There has been much debate over what does and what does not constitute “critical race theory.” The term has been used to describe everything from the foundational legal theory texts by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Richard Delgado, to the popular “anti-racist” works of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Others have erroneously used the term to describe even the most objective and factual descriptions of America’s racial history. The imprecision of the term has led some commentators, like
Chad, you are a winner. Best of luck as you move forward in your legal career. We need more young Americans like you and especially more law students who can think for themselves
A remarkable article. I've been looking for such a neutral and precise description of these concepts for a long time. Here is hoping it spreads around!
You say, “In the legal context, there does not need to be any evidence of discriminatory motive to bring a successful disparate impact lawsuit.” That’s true as far as it goes, but I’m not sure that’s far enough. As I understand it, even where a disparate impact can be shown, a defendant can win the case if it can be proven "that the challenged practice is necessary to achieve one or more substantial, legitimate, non-discriminatory interests." It gets somewhat more complicated than that, but the point is that merely showing a disparate impact may not be sufficient to win a lawsuit.
This is a wonderfully written piece. While I appreciate the nuance you bring to the conversation, I’m curious how you see policy playing a role in improving outcomes. The mere fact of residential segregation that persists today as a result of redlining, restrictive covenants, and real estate methods in the 20th century (discriminatory lending and home appraisals are ongoing) prevented substantial wealth building among the Black community and has pigeonholed a large proportion (as you say, Black people as a group) into areas of poverty. Because of our country’s educational funding structure, these predominately Black districts receive a fraction of the funding of the areas that are, as a result of 20th century housing policy, predominately white. You can blame Black culture, or you can blame poverty, which yields the same results of violence, crime, single-family households, teenage pregnancy, and joblessness across all races. But to say to Black people, who as a group are still struggling to escape the ghettos to which our country assigned them, that it is incumbent upon them to change that structure of residential segregation and overcome the dearth of investment in their children’s education and meanwhile alter their culture (which I presume is a criticism of the violence, crime, single-parent households, etc, that exist in many Black communities) is not only unrealistic but unfair. If you are not saying this, then I’d welcome a clearer explanation of what policy change you do support and how you see Black people, as a group that has less wealth and power than any other group in our country, addressing the outcome of poverty that is sewn into the literal landscape of our country.
Actually, according to the left-leaning/progressive “think tank” - The Brookings Institute: “Nationwide, per-student K-12 education funding from all sources (local, state, and federal) is similar, on average, at the districts attended by poor students ($12,961) and non-poor students ($12,640), a difference of 2.5 percent in favor of poor students.”
I was surprised by these numbers (as you too may be given your comments above). Now one can argue that the “rich” schools benefit from higher informal parent / PTA financial donations/support or that poor schools have to pay more for security or other higher non-education costs, but whatever the actual financial disparities are, it appears (nationwide and on average) that they are largely on the margin.
As Mr. Williams advocates - we should be willing to look beyond the questionable (and sometimes disingenuous) claims of “systematic racism” as the sole or even predominant cause of black student underperformance - as advanced by the CRT crowd. When looking for fuller explanations of the relative poor performance of black kids in our US educational system (and more importantly for ways to close the achievement gap and make black families “safer, healthier, and wealthier”), we shouldn’t be afraid to include cultural differences (as Mr. Williams observed), unaccountable/bloated/ineffective public school district administration/bureaucracy, powerful teacher unions that are often more committed to protecting bad teachers and administrators than they are in improving student learning, differences in group IQ, the impact of class/SES conditions, district funding, etc. as well as the effects of past (and any current) systematic or individual racism.
For obvious reasons, many well intentioned (and not so well intentioned) folks are unable or unwilling to undertake that kind of comprehensive and “systematic” review/analysis. Very glad to see that Mr. Williams is not amongst those in the black community willing to do so.
I appreciate the reference to the Brookings research. I think it's important to also disclose the author/researcher's last two paragraphs:
"But there are good reasons to believe that it is more expensive to provide the same quality of education to disadvantaged children—in other words, funding that is equal may not be equitable. For example, schools serving disadvantaged children likely find it harder (or more expensive) to recruit and retain high-quality teachers.[4] Additionally, poor children may have higher rates of disabilities or social service needs that require resources to appropriately address.
"From this perspective, the fact that overall funding progressivity remains low despite two decades of reforms enacted by courts and state legislatures suggests a troubling lack of progress on equitable funding of public schools. This finding is consistent with our state-level analysis, which shows that states where the distribution of education funding is strongly progressive are the exception rather than the norm."
