Does systemic racism exist in the US?

[Love Mountain]

Certainly, there is nothing to see in a twenty-five second clip of cherry-picked footage posted by an obscure, "political media" outlet which farcically claims that it "won't waste your time or insult your intelligence".



As was pointed out in the 2020 election thread, the police used tear gas and rubber bullets, militarized feds* were deployed, the national guard was called in, fifty people were arrested and four people died, including a white woman who was shot by law enforcement.

The narrative being spread by the liberal press and "woke" celebrities that the authorities would have responded differently "had they [the demonstrators] not been white" is fraudulent. In fact, the condemnation of the Capitol Hill rioters - which even included the disapproval of foreign leaders - has been scathing by comparison to any denunciation of the violent unrest which went on for months ​last year.

*The same feds who were accused of being fascist snatchers when they defended a federal courthouse from left-wing militants in Portland.

The "white woman" who was shot at the U.S. Capitol, is Ashli Babbitt. She was shot when a number of people were attempting to break their way into the House chamber, where a number of congressmen were taking shelter. In other words, the white woman was shot nearly as the last possible resort. Moreover, medical assistance
was rendered almost immediately.

Second, the "tear gas and rubber bullets" were deployed at 2:30 PM, as the the Capitol building was starting to be barricaded. So again, such "basic" tactics were deployed very late into the protest and only, arguably, when the situation could no longer be prolonged.

Protesters were allowed to occupy the building, to occupy congressional offices (the now infamous shot of a man sitting in Pelosi's chair), and there is footage of capitol police quite literally opening the gates for, arguably, better crowd control, as well as taking selfies. In other words, the tactics and response is clearly aimed at reducing casualties and violence. Meanwhile, news reports highlight the reluctance of US Capitol Police to accept external help.

USCP itself rejected multiple offers for help from federal law enforcement ahead of Wednesday's events, and according to the Post, Mayor Muriel Bowser had only requested 340 guardsmen, mostly to monitor traffic and public transit.But DC guard troops answer to state governors, and since DC is not a state, Bowser had to request additional support on Wednesday from the Pentagon, which answers to Trump — a task that proved to be difficult and slow-moving.

Bowser and her staff, as well as lawmakers trapped in the Capitol, called on the governors of neighboring Maryland and Virginia, who themselves were initially ignored by the Pentagon when they asked military leaders to deploy additional guardsmen.

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, who effectively commands the DC Guard, said at a press conference Thursday that 6,200 guardsmen would be deployed by the weekend and that a "non-scalable" 7-foot fence would be set up around the Capitol. He added that military officials had planned for Wednesday assuming it would be like other recent protests and that not in their "wildest imagination" did they expect rioters to breach the Capitol.

But decisions by law enforcement — USCP as well as local and federal agencies — not to prepare for riots have drawn sharp criticism. Former DC Metropolitan Police Chief Charles Ramsey slammed the police response, telling CNN that "they need to be locking them up without question," with regards to rioters inside the Capitol.

In other words, the preparation and even the eventual response to the riot was slow and dismissive.



Let's contrast this to Portland "riots".

According to the Wiki, the riots started on May 28th, and remain on-going. So let's see what happened on May 28th.

May 28th, Thursday, protest was largely uneventful. Nobody broke anything, people just gathered outside to voice their grievances. No police response.
May 29th, Friday, again, the protest was largely peaceful. Nobody broke into government buildings, people marched and impeded business (kind of the point of protest), and exercised their rights. By 11pm, the protest devolved into a riot, breaking into the Justice Center and attempting to set fire. By 11:15 PM, as the Oregonian reports, the police arrived on scene in riot gear and began using tear gas, flashbangs, and loud speakers to break up any large crowd they could find.

15 minutes. That's how long it took the police to start breaking up crowds. There was no second-guessing or any of the we saw in D.C. By Saturday, May 30th, police were using heavy-handed tactics to break up crowds, not looters or riots, crowds. Because they were within a block of the building.



The double standard is so glaring, it's funny, but of course the argument that the "real double standard is with liberals" is as farcical as the argumentation used in this thread to posit that institutional racism does not exist in United States.


To make my position clear, I don't actually have a serious issue with the USCP response to the DC Riots. On the contrary, I believe that all police response to protests and riots should emulate it, in the sense that it should seek to minimize the use of force unless absolutely necessary. The problem is, that courtesy is not extended whatsoever to protests over 2020. And as has been repeatedly demonstrated, on-going police brutality only incenses and fuels further protests and riots, it does not dispel them.

[Lord Thesaurian]

As a courtesy, could you maybe look in a mirror and quit insulting my intelligence once in a while? Acting patronizing may be a great way to “win” “debates” on the internet, but it's actually because people don’t want to deal with the pointless digs.

First of all, the “quibbling over percentages” line was because up until now I didn’t know if you explicitly acknowledged that slavery or post-emancipation racial discrimination in the housing market had actually created any black poverty. That was kind of an important thing to know.

Second of all, you don’t seem to understand what my argument actually is. My argument is this: overt racism in law and practice caused blacks to be poorer, and although these causes have been halted, the effects have never been meaningfully reversed and the resulting disparities were allowed to continue. Instead of impoverishing blacks because of their race, blacks are now impoverished because they are poor. Poor people often lack the means to succeed due to things such as poor schooling or instability at home which is why poverty and debt have a way of accumulating. Racism is effectively what got the ball rolling on why a lot of blacks have a harder time succeeding, and the scars of old-timey racism still have an impact on many people’s lives. The basic unfairness of that makes me think that the problems facing the black community are more difficult than just telling teens to hike up their jeans and stay in school.

Maybe certain policy changes deeply offends your sense of freedom or something, but the point of all these anti-racism measures that are either already in place or are being proposed only exist to help people pursue that same liberty that you cherish which has been denied to them due to something as small as the color of their skin. Perhaps you prefer that poor blacks break out of the cycle on their own or not at all, but again: how did they get put into that cycle? How moral is it to observe that someone has been pushed into a pit and make it up to them to climb out?

