Does systemic racism exist in the US?

[irontaino]

Peaceful BLM protest: met with militarized police, tear gas and rubber bullets.

Literal coup attempt: they get to waltz right in, loot, and police take selfies with domestic terrorists. Funnily enough, Republicans like Ted Cruz condemning this riot encouraged this very behavior.

[Lord Thesaurian]

This isn’t really the thread for off-topic whining about tangential comparisons/countercomparisons that wouldn’t evidence any claim related to this thread one way or another.

[irontaino]

Concession noted.

[pacifism]

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.

You’re just repeating yourself and refusing to examine any other possible effects that it had. I also made the case that blockbusting can cause racial breakdowns of city neighborhoods to change while not actually ending discrimination or its aftereffects. Blockbusting ironically proved the rationale behind redlining to be false. But do I really have to repeat myself that people getting worse loans on their home because of their race will make them poorer, and that being poorer contributes to their children being poor?

Again, no one argued historical discrimination never existed, and an acknowledgment of history wouldn’t substantiate any portion of your argument on its own. I’m not quibbling over percentages, I’m indicating the study’s findings. You misrepresented source material in an attempt to support your argument/counter mine, when the methodology and conclusions of those studies did no such thing.

The question, therefore, involves the causes of a current wealth gap given those historical barriers are illegal and have been for decades.

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%.

You are arguing that historical discrimination might as well have not existed. I am arguing that that statement is ridiculous.

Suggesting the studies and argument I’ve detailed are flawed absent contrary evidence, and/or misconstruing their conclusions because they don’t support your argument, does not constitute evidence proving your hypotheses, nor am I obligated to disprove the latter to substantiate my own. You should be able to establish these things on your own if convinced what you’re saying is accurate. Furthermore, what you outline here would cover historical discrimination, not allegations of current systemic racism, or even labor income, since ROI and home equity/portfolios were parsed separately in the first place. Put simply, you would need to prove your claim that the labor income gap is caused by current housing discrimination caused by systemic racism, more than cognitive skills, behavior or self selection, if this does form the basis of your argument affirming current systemic racism.

I don’t think your studies are necessarily flawed. I think your reading of them is flawed. The part where you keep contradicting them was a bit of a giveaway, really. Whenever you said the racial wealth gap was created by the racial wage gap and argued that housing discrimination is irrelevant, you contradicted your own source that said that the wealth gap was a consequence racial discrimination in areas such as housing.

As has been exhaustively covered at this point, poverty is a complex phenomenon with multiple causes and effects. As a function of the current racial wealth gqp, a labor income gap linked to cognitive skills, behavior and self-selection has been thoroughly established. What has not been established is your theory about the labor income gap being caused by current racially discriminatory mortgage rates, nor a causal link between current systemic racism and current disparities, which is what has been claimed and what I can only assume is the basis of your argument.

The causes of poverty are complex. Poverty that is created by stealing from people and taking away their rights is not that complicated. So don’t bs me: yes or no, did slavery and Jim Crow make blacks poorer?

The suggestion that data from the last 30-40 years is too recent to capture evidence proving your claims about current systemic racism would harm, not help them, since the implication would be that the causal role of systemic racism in disparate racial outcomes ended sometime before then. The Fed study looked at data from 1962 and found labor income, not housing, is the primary driver of the current wealth gap. The lack of support these studies provide for your argument would be a mark against the latter, not mine.

I said that redlining caused black people to pay more for their housing than white people. You attempted to disprove that with a study examining wages in a year when redlining was not in effect. That study cannot prove that what you are saying it proves.

The behavioral impact on pre-labor market factors does not inherently relate to motive or personality. It would be racially prejudicial to assign collective motives or personality traits to entire ethnic groups, let alone to paternalistically speculate as to how to correct them. Claims that current racial disparities are caused by current systemic racism wouldn’t be affirmatively associated with the morality of motive or personal choice anyway, since one would need to determine the current causal role of institutions, not people.

