osewalrus

Turns out the punishing impact of racism on income and social mobility is uniquely powerful for African American boys. Not girls. Boys. Nor does it impact other non-white boys in the same way. As demonstrated in this study last year (no, I will not answer your questions or respond to your issues with the study if these make clear you did not click through and read it), black boys raised in families of comparable structure and income to white boys are likely to end up poorer rather than even maintain the same level of wealth. By contrast, African American women have earning and social mobility indistinguishable from white women. While that is still not as good as for white men, it is profoundly better than for black men.

The only other group that even comes close to the same level of income inequality is Native Americans.

I will not take the time at the moment to launch into my pet theory on the why of this. I will simply observe that the effort to treat all forms of racism or discrimination as identical, and to fail to understand the underlying mechanisms and unique issues around every sort of discrimination, inevitably dooms efforts to combat discrimination to failure. As i often observe, "cancer" is a collective name for a type of disease in which the individual cancers are very different. No one thinks it is somehow "legitimizing cancer" or "failing to appreciate the harm of cancer" when we actually study these details and use them to design better treatments.