Just because something no longer exists right now, that doesn’t mean that it has no relevance to today, or that its effects are not something to consider when examining contemporary issues. For the sake of consistency, would you say that because World War Two doesn’t exist right now because Captain America killed Red Skull in 1945, that it has no relevance today?

Up until a lifetime ago, American history was a history of freedom and the advancement of human rights, but also of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation. The American government merely stopped allowing those practices, they didn’t exactly kiss and make up, to quote the great American philosopher and social critic Katy Perry. Saying “whoopsie-daisy” and merely stopping a terribly hateful and damaging policy doesn’t exactly make everything okay now. You would probably be saying the exact same thing if China they suddenly stopped putting the Uyghurs in concentration camps and surveillance states but also merely deactivated them and didn’t actually do anything that substantially undid the damage the PRC themselves caused.

You know, it’s funny: I was thinking something very similar as well.

Caused.

Maybe you got your money’s worth on a thesaurus, but that is basically what you sounded like when you went on about how the blacks are poor because they don’t stay in school or get married like good Christians. Did you get graded in school by the syllable, or was it more like Scrabble rules?


“Counterintuitively, the interlocutor’s sesquipedalian word choice required an even more protracted timespan to parse his rhetoric than had he availed himself to a more colloquial parlance. Any sizable intellect supposed of one with such expansive diction had the unintended consequence of obfuscating the actual point being made due to the pointless pompous purple posturing. Indeed, the polysyllabic style almost made his responses seem pontifical and prevaricating instead of elucidating a clear answer or insight into his thought process in certain polemics. So much for avoiding paternalistic behavior.”

Ugh, I need to go wash my hands after typing that.

This is a pretty long winded and salty way to admit you don’t have an argument, and your dishonesty about it is rather tedious. That’s not a dig, it’s an accurate description. You’re clearly intelligent enough to motte and bailey your claims, because you’ve been dodging the issue for a few pages now:

Well, I'm being snarky because I didn't ask them what systemic racism means. I asked you. And boy have you been evasive on answering that one so far.

If it's a simple thing to define, then why don't you?

And I’ll say the same thing I said. Those making claims affirming the existence of systemic racism defined it. I addressed the claims on their own terms. It doesn’t matter what I personally believe systemic racism to be, especially if it is observable and provable according to the definitions given.

Let me get this straight: do I need a study or something to explain to you - just as an example - that black people being legally barred from owning homes for some time in the past helped cause lower home ownership rates, or have I merely come across what is quite possibly the most intentionally obtuse argument in the galaxy? At a certain, it isn't even an argument. It's just denial.

I’ll give the same answer as before, which went unaddressed.

As I said, you’ll need to prove that current systemic racism is causing the disparities under discussion. That’s what is claimed. “Systemic racism used to exist therefore it exists currently and is causing these disparities” does not constitute a provable conclusion. It is reasonable to suppose that coming from a poor family increases the odds you will be poor. That doesn’t prove the current existence of systemic racism nor its causal role in current disparate outcomes. If Prohibition ruined my family’s liquor business and we never recovered, suggesting that my current poverty is caused by current systemic bias in society would still need to be proven.

And you still haven’t.

Well, considering how it took about a dozen posts in two threads to get you to say that the racial wealth gap was in fact a result of racial discrimination, I have my doubts about that. But it’s funny: I was thinking something similar to what you said about repetition.

You haven’t been trying to “get me to say the wealth gap was a result of racial discrimination,” because the historical existence of slavery or Jim Crow is not nor has ever been the subject of the discussion.

You have done an excellent job proving that the damage of redlining was not in causing blacks to inherit less. But you haven’t really responded to much else, and you haven’t reacted to the fact that I haven’t been arguing that it only impacts inheritances. You are the one who is limited their thinking that way: by deciding to assume ahead of time that inheritances are the only thing that matters here.

I’ve addressed your argument as well as subsequent contortions you’ve put it through in an effort to salvage it and evade contrary evidence. The study addressed inheritances, portfolios, and labor income. It did not limit anything to inheritances.

I had expanded my argument to show how redlining affects not just inheritance but also income, due to predatory lending and more dangerous alternatives such as higher interest rates or blacks buying homes on contract from whites who were just waiting to foreclose or evict them and repossess the house for the next desperate black family to get suckered, which you have not directly addressed.

This is false. Not only does this “argument” of yours consist entirely of speculation, which I’m expected to disprove for some reason, but I also addressed it directly. The Fed study, provided several pages ago, addressed the impact of portfolio differences, including real estate, as well as the impact of “initial inequality” from 1962 over time, since racial discrimination and redlining have been illegal for 50 years, and the racial wealth gap would logically persist after that point in time. The impact of “initial inequality” was superseded by differences in labor income by 1977 according to their model, and the former impact is currently near zero according to Figure 3:

So, controlling for differences in asset portfolios, which would include the causal variable you chose, redlining, the wealth gap closes by around 5%, like I said before. Controlling for labor income, parsed separately here from real estate holdings, the wealth gap closes by 90%. This means, not only have I not contradicted the study, but for your claims about redlining and the wealth gap to be accurate, you would need to either refute this study’s findings, or find an alternative explanation of your own to substantiate your argument.

The factors contributing to the current racial wage gap have also been discussed in detail. That means your speculation doesn’t comport with the evidence I’ve presented. It doesn’t mean your speculation wasn’t addressed.

I also showed how your assumption that people still need to be living in their historical redlined ghettos for housing discrimination to be a relevant factor in the current wealth gap was not necessarily accurate either by discussing blockbusting and city growth, criticisms which you have not substantially addressed either.

This is false.