I encourage you also to review the research and findings gleaned from the organization EdBuild (https://staging.edbuild.org), which partnered with a number of reputable foundations (The Carnegie Corporation of New York; The CityBridge Foundation; The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; The Walton Family Foundation (Walmart Founders); W.K. Kellogg Foundation, to name a few) to research a more comprehensive picture of disparity in the realm of the U.S. public education. Their analysis gives a more nuanced picture of the true disparity between school districts serving predominately students of color versus those serving predominately white students.
While I know it's tempting to point to behavior (or culture, as you might call it) of a group for whom disparity persists, it overlooks all of the structural and political ways that said group has been intentionally withheld resources over generations. As I said, poverty will create the "culture" that you speak of and so ignoring the way that poverty persists and the way it was created and consolidated among Black people will lead to ineffective outcomes. You can preach all day about personal responsibility (which I think you are using interchangeably with your analysis of Black culture); however, when you approach a problem (the problem you are calling culture) that is unique to people who have been at the receiving end of injustice that has been enacted generationally along lines of race to overcome barriers that were created and, in some cases, continue to exist along lines of race, you are treating a symptom and not a cause.
As it is, at $171,000, the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family ($17,150) (Brookings Institution). Research from Brandeis University and Demos found that the racial wealth gap is not closed when people of color attend college (the median white person who went to college has 7.2 times more wealth than the median black person who went to college and 3.9 times more than the median Latino person who went to college). Nor do they close the gap when they work full time, or when they spend less and save more. The gap, instead, relies largely on inheritance, ”wealth passed from one generation to the next.” And that wealth often comes in the form of inherited homes with value. When white families are able to accumulate wealth because of their earning power or home value, they are more likely to support their children into early adulthood, helping with expenses such as college education, first cars, and first homes. The cycle continues. In 2020 Americans were projected to inherit about $765 billion in gifts and bequests, excluding wealth transfers to spouses and transfers that support minor children.
Further, one-fourth of Black Americans living in poverty live in high-poverty neighborhoods; only 1 in 13 impoverished white Americans lives in a high-poverty neighborhood (Century Foundation). A study found that Black and Asian people were twice as likely to be called in response to a job application if all indications of race were removed from their resumes (poorpeoplescampaign.org). In a University of Wisconsin study, 17 percent of white job applicants with a criminal history got a call back from an employer; only five percent of Black applicants with a criminal history got call backs. College-educated whites are more likely to receive financial assistance from their parents. Black college-educated people are more likely to provide financial assistance to their families (Forbes). Black men make 22 percent less in income and Black women make 34.2 percent less than white men in the same circumstances (Pew Research). Latinos and African-Americans paid almost one tenth of a percentage point more than comparable whites for mortgages between 2008 and 2015, the study found — a disparity that sucked hundreds of millions of dollars from minority homeowners every year. The higher mortgage costs amount to an additional $765 million a year for Black and Latino borrowers.(poorpeoplescampaign.org). A Berkeley study found that both face-to-face and online lenders rejected a total of 1.3 million creditworthy Black and Latinx applicants between 2008 and 2015. Researchers said they believe the applicants "would have been accepted had the applicant not been in these minority groups." That's because when they used the income and credit scores of the rejected applications but deleted the race identifiers, the mortgage application was accepted. Among youth who have never been sent to a juvenile prison before, African Americans are more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes. (The New Jim Crow (TNJC), Michelle Alexander). Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been Black or Latinx (TNJC, Alexander). Across the nation, commercial waste treatment facilities or uncontrolled waste dumps are more likely to be found near African American than white residential areas. And from 1999 to 2018, Black children nationally were nearly twice as likely to test positive for lead in their blood than were white children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a result of living in older, dilapidated homes. Also, due in part to exposure to urban pollution, Black and Hispanic children are three times as likely to have asthma.
My point being that you can talk about culture all day long but the disparity is not a result of culture. In every race, you will find those who cheat the system, don't try hard, shirk responsibility, etc. How we address the pervasive problem of racial disparity is by addressing the disparate impact of forced poverty and withheld generational wealth as well as ongoing discrimination. You could talk about poverty in general, but poverty is also racialized because of how our country distributed resources when it was building the middle class in the mid 20th century. And we are living the outcome of that. Poverty for all people needs to be addressed, but it needs to be done in a way that acknowledges and accounts for the way that race played a role and created disparate impacts.
"Poverty for all people needs to be addressed, but it needs to be done in a way that acknowledges and accounts for the way that race played a role and created disparate impacts."
One can seek to make a society which is as fair as possible to each individual, or one can try to make one which is evaluated based on comparisons between groups (as divided by race, national origin, religion, sex, or whatever). I believe these two goals are not compatible with each other in the general case.
