Discrimination And Disparities Quotes

The principal function of racist ideas in American history has been the suppression of resistance to racial discrimination and its resulting racial disparities. The beneficiaries of slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration have produced racist ideas of Black people being best suited for or deserving of the confines of slavery, segregation, or the jail cell. Consumers of these racist ideas have been led to believe there is something wrong with Black people, and not the policies that have enslaved, oppressed, and confined so many Black people.

24 percent of something is larger than 73 percent of nothing.

The crucial question is not whether evils exist but whether the evils of the past or present are automatically the cause of major economic, educational and other social disparities today. The bedrock assumption underlying many political or ideological crusades is that socioeconomic disparities are automatically somebody's fault, so that our choices are either to blame society or to 'blame the victim.' Yet whose fault are demographic differences, geographic differences, birth order differences or cultural differences that evolved over the centuries before any of us were born?

At a minimum, history shows how dangerous it can be, to a whole society, to automatically and incessantly attribute statistical differences in outcomes to malevolent actions against the less successful.

Wrongs abound in times and places around the world - inflicted on, and perpetrated by, people of virtually every race, creed and color. But what can any society today hope to gain by having newborn babies in that society enter the word as heirs to prepackaged grievances against other babies born into that same society on the same day.

If you are not prepared to undergo the extended toil and sacrifice that some particular endeavor may require, then despite having all the native potential for great success in that endeavor, and with all the doors of opportunity wide open, you can nevertheless become an utter failure.

Statistics compiled from what people say may be worse than useless, if they lead to a belief that those numbers convey a reality that can be relied on for serious decision-making about social policies.

The process occurs in two stages. The first step is to grant law enforcement officials extraordinary discretion regarding whom to stop, search, arrest, and charge for drug offenses, thus ensuring that conscious and unconscious racial beliefs and stereotypes will be given free rein. Unbridled discretion inevitably creates huge racial disparities. Then, the damning step: Close the courthouse doors to all claims by defendants and private litigants that the criminal justice system operates in racially discriminatory fashion. Demand that anyone who wants to challenge racial bias in the system offer, in advance, clear proof that the racial disparities are the product of intentional racial discrimination—i.e., the work of a bigot. This evidence will almost never be available in the era of colorblindness, because everyone knows—but does not say—that the enemy in the War on Drugs can be identified by race. This simple design has helped to produce one of the most extraordinary systems of racialized social control the world has ever seen.

All that the government can do in reality is change the tax rate. How much tax revenue that will produce depends on how people react.

Engels said: “what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.

Any serious consideration of the world as it is around us today must tell us that maintaining common decency, much less peace and harmony, among living contemporaries is a major challenge, both among nations and within nations. To admit that we can do nothing about what happened among the dead is not to give up the struggle for a better world, but to concentrate our efforts where they have at least some hope of making things better for the living.

...lifelong benefits [to students who learn to think for themselves] include a healthy skepticism towards political slogans and a healthy desire to check out the facts before repeating rhetoric on other issues.

Disparities in the world are the reflection of the disparities within us.

The actual track record of promoting separate group identities, whether called “Balkanization” or “diversity,” has been appalling, in countries around the world.

Real chains that we need to shed are the burdens of racial discrimination, economic disparity, religious dogmas, intolerance and social injustice, which still weigh heavily on our shoulders.

The time is long overdue to count the costs of runaway rhetoric and heedless accusations - especially since most of the costs, including the high social cost of a breakdown of law and order, are paid by vulnerable people for whose benefit such rhetoric and such accusations are ostensibly being made.

But what can any society today hope to gain by having newborn babies in that society enter the world as heirs to prepackaged grievances against other babies born into that same society on the same day?

Every time a crisis arrives at the doorstep of humanity, remind yourself - I am what stands between humanity and injustice - I am what stands between humanity and discrimination and disparities - I am what stands between humanity and dictators.

People who depict markets as cold, impersonal institutions, and their own notions as humane and compassionate, have it directly backwards. It is when people make their own economic decisions, taking into account costs that matter to themselves, and known only to themselves, that this knowledge becomes part of the trade-odds they choose, whether as consumers or producers.

When you truly believe that the racial groups are equal, then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination. Committed to this antiracist idea of group equality, I was able to self-critique, discover, and shed the racist ideas I had consumed over my lifetime when I uncovered and exposed the racist ideas that others have produced over the lifetime of America. I know that readers truly committed to racial equality will join me on this journey of interrogating and shedding our racist ideas. But if there is anything I have learned form my research, it's that the principal producers and defenders of racist ideas will not join us. And no logic or fact or history book can change them, because logic and facts and scholarship have little to do with why they are expressing racist ideas in the first place. Stamped from the Beginning is about these close-minded, cunning, captivating producers of racist ideas. But it is not for them. My open mind was liberated in writing this story. I am hoping that other open minds can be liberated in reading this story.