Redlining would indeed have to be creating segregated racial ghettos of mostly black people to this day, or at least demonstrate that they are still de facto restricted from leaving historically redlined areas due specifically to the now banned policy, even today. I don’t know how else one would link redlining to current systemic racism’s alleged causal role in current disparities. As I said, if formerly redlined areas don’t correlate with current black residence today, and the wealth gap is due primarily to wage income resulting from a cognitive skills gap and pre-market behavioral factors, linking redlining to allegations current systemic racism relies primarily on speculation, at least as you’ve presented it thus far. I also discussed the role of immigration in urban gentrification and income inequality, so the current causes of ethnic concentrations of residence or poverty in cities as it relates to alleged systemic racism would be even more difficult to parse from current effects of a policy banned 50 years ago. Nevertheless, it would be necessary to do so in order to substantiate related claims.

[pacifism]

This is a pretty long winded and salty way to admit you don’t have an argument, and your dishonesty about it is rather tedious. That’s not a dig, it’s an accurate description. You’re clearly intelligent enough to motte and bailey your claims, because you’ve been dodging the issue for a few pages now:

Well, I'm being snarky because I didn't ask them what systemic racism means. I asked you. And boy have you been evasive on answering that one so far.

If it's a simple thing to define, then why don't you?

And I’ll say the same thing I said. Those making claims affirming the existence of systemic racism defined it. I addressed the claims on their own terms. It doesn’t matter what I personally believe systemic racism to be, especially if it is observable and provable according to the definitions given.

Let me get this straight: do I need a study or something to explain to you - just as an example - that black people being legally barred from owning homes for some time in the past helped cause lower home ownership rates, or have I merely come across what is quite possibly the most intentionally obtuse argument in the galaxy? At a certain, it isn't even an argument. It's just denial.

I’ll give the same answer as before, which went unaddressed.

As I said, you’ll need to prove that current systemic racism is causing the disparities under discussion. That’s what is claimed. “Systemic racism used to exist therefore it exists currently and is causing these disparities” does not constitute a provable conclusion. It is reasonable to suppose that coming from a poor family increases the odds you will be poor. That doesn’t prove the current existence of systemic racism nor its causal role in current disparate outcomes. If Prohibition ruined my family’s liquor business and we never recovered, suggesting that my current poverty is caused by current systemic bias in society would still need to be proven.

And you still haven’t.

Well, I will say that it’s a little bit odd to be corrected on what I think immediately after I clarified and outlined my basic position. To be honest, I had thought that I was something of an authority on my own mind, but apparently I’ve got nothing on you telling me what I really believe. While we’re here, can you please let me know my positions on some more issues that I didn’t know I had?

I’m sure there is fancy debate term for when someone insists on misrepresenting an argument that they disagree with. Whatever it’s called, you’re getting pretty good at it, since we’re apparently at the stage of the discussion where we’re just giving each other a lot of compliments.

Anyway, as for what you said about proving systemic racism is causing the disparities under discussion: that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I usually hear systemic racism being used to describe the persistence of those relevant disparities since the days when racial discrimination was legal. And here I was thinking that you were going to address the claims of those defining and affirming the existence of systemic racism on their own terms.

Let’s break it down a bit. Housing discrimination was one of the things used exploit black people back in the day, which contributed to their impoverishment. To gain wealth, you need disposable income, but the policies that were once in place prevented that from happening. Those are the initial conditions.

Now that racial discrimination is legally over, race cannot be a factor in preventing anyone from succeeding … but money can be. Being poor makes it difficult to succeed. But this particular form of black poverty that has existed since the sixties did not develop spontaneously. It was induced by racism. The racial aspect of poverty today got started from discrimination. It’s not like blacks were ever on equal economic footing with whites and then black people slipped up in the free market through free decisions.

Racism caused an effective inequality of opportunity that those disparities show still haven’t gone away. That is a big part of what systemic racism is about: the additional informal barriers for success for racial minorities in general and blacks in particular that have been left in place.

So what exact part of that do you disagree with?

You haven’t been trying to “get me to say the wealth gap was a result of racial discrimination,” because the historical existence of slavery or Jim Crow is not nor has ever been the subject of the discussion.

Did the way that I kept bringing it up trigger any mental alarm bells that hey … maybe I was trying to establish that after all? The “subject of the discussion” is not a one-way street, you know, and you’re being oddly insistent on what the topic must be about.

If you really want to get picky, this started when you responded to me, so if anyone gets to demand what the topic actually is … it’s not really you, now is it? There’s really no point to this bickering.

I’ve addressed your argument as well as subsequent contortions you’ve put it through in an effort to salvage it and evade contrary evidence. The study addressed inheritances, portfolios, and labor income. It did not limit anything to inheritances.

I must have missed it.

This is false. Not only does this “argument” of yours consist entirely of speculation, which I’m expected to disprove for some reason, but I also addressed it directly. The Fed study, provided several pages ago, addressed the impact of portfolio differences, including real estate, as well as the impact of “initial inequality” from 1962 over time, since racial discrimination and redlining have been illegal for 50 years, and the racial wealth gap would logically persist after that point in time. The impact of “initial inequality” was superseded by differences in labor income by 1977 according to their model, and the former impact is currently near zero according to Figure 3:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

So, controlling for differences in asset portfolios, which would include the causal variable you chose, redlining, the wealth gap closes by around 5%, like I said before. Controlling for labor income, parsed separately here from real estate holdings, the wealth gap closes by 90%. This means, not only have I not contradicted the study, but for your claims about redlining and the wealth gap to be accurate, you would need to either refute this study’s findings, or find an alternative explanation of your own to substantiate your argument.

The factors contributing to the current racial wage gap have also been discussed in detail. That means your speculation doesn’t comport with the evidence I’ve presented. It doesn’t mean your speculation wasn’t addressed.

I was not speculating; I was describing a historic practice. It’s one of the things that happened where black people lost money to the tune of $500 million – unadjusted for inflation – in Chicago alone between 1940 and 1970 through predatory loan techniques and blockbusting. A lot of that money was probably coming from their income, so … oof. All the way through the golden age of capitalism and creation of suburbia, too.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...724-story.html

I’ll bet you a wooden nickel that white people at the time didn’t really have to worry about that sort of thing as much because of the fancy insured mortgages that they were being offered. I am certain that this, among other things, had no meaningful effect on black poverty in the city and has nothing to do with how rundown some parts of town are to this day.