If we designed race-neutral programs to help *individuals* suffering from poverty, or lack of inherited wealth, then to the exact degree that *any* identifiable group has more members who qualify with those criteria, that group would receive disparate benefits benefits. As the group progressed, fewer of its members would qualify; if the group was losing ground, more of its members would qualify for benefits. This individual approach automatically works across all of the divisions (race, national origin, religion, handedness...) and all intersections of these subgroups.
Some groups may have more qualifying members due to historical discrimination; this even handed approach makes the group's average benefits automatically adjust to the residual effects, whether large or small.
By contrast, a program which treats each person based not on their own individual circumstances, but on the average circumstances of the group(s) to which they belong, is going to inherently be a unfair to everybody who is above or below the group average.
And deciding which groups are taken into account is inherently fraught. Should there be one category for all Native Americans, or two or ten or hundreds? For Blacks or Asians or whites or Latinos? Should we include national origin and for how many generations? What if some religions tended to have lower economic status, does that matter or not?
Many white or Asian individuals did not receive inherited wealth; many Black or Latino individuals did. The income or wealth ratios within each category (say, comparing the top 10% and the bottom 10% for each race) vastly dwarf the disparities between the means or medians of the groups. Advantages and disadvantages have been unevenly distributed among individuals forever, within as well as between groups.
In that context, what role should race play in accounting for individual treatment? How does using broad brush group-level average conditions produce better outcomes than treating people as individuals (with automatic self-leveling based on current need, across all groups and intersections)? Do we tell a poor Asian family "well on average Asians earn the most of any major group, so based on race you do not qualify, tho based on individual circumstances you would"? Or give unneeded benefits to a Black family which is already upper middle class, because others of the same race are suffering in the inner cities?
It's a serious question and I ask you because you seem pretty rational and thoughtful.
I think your response is fair, but I disagree with the very notion of groups, or blacks, or communities. The history of slavery is black on black, the history of black people is countless individuals/families vying with and against each other. I think we all support policies that help the underserved and the brutalized, but they shd not 'black' policies (though they certainly would help many black Americans), they shd be policies for the poor, the beaten, the cheated, the underprivileged, etc, etc - black people do not have any monopoly on any of these issues. Every country has poverty sown into its landscape: none except for a few (incomparable) NW European nations even bother to care about it. We are 60 yrs into doing a good job. We should keep on. CRT is turning the center to the right, and the left to the center.
I can only speak to my understanding of slavery and racial disparity in the US and how the history of US policies and practices has targeted race, which has resulted in the disparity along lines of race today. I will share with you some of what I shared in a response above:
While I know it's tempting to point to behavior (or culture, as you might call it) of a group for whom disparity persists, it overlooks all of the structural and political ways that said group has been intentionally withheld resources over generations. As I said, poverty will create the "culture" that you speak of and so ignoring the way that poverty persists and the way it was created and consolidated among Black people will lead to ineffective outcomes. You can preach all day about personal responsibility (which I think you are using interchangeably with your analysis of Black culture); however, when you approach a problem (the problem you are calling culture) that is unique to people who have been at the receiving end of injustice that has been enacted generationally along lines of race to overcome barriers that were created and, in some cases, continue to exist along lines of race, you are treating a symptom and not a cause.
As it is, at $171,000, the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family ($17,150) (Brookings Institution). Research from Brandeis University and Demos found that the racial wealth gap is not closed when people of color attend college (the median white person who went to college has 7.2 times more wealth than the median black person who went to college and 3.9 times more than the median Latino person who went to college). Nor do they close the gap when they work full time, or when they spend less and save more. The gap, instead, relies largely on inheritance, ”wealth passed from one generation to the next.” And that wealth often comes in the form of inherited homes with value. When white families are able to accumulate wealth because of their earning power or home value, they are more likely to support their children into early adulthood, helping with expenses such as college education, first cars, and first homes. The cycle continues. In 2020 Americans were projected to inherit about $765 billion in gifts and bequests, excluding wealth transfers to spouses and transfers that support minor children.