Okay Charles Dickens, would endlessly harping on about finishing high school, waiting until marriage, and getting a job count as “paternalistically speculat[ing] as to how to correct them”?

[Lord Thesaurian]

You’re just repeating yourself and refusing to examine any other possible effects that it had. I also made the case that blockbusting can cause racial breakdowns of city neighborhoods to change while not actually ending discrimination or its aftereffects. Blockbusting ironically proved the rationale behind redlining to be false. But do I really have to repeat myself that people getting worse loans on their home because of their race will make them poorer, and that being poorer contributes to their children being poor?

Obliging me to repeat myself because you do would be a flaw in your argumentation if anything; I’m following along as a courtesy. You can repeat historical observations as many times as you like; these wouldn’t support your position as to the role of current systemic racism in racial disparities on their own. I’ve examined everything you’ve presented and responded directly. If you don’t have any further argument to that end beyond the points already addressed, I can only wonder what you get out of repetition.

You are arguing that historical discrimination might as well have not existed. I am arguing that that statement is ridiculous.

I’m arguing that it would be necessary to prove claims asserting the causal role of systemic racism in observed racial disparities, especially in light of proven confounding variables that account for some or all of those gaps.

I don’t think your studies are necessarily flawed. I think your reading of them is flawed. The part where you keep contradicting them was a bit of a giveaway, really.

Whenever you said the racial wealth gap was created by the racial wage gap and argued that housing discrimination is irrelevant, you contradicted your own source that said that the wealth gap was a consequence racial discrimination in areas such as housing.

I didn’t make any claims one way or another about the creation of the racial wealth gap because we’re discussing the persistence of the wealth gap as a function of alleged current systemic racism, not how it started historically. If you need me to break it down for you, you can ask. There’s no reason for you to double and triple down on embarrassing false accusations that suggest you don’t understand the difference between the study’s acknowledgment of the creation of the current wealth gap (initial factors) versus its inquiry into the the causal factors in the gap’s continued existence (current factors).

From the study:

The current racial wealth gap is the consequence of many decades of racial inequality that imposed barriers to wealth accumulation either through explicit prohibition during slavery or unequal treatment after emancipation. Examples of postemancipation barriers include legally mandated segregation in schools and housing, discrimination in the labor market, and redlining, which reduced access to capital in black neighborhoods.

And while the existence of a racial wealth gap may not be altogether surprising, it may be surprising how little the racial wealth gap has changed over the past half century, even after the passage of civil rights legislation. In fact, the 2016 wealth gap is roughly the same as it was in 1962, two years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, according to data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF)

Notwithstanding your accusations, nothing about the above commentary on historical factors in the wealth gap contradicts anything I’ve said or supports your argument that the persistence of the wealth gap is caused by housing discrimination, especially since the historical factors mentioned are illegal and have been for decades, as I said. That’s the whole point of the study: to examine the persistence of the racial wealth gap despite the absence of these historical barriers.

The wealth gap might simply be the result of a historical wealth gap that was so large it hasn’t yet had time to close. As we have seen from the 1962 data, black households were much poorer than white households at that time. Even if all racial discrimination had ended in the 1960s, these wealth differences would not have disappeared instantly. Wealth takes time to accumulate. However, it is possible that other factors have kept the wealth levels of blacks and whites from converging, and researchers have investigated the influence of several of these. Specifically, the possible obstacles to wealth equalization that have been studied are savings rates, inheritances, rates of return on investments, and income. If blacks and whites differ on any of these dimensions, it could explain the persistence of the wealth gap.

In the absence of historical barriers like redlining, is it still causing the current wealth gap to persist as you claim?

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.

You initially tried to dismiss this as “quibbling over percentages” which is a curious thing to say about a study you simultaneously claim supports your argument and contradicts mine. But it isn’t quibbling nor does it say that housing discrimination is causing the wealth gap to persist. On the contrary, it specifically says here even as late as the 90s, if black households had the same portfolios as white households - including real estate - almost the entire wealth gap would still exist.