I guess I thought you already knew that. Seriously, it was in Case for Reparations, one of the most well-known articles written in the 2010s. How did you get this far in your “discussions” about systemic racism without ever reading it?

[Lord Thesaurian]

Anyway, as for what you said about proving systemic racism is causing the disparities under discussion: that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I usually hear systemic racism being used to describe the persistence of those relevant disparities since the days when racial discrimination was legal. And here I was thinking that you were going to address the claims of those defining and affirming the existence of systemic racism on their own terms.

I’ve pointed out numerous times that the existence of racial disparity does not prove systemic racism is causing it, but your fallback position here seems to be that it does, in which case, your argument is not falsifiable. That would be a very different argument from what you’d said originally:

I agree that a disparity alone does not prove anything. It usually needs to be used in the context of some kind of history lesson. But I’m not sure how effective your response is when there is such an obvious smoking gun for what created many of these disparities in the first place. When we know how these disparities got started, and that they still exist to this day, then there should be a clear concern that the effects of such a terrible cause are – in some ways – still around.

Thus,

As I said, you’ll need to prove that current systemic racism is causing the disparities under discussion. That’s what is claimed. “Systemic racism used to exist therefore it exists currently and is causing these disparities” does not constitute a provable conclusion. It is reasonable to suppose that coming from a poor family increases the odds you will be poor. That doesn’t prove the current existence of systemic racism nor its causal role in current disparate outcomes. If Prohibition ruined my family’s liquor business and we never recovered, suggesting that my current poverty is caused by current systemic bias in society would still need to be proven.

I’m sure there is fancy debate term for when someone insists on misrepresenting an argument that they disagree with. Whatever it’s called, you’re getting pretty good at it, since we’re apparently at the stage of the discussion where we’re just giving each other a lot of compliments.

I haven’t misrepresented your argument at all. Since you agree that a disparity alone does not prove anything, you would need to prove current disparities are caused by current systemic racism. We’re at the stage of the discussion where you ignore an argument you disagree with because you don’t have a counter, and so falsely claim I misrepresented your argument instead.

I was not speculating; I was describing a historic practice. It’s one of the things that happened where black people lost money to the tune of $500 million – unadjusted for inflation – in Chicago alone between 1940 and 1970 through predatory loan techniques and blockbusting. A lot of that money was probably coming from their income, so … oof. All the way through the golden age of capitalism and creation of suburbia, too.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...724-story.html

I’ll bet you a wooden nickel that white people at the time didn’t really have to worry about that sort of thing as much because of the fancy insured mortgages that they were being offered. I am certain that this, among other things, had no meaningful effect on black poverty in the city and has nothing to do with how rundown some parts of town are to this day.

I guess I thought you already knew that. Seriously, it was in Case for Reparations, one of the most well-known articles written in the 2010s. How did you get this far in your “discussions” about systemic racism without ever reading it?

Reparations for past racism would not evidence the position that current systemic racism is causing current racial disparities today. Past vs current. Make sense?

For example, from your newspaper article:

The group also instigated two federal lawsuits, represented pro bono by a team of Jenner & Block attorneys led by future U.S. Attorney Thomas Sullivan. They were ultimately unsuccessful but added to the pressure on contract sellers to settle with buyers so they could be dropped as defendants.
More than 400 contracts were renegotiated, with an average savings of $13,500 per family, for a total savings of some $5.4 million.

And the documentation gathered by the league to support the lawsuits — the complete financial histories of all 30,000 properties on the West Side held in land trusts — helped end redlining when it was used to argue for the passage of the 1975 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, Satter said.
Still, the damage had been done.

Macnamara, now a visiting scholar at Loyola University Chicago's Center for Urban Research and Learning, calculates that from 1940 to 1970, more than $500 million — not adjusted for inflation — had been, as he puts it, "legally stolen."

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...724-story.html

1970 was 50 years ago. As you continue to ignore because it completely undermines your speculation, the Fed study captured the impact of redlining and discriminatory practices that historically impacted portfolios of assets, including:

Home equity
Other real estate
Farm or business
Stock
Checking and savings
Vehicles
Other savings
Debt

It was estimated that even if black households held the same assets as white households (your wooden nickel), 96% of the wealth gap would still exist. This, again, was parsed separately from labor income. So was “initial inequality” from 1962. As you said, oof.

While portfolio differences are real and impactful, these data suggest that portfolio differences are not the most significant factor contributing to the racial wealth gap. Gittleman and Wolff estimate that over 1984–1994 the wealth gap would have closed by only an additional 4 percentage points if black households had held the same portfolios as white households.

Other factors we might have suspected as playing major roles in maintaining the racial wealth gap pale in comparison to the role of the labor income gap.
https://www.clevelandfed.org/newsroo...ealth-gap.aspx

This means since labor income was factored in separately from these asset differences, your speculation that housing discrimination is causing the labor income gap and thus the wage gap contradicts this study.

Thus, as I said, If you want to argue against the study’s conclusions and insist homeownership is the primary driver of the current racial wealth gap (estimated to account for around 5%), you’d still have to do more than misconstrue sources to evidence that. Afterwards, you can work on demonstrating the causal role of current systemic racism in some significant portion of the other 95%.

[swabian]

...and, btw, my dear Trump's followers, Biden agrees with me.Systemic racism is alive and well.

Yes, he makes the same analytical failure as you do. I have to say this to you, even though i am everything but a Trump supporter.

How would you for example distinguish general racism from "systemic" racism? It's a washed up, faulty use of language and a failure in critical thinking.

[pacifism]

I’ve pointed out numerous times that the existence of racial disparity does not prove systemic racism is causing it, but your fallback position here seems to be that it does, in which case, your argument is not falsifiable. That would be a very different argument from what you’d said originally:

I agree that a disparity alone does not prove anything. It usually needs to be used in the context of some kind of history lesson. But I’m not sure how effective your response is when there is such an obvious smoking gun for what created many of these disparities in the first place. When we know how these disparities got started, and that they still exist to this day, then there should be a clear concern that the effects of such a terrible cause are – in some ways – still around.

