With endogenous causes rendered taboo, all that is left to account for racial disparities is exogenous causes, especially
racial discrimination. But everyone admits that discrimination by individuals has decreased in recent decades. The picture below shows the results of a University of Illinois
survey which concluded that, “One of the most substantial changes in white racial attitudes has been the movement from very substantial opposition to the principle of racial equality to one of almost universal support.”
The absence of discriminatory attitudes doesn’t mean the playing field has been completely leveled, of course. A past bias, once justified, may persist long after the world has changed. Robert Moses’s
racist-inspired building practices in New York leave their mark today. It’s not hard to point to lingering effects of past racism on parents, children, and neighborhoods.
These effects act in complex ways. Proving their existence, much less measuring them with precision, is almost impossible. Many effects are delayed, different individuals vary in their reactions, and allegedly discriminatory actions are often unintentional.
The problem is that these complex and little-understood effects have been bundled together into one toxic package, labeled “systemic racism” (the terms
institutional and
structural racism are also used).
The word
racism is thrown around a lot these days, but a precise definition is hard to find. The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy passes.
Wikipedia comes up with: “Racism is the belief in the superiority of one race over another…”
Other definitions add reasons for racism. Particularly popular is the idea that “inferior” races have unchangeable (“genetically determined”) attributes that render them less able than the favored (usually white) race. But a definition of racism doesn’t have to make reference to the cause. Basically, racism is intentional discrimination against a race for no reason at all: You just think white people are better than black people and so whites and blacks should be treated differently.
Preference by itself—you prefer to spend time with members of your own race, say—is not
ipso facto racist. Only if you think that a person should be
treated differently just because of her race, does it qualify as racist.
By none of these definitions can the complex, lagged effects of past discrimination be termed (systemically) racist. The effects I will discuss are not intentional—if they were, they would be individual racism, not systemic. They are not based directly on race, for the most part. If a black child fails to get into a good college because she scored poorly on the SAT, she fails because of her score not her race—even if her low score might be traced to poor rearing conditions that are a legacy of segregation or past discrimination.
Effects like this are, possibly, effects of racism in the past. They are not racism now, systemic or otherwise, by any reasonable definition. Failure to acknowledge this distinction has unjustly stigmatized white people and is a cause of needless conflict. Let me give some examples of the problems with this pernicious concept.
A 2017
review paper in the respected medical journal
The Lancet, authored by several public health researchers, looks at the health implications of what they term “structural racism
.” They refer to the “rich social science literature conceptualizing structural racism” emphasizing that the idea goes beyond “unfair treatment as experienced by individuals.” Yet in the next paragraph they say, “Any account of structural racism within the USA must start with the experiences of black people…” This inconsistency is never resolved: are the individual experiences of racism by African Americans relevant or not? Apparently not, as the paper goes on to discuss racial disparities as evidence of structural racism.
One example is this: “The legacy of these [ostensibly race-neutral] policies is that the annual rate of incarceration of black men is 3.8–10.5 times greater than that of white men, across all age groups…” which is obviously unfair, hence racist. Unfair—unless the rate of offending is also skewed. Men notoriously commit more crimes, especially violent crimes, than women. We do not cry “sexism” when more males than females wind up in prison. Is disparity in incarceration rates between black and white men another example of racism? Or do black men in fact commit proportionately more crimes than white?
The SPLC has
weighed in on this issue, citing a relevant report from the U.S. Bureau of Justice, “Race and Hispanic Origin of Victims and Offenders, 2012-15.” They headline the report: “White supremacists’ favorite myths about black crime rates take another hit from BJS study: Vast majority of most crimes are committed by a person of the same race as the victim, Bureau of Justice Statistics reports.” It goes on to say that “White supremacists… claim that … African-Americans, are far more crime-prone and the source of most violent crime against whites.”
Either willfully or because the writer doesn’t understand the issue, the headline misses the point of the BJS report. First, the U.S. population is 65 percent white and 12 percent black. It is likely, therefore, that more crimes can be attributed to whites than to blacks. No surprise there. And it has been known for many years that most violent crimes are intra, not inter-racial. Blacks are the victims largely of black criminals, whites of white.
The real issue is “crime-proneness,” which depends both on the number of black and white perpetrators and on the sizes of the black and white populations. Population size is not mentioned in the SPLC article. There are fewer blacks than whites in the U.S., therefore we can expect fewer black than white perpetrators. But how much fewer? Well, if we include population figures (which also appear in the BJS report), we see that there are 5.3 times as many whites as blacks in the US. So, the real question is, are there 5.3 times as many white as black criminals? Well, no. From Table 1 in the BJS report, 43.8 percent of perpetrators are white and 22.7 percent are black, so the ratio of white to black criminals is just 1.93. In other words, blacks are 5.3/1.93 = 2.79 times as likely to be perpetrators as whites. A disparity in criminality may have something to do with the incarceration disparity, although it may not be the whole story. But the differential incarceration rate by itself proves nothing.
Again, these data need to be unpacked to understand what is really going on. Young males are more likely to act violently than older ones. The black population tends to be younger than the white. Does controlling for age reduce the black-white disparity? No doubt other relevant variables should be examined. The point is that the incarceration disparity may have a non-racial cause. Absent a lot more research, it should not be blamed immediately on racism. Which is not to take away from
cogent criticisms of the excessive US incarceration rate in general. The point is that incarceration-rate disparities are not necessarily evidence of racism. This is an example of what
Quillette contributor
Coleman Hughes calls the
disparity fallacy, which “holds that unequal outcomes between two groups must be caused primarily by discrimination…” Indeed, I will argue the opposite: that a charge of “racial discrimination” can be justified only when other possible causes of disparities have been eliminated.
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