“We have a hard time recognizing that racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country and in the world at large … When you truly believe that racial groups are equal, then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination.”-Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning
The idea that persistent outcome disparities between racial groups necessarily reflect or result from discrimination rests on a narrow, misleading, and politically motivated portrayal of the empirical reality. In what follows, I introduce and briefly discuss a number of data points that call this narrative into question.
Disparities between groups are the norm, not the exception—even among ‘whites’.
Binary white vs. black comparisons merely obscure disparities that obtain between virtually all ethnic/ancestry groups while promoting the illusion that white-black disparities are somehow exceptional. Indeed, large disparities in socioeconomic outcomes are observed even between US-born whites of different European ancestry. For example, Figure 1 below graphs the age and sex-adjusted median personal income among US-born respondents (so as to exclude the distortive influence of first-generation immigrants) by self-reported ancestry. Overall, nearly half (47.8%) of all European ancestry groups reported below-average median incomes in the 2015-2019 period, which is almost identical to the share (48.4%) among their non-European counterparts. Among the lowest US-born ‘white’ earners are those of Spanish, Dutch, Acadian, French, and British/English ancestry.