> However, that doesn't mean that racism doesn't also exist and is not very prevalent. Endless research supports that it exists in many areas of society, it seems very unlikely that after centuries of overt, legalized racism it would disappear so quickly, and IMO it's unlikely to be coincidence that the excluded groups today are exactly those that that suffered overt, legalized discrimination until the civil rights era.
It's clearly not a coincidence, the problem is that part of the cause is present day racism and part of it is the economic fallout of historical racism, and they're separate because only the first is actually a race problem. The second is just a slice from the general problem of poverty and mobility and has to be solved in the same way.
But that means the statistics don't mean anything unless you can identify what caused it, because it changes what we have to do about it. If black people are underrepresented because of real live racists then we need to hunt down the racists, but if they're underrepresented because they're poor or raised by single parents or other such things where everyone like that is underrepresented, then we need to fight poverty and promote premarital contraception and so on.
And in practice it's going to be both, but that doesn't save you any work. You still need to find each root cause to destroy it. The problem isn't that there aren't enough black Senators, the problem is that a promising black entrepreneur who would otherwise have become a Senator had no choice other than to go to a racist loan officer who denied the loan. The lack of black Senators is the consequence.
> Sadly, my anecdotal experience is far too many white people expressing racist views in private, often grouping all blacks together and saying 'they' do X or Y. One, who holds a PhD, told me that Kenyan runners were faster because the harsh life of slaves caused natural selection to favor strength!
A hundred psychology experiments have shown that if you put people on a team and put some other people on another team, they'll instantly become adversaries. To actually eliminate racism you have to destroy the idea of it. It was never a real thing -- the human race is the only race. To make it go away we have to stop having "African Americans" as a category. They need to be just Americans.
I mean your PhD friend is clearly wrong. Weren't the people still in Kenya the ones not captured as slaves? Otherwise they would be in Alabama. But the stupidity of the argument doesn't phase because it isn't meant to convince. It's meant to rationalize a win by The Other Team when Our Team is supposed to be better at everything.
But we can't convincingly argue that race isn't important and people shouldn't identify with it, while at the same time making a big deal about racial disparities and rehashing the differences between races.
> I would be interested in research on the relative social mobility of various excluded groupings (people who are black, Latino, Muslim, or women) and also of poor white people. Lots of people try to claim there is no difference, as a sort of political blow against people seeking to address race issues, but I've never seen data supporting it.
The reason there is never any good data one way or the other is that people keep trying to measure the empty space. You can't just go to companies and do a survey that says "how many black people didn't you hire because you're a dirty racist?" So what people do instead is to say that there is X amount of disparity, and if you account for income then this much goes away, and if you account for education level then this much etc., and then whatever is left at the end is labeled the contribution of racism.
But there are arbitrarily many confounders. If you account for enough of them then the whole amount might be "explained," but it isn't really because you e.g. accounted for credit history but that includes the racist creditors who maliciously ruined the credit of minorities. It turns into a political fight over what factors should be considered and there is no answer. And even if there was, it would only tell you how much racism there is, not where it is.
But there is a simple solution, which is to realize that the exact number is irrelevant. It isn't zero. Nobody seriously claims that there is no racism at all. It doesn't matter if it's 50% or 0.0001%. You do the same thing in each case -- fight every instance of racism you find.
But actual racism, not statistics and aggregates. Your friend with the PhD is Wrong. It is now your responsibility to fix it by convincing them.