When Blacks were seen as simply people—a collection of imperfect individuals, equal to the imperfect collection of individuals with white skins—then Blacks’ imperfect behavior became irrelevant. Discrimination was the social problem: the cause of the racial disparities between two equal collections of individuals.

Most notable achievements involve multiple factors—beginning with a desire to succeed in the particular endeavor, and a willingness to do what it takes, without which all the native ability in an individual and all the opportunity in a society mean nothing, just as the desire and the opportunity mean nothing without the ability.

Economists tend to rely on “revealed preference” rather than verbal statements. That is, what people do reveals what their values are, better than what they say.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said: “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.

What seems a more tenable conclusion is that, as economic historian David S. Landes put it, "The world has never been a level playing field.

In no society have all regions and all parts of the population developed equally. Fernand Braudel

The Bible is clear that discrimination exists and that Christians must resist it. Sinful discrimination indeed causes some disparities. But the Bible never goes to the extreme that we find in the thinking of Ibram X. Kendi. In his award-winning bestseller Stamped from the Beginning, Kendi argues that “racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination.

The civil rights vision relies heavily on statistical “disparities” in income and employment between members of different groups to support its sweeping claims of rampant discrimination.

And when we talk about race today, with all the pain packed into that conversation, the Holy Spirit remains in the room, This doesn't mean the conversations aren't painful, aren't personal, aren't charged with emotion. But it does mean we can survive. We can survive honest discussions about slavery, about convict leasing, about stolen land, deportation, discrimination, and exclusion. We can identify the harmful politics of gerrymandering, voter suppression, criminal justice laws, and policies that disproportionately affect people of color negatively. And we can expose the actions of white flight, the real impact of all-white leadership, the racial disparity in wages, and opportunities for advancement. We can lament and mourn. We can be livid and enraged. We can be honest. We can tell the truth. We can trust that the Holy Spirit is here. We must. For only by being truthful about how we got here can we begin to imagine another way.

Including the differential mortgage loan approval rates between Asian Americans and whites shows that the same methods to conclude that that blacks are discriminated against in mortgage lending would also lead to the conclusion that whites are discriminated against in favor of Asian Americans, reducing this whole procedure to absurdity, since no one believes that banks are discriminating against whites..."[W]hen loan approval rates are not cited, but loan denial rates are, that creates a larger statistical disparity, since most loans are approved. Even if 98 percent of blacks had their mortgage loan applications approved, if 99 percent of whites were approved than by quoting denial rates alone it could be said that blacks were rejected twice as often as whites.

Confiscating physical wealth for the purpose of redistribution is confiscating something that will be used up over time, and cannot be replaced without the human capital that created it. Nor is human

In short, statistical disparities are commonplace among human beings. Many historical and cultural reasons underlie the peculiar patterns observed. But the even “representation” of groups chosen as a baseline for measuring discrimination is a myth rather than an established fact. It is significant that those who have assumed that baseline have seldom, if ever, been challenged to produce evidence.

There are many variables that have nothing to do with a person’s education, experience, or accomplishments that will significantly influence his or her standing for higher-level positions and opportunities for advancement.

Alternative explanations for these changing patterns of racial differences—such as racism, poverty or inferior education among blacks—cannot establish even correlation with changing employment outcomes over the years, because all those things were worse in the first half of the twentieth century, when the unemployment rate among black teenagers in 1948 was far lower and not significantly different from the unemployment rate among white teenagers.

But, if the wealth of rich capitalists comes from exploitation of poor workers, then we might expect to find that where there are larger concentrations of rich capitalists, we would find correspondingly larger concentrations of poverty.

Moreover, “after 10 years in Sweden, only half of asylum seekers have a job.”39 Immigrants, who are now 16 percent of Sweden’s small population, have become 51 percent of the long-term unemployed and 57 percent of the recipients of welfare payments.

What seems a more tenable conclusion is that, as economic historian David S. Landes put it, “The world has never been a level playing field.”64 The idea that the world would be a level playing field, if it were not for either genes or discrimination, is a preconception in defiance of both logic and facts. Nothing is easier to find than sins among human beings, but to automatically make those sins the sole, or even primary, cause of different outcomes among different peoples is to ignore many other reasons for those disparities.

There may be very legitimate reasons to react adversely to words like “war,” “racism” or “murder,” but it is the illegitimate invoking of emotionally charged words that is especially dangerous—as anything that overrides thought, or substitutes for thought, can be dangerous.

