Recent posts by William Briggs and Francis Berger have staked out the position -- which seems at first glance to be obviously true -- that systemic racism against black people no longer exists in the modern West. (That it did exist until very recently is of course undeniable.) I thought I'd check out the evidence on the other side, and for some reason one of the first links Google served up was an article from Ben & Jerry's -- yes, the ice-cream company -- called "7 Ways We Know Systemic Racism Is Real." So here are my thoughts on the points made in that article.
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Claim: Whites have, on average, much more money than blacks. For example, blacks were 13% of the U.S. population in 2016 but controlled only 2.6% of the nation's wealth.
Comment: The article cites no evidence at all that this gap is the result of systemic racism. It could be, of course, but it is also consistent with the hypothesis that blacks, for race-internal reasons such as genetics or culture, tend to work less hard, be less reliable, have lower aptitude for high-paying jobs, etc. Another obvious possibility is that this gap is at least partly the result of past systemic racism. Today's blacks may or may not be victims of systemic racism, but their grandparents undeniably were, and wealth runs in families.
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Claim: Unemployment rates are consistently twice as high among blacks as among whites.
Comment: Again, the article does not even address the question of how much of this (if any) is due to systemic racism, past or present, and how much (if any) is a result of racial differences in intelligence, conscientiousness, etc.
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Claim: Even among college graduates, blacks are twice as likely to be unemployed as are non-blacks.
Comment: First of all, "affirmative action" (lower admission and sometimes graduation standards for blacks) means that a black with a given degree is likely to be less qualified than a white with an identical degree. Secondly, this is not necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison. Blacks are more likely to choose less lucrative majors (for example, social work rather than engineering; see here) and, I assume, tend to attend less prestigious universities as well. Finally, restricting our attention to a population (college graduates) that is selected for relatively high IQ, conscientiousness, etc., is not the same as "controlling for" those traits and does not eliminate group differences. Men are, on average, taller than women -- and men-over-six-feet are, on average, taller than women-over-six-feet. The same logic applies to other normally-distributed traits. Since so many factors other than systemic racism could account for this observed discrepancy, it is not strong evidence for systemic racism.
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Claim: If two identical resumes are sent out, one with a white-sounding name and the other with a black-sounding one, the applicant with the white name is 50% more likely to be called for an interview.
Comment: Again, "affirmative action" means that a black with a given degree and job experience is likely to be less qualified than a white with an identical degree and identical experience. Also, discriminating against people with ghetto-sounding names is not the same as discriminating against blacks as a whole, and may well have more to do with class than with race per se.
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Claim: Applicants with white-sounding names are more likely to be approved for Airbnb rentals than otherwise identical applicants with black-sounding names.
Comment: Again, "people with ghetto names" is not a good proxy for "black people."
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Claim: Black students of all ages are suspended from school, and referred to law enforcement, at much higher rates than their white counterparts, "even when their infractions are similar."
Comment: The report cited (pdf) contains absolutely nothing to back up the "even when their infractions are similar" bit. It simply reports how many students are suspended, with no indication of what infractions they were being punished for, or what percentage of students guilty of those same infractions were not suspended. In other words, it's entirely consistent with the hypothesis that black students are suspended more often than whites for no other reason than that they misbehave more often.
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Claim: Blacks are vastly over-represented in prisons (13% of the general population; 40% of the prison population).
Comment: Surveys of crime victims confirm that blacks commit many crimes at much higher rates than other races. The "demographics of crime" statistics derived from victim surveys match those of the justice system almost perfectly, strongly suggesting that systemic racism (incarcerating blacks at a rate disproportionate to their rate of criminal activity) is not at work here.
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Claim: If a black person and a white person each commit a crime, the black person has a higher chance of being arrested.
Comment: This is based on an ACLU report (qv) about marijuana possession, not about crime in general. Surveys indicate that blacks and whites use marijuana at similar rates, but blacks are 3.7 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. This probably has to do with blacks being more heavily policed -- which, in turn, is probably because (as discussed above) they commit more crimes. I guess you could call that systemic racism.
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Claim: Once arrested, black people are convicted more often than white people.
Comment: According to the report cited (qv), blacks account for 35% of drug-related arrests and 46% of drug-related convictions. About two-thirds of drug arrests result in convictions, so if you do the math, that means that non-blacks arrested on drug charges are about four times more likely to be acquitted than are their black counterparts.
How to account for this discrepancy? It could be due to systemic racism against blacks, of course, but it's almost trivially easy to interpret it as just the opposite. One way to interpret these numbers is to say that non-blacks are four times more likely to be unjustly arrested (i.e., arrested even though, as it turns out, they are not guilty) than blacks are.
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Claim: Until recently, crimes involving crack were punished much more severely than crimes involving powder cocaine -- and crack is, like, the blackest drug there is.
Comment: According to this site, in 2009, 73% of sentenced cocaine offenders who were black were in for crack rather than powder. White and Hispanic offenders, in contrast, were 64% powder and 85% powder, respectively. I guess the implication is supposed to be that crack was more harshly punished because it is disproportionately popular among blacks? It's hard for me to work up much outrage over this, since no one's stopping blacks from switching to powder -- or, you know, just not using cocaine. Anyway, this is "until recently" and so not directly relevant to the question of systemic racism in the present.
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Claim: Blacks who are convicted are 20% more likely to be sentenced to jail time than whites who are convicted.
Comment: The report cited in support of this statement has no information about what percentage of convicts receive jail time, but only about the average length of prison sentences.
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Claim: Prison sentences for blacks are typically about 20% longer than those for whites convicted of similar crimes.
Comment: This is backed up by a 2017 report from the United States Sentencing Commission (qv), which adds that this discrepancy remains even when controlling for an offender's history of violence. This does look like an instance of systemic racism.
It's worth noting that, according to this article, "the most potent predictor of recidivism was being a Black male, even though Black men had less contact with the criminal justice system and few of the risk factors traditionally associated with recidivism." Systematically giving longer sentences to a group with a high risk of recidivism seems defensible, though of course that doesn't make it non-racist.
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Claim: Banks have considered mortgages for blacks to be high-risk investments and have either refused to lend to them ("redlining") or targeted them for subprime loans ("reverse redlining")
Comment: Yes, this is systemic racism.
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Claim: Black drivers are pulled over 31% more often than white drivers.
Comment: No evidence is offered that this is due to racism rather than to, say, blacks committing more traffic violations.
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Claim: Drivers are more likely to drive through a crosswalk while a black pedestrian is crossing the road than while a white one is.
Comment: At least two different studies (see one here) have demonstrated this, and, yes, "racism" seems to be the only plausible explanation.
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Claim: A majority of doctors have “unconscious racial biases” when it comes to their black patients.
Comment: The study referred to (qv) used the Implicit Association Test and found that implicit bias against blacks was associated with doctors' spending more time with black patients, talking to them more slowly, etc., and with black patients liking those doctors less and being less likely to recommend them to others. There is no indication that "biased" doctors gave blacks substandard medical care or anything like that.
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Claim: Black doctors are less likely than white doctors with similar credentials to receive government grants for research projects.
Comment: No study is cited in support of this, but let me repeat what I've already said twice before: Thanks to "affirmative action" (i.e., systemic racism) blacks and whites with "similar credentials" are not likely to be equally qualified.
