Jim Crow laws had no effect? Really?
Are we talking about the past or the present? I can't possibly change the past, and including it in my list of causes for the present is almost impossible. I can try to do it, but any stopping point is completely arbitrary. Aristotle, for example, influenced how things are in the present. I can go back to him and show how he impacted all of what we call "western civilization" and the reasons why they did the things they did.
Obviously the past affects the present. I agree with that statement 100%. When we're talking about wealth of the black population...I don't know if Jim Crow and it's effects had a bigger impact on black wealth today than the globalization of industry. I don't know how to compare those things. It's really difficult because, frankly, the wealth gap between whites and blacks shrank until the mid 60s....then increased again. That's right around the time when blacks were given full rights, and major industries were moving overseas. It would seem to indicate that globalization had the bigger impact...but I really don't want to jump to that conclusion. There's simply too many factors.
These are recent policies, for nearly two centuries there were very explicit policies that were quite effective in ensuring that wealth was taken from blacks.
Well that's the thing....if you chart the wealth of the black population under Jim Crow, the trend is generally upward. Here's a good chart...
So a few things to note.
1. There was already a gap. If we go back further into the slavery era, the gap was even larger. From what we understand of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, there was a gap between European traders and African kings. To go all the way back to where we will find either no gap or African advantage in wealth, I'm pretty sure it would be at least until ancient Egypt or possibly some post-Islamic African nations.
2. White wealth was increased faster...but not by a lot.
3. After Jim Crow was ended in the 60s....there's a flattening or even a decrease in black wealth.
4. Post Affirmative Action we see a rather significant increase of wealth meant to address the gap...but it doesn't resolve it.
My point here is that obviously Jim Crow affected wealth. The problem is how much? I know that some people think it's the biggest factor or even the only factor...but it's definitely not the only factor, and I don't know how to figure out if it's the biggest.
So you say. I did not agree to that.
You don't have to agree. That's what the science says.
Appellate Advocacy Blog: Implicit Bias: Does It Have Any Relationship to Biased Behavior?
"Researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Harvard, and the University of Virginia examined 499 studies over 20 years involving 80,859 participants that used the IAT and other, similar measures. They discovered two things:
One is that the correlation between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior appears weaker than previously thought. They also conclude that there is very little evidence that changes in implicit bias have anything to do with changes in a person’s behavior."
You disagree with the massive number of scientific studies and their conclusions? Fine. If you want to institute policy based on your disagreement with science or even change teaching to include the idea that implicit biases effect behavior....you should be fought at every step.
We're talking about policies that impact millions of lives. It shouldn't be anti-science. I don't mind if a creationist wants to teach their kids that god explains the way things are...but I don't want it in the classroom. Anti-scientific beliefs shouldn't be taught to little children.
If we examine culture as the cause, be sure to take into account that black culture coming out of slavery was the culture given to them by their white masters. And that culture going forward from there is in a feedback loop with social situations. That is, people in poverty tend to develop a very different culture from people in affluence. I say it is a feedback loop because culture affects prosperity and prosperity affects culture. It would be incomplete to look only at half of this equation.
How does one account for that? No offense but if you want to explain all problems in the black community as the fault of whites....how is that any different from racial scapegoating? Are we stripping all agency from black people?
I can understand saying that one has affected the other. It has. The schism between slaves kept in the house of slave masters and those kept in the fields has resulted in a rather ugly racial slur that black people tend to use against black people who work with whites, get perceived as "acting white", or otherwise are generally seen as betraying the black community.
Yes, that exists because of the days of slavery. There's no white people forcing black people to keep saying it though. They can stop at any time. I've seen it even as recently as last year....when Terry Crews dared to suggest there were some angry militant voices in BLM. I saw it after Tim Scott gave a public speech that was pretty uplifting and the black community called him "uncle tim".
That's on the black community. They can stop anytime they want. I can't blame the white community for it. No amount of blaming white people will change that.
Sherlock Holmes is famously quoted as saying "When you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." This may be a nice saying in fiction, but in the real world, it is terrible logic. The reason is that the premise (eliminating [all] the impossible answers) is hardly ever practical. On what basis can anyone ever say they have considered all the possibilities? One may think they have considered all the possibilities, but through a failure of imagination, they have simply missed a possibility.