Thus,

As I said, you’ll need to prove that current systemic racism is causing the disparities under discussion. That’s what is claimed. “Systemic racism used to exist therefore it exists currently and is causing these disparities” does not constitute a provable conclusion. It is reasonable to suppose that coming from a poor family increases the odds you will be poor. That doesn’t prove the current existence of systemic racism nor its causal role in current disparate outcomes. If Prohibition ruined my family’s liquor business and we never recovered, suggesting that my current poverty is caused by current systemic bias in society would still need to be proven.

Remember when I kept droning on and on and on and on about housing discrimination and slavery and stuff? That was me trying to get you to admit that black people became poor due to racial discrimination and many are still poor today due to the damages said discrimination caused that make it more difficult to succeed. That has been my entire argument so far. That is the history lesson that I mentioned explaining what created the racial wealth gap:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I agree that a disparity alone does not prove anything. It usually needs to be used in the context of some kind of history lesson. But I’m not sure how effective your response is when there is such an obvious smoking gun for what created many of these disparities in the first place. When we know how these disparities got started, and that they still exist to this day, then there should be a clear concern that the effects of such a terrible cause are – in some ways – still around.

Now that racial discrimination is legally over, race cannot be a factor in preventing anyone from succeeding … but money can be. Being poor makes it difficult to succeed. But this particular form of black poverty that has existed since the sixties did not develop spontaneously. It was induced by racism. The racial aspect of poverty today got started from discrimination. It’s not like blacks were ever on equal economic footing with whites and then black people slipped up in the free market through free decisions.

Racism caused an effective inequality of opportunity that those disparities show still haven’t gone away. That is a big part of what systemic racism is about: the additional informal barriers for success for racial minorities in general and blacks in particular that have been left in place.

So - again - what exact part of that do you disagree with?

I haven’t misrepresented your argument at all. Since you agree that a disparity alone does not prove anything, you would need to prove current disparities are caused by current systemic racism. We’re at the stage of the discussion where you ignore an argument you disagree with because you don’t have a counter, and so falsely claim I misrepresented your argument instead.

Okay then. When exactly did I say that the racial wealth gap persists because of different homeownership rates?

Reparations for past racism would not evidence the position that current systemic racism is causing current racial disparities today. Past vs current. Make sense?

What are you even talking about? I’m not referring to reparations, I’m referring to The Case for Reparations. You know, the article from The Atlantic?

For example, from your newspaper article:

The group also instigated two federal lawsuits, represented pro bono by a team of Jenner & Block attorneys led by future U.S. Attorney Thomas Sullivan. They were ultimately unsuccessful but added to the pressure on contract sellers to settle with buyers so they could be dropped as defendants.
More than 400 contracts were renegotiated, with an average savings of $13,500 per family, for a total savings of some $5.4 million.

And the documentation gathered by the league to support the lawsuits — the complete financial histories of all 30,000 properties on the West Side held in land trusts — helped end redlining when it was used to argue for the passage of the 1975 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, Satter said.
Still, the damage had been done.

Macnamara, now a visiting scholar at Loyola University Chicago's Center for Urban Research and Learning, calculates that from 1940 to 1970, more than $500 million — not adjusted for inflation — had been, as he puts it, "legally stolen."

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...724-story.html

1970 was 50 years ago. As you continue to ignore because it completely undermines your speculation, the Fed study captured the impact of redlining and discriminatory practices that historically impacted portfolios of assets, including:

Home equity
Other real estate
Farm or business
Stock
Checking and savings
Vehicles
Other savings
Debt

It was estimated that even if black households held the same assets as white households (your wooden nickel), 96% of the wealth gap would still exist. This, again, was parsed separately from labor income. So was “initial inequality” from 1962. As you said, oof.

While portfolio differences are real and impactful, these data suggest that portfolio differences are not the most significant factor contributing to the racial wealth gap. Gittleman and Wolff estimate that over 1984–1994 the wealth gap would have closed by only an additional 4 percentage points if black households had held the same portfolios as white households.

Other factors we might have suspected as playing major roles in maintaining the racial wealth gap pale in comparison to the role of the labor income gap.
https://www.clevelandfed.org/newsroo...ealth-gap.aspx

This means since labor income was factored in separately from these asset differences, your speculation that housing discrimination is causing the labor income gap and thus the wage gap contradicts this study.

Thus, as I said, If you want to argue against the study’s conclusions and insist homeownership is the primary driver of the current racial wealth gap (estimated to account for around 5%), you’d still have to do more than misconstrue sources to evidence that. Afterwards, you can work on demonstrating the causal role of current systemic racism in some significant portion of the other 95%.

I think you short-circuited there. It looks like you are using data from the 1980s-90s about the persistence of the racial wealth gap to explain away a part of the creation of the racial wealth gap during the 1940s-60s. In other words, you’re kind of doing that thing you keep accusing me of doing. You are going to have to prove (not assume, but prove) that that data from after racial discrimination was outlawed is still accurate for when racial discrimination was legal. I don't think that that particular source makes such a claim. In fact, it seems to acknowledge that legal racial discrimination era was a completely different set of circumstances.

On top of that, if housing discrimination caused very little change in wealth or income disparities, why do you make such a big deal that those days are over and were so long ago that they are now merely "historic"?

[Lord Thesaurian]

Remember when I kept droning on and on and on and on about housing discrimination and slavery and stuff? That was me trying to get you to admit that black people became poor due to racial discrimination and many are still poor today due to the damages said discrimination caused that make it more difficult to succeed. That has been my entire argument so far. That is the history lesson that I mentioned explaining what created the racial wealth gap:

The historical existence of slavery and Jim Crow was never a subject of debate at any point in the thread. It was something you subsequently construed as a point of contention to motte and bailey your refuted claim(s).