Further, one-fourth of Black Americans living in poverty live in high-poverty neighborhoods; only 1 in 13 impoverished white Americans lives in a high-poverty neighborhood (Century Foundation). A study found that Black and Asian people were twice as likely to be called in response to a job application if all indications of race were removed from their resumes (poorpeoplescampaign.org). In a University of Wisconsin study, 17 percent of white job applicants with a criminal history got a call back from an employer; only five percent of Black applicants with a criminal history got call backs. College-educated whites are more likely to receive financial assistance from their parents. Black college-educated people are more likely to provide financial assistance to their families (Forbes). Black men make 22 percent less in income and Black women make 34.2 percent less than white men in the same circumstances (Pew Research). Latinos and African-Americans paid almost one tenth of a percentage point more than comparable whites for mortgages between 2008 and 2015, the study found — a disparity that sucked hundreds of millions of dollars from minority homeowners every year. The higher mortgage costs amount to an additional $765 million a year for Black and Latino borrowers.(poorpeoplescampaign.org). A Berkeley study found that both face-to-face and online lenders rejected a total of 1.3 million creditworthy Black and Latinx applicants between 2008 and 2015. Researchers said they believe the applicants "would have been accepted had the applicant not been in these minority groups." That's because when they used the income and credit scores of the rejected applications but deleted the race identifiers, the mortgage application was accepted. Among youth who have never been sent to a juvenile prison before, African Americans are more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes. (The New Jim Crow (TNJC), Michelle Alexander). Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been Black or Latinx (TNJC, Alexander). Across the nation, commercial waste treatment facilities or uncontrolled waste dumps are more likely to be found near African American than white residential areas. And from 1999 to 2018, Black children nationally were nearly twice as likely to test positive for lead in their blood than were white children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a result of living in older, dilapidated homes. Also, due in part to exposure to urban pollution, Black and Hispanic children are three times as likely to have asthma.
My point being that you can talk about culture all day long but the disparity is not a result of culture. In every race, you will find those who cheat the system, don't try hard, shirk responsibility, etc. How we address the pervasive problem of racial disparity is by addressing the disparate impact of forced poverty and withheld generational wealth as well as ongoing discrimination. You could talk about poverty in general, but poverty is also racialized because of how our country distributed resources when it was building the middle class in the mid 20th century. And we are living the outcome of that. Poverty for all people needs to be addressed, but it needs to be done in a way that acknowledges and accounts for the way that race played a role and created disparate impacts.
Sure but once you go beyond the US, and humans are humans, the story of black Americans pales into the injustice suffered by millions in hundreds of other societies. More recently, more brutally, and bereft of any movement to ameliorate. Yet other groups move on. And immigrants of color for a century make the BLM/DEI argument suspiciously lame. And other black immigrants, usually coming from far worse circumstances in Africa/Caribbean, make the BLM argument ostensibly irrelevant. All this disaggregated, generalized 'racial' data the DEI industry produces is a, irrelevant to most people who work hard for their money and b, dubious with relation to cause and effect.
Put simply. Millions of people have suffered greater injustices than black Americans in the past few generations. Its a tired argument. It made some sense in 1955. It no longer does.
The problem is culture, not race. The problem beyond that is class, not race. Race is no longer the central issue. Thanks for your views.
I appreciate Mr. Williams' argument and point of view, but I think he misstates what CRT is, instead arguing about what it does. CRT is a theory, first, and all of its manifestations follow from the theory. It is a theory of social relations and this theory begins with the assumption that each of us is either master or slave, oppressor or the oppressed. Any theory is only as valid as the assumptions on which it is based. If the assumption is faulty then everything that follows from the theory is faulty, too.
When Karl Marx wrote about his theory of social relations, it may have appeared in mid 19th Century England where he lived and wrote and Europe where he was born and raised that there were masters and slaves and no other station in life. His theory failed to take into account, for example, the 3/4 of the planet where other societies existed and in some cases flourished.
The West's experience in the 20th Century and especially the American experience demonstrated that we can be agents of our own destiny and are not limited by Marx's assumed categories of master and slave. Our laws removed the legal opportunity to discriminate on the basis of master/slave status and the success of men like Mr. Williams and many women, too, show us that Black people have agency for their destinies if they choose to apply it.
The proponents of CRT demand we apply a "lens" of race to everything we do; they insist on perpetuating the master/ slave binary. They do it not to build a better society but to tear down the one we have worked hard to achieve.
I think the hardest thing for Blacks to face, is other Blacks holding them down. During slavery, there were Black slave owners and Black overseers. Today, the most dangerous thing to a Black man is another Black man. Yet, whites get the blame for it all.
Thank you, Mr. Chad Williams. This is the type of thinking that will move us forward in a positive way. Revenge/coercion/hyperbole won't solve this. But love, combined with rational thinking (humanistic approach) and individual effort will. Bravo!
Like all others I agree with this brilliant piece, that 100s will read while Kendi, Blow and Coates, oh so oppressed, delude millions by the day.
"However, despite the successes black Americans have achieved in the years since the Civil Rights Movement, disparities between racial groups persist." -
To this, yes, because tens of millions of people have been born into families they should not have, in broken families, abused by shameful parenting, and then on top, made lazy choices about reading at school, behaving, abiding by law, or conforming to any healthy degree. Hence, disparities persist. If Jewish, or Asian American families/kids had done the same thing since the 1960s they too would have had the same outcomes.
Chad, you are a winner. Best of luck as you move forward in your legal career. We need more young Americans like you and especially more law students who can think for themselves
A remarkable article. I've been looking for such a neutral and precise description of these concepts for a long time. Here is hoping it spreads around!