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%.

From the study:

What do we mean when we say that the labor income gap can account for the racial wealth gap? First, our model predicts that income and wealth will have a relationship in the future like the one we observe today. Our model predicts that, starting from 1962, it would take 259 years for the ratio of black and white mean wealth to reach 0.90.

Second, changing the labor income gap in the model changes the wealth gap dramatically. For example, when we remove the labor income gap in our model, meaning black and white households immediately earn the same income from their labor from 1962 onward, the black-to-white wealth ratio reaches 90 percent by 2007.

Third, 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. For example, when our model makes predictions under a gap in returns to investment as large as the gap in labor income, we find little change. The same is true for equalizing the inheritance process.
https://www.clevelandfed.org/newsroo...ealth-gap.aspx

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 causes of poverty are complex. Poverty that is created by stealing from people and taking away their rights is not that complicated. So don’t bs me: yes or no, did slavery and Jim Crow make blacks poorer?

Misdirection won’t make your rhetorical question into an argument. No one suggested slavery and Jim Crow didn’t deprive blacks of wealth when those things existed, because neither of those things exist now, nor have for 50-150 years, thus wouldn’t independently evidence the claim that current systemic racism is causing current racial disparities.

I said that redlining caused black people to pay more for their housing than white people. You attempted to disprove that with a study examining wages in a year when redlining was not in effect. That study cannot prove that what you are saying it proves.

I get the feeling you’ve lost the plot at this point and are grasping at straws with these fictional retellings of our conversation that hasn’t progressed since your argument ran aground pages ago. I didn’t try to disprove the historical existence of redlining. This study doesn’t need redlining to exist in the 1990s to substantiate its conclusion linking the wage gap to cognitive skills. You’re the one trying to work out how a policy banned 50 years ago is still causing the current wealth gap, or in this case the labor income gap, which necessarily includes 1990-2020.

Okay Charles Dickens, would endlessly harping on about finishing high school, waiting until marriage, and getting a job count as “paternalistically speculat[ing] as to how to correct them”?

Like I said, the behavioral impact on pre-labor market factors does not inherently relate to motive or personality, meaning it would only be paternalistic or speculative if someone made that way by reframing the issue along the lines of “why blacks are so bad at doing those things,” for instance.

Concession noted

Whose concession? Yours? You’ve yet to substantiate your claim that the Capitol mob got some kind of special or privileged treatment relative to anti police protestors, let alone as a function of systemic racism, and your false comparison/attempt to derail the thread was already debunked.

[irontaino]

Whose concession? Yours? You’ve yet to substantiate your claim that the Capitol mob got some kind of special or privileged treatment relative to anti police protestors, let alone as a function of systemic racism, and your false comparison/attempt to derail the thread was already debunked.

Nothing to see here.


You just keep doing you

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Lord Thesaurian]

Is this the part where I come up with more examples of Capitol protestors getting btfo? I included one already. Here’s some more.

Capitol protestor shot dead by police:

The woman who was fatally shot Wednesday by U.S. Capitol Police when rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol has been identified as a San Diego resident.

The victim, Ashli Babbitt, 35, was in Washington D.C. protesting President Donald Trump's loss in the 2020 election, according to her brother-in-law Justin Jackson.

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/loc...diego/2489076/

National guard deployed:

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told reporters that all 1,100 members of the D.C. National Guard had been mobilized on Wednesday afternoon to support the local police. He said that several federal law enforcement entities would be working to determine “how a clearing operation may be conducted.”

The decision to mobilize the D.C. National Guard — by Secretary McCarthy and Christopher C. Miller, the acting defense secretary — came as a pro-Trump mob breached the Capitol earlier in the day.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/u...itol-army.html

Trump mob bloodied, peppersprayed, bound and held at gunpoint:

Capitol Police were seen providing aid to a bloodied woman lying on the floor in the Capitol building. The Associated Press said one person was shot.