And generally speaking, it's a problem with the social sciences. They're good at telling you what happened but bad at explaining why it happened.
As for the explanation you are asking for, this is what Critical Race Theory studies.
It doesn't study anything. It starts with a conclusion and then looks for evidence to support it while ignoring it dismissing any evidence that doesn't. That's not research, that's a worldview.
If you can show me just 1 bit of research into any social problems that doesn't ultimately conclude that the problem is the fault of white people...I'll admit I could be wrong.
That shouldn't be too difficult, right? There's thousands of research papers that look into all sorts of problems that tell you right in the premise they are using a CRT framework.
I've never found one that doesn't come to the conclusion that it is white people who are to blame.
And there are plenty of possible and reasonable explanations for the discrepancy in black wealth vs. white wealth (which is different from black income vs. white income). The white/black wealth discrepancy currently stands at 7.8 (median household wealth). There is undeniably a history of black wealth being plundered under the law and outside of the law, starting with slavery itself, continuing to Jim Crow laws, and redlining.
The disparity didn't start with slavery. The merchants trading with some of the wealthiest and most powerful African kings were in most ways wealthier than those kings. The idea that European empires were discovering the societies of Africa and the Americas on equal footing....then began using deceit and trickery or began engaging in immoral practices that gave them some huge wealth advantage is provably false. They showed up in Africa and found slavery endemic. It was normal. The things they traded were vastly different...they got raw materials and slaves from Africa, they traded guns and gunpowder which were cheap to them but rare to Africans.
To explain why this "unequal footing" already existed is a long story that involves a lot of factors. Did those merchants see themselves as coming from a place of superiority? Yes. Did those exact same merchants see everyone that way? No. They saw China, India, and many parts of the middle east as superior to their own nations. In China, Europeans had a trade deficit for all of history until the Opium wars.
The point here is that if you genuinely believe there was some sort of time when everyone was equal and European nations ruined it with slavery and colonialism....you're wrong.
Redlining is a very significant factor because a major way in which wealth is grown is through real estate. When blacks are denied to opportunity to purchase a home in an up and coming neighborhood, they miss out on that growth of wealth. Once a wealth gap exists, it is easy to see how it is naturally perpetuated and expanded. Wealth is often handed down through inheritance. Since blacks have black parents, they have much less to inherit.
Redlining is now illegal and frankly, just like everything illegal, making it a crime isn't a guarantee it will stop. Theft is a crime but it still happens. Wells Fargo (I believe) was caught redlining and had to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to black families as a result.
I get that it had an impact on outcomes....all of history did. I also understand that justice isn't perfect and sometimes a bank will get away with it.
As I said though, these statements are true of all history and all crimes. I don't know what you would see as a solution.
Beyond that there are unwritten policies that disadvantage minorities in subtle ways.
If they are unwritten, how do you know they exist?
I'm going to remind you that you can't point to a disparity of wealth and conclude they exist. The disparity is what we are trying to explain. A disparity can't be the evidence of a hypothesis that seeks to explain the disparity. That's called circular reasoning.
None of these things are absolute bars to blacks becoming wealthy. After all there are examples of black millionaires.
And millions of white people in poverty. We can also look at disparities of wealth between asians and whites and see that asians have better outcomes in wealth, life expectancy, and education. Jews also have similar outcomes.
Do you think CRT has an explanation for these things? It does...but it's not a very good explanation. It will say that wealthy blacks have a "false consciousness" (which is a Marxist idea) and they are engaging in white supremacy. It will claim that asians have a "proximity to whiteness" which is an explanation without any evidence, just an idea created whole cloth to preserve the ideology of CRT. The millions of poor whites aren't even discussed. I don't think they can explain why they are poor without an answer that sounds like a meritocracy....which they reject.
The Jews probably represent the biggest problem since they are the targets of white supremacists....no one would really believe that they are supporting white supremacy. The "proximity to whiteness" story doesndo really work either...as they have their own traditions, holidays, and culture which they defend pretty seriously.
I don't think they have any explanation for the disparities of Jewish outcomes because frankly, they would have to change their worldview to fit the evidence. What I've tended to see is an explanation that resembles some very old very anti-semitic conspiracy theories.