Okay then. When exactly did I say that the racial wealth gap persists because of different homeownership rates?

I agree that a disparity alone does not prove anything. It usually needs to be used in the context of some kind of history lesson. But I’m not sure how effective your response is when there is such an obvious smoking gun for what created many of these disparities in the first place. When we know how these disparities got started, and that they still exist to this day, then there should be a clear concern that the effects of such a terrible cause are – in some ways – still around

The example you give:

[Redlining] is one of the things that causes the disparities to persist.

This is your original claim and forms the basis of subsequent arguments you’ve made in this thread.

I’m fine with the idea that the racial wealth gap is driven by the racial income gap. Housing discrimination clearly impacts the income gap anyways.

If black people were given higher interest rates on their loans, were offered lower quality mortgages than whites (if they were offered at all), and were driven to rent at higher rates than whites, that means that blacks had to spend a disproportionately higher amount of their income on their housing due to their race. That would contribute to impoverishment, which would become a major factor in how educated or successful they would likely be once those practices of racial discrimination became illegal.

This was your fallback position from your original argument that redlining is causing the current wealth gap to persist, in order to work around the Fed study’s conclusion that the labor income gap accounts for virtually the entire current wealth gap. Your speculation here that labor income disparity includes extra spending due to housing discrimination, to salvage your original point, is also refuted by the Fed study, since the latter also tracked asset disparities in things like cash, debt, business ownership, investment returns, real estate, and home equity, separately from labor income, from 1962 to present.

I think you short-circuited there. It looks like you are using data from the 1980s-90s about the persistence of the racial wealth gap to explain away a part of the creation of the racial wealth gap during the 1940s-60s. In other words, you’re kind of doing that thing you keep accusing me of doing. You are going to have to prove (not assume, but prove) that that data from after racial discrimination was outlawed is still accurate for when racial discrimination was legal. I don't think that that particular source makes such a claim. In fact, it seems to acknowledge that legal racial discrimination era was a completely different set of circumstances.

I’ve used several different studies to make my arguments. The Fed study tracks the entire time period in question, since the end of Jim Crow, for changing dynamics over time, directly refuting your argument on its own terms. Analysis of the current wage gap wouldn’t be handicapped by looking at current data either, and I’ve provided multiple studies in this thread looking at various datasets. Given the labor income gap has only increased as a portion of the wealth gap since the end of Jim Crow, and the impact of “initial inequality” is near zero, more recent data would not only be more relevant, but also fundamental to any claims regarding the alleged causal role of current systemic racism in the persistence of the wealth gap.

[pacifism]

The historical existence of slavery and Jim Crow was never a subject of debate at any point in the thread. It was something you subsequently construed as a point of contention to motte and bailey your refuted claim(s).

And yet you act like it doesn't affect the present in the slightest. Again, the topic of a conversation is a two-way street.

As I have explained multiple times, a statistical disparity in and of itself is not a sign of anything. It needs to be interpreted. For example, black people in America are poorer on average this year, and the year before, and the year before that, etc. all the way to ... always. Now, why is that?

As I also said multiple times now, it's because it was legal to exploit and discriminate against black people for a long time. You seem to be on board with that so far. Those practices are not legal anymore (I think you clearly agree with that too), but the poverty and damage that that exploitation and discrimination caused has clearly had not been undone (I can't tell if you agree with that or not). In other words, these people became poor due to their race back in the day, and stay poor today due to their preexisting poverty that was created due to their race. Some people would call that systemic racism: a social system that is ostensibly equal but still sees race as a system, not necessarily due to the actions of any individuals (I know I lost you by this point).

The example you give:

This is your original claim and forms the basis of subsequent arguments you’ve made in this thread.

This was your fallback position from your original argument that redlining is causing the current wealth gap to persist, in order to work around the Fed study’s conclusion that the labor income gap accounts for virtually the entire current wealth gap. Your speculation here that labor income disparity includes extra spending due to housing discrimination, to salvage your original point, is also refuted by the Fed study, since the latter also tracked asset disparities in things like cash, debt, business ownership, investment returns, real estate, and home equity, separately from labor income, from 1962 to present.

I mistyped. I meant "caused" the disparities "that" persist. But sure, you caught me. An incorrect word tense demolishes the times I clarified and reiterated what my position was since then. Bravo.

Although it is a little cute to see you try to describe the most obvious financial advice ever (don't try predatory lending) and a documented phenomenon as my "fallback", I think the way that everything you've supposedly been griping about this entire time actually comes down to a typo from forty posts ago is all any of the masochists still reading this needs to know about how well you have been representing my views.

I’ve used several different studies to make my arguments. The Fed study tracks the entire time period in question, since the end of Jim Crow, for changing dynamics over time, directly refuting your argument on its own terms. Analysis of the current wage gap wouldn’t be handicapped by looking at current data either, and I’ve provided multiple studies in this thread looking at various datasets. Given the labor income gap has only increased as a portion of the wealth gap since the end of Jim Crow, and the impact of “initial inequality” is near zero, more recent data would not only be more relevant, but also fundamental to any claims regarding the alleged causal role of current systemic racism in the persistence of the wealth gap.

What, with data from every three years from 1983 to 2016 except for one whole data point in 1962? You'll have to better than that, I'm afraid. Don't you realize that at this point you are basically arguing against the idea that Jim Crow legalized racism affected black poverty? I mean, that clearly doesn't quite line up with other parts of your posts.

I mean, come on. The chart you've posted literally shows the labor income gap accounted for... hmm, what percent of the wealth gap around 1970ish? My, is that... zero percent? It really makes you wonder what exactly those "initial conditions" could possibly be referring to. I know I'm curious.

[Lord Thesaurian]

And yet you act like it doesn't affect the present in the slightest. Again, the topic of a conversation is a two-way street.

As I have explained multiple times, a statistical disparity in and of itself is not a sign of anything. It needs to be interpreted. For example, black people in America are poorer on average this year, and the year before, and the year before that, etc. all the way to ... always. Now, why is that?

