Reply #13: It's not equal. [View All]

[Igel]

You don't have equal starting points, so I don't know why you expect equal outcomes.

Blacks in the US have lower average
education achievement
inherited wealth
marriage rates
incomes

Blacks in the US have higher average
birth rates
crime rates for some categories of crime--even in descriptions of perps by same-race victims
incarceration rates (even controlling for crime category, but not for prior convictions)
rates of single mothers
likelihoods of living in pockets of persistent poverty
rates of childhood poverty

In other words, a black woman is more likely to be single, with more kids, lower income, live in an area with few opportunities, and have lower income than a white woman of the same age.

Income and education are correlated. Poverty depends on the family income divided by the number of family members: Larger family --> easier to be in poverty. Moreover, more kids --> harder to have steady, high-paying job or go to college.

I look at kids in my neighborhood. They make choices when they're young; their parents make choices for them. The choices have consequences later. Did they choose the consequences? No, but they failed to predict them--or, most of the time, they've been convinced that the consequences would be the same regardless of their actions so they may as well do what's easy, fun, or cool. They're wrong. But this is what their parents often tell them, in word or in action. The same bad choices are made by kids and parents of other ethnicities; you can find white, Asian, and Latino communities like the majority-black community I live in, with the same bad choices and the same bad outcomes. It's just that blacks disproportionately have failed to make the choices that would lead away from the bad outcomes. (It's been pointed out that the immigrant Latino youth is bifurcating: Some areas see them making the same kinds of choices as the nearby impoverished black community; some areas see them making choices similar to what previous generations of Latinos did. Some groups of recent Latino immigrants have outstripped the black average for income and wealth. Some haven't.)

Now, there's racism, to be sure. But once you eliminate a lot of things that result from choices, the amount of the wealth, income (etc.) gap due to racism diminishes. Nobody wants to hear that. It's hard to be empowered.