Thread by @AkivaMCohen

Since I keep seeing people arguing that the disparities highlighted in this piece are just correlation, not causation - particular shoutout to @groo_wonderer, who blocked me for explaining why that wasn't true - a brief thread on causation and mechanisms

https://twitter.com/ArcDigi/status/1271445913043689472

Let's talk about wealth disparities. This one is super easy. Until the mid-20th century, there were strong *legal* barriers to black wealth development - like, y'know, slavery and segregation - to go along with racist social barriers (people who wouldn't hire or patronize blacks)

It shouldn't take a dissertation to see that this will have an intergenerational impact. If Black guy David and White guy David are both born into the same crushing poverty in 1871 Georgia, who will have a better chance of economic success?

And if White guy David has a better chance of economic success than Black guy David, whose children are likely to be in better financial shape when they're born in 1896 or so?

And if White guy David's kids are likely to be in better economic shape than Black guy David's kids as they start their lives in 1896, which of them is likely to have more economic success as they grow?

Does that mean that if you went through the history of every poor person born in Georgia in 1871, even the black kid with the best outcome definitely ended up worse off than the white kid with the best outcome? No. There can be outliers.

But on average, given the circumstances, the white kids born in 1871 Georgia are going to do better than their black peers. So spread that across hundreds of thousands of kids and multiple generations, and *on average* white families had more of a chance to build up wealth than

black families did, *as a direct result of racism, both legal and social*. And that's reflected in the black-white wealth disparities.

Again, that doesn't mean there aren't outliers. LeBron, Will Smith, and Daymond John's families will be wealthier than 90% of whites ever will

But the existence of outliers doesn't mean the broader systemic impact isn't reflected in the broader systemic reality that, on the whole, black families have less wealth than white ones.

And that's granting the ludicrous assumption that current racism has no impact on black/white economics; virulent racism is (thankfully) far less prevalent than it used to be, but it still clearly exists

Let's take another easy one: education. How do we fund our schools? Primarily with local tax dollars. On its face, that's a race neutral approach. But only on its face, and it doesn't need to be *motivated* by race for you to recognize that. Because where do those tax dollars

come from? Property taxes.

Which are based on? Property values.

Are property values in black neighborhoods impacted by racism? Hell yes. How? Let's count the ways

1) A history of neglect. In less enlightened times, do you think minority neighborhoods got equal funding? No.

2) Wealth disparities, redlining and lending discrimination. If black families have access to less wealth (because of a history of racism, see above) and banks aren't lending to them or are demanding higher interest in minority neighborhoods, what does that do to the value of

homes black families can buy? It drives them down. So - again, *on average* - black neighborhoods tend to have lower property values. Because of racism. And that's accelerated by ...

3) White flight. As black families move in, white families fled. Because racism. Which meant

more neighborhoods becoming "black neighborhoods" rather than mixed-race neighborhoods, making the neglect and redlining of 1 & 2 even easier and more likely.

There are other inputs, but the bottom line is this:

Racism directly drove down the housing value in black neighborhoods. And housing value is how schools get funded. So racism directly contributed to the 23,000,000,000 education funding disparity I linked in my piece.

No biggie, right?Not like education impacts anything else

How about the persistent and stable employment gaps?Well, what we just talked about re education and wealth should already be cluing you in - when your education is less supported, when you have less money to supplement it or pay for college, do you end up in better schools or

worse colleges (again, ON AVERAGE)? Now layer on some more racism: Studies (plenty here google.com/search?q=resum…) have shown that resumes with stereotypically black names lead to interviews less often than resumes with stereotypically white names

Maybe that's just because of the content of the resumes? Nope. The effect holds even when they are *identical* resumes for made-up job applicants, with only the names changed cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Div…

But wait, there's more. How many times have you heard the phrase "it's not what you know, it's who you know?" Because connections open doors.

But if you're a black kid, you're much less likely to have relevant and useful connections than a white kid, because *see ⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️*

All of which contributes to the *remarkably* stable unemployment disparities.

And even if you hadn't thought about all this stuff deeply, the very stability of the gap should have told you something. If race weren't a factor, why would a racial gap remain stable over time?

If we were talking short periods, that could be dismissed as an anomaly. But over decades? Come on.

None of this means that systemic racism is the product of deliberately racist decisions. If a white CEO's white friend asks him to get their kid a summer internship at the company the CEO works for, the CEO isn't necessarily thinking "I'd do this only for a white kid"

But because of the accretion of systemic issues we've just discussed, the odds that a black kid will have that kind of access is just far smaller, *because* of their race, than the odds a white kid will. There's nothing wrong or immoral in the CEO helping a kid get a first job

But their will be racial disparities in who gets access to that kind of help, because of racial disparities in underlying issues, which exist because of racism even if that racism was addressed on the legal side decades ago.

And that access - which is ultimately a *product* of racism even if not *specifically motivated by* racism - will then perpetuate those racial disparities.

I said a brief thread, and this isn't brief, so I'll stop here. But there's causation in access to justice, health, etc too

Bottom line: If you're a good person who opposes racism - and I know you are, because most of us are - it's time to recognize that our work is NOT done when we cut out the racist decisionmaking but leave alone the impacts of past racist decisions

HOW we address those impacts? That's a tough question, and it needs to take into account peoples' individual rights and expectations and situations.

But THAT we address them? That shouldn't be up for debate. Not if your eyes are open.