Yes. I'm convinced the most racist people are those who can't stop talking about race, and that would include a fair amount of self-proclaimed and vocal "anti-racists".
The average wealth of a black family in Boston is $8 whereas the average wealth of a white family is about $200,000. How do we talk about these disparities if we throw away the language to talk about race?
Or is your argument that these disparities are innate? Or that they are not at all due to the legacy of explicitly race based discrimination in the US (the last school desegregated due to Brown v. Board was in 1998)?
If you're not making either of those arguments, it seems kinda obvious why discussing race is still necessary today to me, not sure what you are missing.
If more black people are poor, then more black people will be helped by such policies. If we want to help the poor, let's help the poor.
If we only help the "black poor" we have to precisely codify what being black is, and I'm sick of such race science. The argument that being black implies the need of additional help is even _further_ condescending.
But I don't think the causes of poverty are universal, and for lots of black people, they are racially driven.
Discussing policies around the "poor generally" while banning discussion of race means abdicating any attempts at integrating schools, means that it is impossible to address discrimination against pepole with black sounding names (50% less likely to get a callback), means that it is impossible to discuss ongoing discrimination in the housing market (rampant, https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/real-estate-agents-... is a great resource if you want to see what racism in the urban US in the 21st century looks like).
None of those problems - all of which are likely large proximate causes for the racial disparities here - could be addressed if we are only allowed to talk about class and not race.
No compelling reason for why any discussion of race should be taboo has been provided. If the people who are discussing race in this manner are the "most racist", they're doing a pretty bad job at it given the massive disparities benefiting white poeple in pretty much all sectors of society in the country.
It seems ridiculous to me that the solution is to stop discussing race at all in a country that had legally enshrined anti-black discrimination within living memory.
You can make it illegal to discriminate against black people without creating a race database of every single worker in the country. Requiring every employer to ask every applicant "what kind of human race are you?" is so dumb that you can't make that up, asking applicants what race they are should be illegal but instead USA requires you to do it! That is like requiring every employer to ask every woman if they are pregnant or not and then report those statistics to the government, since how else can you ensure that pregnant women aren't discriminated against? It is almost as if the policy was made to encourage discrimination and white supremacy, but it is fine since you say you do it for good!
I think it is telling on HN that many seem more up in arms around the reporting requirements stemming from the 1964 Civil Rights act than any of the huge racial disparities I've identified above.
Given that the government has not been able to do anything about rampant racial discrimination in the real estate space, I am unsure how you think the government could do better if it can't even consider the race of employees or customers when making an equal opportunity case.
I agree with your point, if disparities exist, they should be discussed.
What's surprising is that when looking at the sample breakdown, even thought the # of observations and median age was approximately the same for White and U.S. Black, the U.S Black sample group where significantly less likely to be married (and thus not able to account for any spouse's income/wealth in the calculations for household net worth).
> Although members of communities of color are less likely to own homes, among homeowners they are more likely to have mortgage debt. Also, data on student loans and medical debt for whites and racial/ethnic minorities suggest that whites are often less likely to have these forms of debt.
This looks like the most critical reason for such a disparity.
Median is an average. [0] If anything the fact that it is a median makes it only more compelling, at least to me.
> thus not able to account for any spouse's income/wealth in the calculations for household net worth
Yes, maybe if more were married they would have double the net worth up to $16.
> This looks like the most critical reason for such a disparity.
It seems like a reflection of disparities in wealth, not the reason for it. My guess is there is a sizable historical component to the disparity, given that 60% of private wealth in the US is inherited [1], that would make large portions of that wealth inherited from either times where black people were actively enslaved or excluded from wealth acquisition mechanisms by law or custom. Such exclusion by custom is ongoing today, there is clear evidence for it in hiring and real estate markets.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/02/06/people-l...
I'm merely denouncing those who try to shoehorn the subject of race in every discussion.
I think I took your agreement that anyone identifying as "anti-racist" is a professional victim as suggesting that we should refrain from discussing race.
If you say “I don’t know, but it needs to be closer” that’s just in group preference - which is fine, but don’t present that statistic as evidence of anything but a disparity. You need to prove (while accounting for all confounds) that this gap is a result of x.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...
It doesn't take a genius to recognize that intergenerational wealth will have large disparities as a result of vastly different starting points in wealth (yes, due to slavery), jim crow legal constructs, as well as the ongoing fact that there is large ongoing (and well-studied) discrimination against black people in job and real estate markets, at minimum.