But statistically speaking, the chances of being prosperous are much lower for blacks.
If you're saying that on average black people have less wealth than whites...I'd agree. The average itself changes over time for various reasons. This is different from saying something like "the chances of becoming wealthy". That's a very different question.
This view of the effect of properity is confirmed by the fact that blacks who do happen to be reasonably prosperous (as much as the average white) do not in fact have a higher murder rate than whites.
Is that a fact? I've seen studies on the average murder rates of black men in the NFL....many of whom often grew up poor...and compared to the murder rates of all white people, poor and wealthy, they are the same.
But that compares the murder rate of wealthy blacks to the murder rate of whites regardless of wealth. It's a very different thing from comparing just wealthy whites and wealthy blacks.
I've never seen the latter. If you have the data though, I'd like to.
This is a fact that is inconvenient to the view that blacks deserve to be where they are. But it is nevertheless true.
I don't make judgements about "deserve". I think the person who works in ensuring we all have clean water and checks the water quality is someone who deserves to be recognized for how important their work is and how easily we take it for granted....
I don't make statements about races and what they deserve. That's always going to come off as racist.
Scientifically we don't call such theories "untrue". We call them "unsupported".
Ok. I'm not interested in semantics. There's a method for determining what kind of truth claims can be held reliably. CRT doesn't use that method. It uses a method that is provably unreliable for making claims about reality that consistently hold up over time.
A theory that is unsupported may still turn out to be true, if said support somehow turns up. Similarly, a theory that is supported, may still turn out to be false, if better data appears showing that the support was faulty and better support exists for an opposing theory.
Right. Reality is the final arbiter for truth in science. New evidence can change the claims that science makes about truth.
It would not be racist if evidence turned up that actually supported the theory. Again, I dismiss the statement above, not because it is racist, but because it is factually untrue (or, more accurately, unsupported). As I said before, the statement "black people are more likely to have sickle cell anemia because they are black" is not racist. It is simply a true fact.
I don't think their skin color has anything to do with sickle cell anemia. It has to do with exposure to the malaria parasite over many generations. This is a feature of geography. I don't know, for example, the indigenous populations of Australia have significantly higher rates of sickle cell anemia...even though they would be considered black here in the US.
Just about any reasonable interpretation of success would prove the point. For example, having access to clean water, good schools, healthy grocery stores, and an average amount of wealth.
Those aren't racial characteristics. In fact, the average second generation immigrant to the US is more wealthy than the average person in the US. That's a large group of people from a large geographic area and multiple different races and "starting points" of wealth (in fact, their parents are on average less wealthy than the average US citizen).
Now, they don't come from wealth and if we were to look at their races, they are overwhelmingly non-white, and there's a plethora of obstacles regarding culture, language, beliefs, etc...that stand in their way.
That's a claim that is extremely difficult to answer if you want to believe in CRT.
I would say, possibly yes. Being black means one's parents are likely black. That means they are likely to have 1/7 the wealth of a white family. That means they are less likely to have the means to provide you with good schooling, and more likely to need you to get a job instead of going to school. That means you will be less prepared to get a good job. That means you will be less likely to make $80,000 a year or more.
See above.
All these factors that you have mentioned - every single one of them - is more likely if you are black. Therefore it is not correct to say that these factors are unrelated to race.
No....I pointed out factors that are entirely irrelevant to race and entirely dependent upon personal choice.
Take having a child as a teenager. There's nothing race that makes anyone more capable or more likely to do that. It's a choice. One race may on average make that choice more often than another....but that doesn't make the choice related to race.
Which is more likely if your family needs the money and you can get a low-paying job right away. It is also more likely if you go to a crummy unsafe school, which also is related to race.
Even personal choices like this are somewhat influenced by one's social situation, which in turn is related to race.
I don't think you're understanding the difference "related to race" and something that on average occurs more within a racial group.
The racial groups that we recognize in the US are arbitrary characteristics. The fact that black people on average have a higher rate of sickle cell anemia isn't because they are black. It's because Africa has a lot of sunlight so skin color tends to be darker there by evolution. Sickle cell anemia has to do with exposure to mosquitoes carrying malaria....which there are a lot of in Africa. It's also a product of evolution....but it's guided by geography and natural selection.