Many of us have been so brainwashed over the years — by sheer repetition, rather than by either logic or empirical tests — that statistical disparities are automatically taken to mean discrimination, whether between races, sexes or whatever. The plain fact that different individuals and groups make different choices is resolutely ignored, because it does not fit the prevailing preconceptions, or the crusades based on those preconceptions. Women make different career choices than men, and wisely so, because men do not become mothers, and being a mother is not the same as being a father. And we can’t make them the same by simply calling them both “parents” or saying that “the couple” is pregnant. Discrimination can certainly cause statistical disparities. But statistical disparities do not automatically mean discrimination.

Successful charter schools give a glimpse of what can be accomplished by black children in low-income ghettos when self-sorting frees them from the disruptions and violence of unruly classmates, just a small number of whom can prevent a whole class from getting a decent education.

Neither in nature nor among human beings are either equal or randomly distributed outcomes automatic. On the contrary, grossly unequal distributions of outcomes are common, both in nature and among people, including in circumstances where neither genes nor discrimination are involved.

As Edmund Burke said, more than two centuries ago, “In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from past errors and infirmities of mankind.” But he warned that the past could also be a means of “keeping alive, or reviving, dissensions and animosities.

In any event, the crusade to racially integrate public schools, during the decades following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, generated much social turmoil, racial polarization and bitter backlashes, but no general educational improvement from seating black school children next to white school children.

Certainly there have been many examples of times and places where money or other physical wealth has been confiscated by governments or looted by mobs. But physical wealth is a product of human capital—the knowledge, skills, talents and other qualities that exist inside the heads of people—where it cannot be confiscated.

Wrongs abound in times and places around the world - inflicted on, and perpetrated by, people of virtually every race, creed and color. But what can any society today hope to gain by having newborn babies in that society enter the world as heirs to prepackaged grievances against other babies born into that same society on the same day.

When John Rawls, in his A Theory of Justice repeatedly referred to outcomes that 'society' can 'arrange,' these euphemisms finessed aside the plain fact that only government has the power to override millions of people's mutually agreed transactions terms. Interior decorators arrange. Governments compel. It is not a subtle distinctions.

Adam Smith declared “the good temper and moderation of contending factions” to be “the most essential circumstance in the public morals of a free people.”51 But what good temper or moderation can be expected when a major segment of the population becomes convinced that “the system is rigged” against them and morality is just a giant fraud?

Ironically, in some countries the immigrants who brought skills most lacking in the native population have been among the most resented and even hated. Often their predominance in particular industries has led to accusations that they have “taken over” those industries, even when the industries did not exist until the immigrants created them.

In each case, the key trick is to verbally collectivize wealth produced by individuals and then depict those individuals who produced more of it, and received payment for doing so, as having deprived others of their fair share. With such word games, one might say that Babe Ruth took an unfair share of the home runs hit by the New York Yankees.

What words openly declare can be tested against empirical evidence, but what words insinuate can bypass that safeguard. Even an innocent-sounding phrase like “income distribution,” endlessly repeated, can suggest a process in which income exists somehow and is then distributed, as one might distribute food at a dinner table or gifts at Christmas.

Put differently, it is the interaction of the welfare state with differing existing cultures in the population which produces varying socioeconomic outcomes, whether within nations or between nations. But here, as in other contexts, the invincible fallacy often trumps the hardest facts, so that very different people are treated as if they were the same.

Despite the inability to confiscate and redistribute human capital, nevertheless human capital is - ironically - one of the few things that can be spread to others without those with it having any less remaining for themselves. But one of the biggest obstacles to this happening is the 'social justice' vision, in which the fundamental problem of the less fortunate is not an absence of sufficient human capital, but the presence of other people's malevolence. For some, abandoning that vision would mean abandoning a moral melodrama, starring themselves as crusaders against the forces of evil. How many are prepared to give up all that - with all its psychic, political and other rewards - is an open question.

In the job industry, in education, and in many other sectors of society, officials could justify their racial disparities by pointing to test scores and claiming they were not intending to discriminate. And to racist Americans, the racial gaps in the scores—the so-called achievement gap—said something was wrong with the Black test-takers—not the tests.13

Yet Rousseau, like many later believers in this seemingly invincible fallacy, took it as axiomatic that only human biases create inequalities. Geography, demography, cultural differences and differences in the quantity and quality of parenting all vanish from this vision, in favor of one causal factor, for which many have imagined that they had a “solution.

Much of the Western Hemisphere is similar, geographically, to Europe, in terms of fertile soil, navigable waterways and climate, but was utterly devoid of heavy-duty draft animals and beasts of burden like horses and oxen before such animals, which played major roles in the economic development of Europe, were brought to the Western Hemisphere by Europeans.