During the evacuation, reporters could see several protesters spread-eagled on the floor outside the chamber being guarded by police officers with machine guns. The group was moved to another location in the complex.

Police reinforcements in riot gear undertook crowd control measures, including the use of pepper spray. Secret Service and federal police were being rushed to Capitol Hill following a request from Capitol police, according to a spokesman for Homeland Security Department.
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/...rm-u-s-capitol

As I already warned you earlier, you have no argument.

[Cope]

Nothing to see here.

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".

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Who We Are

The Recount is a video-first political media brand informed by the highest standards of journalism.

We're all about enabling people to see and understand what's happening in politics right now, without wasting their time, insulting their intelligence, or burying them in b* or bad faith.

We're in an era of 24-hour news and information overload, of petty partisanship and ludicrous lies. The Recount was made for this moment.

We hold power to account and cut through the noise to give you the facts — all in 5 minutes or less. Get context on the political stories that matter.

No time wasted. All b* eliminated.

The Recount

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.

[Ludicus]

..whining about tangential comparisons.

I completely disagree.This is systemic rascism in action. The evidence is here,
Maga v BLM: how police handled the Capitol mob and George
and George Floyd activists – in pictures.

National Guard troops were deployed to the Lincoln Memorial on June 2, 2020, during protests held in Washington, DC, over the death of George Floyd.



A pro-Trump insurrect is tended to by a police officer,



---

From the Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex bulls in the middles 1400's, to Rosa Parker, to the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the troubled history of American education after the Brown decision, to the one of the Americas's longest-running school-desegregation disputes,systemic racism is still alive and well

May 2015,



Only after decades and decades of legal disputes, Mississippi School District ordered to desegregate.The Associated Press writes that the case may be eye-catching, but it's not unique:

Merging black and white schools was a common desegregation method in the 1960s and 1970s, and the opinion is a reminder that desegregation lawsuits never ended in some places. As recently as 2014, the U.S. Justice Department was still a party to 43 such suits in Mississippi alone."

----

Let's make no mistake: there is nothing tangential here,
Call it what it was

It was a long time coming, building up for years with white rage, especially white male rage fuelled by everyone from Trump himself to the National Rifle Association, Fox News and the various rightwing pundits, the Republican party, the various faces of white supremacy, and far-right groups such as the Proud Boys. It is a rage against the fact that other people might be equal under the law, that women and people of color might also govern as power begins to be distributed more equally, the same rage that attempted to delegitimize a black president with birtherism and obstruction. It is a rage against equality.

[Lord Thesaurian]

I completely disagree.This is systemic rascism in action. The evidence is here,
Maga v BLM: how police handled the Capitol mob and George
and George Floyd activists – in pictures.

Disagreement wouldn’t change the fact this is an anecdote rather than an analysis of systemic issues. The suggestion the Capitol mob got some kind of special or privileged treatment relative to anti police protestors has also been debunked here and in the other thread.

Only after decades and decades of legal disputes, Mississippi School District ordered to desegregate.The Associated Press writes that the case may be eye-catching, but it's not unique:

If anything, this would constitute an argument against the causal role of systemic racism in aforementioned disparities, given that the country’s institutions are still actively and systemically enforcing federal civil rights laws.

[Ludicus]

. The suggestion the Capitol mob got some kind of special or privileged treatment relative to anti police protestors has also been debunked here and in the other thread.

WHAT??? as the song says, my eyes still see, Legio. I'm not alone here.And its not a "mob".It was an white racist insurrection at Capitol, incited by a racist President.
Figures Show Stark Difference Between Arrests At D.C. Black ...
Police response to Trump rioters and BLM 'night and day ...
Police treated Black Lives Matter protesters and the ... - Quartz

[Cope]

WHAT??? as the song says, my eyes still see, Legio. I'm not alone here.And its not a "mob".It was an white racist insurrection at Capitol, incited by a racist President.
Figures Show Stark Difference Between Arrests At D.C. Black ...
Police response to Trump rioters and BLM 'night and day ...
Police treated Black Lives Matter protesters and the ... - Quartz

"It's not a mob" except when your own source (which uses selective imagery to spin its usual doctrinal narrative) calls it one.