Clearest description of the issue I have read. Really helpful.
Great piece. I wrote about the data describing the many causes of disparities on my Substack as well, which can be found here, along with eleven other related essays: https://paultaylor.substack.com/p/part-3-the-many-causes-of-disparities.
You say, “In the legal context, there does not need to be any evidence of discriminatory motive to bring a successful disparate impact lawsuit.” That’s true as far as it goes, but I’m not sure that’s far enough. As I understand it, even where a disparate impact can be shown, a defendant can win the case if it can be proven "that the challenged practice is necessary to achieve one or more substantial, legitimate, non-discriminatory interests." It gets somewhat more complicated than that, but the point is that merely showing a disparate impact may not be sufficient to win a lawsuit.
This is a wonderfully written piece. While I appreciate the nuance you bring to the conversation, I’m curious how you see policy playing a role in improving outcomes. The mere fact of residential segregation that persists today as a result of redlining, restrictive covenants, and real estate methods in the 20th century (discriminatory lending and home appraisals are ongoing) prevented substantial wealth building among the Black community and has pigeonholed a large proportion (as you say, Black people as a group) into areas of poverty. Because of our country’s educational funding structure, these predominately Black districts receive a fraction of the funding of the areas that are, as a result of 20th century housing policy, predominately white. You can blame Black culture, or you can blame poverty, which yields the same results of violence, crime, single-family households, teenage pregnancy, and joblessness across all races. But to say to Black people, who as a group are still struggling to escape the ghettos to which our country assigned them, that it is incumbent upon them to change that structure of residential segregation and overcome the dearth of investment in their children’s education and meanwhile alter their culture (which I presume is a criticism of the violence, crime, single-parent households, etc, that exist in many Black communities) is not only unrealistic but unfair. If you are not saying this, then I’d welcome a clearer explanation of what policy change you do support and how you see Black people, as a group that has less wealth and power than any other group in our country, addressing the outcome of poverty that is sewn into the literal landscape of our country.
Actually, according to the left-leaning/progressive “think tank” - The Brookings Institute: “Nationwide, per-student K-12 education funding from all sources (local, state, and federal) is similar, on average, at the districts attended by poor students ($12,961) and non-poor students ($12,640), a difference of 2.5 percent in favor of poor students.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.brookings.edu/research/how-progressive-is-school-funding-in-the-united-states/%3famp
I was surprised by these numbers (as you too may be given your comments above). Now one can argue that the “rich” schools benefit from higher informal parent / PTA financial donations/support or that poor schools have to pay more for security or other higher non-education costs, but whatever the actual financial disparities are, it appears (nationwide and on average) that they are largely on the margin.
As Mr. Williams advocates - we should be willing to look beyond the questionable (and sometimes disingenuous) claims of “systematic racism” as the sole or even predominant cause of black student underperformance - as advanced by the CRT crowd. When looking for fuller explanations of the relative poor performance of black kids in our US educational system (and more importantly for ways to close the achievement gap and make black families “safer, healthier, and wealthier”), we shouldn’t be afraid to include cultural differences (as Mr. Williams observed), unaccountable/bloated/ineffective public school district administration/bureaucracy, powerful teacher unions that are often more committed to protecting bad teachers and administrators than they are in improving student learning, differences in group IQ, the impact of class/SES conditions, district funding, etc. as well as the effects of past (and any current) systematic or individual racism.
For obvious reasons, many well intentioned (and not so well intentioned) folks are unable or unwilling to undertake that kind of comprehensive and “systematic” review/analysis. Very glad to see that Mr. Williams is not amongst those in the black community willing to do so.
Sorry last sentence should read: “Very glad to see that Mr. Williams is amongst those in the black community willing to do so.”
I appreciate the reference to the Brookings research. I think it's important to also disclose the author/researcher's last two paragraphs:
"But there are good reasons to believe that it is more expensive to provide the same quality of education to disadvantaged children—in other words, funding that is equal may not be equitable. For example, schools serving disadvantaged children likely find it harder (or more expensive) to recruit and retain high-quality teachers.[4] Additionally, poor children may have higher rates of disabilities or social service needs that require resources to appropriately address.
"From this perspective, the fact that overall funding progressivity remains low despite two decades of reforms enacted by courts and state legislatures suggests a troubling lack of progress on equitable funding of public schools. This finding is consistent with our state-level analysis, which shows that states where the distribution of education funding is strongly progressive are the exception rather than the norm."
I encourage you also to review the research and findings gleaned from the organization EdBuild (https://staging.edbuild.org), which partnered with a number of reputable foundations (The Carnegie Corporation of New York; The CityBridge Foundation; The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; The Walton Family Foundation (Walmart Founders); W.K. Kellogg Foundation, to name a few) to research a more comprehensive picture of disparity in the realm of the U.S. public education. Their analysis gives a more nuanced picture of the true disparity between school districts serving predominately students of color versus those serving predominately white students.
