I make four basic points about racism. 1st, there obviously is mild but REAL racism in the USA...like every human society. Studies find that that 8% of whites wouldn't vote for a qualified Black President (Pew 2016), Blacks are 6-9% less likely to be rented a nice apartment, etc.
(2) But, it can't be ignored that the USA spent an EXTRAORDINARY amount of blood/treasure compensating for racism this century. Brown v. Board dates back to 1954, the Civil Rights Act made discrimination ILLEGAL in '64, and pro-minority affirmative action dates to 1967.
(3) In the context of this actual history, we don't see "oppression" today as much as a complex mix of advantages for whites and POC. A Black or Hispanic student has a 200-300 point SAT advantage (Sander & Taylor 2012) over an equally qualified white kid when applying to college.
(4) More notably, many/most of the gaps attributed to "institutional racism" vanish under competent scrutiny. Blacks make ~82% of what whites do- but the gap closes to basically nothing if you adjust for age, living in the South, SAT score, etc (O'Neill 1990, 2005).
(5) Also, most OTHER core traits seem to affect income and happiness more than race does. The one time I ran a large-N test of a solid quant survey of "privilege," race had the SIXTH highest effect on the DV, after social CLASS, female sex, being gay, urban v. rural status, etc.
(6) In short, racism exists here- as everywhere. But claims of vast "structures" of oppression often collapse when we adjust for anything BUT race - and race is one of 12-15 things correlated with "privilege" or income. Many social justice arguments strike me as just wrong.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