The evidence is here,
Maga v BLM: how police handled the Capitol mob and George
and George Floyd activists – in pictures.

How about this for an agreeable headline: "White supremacist demonstrators, aided by white supremacist police, storm the center of white supremacy on earth to perpetuate white supremacy".

P.S: The Forbes article which complains of the "paltry" number arrested during the Capitol Hill riot compared to the Floyd protests makes no attempt to take into consideration the number of participants in each case, nor does it recognize that the search for perpetrators in the former case is ongoing.

[Lord Thesaurian]

WHAT??? as the song says, my eyes still see, Legio. I'm not alone here.And its not a "mob".It was an white racist insurrection at Capitol, incited by a racist President.
Figures Show Stark Difference Between Arrests At D.C. Black ...
Police response to Trump rioters and BLM 'night and day ...
Police treated Black Lives Matter protesters and the ... - Quartz

Those articles are reporting on unfalsifiable allegations of “what would have happened” if more of the Capitol protestors had been black. They do not substantiate those allegations, nor your insistence those allegations independently evidence your characterization of the event, nor would it be possible to prove an appeal to a hypothetical. Like your narrative, there is no way to substantiate tongue in cheek assumptions inherent to these allegations, as if police should have shot, arrested, beaten and pepper sprayed more people than they did.

As for the failure of police to control the mob, it’s public knowledge that intervention from the city, not nebulous allegations of racist double standards, directly contributed to the lack of preparation:

Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) told Justice Department and Pentagon leaders on Tuesday that the city is not requesting federal law enforcement assistance with protests organized by President Trump's supporters this week.

"To be clear, the District of Columbia is not requesting other federal law enforcement personnel and discourages any additional deployment without immediate notification to, and consultation with, MPD if such plans are underway," she said in the letter.

During the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, military personnel, at least some of whom were not wearing identifiers, extended the perimeter around the White House in the days after law enforcement and demonstrators clashed in the area.

Bowser indicated that MPD "is prepared" for the demonstrations over the next few days and has coordinated with its federal partners, specifically the U.S. Park Police, U.S. Capitol Police and U.S. Secret Service. She noted that these agencies "regularly have uniformed personnel protecting federal assets" in the city.

She also referenced her activation of the D.C. National Guard on Monday, saying the troops will work with the police department. The D.C. National Guard said about 340 members will be activated to assist the city and address the expected protests.

https://thehill.com/homenews/adminis...enforcement-to

Of course political leaders are crying racism to deflect from their own failures. Capitol police called for emergency backup from federal law enforcement, and additional national guard units were deployed after the Capitol had already been breached, and after the mayor had specifically indicated she would not request that assistance beforehand, because she deemed it unnecessary. I highly doubt the African American mayor of DC was confident in what turned out to be lax security because she was racially biased in favor of white protestors.

Edit: Comedy gold - DC mayor demands congressional investigation into why the security measures she specifically determined to be sufficient were not, in fact, sufficient. Shameless

The mayor of Washington, D.C., called on Congress to establish a panel to investigate the security lapses that enabled a mob to penetrate the U.S. Capitol Complex and threaten lawmakers.

"We must also understand why the federal law enforcement response was much stronger at the protests over the summer than during yesterday's attack on Congress," Bowser said, referring to the overwhelming response to those protesting police violence in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/07/dc-r...-failures.html

“We must understand why I specifically indicated to the DOJ that I did not want the additional resources provided last summer to monitor the protests.” Kek.

[swabian]

@swabian, redefining the concept (which is what you're doing) solves nothing.