While I know it's tempting to point to behavior (or culture, as you might call it) of a group for whom disparity persists, it overlooks all of the structural and political ways that said group has been intentionally withheld resources over generations. As I said, poverty will create the "culture" that you speak of and so ignoring the way that poverty persists and the way it was created and consolidated among Black people will lead to ineffective outcomes. You can preach all day about personal responsibility (which I think you are using interchangeably with your analysis of Black culture); however, when you approach a problem (the problem you are calling culture) that is unique to people who have been at the receiving end of injustice that has been enacted generationally along lines of race to overcome barriers that were created and, in some cases, continue to exist along lines of race, you are treating a symptom and not a cause.
As it is, at $171,000, the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family ($17,150) (Brookings Institution). Research from Brandeis University and Demos found that the racial wealth gap is not closed when people of color attend college (the median white person who went to college has 7.2 times more wealth than the median black person who went to college and 3.9 times more than the median Latino person who went to college). Nor do they close the gap when they work full time, or when they spend less and save more. The gap, instead, relies largely on inheritance, ”wealth passed from one generation to the next.” And that wealth often comes in the form of inherited homes with value. When white families are able to accumulate wealth because of their earning power or home value, they are more likely to support their children into early adulthood, helping with expenses such as college education, first cars, and first homes. The cycle continues. In 2020 Americans were projected to inherit about $765 billion in gifts and bequests, excluding wealth transfers to spouses and transfers that support minor children.
Further, one-fourth of Black Americans living in poverty live in high-poverty neighborhoods; only 1 in 13 impoverished white Americans lives in a high-poverty neighborhood (Century Foundation). A study found that Black and Asian people were twice as likely to be called in response to a job application if all indications of race were removed from their resumes (poorpeoplescampaign.org). In a University of Wisconsin study, 17 percent of white job applicants with a criminal history got a call back from an employer; only five percent of Black applicants with a criminal history got call backs. College-educated whites are more likely to receive financial assistance from their parents. Black college-educated people are more likely to provide financial assistance to their families (Forbes). Black men make 22 percent less in income and Black women make 34.2 percent less than white men in the same circumstances (Pew Research). Latinos and African-Americans paid almost one tenth of a percentage point more than comparable whites for mortgages between 2008 and 2015, the study found — a disparity that sucked hundreds of millions of dollars from minority homeowners every year. The higher mortgage costs amount to an additional $765 million a year for Black and Latino borrowers.(poorpeoplescampaign.org). A Berkeley study found that both face-to-face and online lenders rejected a total of 1.3 million creditworthy Black and Latinx applicants between 2008 and 2015. Researchers said they believe the applicants "would have been accepted had the applicant not been in these minority groups." That's because when they used the income and credit scores of the rejected applications but deleted the race identifiers, the mortgage application was accepted. Among youth who have never been sent to a juvenile prison before, African Americans are more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes. (The New Jim Crow (TNJC), Michelle Alexander). Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been Black or Latinx (TNJC, Alexander). Across the nation, commercial waste treatment facilities or uncontrolled waste dumps are more likely to be found near African American than white residential areas. And from 1999 to 2018, Black children nationally were nearly twice as likely to test positive for lead in their blood than were white children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a result of living in older, dilapidated homes. Also, due in part to exposure to urban pollution, Black and Hispanic children are three times as likely to have asthma.
My point being that you can talk about culture all day long but the disparity is not a result of culture. In every race, you will find those who cheat the system, don't try hard, shirk responsibility, etc. How we address the pervasive problem of racial disparity is by addressing the disparate impact of forced poverty and withheld generational wealth as well as ongoing discrimination. You could talk about poverty in general, but poverty is also racialized because of how our country distributed resources when it was building the middle class in the mid 20th century. And we are living the outcome of that. Poverty for all people needs to be addressed, but it needs to be done in a way that acknowledges and accounts for the way that race played a role and created disparate impacts.
"Poverty for all people needs to be addressed, but it needs to be done in a way that acknowledges and accounts for the way that race played a role and created disparate impacts."
One can seek to make a society which is as fair as possible to each individual, or one can try to make one which is evaluated based on comparisons between groups (as divided by race, national origin, religion, sex, or whatever). I believe these two goals are not compatible with each other in the general case.
If we designed race-neutral programs to help *individuals* suffering from poverty, or lack of inherited wealth, then to the exact degree that *any* identifiable group has more members who qualify with those criteria, that group would receive disparate benefits benefits. As the group progressed, fewer of its members would qualify; if the group was losing ground, more of its members would qualify for benefits. This individual approach automatically works across all of the divisions (race, national origin, religion, handedness...) and all intersections of these subgroups.
