, there's also no evidence of systemic racism there. In most cases of police misconduct it's just that -- a bad officer doing a bad thing. Yet, when it came to the Breonna Taylor shooting, her death was actually a result of a system. I don't think that there's sufficient evidence to say that it was a result of a racist system, especially not an inherently racist system, but a system nonetheless. Still, I can count on one hand the people who I know who were pointing out the system and the series of bad decisions and policies that lead to Taylor's death and none of us are vocal about systemic racism. The people who are always talking about systemic racism were spending so much time complaining about the cops that they didn't even know that Rand Paul introduced the Breonna Taylor act. If these people are focused on the cops rather than the system even in the case of Breonna Taylor, I doubt they're thinking things through.
The reality is that it's a tactic. Some people like Ibram X Kendi are accidentally honest about it while most people seem to not fully grasp what they're doing.
Even before I was born it was well known that "racist" is the worst thing that you can be called. Throughout my entire life people have known that calling a person "racist" was a useful tactic when they're losing an argument. The problem was, when we all generally agreed on the traditional concept of racism, a person calling somebody a racist for his or her position on tax policy would have been laughed out of the room.
Kendi said in no uncertain terms that he would regard any proposal to cut the capital gains tax rate to be racist. That's why people are trying to make the concept more obscure and broad -- they can use it to justify calling any disagreement on any issue "racist". This has come to the point where asking for evidence that systemic racism is a thing is racist in and of itself. Hence the religious aspect of this.
Now, how about the evidence? Well, they'll always point to inequities. They won't point to inequalities because equality isn't the goal. The reason why Kendi wants adjustments in the tax code to be seen as systemically racist isn't because people of different races are being treated differently under the law. His reason is because he believes what whites will benefit more than blacks.
This is another component of the ploy. They want to drive everything toward equal outcomes. Anybody with two functioning brain cells that if you allow free people to make choices freely and then you cop them into groups and run the numbers that you'll get disparities. If you add a third functioning brain cell you know that people can be divided into smaller and smaller groups until you get to the individual. Add one more functioning brain cell and you see that the ultimate goal is communism.
I think there are two possibilities left for me regarding what to think when I hear "systemic racism." One is that it's 95% tactic and maybe 5% truth and most of the time people are just using it as a buzzword without really thinking it through. The other is that, maybe Kendi was right about one thing in How to be an Antiracist -- the answer is "You can't."
On that second option, the most absurd component of the arguments regarding systemic racism made by people like Kendi and DiAngelo come with proposed fixes which all include more government control and some version of Marxism. We've tried those and we got genocides. The cure will actually aggravate the disease. If systemic racism is real, I see nobody on the planet with a coherent path to progress.