I'm just being a little more precise about it, i'm not redefining it (as if there was a textbook definition to it at all), and i think it's worth discussing along this way.

Whether a system requires racial discrimination or is merely not fighting it effectively enough is a big and decisive difference. How is this a redefinition of anything?

The number of racists in bureaucracy, law enforcement and so forth are nothing quintessentially different to cases of corruption, i. e. to cases of individuals who are supposed to have executive function in the system, but are actually working against the system.

Racial discrimination by officeholders is criminal behavior after all. So what is characterized as supposedly system inherent racism is actually system failure based on the criminal conduct of a few of it's operatives.

[Ludicus]

Come on, Legio, wake up. As Mondaire Jones put it succintly (Member of the US House, Jones worked in the US department of Jutice during the Presidency of Obama),

I’ll just say it. If today’s domestic terrorists were black, they would never been allowed to storm the Capitol

An honest assemment, if we look back at how the police treated the BLM protest, and the... the inconceivable strangeness of Trump's bible photo-op after

It's called systemic racism, Legio.

[swabian]

The BLM protests were protests, often announced and legal, then it escalated more and more and it was under this premise, as the protests arrived at the capitol, that troops were deployed around it.

The recent intermezzo was completely unforeseen, both, the number of protestors as well as the time available to prepare to adjust to the protests strongly evidence that the whole thing was just utterly unexpected.
The entire range of the tumults surrounding the BLM protests far exceed what has been seen from the comparatively small crowd of Trumpets which especially didn't announce itself by huge preceding mass protests and acts of vandalism.

So, come on, Ludico. It's not.

[Lord Thesaurian]

Come on, Legio, wake up. As Mondaire Jones put it succintly (Member of the US House, Jones worked in the US department of Jutice during the Presidency of Obama),


An honest assemment, if we look back at how the police treated the BLM protest, and the... the inconceivable strangeness of Trump's bible photo-op after

It's called systemic racism, Legio.

No it’s not called that. Systemic racism had already been defined more than once in this thread. As I said, the anecdotes you ascribe to systemic racism based on op eds are not self evident. If you do have evidence the police or political leadership went easy on the Trump mob because of systemic racism, feel free to present it. I don’t know why you think your narrative is self evident or otherwise doesn’t need it, but that’s not the case.

[Infidel144]

I highly doubt the African American mayor of DC was confident in what turned out to be lax security because she was racially biased in favor of white protestors.

As the Mayor of DC, she is part of the system. As the system is systemically racist, she as part of that system is also racist.

Plus internalized white supremacy or something...

Edit: Comedy gold - DC mayor demands congressional investigation into why the security measures she specifically determined to be sufficient were not, in fact, sufficient. Shameless

“We must understand why I specifically indicated to the DOJ that I did not want the additional resources provided last summer to monitor the protests.” Kek.

Excellent tactic.
If Congress does decide to investigate:
It is controlled by Democrats, and can exonerate her completely and find some white male to blame.
or:
If Congress does apportion responsibility to her, she can claim to be a victim of systemic racism, which is looking to blame the black woman.

If Congress decides not to investigate, then it can be the systemically racist power structure trying to cover up for itself.

[pacifism]

Obliging me to repeat myself because you do would be a flaw in your argumentation if anything; I’m following along as a courtesy.

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.

You can repeat historical observations as many times as you like; these wouldn’t support your position as to the role of current systemic racism in racial disparities on their own. I’ve examined everything you’ve presented and responded directly. If you don’t have any further argument to that end beyond the points already addressed, I can only wonder what you get out of repetition.

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 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 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. 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.

I didn’t make any claims one way or another about the creation of the racial wealth gap because we’re discussing the persistence of the wealth gap as a function of alleged current systemic racism, not how it started historically. If you need me to break it down for you, you can ask. There’s no reason for you to double and triple down on embarrassing false accusations that suggest you don’t understand the difference between the study’s acknowledgment of the creation of the current wealth gap (initial factors) versus its inquiry into the the causal factors in the gap’s continued existence (current factors).