As I also said multiple times now, it's because it was legal to exploit and discriminate against black people for a long time. You seem to be on board with that so far. Those practices are not legal anymore (I think you clearly agree with that too), but the poverty and damage that that exploitation and discrimination caused has clearly had not been undone (I can't tell if you agree with that or not). In other words, these people became poor due to their race back in the day, and stay poor today due to their preexisting poverty that was created due to their race. Some people would call that systemic racism: a social system that is ostensibly equal but still sees race as a system, not necessarily due to the actions of any individuals (I know I lost you by this point).

You’re free to define systemic racism as the mere existence of disparate outcomes by race. It’s certainly easier than trying to substantiate your actual claims. I’m interested in the causal role current systemic racism allegedly plays in those disparities based on the definitions provided previously, since that would be the bare minimum standard by which to substantiate related claims and talking points.

I mistyped. I meant "caused" the disparities "that" persist. But sure, you caught me. An incorrect word tense demolishes the times I clarified and reiterated what my position was since then. Bravo.

Although it is a little cute to see you try to describe the most obvious financial advice ever (don't try predatory lending) and a documented phenomenon as my "fallback", I think the way that everything you've supposedly been griping about this entire time actually comes down to a typo from forty posts ago is all any of the masochists still reading this needs to know about how well you have been representing my views.

You didn’t mistype. You’ve doubled and tripled down on the same refuted argument(s) for several pages.

What, with data from every three years from 1983 to 2016 except for one whole data point in 1962? You'll have to better than that, I'm afraid. Don't you realize that at this point you are basically arguing against the idea that Jim Crow legalized racism affected black poverty? I mean, that clearly doesn't quite line up with other parts of your posts.

I mean, come on. The chart you've posted literally shows the labor income gap accounted for... hmm, what percent of the wealth gap around 1970ish? My, is that... zero percent? It really makes you wonder what exactly those "initial conditions" could possibly be referring to. I know I'm curious.

You either don’t understand the study(s), which is unlikely given exhaustive and repeated explanations, or you’re just being dishonest about it to save face. If you believe systemic racism is causing racial disparities to persist simply because they exist, that’s certainly fashionable, but it’s not a falsifiable argument.

[pacifism]

I can't even convince you that I made a mistake. This is so pointless.

Feel free to do a victory dance or whatever you do when your presupposed responses sufficiently wear down someone’s desire to interact with you.

Bye, Felicia.

[Ludicus]

Yes, he makes the same analytical failure as you do.

Right. Biden Fills Economic Posts With Experts on Systemic Racism
He said his administration, for a start, will address inequities in housing and the health-care system.
------
On a ligher note: "If you’re Black and not slightly paranoid, you’re sick.” (Dick Gregory)

[Lord Thesaurian]

But while the notion of sprawling, multi-institutional "systemic racism" is a lie, there is at least one major American institution that does suffer from legally codified racism that tarnishes the institution's integrity, sullies its legitimacy and is so widespread that it might earnestly be dubbed "systemic." I speak, of course, of affirmative action admission policies in American higher education.

Thankfully, due to the petition for a writ of certiorari that was filed before the U.S. Supreme Court just this week in the case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, the nightmarish systemic racism of affirmative action might finally end soon.

https://www.newsweek.com/supreme-cou...pinion-1572222

Given the political and financial stakes, I don’t see this ultimately going anywhere. That might change if SCOTUS agrees to hear the appeal. The plaintiffs make a pretty solid case IMO:

Harvard uses race at every stage of the admis-sions process. To begin, Harvard recruits high-school students differently based on race. App.154-56. Afri-can-American and Hispanic students with PSAT scores of 1100 and up are invited to apply to Harvard, but white and Asian-American students must score a 1350. JA.577:6-581:20; JA.3741. In some parts of the country, Asian-American applicants must score higher than all other racial groups, including whites, to be recruited by Harvard. JA.585:15-594:8; JA.3741

When asked about this disparity, Harvard’s long-serv-ing dean of admissions, William Fitzsimmons, de-ployed a stereotype: Harvard preferred the white stu-dents who probably “lived [in the rural areas] for their entire lives,” not the Asian-American students who lived there for only “a year or two.” JA.591:4-8

The undisputed expert testimony at trial con-firmed OIR’s findings. Harvard admits Asian Ameri-cans at lower rates than whites, even though Asian Americans receive higher academic scores, extracur-ricular scores, and alumni-interview scores. App.170; App.172; App.262; JA.4530. According to an unrebut-ted model of the personal rating, Asian Americans re-ceive the lowest personal ratings among all races, and the “negative relationship between Asian American identity and the personal rating” is “statistically sig-nificant.” App.189-90; App.172-73; App.262. Unsur-prisingly then, a statistical model accepted by the dis-trict court showed a “statistically significant” penalty against Asian Americans in admissions outcomes. App.203.

Harvard’s admissions officers uniformly deny that Asian-American applicants have lower personal qual-ities than applicants of other races. JA.1437:20-1438:9; JA.2055:1-23; JA.1893:1-4; JA.711:5-712:4. Harvard also insists that race does not influence the personal rating. But the actual ratings reveal a clear racial hierarchy—with African Americans receiving the highest personal ratings, followed by Hispanics, then whites, then Asian Americans coming in last.

https://www.scribd.com/document/4959...-cert-petition

Harvard already confirmed their admissions practices are radially discriminatory in an internal investigation in 2013, and took no action to correct it nor publicize the findings. Hopefully SCOTUS will do the right thing and consider the appeal.

[Ludicus]

It is perfectly surreal to watch the continuing denial of systemic racism in the US. The question is not if it exists, the question is when it will end.
#176

-------------

How would you for example distinguish general racism from "systemic" racism? .

Merriam-Webster to revise racism definition

we have concluded that omitting any mention of the systemic aspects of racism promotes a certain viewpoint in itself … It also does a disservice to readers of all races.”