The feedback from process goals is inescapable for those who directly experience the costs and benefits of their own decisions, while adverse experiences for those directly affected can be ignored, rationalized or obfuscated by third-party surrogates reluctant to admit it to others, and perhaps even to themselves, when their decisions have made matters worse.

People who depict markets as cold, impersonal institutions, and their own notions as humane and compassionate, have it directly backwards. It is when people make their own economic decisions, taking into account costs that matter to themselves, and known only to themselves, that this knowledge becomes part of the trade-offs they choose, whether as consumers or producers.

When scholars who are also educators do such things, the most important damage that is done is not to those they attack, but to those whom they are paid to educate. Moreover, that damage is not limited to whatever particular false conclusions may be produced, but to the whole way of thinking—and not thinking—that they demonstrate, and which may be emulated by their students.

Similarly, lightning occurs more often in Africa than in Europe and Asia put together, even though Asia alone is larger than Africa or any other continent.58 Thunderstorms have prerequisites, and those prerequisites all come together more often in some geographic settings than in others. In the United States, thunderstorms are 20 times as frequent in southern Florida as in coastal California.

Just one example were the European slaves brought to the coast of North Africa by pirates. These European slaves were more numerous than the African slaves brought to the United States and to the American colonies from which it was formed.64 But the politicization of history has shrunk the public perception of slavery to whatever is most expedient for promoting politically correct agendas today.65

Against that background, the assumption that discriminatory bias can be automatically inferred when there are differences in socioeconomic outcomes—and that the source of that bias can be determined by where the statistics were collected—seems indefensible. Yet that seemingly invincible fallacy guides much of what is said and done in our educational institutions, in the media and in government policies.

The historic consequences of treating particular beliefs as sacred dogmas, beyond the reach of evidence or logic, should be enough to dissuade us from going down that road again—despite how exciting or emotionally satisfying political dogmas and the crusades resulting from those dogmas can be, or how convenient in sparing us the drudgery and discomfort of having to think through our own beliefs or test them against facts.

In Eastern Europe during the years between the two World Wars, young people who were the first member of their families to become educated had no such tradition to prepare them for the world of higher education. Not surprisingly, such students lacked the intellectual background of Jewish students with whom they were in competition in universities, and students from such groups became prominent among members of anti-Semitic movements.

The seductive plausibility of the invincible fallacy makes it all the more important to subject it to critical scrutiny, instead of simply citing statistics on outcome differences and issuing denunciations. Nevertheless, assumptions of sameness are as common in social visions and their accompanying rhetoric as sharp differences are when examining empirical facts in the real world, whether examining the facts of nature or of human societies.

In much, if not most, of the literature on income and wealth disparities, the production of income and wealth is glided over, as something that just happens somehow, even though it happens to radically different degrees in different parts of the world and under different economic systems. Even a fraction of the wealth generated around the world by the Microsoft operating system that was received by Gates himself was enough to produce a gigantic fortune.

Astonishing as such reactions might seem, Dunbar High School faced similar hostility in segments of the black population during the era of its academic excellence.34 In many contexts around the world, egalitarianism as an abstract philosophy has often meant resentment of success as a social reality. More broadly, outstanding achievements of various sorts—whether educational, economic or other—have provoked hostile responses in many countries around the world and in many periods of history.

The changing origins of immigrants to Sweden were reflected in changing behavior patterns within the Swedish welfare state. There was a sharply rising use of the government’s “social assistance” programs by immigrants. Just 6.2 percent of the predominantly European immigrants in the pre-1976 era resorted to these “social assistance” programs, compared to 40.5 percent of the immigrants in the 1996–1999 period, when those immigrants were refugees predominantly from the Balkans and the Middle East.

Deliberate, biased suppressions of other people’s opportunities are just one of the various other impediments to equal outcomes. But those things which offend our moral sense do not automatically have more causal weight than morally neutral factors such as demography, geography or language differences. Determining particular reasons for particular differences at particular times and places requires the hard work of examination and analysis, rather than heady rhetoric and sweeping presuppositions.

No one expects small children to perform as well as adults with decades of education and experience—and groups differ significantly in the respective proportions of their populations which consist of children and which consist of those who are middle-aged adults. Moreover, such intergroup differences in demographic characteristics are common in societies around the world. In the United States, for example, the median age of Jews is decades older than the median age of Puerto Ricans. Even if Puerto Ricans and Jews were identical in every other respect, they would still not be equally represented, in proportion to their respective populations, in jobs requiring long years of experience, or in homes for the elderly, or in activities associated with youth, such as sports or crime. The point here is not to claim that age alone explains most income or wealth differences. The point is that age differences alone are enough to preclude the equality that is presumed to exist in the absence of discrimination.