From the study:

The current racial wealth gap is the consequence of many decades of racial inequality that imposed barriers to wealth accumulation either through explicit prohibition during slavery or unequal treatment after emancipation. Examples of postemancipation barriers include legally mandated segregation in schools and housing, discrimination in the labor market, and redlining, which reduced access to capital in black neighborhoods.

And while the existence of a racial wealth gap may not be altogether surprising, it may be surprising how little the racial wealth gap has changed over the past half century, even after the passage of civil rights legislation. In fact, the 2016 wealth gap is roughly the same as it was in 1962, two years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, according to data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF)

Notwithstanding your accusations, nothing about the above commentary on historical factors in the wealth gap contradicts anything I’ve said or supports your argument that the persistence of the wealth gap is caused by housing discrimination, especially since the historical factors mentioned are illegal and have been for decades, as I said. That’s the whole point of the study: to examine the persistence of the racial wealth gap despite the absence of these historical barriers.

The wealth gap might simply be the result of a historical wealth gap that was so large it hasn’t yet had time to close. As we have seen from the 1962 data, black households were much poorer than white households at that time. Even if all racial discrimination had ended in the 1960s, these wealth differences would not have disappeared instantly. Wealth takes time to accumulate. However, it is possible that other factors have kept the wealth levels of blacks and whites from converging, and researchers have investigated the influence of several of these. Specifically, the possible obstacles to wealth equalization that have been studied are savings rates, inheritances, rates of return on investments, and income. If blacks and whites differ on any of these dimensions, it could explain the persistence of the wealth gap.

In the absence of historical barriers like redlining, is it still causing the current wealth gap to persist as you claim?

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.

You initially tried to dismiss this as “quibbling over percentages” which is a curious thing to say about a study you simultaneously claim supports your argument and contradicts mine. But it isn’t quibbling nor does it say that housing discrimination is causing the wealth gap to persist. On the contrary, it specifically says here even as late as the 90s, if black households had the same portfolios as white households - including real estate - almost the entire wealth gap would still exist.

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%.

From the study:

What do we mean when we say that the labor income gap can account for the racial wealth gap? First, our model predicts that income and wealth will have a relationship in the future like the one we observe today. Our model predicts that, starting from 1962, it would take 259 years for the ratio of black and white mean wealth to reach 0.90.

Second, changing the labor income gap in the model changes the wealth gap dramatically. For example, when we remove the labor income gap in our model, meaning black and white households immediately earn the same income from their labor from 1962 onward, the black-to-white wealth ratio reaches 90 percent by 2007.

Third, 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. For example, when our model makes predictions under a gap in returns to investment as large as the gap in labor income, we find little change. The same is true for equalizing the inheritance process.
https://www.clevelandfed.org/newsroo...ealth-gap.aspx

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.

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?

Misdirection won’t make your rhetorical question into an argument. No one suggested slavery and Jim Crow didn’t deprive blacks of wealth when those things existed, because neither of those things exist now, nor have for 50-150 years, thus wouldn’t independently evidence the claim that current systemic racism is causing current racial disparities.

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.

I get the feeling you’ve lost the plot at this point and are grasping at straws with these fictional retellings of our conversation that hasn’t progressed since your argument ran aground pages ago.

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

I didn’t try to disprove the historical existence of redlining. This study doesn’t need redlining to exist in the 1990s to substantiate its conclusion linking the wage gap to cognitive skills. You’re the one trying to work out how a policy banned 50 years ago is still causing the current wealth gap, or in this case the labor income gap, which necessarily includes 1990-2020.

Caused.

Like I said, the behavioral impact on pre-labor market factors does not inherently relate to motive or personality, meaning it would only be paternalistic or speculative if someone made that way by reframing the issue along the lines of “why blacks are so bad at doing those things,” for instance.

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.

[Ludicus]

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