Some groups may have more qualifying members due to historical discrimination; this even handed approach makes the group's average benefits automatically adjust to the residual effects, whether large or small.
By contrast, a program which treats each person based not on their own individual circumstances, but on the average circumstances of the group(s) to which they belong, is going to inherently be a unfair to everybody who is above or below the group average.
And deciding which groups are taken into account is inherently fraught. Should there be one category for all Native Americans, or two or ten or hundreds? For Blacks or Asians or whites or Latinos? Should we include national origin and for how many generations? What if some religions tended to have lower economic status, does that matter or not?
Many white or Asian individuals did not receive inherited wealth; many Black or Latino individuals did. The income or wealth ratios within each category (say, comparing the top 10% and the bottom 10% for each race) vastly dwarf the disparities between the means or medians of the groups. Advantages and disadvantages have been unevenly distributed among individuals forever, within as well as between groups.
In that context, what role should race play in accounting for individual treatment? How does using broad brush group-level average conditions produce better outcomes than treating people as individuals (with automatic self-leveling based on current need, across all groups and intersections)? Do we tell a poor Asian family "well on average Asians earn the most of any major group, so based on race you do not qualify, tho based on individual circumstances you would"? Or give unneeded benefits to a Black family which is already upper middle class, because others of the same race are suffering in the inner cities?
It's a serious question and I ask you because you seem pretty rational and thoughtful.
I think your response is fair, but I disagree with the very notion of groups, or blacks, or communities. The history of slavery is black on black, the history of black people is countless individuals/families vying with and against each other. I think we all support policies that help the underserved and the brutalized, but they shd not 'black' policies (though they certainly would help many black Americans), they shd be policies for the poor, the beaten, the cheated, the underprivileged, etc, etc - black people do not have any monopoly on any of these issues. Every country has poverty sown into its landscape: none except for a few (incomparable) NW European nations even bother to care about it. We are 60 yrs into doing a good job. We should keep on. CRT is turning the center to the right, and the left to the center.
I can only speak to my understanding of slavery and racial disparity in the US and how the history of US policies and practices has targeted race, which has resulted in the disparity along lines of race today. I will share with you some of what I shared in a response above:
While I know it's tempting to point to behavior (or culture, as you might call it) of a group for whom disparity persists, it overlooks all of the structural and political ways that said group has been intentionally withheld resources over generations. As I said, poverty will create the "culture" that you speak of and so ignoring the way that poverty persists and the way it was created and consolidated among Black people will lead to ineffective outcomes. You can preach all day about personal responsibility (which I think you are using interchangeably with your analysis of Black culture); however, when you approach a problem (the problem you are calling culture) that is unique to people who have been at the receiving end of injustice that has been enacted generationally along lines of race to overcome barriers that were created and, in some cases, continue to exist along lines of race, you are treating a symptom and not a cause.
As it is, at $171,000, the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family ($17,150) (Brookings Institution). Research from Brandeis University and Demos found that the racial wealth gap is not closed when people of color attend college (the median white person who went to college has 7.2 times more wealth than the median black person who went to college and 3.9 times more than the median Latino person who went to college). Nor do they close the gap when they work full time, or when they spend less and save more. The gap, instead, relies largely on inheritance, ”wealth passed from one generation to the next.” And that wealth often comes in the form of inherited homes with value. When white families are able to accumulate wealth because of their earning power or home value, they are more likely to support their children into early adulthood, helping with expenses such as college education, first cars, and first homes. The cycle continues. In 2020 Americans were projected to inherit about $765 billion in gifts and bequests, excluding wealth transfers to spouses and transfers that support minor children.