Multiple factors have to come together in order to create tornadoes, and more than 90 percent of all the tornadoes in the entire world occur in just one country—the United States.57 Yet there is nothing startlingly unique about either the general climate or the terrain of the United States that cannot be found, as individual features, in various other places around the world. But all the prerequisites for tornadoes do not come together as often, anywhere in the rest of the world, as in the United States.

When there are major disparities in outcomes among men who are all in the top one percent in IQ, and among siblings raised under the same roof, as well as discriminated-against minorities being more economically successful than those discriminating against them—as has happened in the Ottoman Empire, many Southeast Asian countries, and much of Eastern Europe, for example—the insistence on believing that human biases are the primary cause of disparities in outcomes ignores a vast range of evidence to the contrary.

Among the many appalling things about the past, it is hard to know which was the worst, since there are all too many candidates, from around the world, for that designation. That something like the Holocaust could have happened, after thousands of years of civilization, and in one of the most advanced societies, is almost as incomprehensible intellectually as it is devastating morally and in terms of showing what depths of depravity are possible in all human beings. It is a painful reminder of a description of civilization as “a thin crust over a volcano.

The violence unleashed against successful groups has often exceeded the violence unleashed against lagging groups disdained as “inferior.” The number of overseas Chinese killed by mobs in Vietnam, in just one year, exceeded the number of lynchings of black Americans recorded in the history of the United States.25 So did the number of Armenians killed in just one year by rampaging mobs in the Ottoman Empire,26 and so has the number of Jews killed in a given year, at numerous times and places throughout history,27 even before millions were murdered in the Holocaust.

While we live in the world of reality, we often advance through the world of visions. In even the hardest of the hard sciences, advances often begin with new conceptions, beliefs, hunches and hopes—in short, visions. What makes science scientific are the rigorous, systematic processes by which those visions can be tested, both logically and empirically. Many, if not most, of those visions may fail such tests, but the benefits from those visions whose premises and corollaries are verified empirically, thereby advancing our understanding, are what make the whole process worthwhile.

In the world of words, the hardest facts can be made to vanish into thin air by a clever catchword or soaring rhetoric. In a public discourse where slogans and images have too often replaced facts and logic, words have indeed become for some what Hobbes called them, centuries ago—the money of fools,114 often counterfeit money created by clever people. Our educational system, which might have been expected to develop students’ ability to “cross-examine the facts,” as the great economist Alfred Marshall once put it, has itself become one of the fountainheads of insinuations and obfuscations.

Discrimination as an explanation of economic and social disparities may have a similar emotional appeal for many. But we can at least try to treat these and other theories as testable hypotheses. The historic consequences of treating particular beliefs as sacred dogmas, beyond the reach of evidence or logic, should be enough to dissuade us from going down that road again—despite how exciting or emotionally satisfying political dogmas and the crusades resulting from those dogmas can be, or how convenient in sparing us the drudgery and discomfort of having to think through our own beliefs or test them against facts.

Critics of disparities often either explicitly or implicitly call for some kind or approximation of equality. But when we speak of “equality” among human beings, what do we mean? We certainly cannot all sing like Pavarotti, think like Einstein or land a commercial airliner safely in the Hudson River like pilot “Sully” Sullenberger. Clearly we cannot all be equally capable of doing concrete things. In terms of specific capabilities in real life, a given man is not even equal to himself at different stages of life—sometimes not even on different days—much less equal to all others who are in varying stages of their own lives.

None of these facts requires extraordinary research in esoteric places. One need only read Mellon’s book Taxation to see what he advocated, and look at the published records of the Internal Revenue Service to see what happened. Both of these sources are available in libraries or on the Internet. That renowned historians and economists failed to check these readily available sources is just one sign of what can happen in an academic monoculture where the promotion of a social vision takes precedence over the search for facts—and where there are few people with fundamentally different views who would challenge what was said.

In many cases, educators verbally transmute higher capabilities into “privilege.” Through the magic of words, and in the name of “social justice,” such educators oppose using the schools to facilitate the development of special individual abilities that can benefit society as a whole, because that can cause an expansion of educational disparities and the economic disparities that follow. Many of those with this social vision not only proceed as if society is a zero-sum process, in which benefits to one segment necessarily come at the expense of other segments, they also often ignore, dismiss or demonize other ways of looking at the situation.

Much of the difference between those who promote process goals and those who promote outcome goals seems to reflect differences in how they conceive what knowledge is, and whether relevant knowledge is concentrated in a few or widely diffused among the many. Such knowledge includes knowledge of costs. Whatever the amount of socially consequential information that is known to surrogate decision-makers, no given decision-maker is likely to know more than a small fraction of what is necessary to know, in order to make the best decisions for a whole society. That can be a much more serious problem when prescribing outcome goals than when prescribing process goals.

