Matt Lutz opens at Persuasion with a great anecdote that I never heard before.

In “The Imaginary Invalid,” a play written by the French satirist Molière, a doctor is asked why opium makes people fall asleep. The doctor replies that “there is a dormitive virtue in it, whose nature it is to make the senses drowsy.” In other words, opium makes people fall asleep because it has the power to make people fall asleep. That joke has since become a favorite among philosophers and historians of science because it is a wonderful example of an explanation that doesn’t explain. Rather than provide an understanding of why opium causes sleepiness, it’s a tautology dressed up in jargon.

Its application to the crux of his post is obvious. The endemic phrase “systemic racism” is defined as racism that is systemic. Lawyers often argue that a definition that includes the word being defined is not a definition at all. When we do, the response is “but IT IS!!!” Not a strong argument, but if delivered with sufficient passion, its promulgators feel confident they’ve won the point.

These days, in discussions of race, the term “systemic racism” is everywhere. In the bad old days, the theory goes, racism was personal, a matter of individual racial animus. Personal racism was easy to identify and, thus, easy to stamp out, or at least to drive underground. Why, then, do racial inequalities persist? Believers in systemic racism would say that disparities today are not primarily caused by the racism of people, but by the racism of systems. We have a society that is racist, even if the people in it are not personally racist.

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This is not to say that systemic racism doesn’t exist. There are persistent racial disparities in society; those disparities have a cause; therefore, there is systemic racism.

Lutz falls into a trap here, where the proof is disparate racial outcomes, an assumption that ignores a wealth of reasons. The days of Griggs v. Duke Power‘s rebuttable presumption are long gone, and it’s no longer tenable among academics to recognize that sometimes people make choices, like a preference to be an NBA star or a rapper than an astrophysicist.

But Lutz goes on to make a salient point using a story from my erstwhile buddy, The Agitator, back when he reported on substantive fact that offered insight as to the problems to be faced, and thus fixed, that would actually accomplish something.

There is a better way forward. One of the most incisive pieces of journalism to come out of the racial unrest of the last seven years or so was an article on policing practices in Ferguson, Missouri, by Radley Balko at The Washington Post. Balko showed that the St. Louis suburbs had an abnormal municipal structure, as the area around St. Louis was divided into an unusually large number of small towns. This created a massive bureaucratic overhead, as each small town needed to maintain its own set of services, including its own local police department.

Some of these towns, like Ferguson, encompassed mostly low-income areas, which meant that there wasn’t a wealthy tax base from which to draw. So the town, and the police department, funded itself by fining its citizens for even the most minor infractions. This exacerbated the impoverished conditions among the predominantly black citizens of Ferguson. It also strained the relationship between the people of Ferguson and the police force, which mostly lived in other, wealthier towns. That fraught dynamic explains, in part, why Ferguson exploded in righteous fury after the 2014 shooting of an 18-year-old black man named Michael Brown. (Despite initial reports, the shooting was not cut and dry, and the Obama Department of Justice declined, after an investigation, to prosecute the officer involved).

The scenario in Ferguson and its surrounding towns seems to fit the characterization of “systemic,” provided one didn’t surmise that dumping the bureaucratic cost of maintaining a bunch of local white-run fiefdoms that had no cognizable reason to continue to exist on the backs of the poor, black residents wasn’t intentionally racist, and the system was constructed for the specific purpose of making the poor black residents pay so the wealthier white residents could enjoy their local control without expense.

This story documents an instance of systemic racism. And it illustrates a pattern of oppression that isn’t confined to Ferguson: poor towns can’t raise enough money through taxes and have to find ways to extract it from their citizens by other means, exacerbating the cycle of poverty and damaging the relationship between police and citizens. Let’s give that pattern a snappy name and campaign against it: End municipal funding exploitation! Ok, that doesn’t have the same snap as “end systemic racism”—branding isn’t my strong suit. But, as a concept, municipal funding exploitation identifies one of the myriad mechanisms by which racial inequalities endure. Talking about it, and campaigning against it, is likely to do much more good than any campaign to “end systemic racism.”

And that’s a valuable point, that calling what was happening in Ferguson “municipal funding exploitation” wasn’t sufficiently snappy, so better to call it systemic racism. Except then it conveyed no message as to what was wrong in Ferguson and, accordingly, what could be done to fix it.

It would be cynical to suggest that the pervasive embrace of “systemic racism” is designed for just this purpose, to obscure real problems in favor of this simplistic vagary so that no one takes a hard, serious look at actual racism. We can feel warm about our bold stance against “systemic racism” without ever meaningfully identifying a problem, and thus never fixing it. An even more cynical wag might argue that this means racism will be perpetuated, so there will be an enduring cause to be against to mobilize the mob against a phantom enemy in perpetuity.

But for those of us who want to find serious solutions for racism, snappy phrases that obscure real problems don’t cut it. Indeed, like Molière’s opium, they just make people drowsy.