Further, one-fourth of Black Americans living in poverty live in high-poverty neighborhoods; only 1 in 13 impoverished white Americans lives in a high-poverty neighborhood (Century Foundation). A study found that Black and Asian people were twice as likely to be called in response to a job application if all indications of race were removed from their resumes (poorpeoplescampaign.org). In a University of Wisconsin study, 17 percent of white job applicants with a criminal history got a call back from an employer; only five percent of Black applicants with a criminal history got call backs. College-educated whites are more likely to receive financial assistance from their parents. Black college-educated people are more likely to provide financial assistance to their families (Forbes). Black men make 22 percent less in income and Black women make 34.2 percent less than white men in the same circumstances (Pew Research). Latinos and African-Americans paid almost one tenth of a percentage point more than comparable whites for mortgages between 2008 and 2015, the study found — a disparity that sucked hundreds of millions of dollars from minority homeowners every year. The higher mortgage costs amount to an additional $765 million a year for Black and Latino borrowers.(poorpeoplescampaign.org). A Berkeley study found that both face-to-face and online lenders rejected a total of 1.3 million creditworthy Black and Latinx applicants between 2008 and 2015. Researchers said they believe the applicants "would have been accepted had the applicant not been in these minority groups." That's because when they used the income and credit scores of the rejected applications but deleted the race identifiers, the mortgage application was accepted. Among youth who have never been sent to a juvenile prison before, African Americans are more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes. (The New Jim Crow (TNJC), Michelle Alexander). Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been Black or Latinx (TNJC, Alexander). Across the nation, commercial waste treatment facilities or uncontrolled waste dumps are more likely to be found near African American than white residential areas. And from 1999 to 2018, Black children nationally were nearly twice as likely to test positive for lead in their blood than were white children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a result of living in older, dilapidated homes. Also, due in part to exposure to urban pollution, Black and Hispanic children are three times as likely to have asthma.
My point being that you can talk about culture all day long but the disparity is not a result of culture. In every race, you will find those who cheat the system, don't try hard, shirk responsibility, etc. How we address the pervasive problem of racial disparity is by addressing the disparate impact of forced poverty and withheld generational wealth as well as ongoing discrimination. You could talk about poverty in general, but poverty is also racialized because of how our country distributed resources when it was building the middle class in the mid 20th century. And we are living the outcome of that. Poverty for all people needs to be addressed, but it needs to be done in a way that acknowledges and accounts for the way that race played a role and created disparate impacts.
Sure but once you go beyond the US, and humans are humans, the story of black Americans pales into the injustice suffered by millions in hundreds of other societies. More recently, more brutally, and bereft of any movement to ameliorate. Yet other groups move on. And immigrants of color for a century make the BLM/DEI argument suspiciously lame. And other black immigrants, usually coming from far worse circumstances in Africa/Caribbean, make the BLM argument ostensibly irrelevant. All this disaggregated, generalized 'racial' data the DEI industry produces is a, irrelevant to most people who work hard for their money and b, dubious with relation to cause and effect.
Put simply. Millions of people have suffered greater injustices than black Americans in the past few generations. Its a tired argument. It made some sense in 1955. It no longer does.
The problem is culture, not race. The problem beyond that is class, not race. Race is no longer the central issue. Thanks for your views.
Terrific. Argued with logic and compassion.
Well-thought, well-said, well-hoped. Thank you Chad.
I appreciate Mr. Williams' argument and point of view, but I think he misstates what CRT is, instead arguing about what it does. CRT is a theory, first, and all of its manifestations follow from the theory. It is a theory of social relations and this theory begins with the assumption that each of us is either master or slave, oppressor or the oppressed. Any theory is only as valid as the assumptions on which it is based. If the assumption is faulty then everything that follows from the theory is faulty, too.
When Karl Marx wrote about his theory of social relations, it may have appeared in mid 19th Century England where he lived and wrote and Europe where he was born and raised that there were masters and slaves and no other station in life. His theory failed to take into account, for example, the 3/4 of the planet where other societies existed and in some cases flourished.
The West's experience in the 20th Century and especially the American experience demonstrated that we can be agents of our own destiny and are not limited by Marx's assumed categories of master and slave. Our laws removed the legal opportunity to discriminate on the basis of master/slave status and the success of men like Mr. Williams and many women, too, show us that Black people have agency for their destinies if they choose to apply it.
The proponents of CRT demand we apply a "lens" of race to everything we do; they insist on perpetuating the master/ slave binary. They do it not to build a better society but to tear down the one we have worked hard to achieve.
I think the hardest thing for Blacks to face, is other Blacks holding them down. During slavery, there were Black slave owners and Black overseers. Today, the most dangerous thing to a Black man is another Black man. Yet, whites get the blame for it all.
Thank you, Mr. Chad Williams. This is the type of thinking that will move us forward in a positive way. Revenge/coercion/hyperbole won't solve this. But love, combined with rational thinking (humanistic approach) and individual effort will. Bravo!
Like all others I agree with this brilliant piece, that 100s will read while Kendi, Blow and Coates, oh so oppressed, delude millions by the day.
"However, despite the successes black Americans have achieved in the years since the Civil Rights Movement, disparities between racial groups persist." -
To this, yes, because tens of millions of people have been born into families they should not have, in broken families, abused by shameful parenting, and then on top, made lazy choices about reading at school, behaving, abiding by law, or conforming to any healthy degree. Hence, disparities persist. If Jewish, or Asian American families/kids had done the same thing since the 1960s they too would have had the same outcomes.
Race Essentialism is the issue.
Wonderful argument.
This is an EXCELLENT piece. Very balanced and well-written.
Excellent!