One of the very few media outlets to even consider alternative explanations for the black-white statistical differences was the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which showed that 52 percent of blacks had credit scores so low that they would qualify only for the less desirable subprime mortgages, as did 16 percent of whites. Accordingly, 49 percent of blacks in the data cited by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ended up with subprime mortgages, as did 13 percent of whites and 10 percent of Asians.3 In short, the three groups’ respective rankings in terms of the kinds of mortgage loans they could get was similar to their respective rankings in average credit ratings.

Many of the beneficiaries of the welfare state have sought to fill the void with drugs, sex, violence and other self-indulgences, or joining in mob rampages over the grievance du jour. Far from an assurance of subsistence producing a relaxed sense of security and contentment, it seems instead to have produced a sense of inchoate grievance against a society that has left them adrift, with no intrinsically meaningful role in life, while others have both meaningful achievements and visibly higher standards of living than whatever is given to them as basic necessities—and all this amid unceasing emphasis on invidious comparisons and on how wrong it is that some have so much more than others.

Why the difference behind the fierce cries of outrage at pay differentials in business, and the passing over in silence of far greater pay differentials in sports and entertainment? One possible explanation is that business owners and managers have roles in which they can be replaced by political decision-makers, who in turn can impose the kinds of policies preferred by those who imagine that their own superior wisdom or virtue entitles them to dictate to others. But professional athletes and entertainers have roles that obviously cannot be taken over by politicians or bureaucrats. So there would be no point in trying to discredit highly paid people in sports or entertainment, or to arouse public outrage against them.

The phrase “white privilege” is not the only verbal sleight of hand used to make achievement differences vanish. Even racial or ethnic groups that arrived in the United States destitute during the nineteenth century, and were forced to live in a desperate poverty and squalor almost inconceivable today, have had their later rise from such dire conditions verbally erased by calling their eventual achievement of prosperity a “privilege.” The histories of Irish, Jewish, Chinese and Japanese immigrants in America are classic examples of this process—and of their achievements being verbally air-brushed out of history by simply calling them “privilege.” Even middle-class blacks today have likewise been characterized by some as “privileged,” even though their ancestors arrived as slaves.

The phrase “white privilege” is not the only verbal sleight of hand used to make achievement differences vanish. Even racial or ethnic groups that arrived in the United States destitute during the nineteenth century, and were forced to live in a desperate poverty and squalor almost inconceivable today, have had their later rise from such dire conditions verbally erased by calling their eventual achievement of prosperity a “privilege.”19 The histories of Irish, Jewish, Chinese and Japanese immigrants in America are classic examples of this process—and of their achievements being verbally air-brushed out of history by simply calling them “privilege.” Even middle-class blacks today have likewise been characterized by some as “privileged,”20 even though their ancestors arrived as slaves.

To people who conceive of consequential knowledge as concentrated in a highly educated few with high IQs, specifying particular outcome goals for a whole society may seem far more doable than to people who see vast amounts of consequential knowledge as highly diffused among the people at large, in individually unimpressive fragments. It may be virtually impossible for any given individual, or any manageable number of surrogate decision-makers collectively, to take all the factors into account. But where decisions are made by vast numbers of individuals transacting in a marketplace, each with their own fragment of the necessary knowledge of factors to be considered, and all are forced to reach mutually compatible terms, that is when all the knowledge available to all those concerned affects the economic outcome.

Draw a line down the middle of any room, and you will find group disparities in income, IQ, education, and age. Such disparities are not the result of societal discrimination. They are the result of statistical probability. But according to the Disintegrationists, disparities are automatically the result of discrimination, often relabeled under vague terms like “privilege,” “institutional racism,” or “patriarchalism.” The Disintegrationist philosophy therefore leads to this extraordinarily destructive logic: we must have equality of opportunity, which means unequal rights, because people are not inherently equal; any inequality in society is proof of inequality of opportunity. No system can survive under this logic: inequality of outcome is a feature inherent to humankind. But that’s precisely the point. The system must be destroyed.

