Testing The "Systemic Racism" Narrative
/How do you establish that a hypothesis is true? According to numerous explainers of the scientific method, starting with philosopher Karl Popper, the best you can do is to try to prove the hypothesis false, and fail. By this method — the scientific method — you can never definitively establish “truth” of a hypothesis, but over time you can get close.
Of course, we now live in the era of official narratives permanently immunized from attempts at falsification, nevertheless incorrectly claiming the mantle of “science.” The big three for this crazy year of 2020 are (1) the proposition that forced “lockdowns” and mask-wearing mandates slow the spread of the Covid-19 virus, (2) the proposition that human greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous increase in global surface temperatures, and (3) the proposition that income and wealth inequality are the result of “systemic racism” in our society. Proponents flood us with information consistent with these narratives, as if such information, if only provided in sufficient quantity, could prove their truth. But if we are really interested in getting as close as possible to the truth, shouldn’t we instead be looking for information inconsistent with the narratives?
Here is the exposition of the scientific method from physicist Richard Feynman from his classic series of recorded lectures:
[W]e compute the consequences of the [hypothesis], to see what, if this is right, if this law we guess is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare the computation results to nature or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. . . .
For today, let’s consider applying this logical method to testing one of this year’s big three narratives, namely the narrative that “systemic racism” is the principal explanation for disparities of income and wealth in our society. Following Feynman’s exposition, our first step would be to come up with some of the necessary consequences of this hypothesis, so that they can be tested. For example, if the “systemic racism” hypothesis is correct, surely that would imply that all sub-groups of non-white races would rank lower than whites in measures of income and wealth. Remarkably, in hundreds of pieces in dozens of sources railing about the evils of systemic racism in the U.S., you almost never find anyone considering this kind of a test of the narrative.
Now along comes a guy named Rav Arora with a piece on December 22 at Quillette, headline “A Peculiar Kind of Racist Patriarchy.” Arora takes exactly the approach that the scientific method would suggest, testing the “systemic racism” narrative by seeing whether actual data support or refute its logical consequences. Arora’s piece is filled with dozens of examples of data that are simply inconsistent with the “systemic racism” narrative. I’ll give just a few examples:
[Based on] newly released statistics from the US Department of Labor for the third quarter of 2020 . . ., Asian women have now surpassed white men in weekly earnings. That trend has been consistent throughout this past year—an unprecedented outcome. Full-time working Asian women earned $1,224 in median weekly earnings in the third quarter of this year compared to $1,122 earned by their white male counterparts.
[C]opious research finds that ethnic minorities and women frequently eclipse their white and male counterparts, even when these identities intersect. Several ethnic minority groups consistently out-perform whites in a variety of categories—higher test scores, lower incarceration rates, and longer life expectancies. According to the latest data from the US Census Bureau, over the 12 months covered by the survey, the median household incomes of Syrian Americans ($74,047), Korean Americans ($76,674), Indonesian Americans ($93,501), Taiwanese Americans ($102,405), and Filipino Americans ($100,273) are all significantly higher than that of whites ($69,823).
Valerie Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute reports that from 2018 to 2019, Asian and black households had the highest rate of median income growth (10.6 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively) of all main racial groups.
[D]espite the greater oppression black women supposedly face compared to white women, a much-publicized 2018 study featured in the New York Times found that black women had slightly higher incomes than white women raised in families with comparable earnings.
This is just a small sample. Mr. Arora’s Quillette piece goes on at great length. There are also additional data that Mr. Arora does not get to, including that median household income for some black ethnic subgroups exceeds the median household income for white Americans. As examples, per the American Community Survey for 2018, the median household income for white Americans was $65,777; but Nigerian-Americans had median household income of $68,658, and Ghanaian-Americans had median household income of $66,571.
Don’t expect the purveyors of the “systemic racism” narrative to be trying to deal with these contradictions any time soon. It’s too easy just to play to progressive guilt, and assume that no one will really bother to check the readily-available data for things that completely undermine the narrative.