How 'Racism' Made Its Way Into the Dictionary - The Atlantic

Racism and racist are surprisingly recent additions to the English lexicon. You won’t find those words in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, or Abraham Lincoln. While the Oxford English Dictionary currently dates racism in English to 1903 and racist to 1919, the terms were still rarely used in the early decades of the 20th century. The pioneering civil-rights activist and journalist Ida B. Wells, for instance, instead used phrases like race hatred and race prejudice in her memoir, Crusade for Justice, which she began writing in 1928 but left unfinished when she died three years later.
When Merriam-Webster published the second edition of its unabridged New International Dictionary, in 1934, racism was nowhere to be found. The editors did include another, related term, which was more popular at the time: racialism, defined as “racial characteristics, tendencies, prejudices, or the like; spec., race hatred.” But racism was not yet on the radar of the lexicographers diligently at work at Merriam-Webster’s Springfield, Massachusetts, office.
when the word racism appeared in print in the late 1930s (still vying with racialism as the preferred term), it was most frequently in the context of European fascism under Hitler and Mussolini, with one definition drafted by the Merriam-Webster editors referring to “totalitarian ideology” and another to “the Nazi assumption of Teutonic superiority and attendant anti-Semitism.” Just a week after Egan made her inquiry about racism in 1938, German Jews were viciously attacked in the Nazi pogrom known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

A few weeks later, the activist Jesuit priest Father John LaFarge Jr. spoke out against racism (newspaper accounts at the time gave the still-novel term scare quotes), warning that the destructive forces of racism were gaining ground not just in Europe but in the United States as well.
Speaking at a dinner sponsored by the Catholic Interracial Council, LaFarge explicitly called out American racism against “Negroes, foreigners, and Jews.” Even if most Americans were unfamiliar with the word racism being applied to American life, doctrines of white supremacy in the country were, of course, widespread and pernicious at the time.
Racist tracts such as Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) provided cover for segregation and anti-immigration laws in the U.S., and indeed served as inspiration to Hitler for the Nazis’ own racist policies.

When the racism entry came due for an overhaul in the third edition of the New International in 1961, for instance, Editor in Chief Philip B. Gove and his staff determined that racism, by then no longer so associated with Nazi ideology, primarily referred to personal beliefs about racial superiority. But they made room for a second sense allowing that racism could also relate to institutional forces embedding implicit bigotry more broadly in society. And a third numbered sense defined it more succinctly as “racial prejudice or discrimination.” In fact, it was this 1961 definition that Mitchum would have seen when she consulted Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary in June.

The legacy of past editions meant that the entry was so broadly construed that it did not seem particularly applicable to systemic racism as experienced by Black Americans. Laying out the semantics of the word has always been a balancing act between what scholars on race like Camara Phyllis Jones have identified as “institutionalized” racism on the one hand and “personally mediated” or “internalized” racism on the other. With the institutionalized side of racism coming to the fore in the current discourse, dictionaries need to reflect that change of emphasis.

[enoch]

If the US government isn’t riddled with systemic racism, explain how whether the president is an open racist from one party or a former one from the other, the best the most powerful man (of course) in the government can do is put innocent brown kids in cages.

[Cope]

If the US government isn’t riddled with systemic racism, explain how whether the president is an open racist from one party or a former one from the other, the best the most powerful man (of course) in the government can do is put innocent brown kids in cages.

Lack of sufficient infrastructure to temporarily house thousands of migrants whose legal status is unknown. It has nothing to do with "racism". Next.

[enoch]

Lack of sufficient infrastructure to temporarily house thousands of migrants whose legal status is unknown. It has nothing to do with "racism". Next.

Didn’t realize this infrastructure was included in the new is it 2T or 3T bill. Doubt they forgot it. Why isn’t there infrastructure? Media across the spectrum points out this was an inevitable crisis (blame being the only difference tale to tale). Do we not care enough about innocent brown children in the US? That can’t be it though, because that would a systemic problem.

Why the Next? Is rudeness the goal? Is that how you speak irl?

[Cope]

Didn’t realize this infrastructure was included in the new is it 2T or 3T bill. Doubt they forgot it. Why isn’t there infrastructure? Media across the spectrum points out this was an inevitable crisis (blame being the only difference tale to tale). Do we not care enough about innocent brown children in the US? That can’t be it though, because that would a systemic problem.

Biden's policies, proposals and rhetoric (which came with no enforcement strategy) encouraged a surge of migration which is overwhelming border facilities and security. Liberal incompetence is the cause of the crisis, not racism.

Why the Next? Is rudeness the goal? Is that how you speak irl?

Move on to a more substantive argument.

[enoch]

Biden's policies, proposals and rhetoric (which came with no enforcement strategy) encouraged a surge of migration which is overwhelming border facilities and security. Liberal incompetence is the cause of the crisis, not racism.



Move on to a more substantive argument.

So Trump’s policies played no significant part? His enforcement strategy of let camps form at the borders didn’t increase the inevitable surge when the borders inevitably “reopened” someday? World was born in 2021. Immigration is a liberal crisis. Nothing more complex than that?

Do you even know why you think typing Next has value? I have my suspicions.

[Cope]

So Trump’s policies played no significant part? His enforcement strategy of let camps form at the borders didn’t increase the inevitable surge when the borders inevitably “reopened” someday? World was born in 2021. Immigration is a liberal crisis. Nothing more complex than that?

The pivot to Trump is a tacit concession on the point regarding Biden's incompetence. And yes, encouraging mass migration without having made the necessary preparations is a consequence of liberal ineptitude (more than 3x as many migrants attempted to enter via the southern border in February as did in the same month last year). See the European migrant crisis of 2015/16 for an even more extreme example.

Though to reiterate: it has nothing to do with racism.

Do you even know why you think typing Next has value? I have my suspicions.

The intention is to encourage you to move onto a more substantive point.

[enoch]

You misunderstand. My statement is both Trump and Biden made policy decisions that caused this easily avoidable mayhem. To blame one and not the other is something you find in people who speak in narratives they are regurgitating.