The central question, then, is how exactly does a formally colorblind criminal justice system achieve such racially discriminatory results? Rather easily, it turns out. The process occurs in two stages. The first step is to grant law enforcement officials extraordinary discretion regarding whom to stop, search, arrest, and charge for drug offenses, thus ensuring that conscious and unconscious racial beliefs and stereotypes will be given free rein. Unbridled discretion inevitably creates huge racial disparities. Then, the damning step: Close the courthouse doors to all claims by defendants and private litigants that the criminal justice system operates in racially discriminatory fashion. Demand that anyone who wants to challenge racial bias in the system offer, in advance, clear proof that the racial disparities are the product of intentional racial discrimination—i.e., the work of a bigot. This

In hunter-gatherer terms, these senior executives are claiming a disproportionate amount of food simply because they have the power to do so. A tribe like the !Kung would not permit that because it would represent a serious threat to group cohesion and survival, but that is not true for a wealthy country like the United States. There have been occasional demonstrations against economic disparity, like the Occupy Wall Street protest camp of 2011, but they were generally peaceful and ineffective. (The riots and demonstrations against racial discrimination that later took place in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, led to changes in part because they attained a level of violence that threatened the civil order.) A deep and enduring economic crisis like the Great Depression of the 1930s, or a natural disaster that kills tens of thousands of people, might change America’s fundamental calculus about economic justice. Until then, the American public will probably continue to refrain from broadly challenging both male and female corporate leaders who compensate themselves far in excess of their value to society. That

The central question, then, is how exactly does a formally colorblind criminal justice system achieve such racially discriminatory results? Rather easily, it turns out. The process occurs in two stages. The first step is to grant law enforcement officials extraordinary discretion regarding whom to stop, search, arrest, and charge for drug offenses, thus ensuring that conscious and unconscious racial beliefs and stereotypes will be given free rein. Unbridled discretion inevitably creates huge racial disparities. Then, the damning step: Close the courthouse doors to all claims by defendants and private litigants that the criminal justice system operates in racially discriminatory fashion. Demand that anyone who wants to challenge racial bias in the system offer, in advance, clear proof that the racial disparities are the product of intentional racial discrimination—i.e., the work of a bigot. This evidence will almost never be available in the era of colorblindness, because everyone knows—but does not say—that the enemy in the War on Drugs can be identified by race. This simple design has helped to produce one of the most extraordinary systems of racialized social control the world has ever seen.

Statistical discrimination explains why the police in the United States justify stopping black drivers more often. And how the Hindu majoritarian government of the state of Uttar Pradesh recently explained why so many of the people “accidentally” killed by the state police (in what are called “encounter deaths”) are Muslim. There are more blacks and Muslims among criminals. In other words, what looks like naked racism does not have to be that; it can be the result of targeting some characteristic (drug dealing, criminality) that happens to be correlated with race or religion. So statistical discrimination, rather than old-fashioned prejudice—what economists call taste-based discrimination—may be the cause. The end result is the same if you are black or Muslim, though. A recent study on the impact of “ban the box” (BTB) policies on the rate of unemployment of young black men provides a compelling demonstration of statistical discrimination. BTB policies restrict employers from using application forms where there is a box that needs to be checked if you have a criminal conviction. Twenty-three states have adopted these policies in the hope of raising employment among young black men, who are much more likely to have a conviction than others and whose unemployment rate is double the national average.31 To test the effect of these policies, two researchers sent fifteen thousand fictitious online job applications to employers in New Jersey and New York City, just before and right after the states of New York and New Jersey implemented the BTB policy.32 They manipulated the perception of race by using typically white or typically African American first names on the résumés. Whenever a job posting required indicating whether or not the applicant had a prior felony conviction, they also randomized whether he or she had one. They found, as many others before them, clear discrimination against blacks in general: white “applicants” received about 23 percent more callbacks than black applicants with the same résumé. Unsurprisingly, among employers who asked about criminal convictions before the ban, there was a very large effect of having a felony conviction: applicants without a felony conviction were 62 percent more likely to be called back than those with a conviction but an otherwise identical résumé, an effect similar for whites and blacks. The most surprising finding, however, was that the BTB policy substantially increased racial disparities in callbacks. White applicants to BTB-affected employers received 7 percent more callbacks than similar black applicants before BTB. After BTB, this gap grew to 43 percent. The reason was that without the actual information about convictions, the employers assumed all black applicants were more likely to have a conviction. In other words, the BTB policy led employers to rely on race to predict criminality, which is of course statistical discrimination.

The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature. No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation's capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison. Similar rates of incarceration can be found in black communities across America. These stark racial disparities cannot be explained by rates of drug crime. Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. If there are significant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color. That is not what one would guess, however, when entering our nation's prisons and jails, which are over-flowing with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men. And in major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. These young men are part of a growing undercaste, permanently locked up and locked out of mainstream society.

