Jamelle Bouie responds to a recent paper by Roland Fryer that finds "discrimination isn't as nearly as important to explaining racial inequality as it once was." That might seem obvious, but let Bouie elaborate:
"Greatly reduced" is a bit of an understatement; if Fryer's analysis is correct, educational achievement and "pre-market skills" account for a huge portion of the racial gap between blacks, whites, and Hispanics. For example, after accounting for educational achievement, the pay gap between black and white workers drops from 39.4 percent to 10.9 percent for men, and drops from 13.1 percent lower to 12.7 percent higher for black women. The same goes for the racial gap in unemployment, incarceration, and physical health; once educational achievement is taken into account, the wide gaps either narrow or disappear completely. And while Fryer doesn't explicitly go into this, we can look to the legacy of institutionalized racism to find the roots of the achievement gap.
In a somewhat tangentially related piece, John McWhorter reviews Amy Wax's new book arguing that government efforts "cannot bring equality, and therefore must be abandoned."
Wax is well aware that past discrimination created black-white disparities in education, wealth, and employment. Still, she argues that discrimination today is no longer the “brick wall” obstacle it once was, and that the main problems for poor and working-class blacks today are cultural ones that they alone can fix. Not that they alone should fix—Wax is making no moral argument—but that they alone can fix.
In so far as conservatives don't believe government intervention is ever effective, this has a kind of consistency. But similar assumptions about intractable cultural pathology were once made of white ethnics who were catapulted into the middle class through the government activism of the New Deal.
To say that discrimination is no longer the problem is not the same as saying there's nothing the government can do; the government's options for reducing racial inequalities aren't limited to say, affirmative action. The recent Affordable Care Act, for example, will likely do a great deal to address racial health-care disparities despite not being explicitly passed as an effort to remedy past discrimination. I'm just unpersuaded by the idea that black people are somehow supernaturally immune to positive incentives created by government intervention while being inescapably doomed by bad ones.