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Originally Posted by GGG
It’s sounds like you are acknowledging systemic racism but just don’t want to call it that.
If you have a magic box and you put people in line for the magic box and the people are substantially the same aside from skin colour going in and on the other side of the box the outcomes are sorted by skin colour you have a systemically racist box.
There are likely a lot of factors that go into making that box Systemically racist. Some might not be controllable by the people in power. I think you are limiting systemic racism to power structures created by white people to disenfranchise black people as opposed to the more general systems in society which Negatively affect POCs to a greater degree then Whites.
Both are examples of systemic racism.
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We would really need to dig into the data. The "box" as you say is not an algorithm with clear formulas. Different ethnic groups within the black community have significantly different outcomes. Different white communities have different outcomes, which are also clearly delineated. Why do Russian-Americans earn vastly more than Yugoslavian Americans?
Neither of these outcomes is clearly explained by race. The average income of a two parent black families isn't that far off of white two parent families for about 25 years now. Average incomes (mean and median) are greatly skewed by single mother families. Median incomes in the south are lower than median incomes in the northern states - and the south has a larger population of blacks, skewing in the national average.
Hughes (in the article linked above) highlighted an interesting outcome of the disparity fallacy:
"The disparity fallacy holds that unequal outcomes between two groups must be caused primarily by discrimination, whether overt or systemic. What’s puzzling about believers in the disparity fallacy is not that they apply the belief too broadly, but that they apply it too narrowly. Any instance of whites outperforming blacks is adduced as evidence of discrimination. But when a disparity runs the other way—that is, blacks outperforming whites—discrimination is never invoked as a causal factor."
Racism exists, absolutely. However. The argument for systemic racism being the driving force behind the disparity between blacks and white is a facile argument that is simply a classic example of confusing correlation with causation.
The truly insidious result of the systemic racism argument is that it removes agency. It implies that outside factors are more important than intrinsic factors when it comes to success. If you convince someone that they will be the victim of oppression and racism, it will be demotivating. I believe that this is why the messages of Obama, McWhorter, Hughes, Sowell, Elder, and Loury are the most hopeful ones.