In seeking to establish the causes of poverty and other social problems among black Americans, for example, sociologist William Julius Wilson pointed to factors such as “the enduring effects of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, public school segregation, legalized discrimination, residential segregation, the FHA’s redlining of black neighborhoods in the 1940s and ’50s, the construction of public housing projects in poor black neighborhoods, employer discrimination, and other racial acts and processes.”1 These various facts might be summarized as examples of racism, so the causal question is whether racism is either the cause, or one of the major causes, of poverty and other social problems among black Americans today. Many might consider the obvious answer to be “yes.” Yet some incontrovertible facts undermine that conclusion. For example, despite the high poverty rate among black Americans in general, the poverty rate among black married couples has been less than 10 percent every year since 1994.2 The poverty rate of married blacks is not only lower than that of blacks as a whole, but in some years has also been lower than that of whites as a whole.3 In 2016, for example, the poverty rate for blacks was 22 percent, for whites was 11 percent, and for black married couples was 7.5 percent.4 Do racists care whether someone black is married or unmarried? If not, then why do married blacks escape poverty so much more often than other blacks, if racism is the main reason for black poverty? If the continuing effects of past evils such as slavery play a major causal role today, were the ancestors of today’s black married couples exempt from slavery and other injustices? As far back as 1969, young black males whose homes included newspapers, magazines, and library cards, and who also had the same education as young white males, had similar incomes as their white counterparts.5 Do racists care whether blacks have reading material and library cards?

The poor health outcomes of the world’s wealthiest nation are often presented as a mystery, yet their root causes are hiding in plain sight: these disparities are driven by inequality and discrimination, which lead to poor health in people of color in the United States, particularly African Americans. The health outcomes of Black Americans are by several measures on par with people living in far poorer nations. At every stage of life, Blacks have poorer health outcomes than whites and, in most cases, than other ethnic groups. Black babies are more than twice as likely as white babies to die at birth or in the first year of life—a racial gap that adds up to thousands of lost lives every year. Blacks in every age-group under sixty-five have significantly higher death rates than whites. Black life expectancy at birth is several years lower than that of whites. African Americans have elevated death rates from conditions such as diabetes, stroke, and heart disease that among whites are found more commonly at older ages. In a phrase, African Americans “live sicker and die quicker,” which, if you estimate years of life lost because of deaths that could’ve been prevented, adds up to tens of thousands of lost years.

Even in the south where he had once been hated and feared as an abolitionist and union general, there was suprising pride in Garfield's presidency. Although he had made it clear from the moment he took office, even in his inaugural address that he would not tolerate the discrimination he knew was taking place in the south, what he promised was not judgement and vengeance, but help. The root of the problem he believed was ignorance. And it was the responsibility, indeed the high privilege and sacred duty of the entire nation, north and south to educate its people. Garfield's plan was to give the south as rapidly as possible, the blessings of general education and business enterprise, and trust to time in these courses. The south had taken him at his word and for the first time in decades had accepted the president of the north as its president as well. With Garfield in the White House, The New York Times wrote, the south had felt as they had not felt before for years, that the government was their government and the chief magistrate of the country had an equal claim upon the loyal affection of the whole people. Although each of these disparate groups trusted Garfield, it was not until they were plunged into a common grief and fear that they began to trust one another. Suddenly, the contemporaries of Garfield wrote, the nation was - united, as if by magic. Even Jefferson Davis, the former president of the confederacy, and a man whom Garfield had voted to indite as a war criminal, admitted that the assassination attempt had made the whole nation kin.

Williams, the Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health and chair in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, created this set of questions in 1995, basically on a dare, after having been told that there was no way to measure racism. His scale has now been universally accepted, and also adapted and amended and used all over the world to measure the ways in which discrimination hurts health and shortens lives. Like many researchers in the area of health disparities, Williams has been beating the same drum for decades about race and health: that yes, as far as health goes, socioeconomic status and education matter, but they are not the whole story. The lived experience of being Black in America, regardless of income and education, also affects health.

A computer study of the frequency of the word “duty” in British and American books showed its frequency had shrunk to one-third of its frequency in earlier times.124 Shame is another of the concepts that seems to have faded, as shameless behavior has flourished, and has even been celebrated as “liberation” in some quarters.

In many discussions of social visions and social policies, familiar words have often been used in new ways, to mean something very different from what those words meant before. Among the words given new and often misleading meanings are such common and simple words as “change,” “opportunity,” “violence” and “privilege.” Conversely, old meanings have been expressed by new words, as vagrants became “the homeless,” exultant young thugs became “troubled youths,” and Balkanization became “diversity

the breakdown of law and order brought on by constantly stirred bitter resentments almost invariably leads to more suffering among the less fortunate.

Among the many dangers of surrogate decision-making is that such decision-makers cannot know the situation of millions of other people as well as those people know their own situations, which may not conform to the vision prevailing among the surrogates. Moreover, surrogate decision-makers often pay no price for being wrong, no matter how wrong or how catastrophic the consequences for those whose decisions they have preempted. Given the fallibility of all human beings, the chastening effect of facing the consequences of one’s decisions can be dispensed with only at great peril.