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[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

‘Systemic racism’ is a conspiracy theory

The narrative behind movements like Black Lives Matter contends that hundreds – if not thousands – of black Americans are murdered by the state on an annual basis, that harassment and abuse of blacks by whites is constant, and that virtually all gaps in performance between racial groups must reflect hidden racism. These claims are almost universally false. But they have been accepted as conventional wisdom.

The pervasiveness of these ideas – despite the fact they are presented as ‘radical’ and ‘rebellious’ – is truly striking. The infamous (and entirely false) claim that an unarmed black male is ‘murdered’ by US police roughly once a day has been repeated by numerous BLM activists. A book called Open Season: the Legalised Genocide of Coloured People has become a bestseller.

The ‘all gaps stem from racism’ point has made the career of Dr Ibram X Kendi, author of such works as How to be an Antiracist and Antiracist Baby. Kendi specifically contends that any large-group performance gap has to be due to racism. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey recently gifted Dr Kendi with a $10million bequest, to help him share arguments like this with an even larger audience.

I have tackled the first two prongs of the BLM argument in other essays on spiked, so I will focus on the third prong. With all due respect to Dr Kendi, it is simply not the case that any gap in performance (such as SAT scores) between two populations has to be due to racism. In fact, while no one denies some bigotry endures, it is remarkable that an argument so demonstrably untrue has reached such an uncritical level of near-global acceptance. As Thomas Sowell pointed out literally decades ago, groups which vary in terms of major traits like race (or sex) also often vary in terms of almost everything else. One group might simply study more for the SAT than most others, for cultural reasons – and adjusting for this sort of thing almost always reduces or eliminates the massive gaps which some would like to attribute to racism.

Exactly this sort of adjustment has been done, often and well, in the context of race in the US. Thirty years ago, economist June O’Neill unpacked a well-known ratio of 82:100 for the earnings of black vs white men. Less technically put, black guys made about 80 cents for each dollar that white guys earned. This gap was – then as now – almost universally attributed to racism. But O’Neill pointed out that simply adjusting for variables like median age, where someone lives and years of education closed the gap substantially.