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Indeed, a simple reading of almost anything by Thomas Sowell, especially Discrimination and Disparities, would go a long way to educate everyone that discrimination is not a meaningful factor in why we have disparities between groups.

Thomas Sowell's book Discrimination and Disparities discusses discrimination and has made me reconsider what is actually happening in the type of scenario you describe.

I highly recommend it.

It reminds me of a section of Thomas Sowell's book Discrimination and Disparities.

It was talking about automatic background checks for applicants at businesses. Some people wanted such processes to be illegal, on the grounds that they were supposedly racist.

In reality, automatic (i.e. indiscriminate) background checks actually resulted in more blacks being hired. Even if the local black population had a higher or much higher percentage of people with bad marks on background checks, being able to screen them out and allow those blacks with no bad marks to apply was made easy.

Without automatic background checks, employers fell back on their own biases, resulting in fewer blacks being hired.

The SAT is like an automatic background check. Without this indiscriminate screening, the schools have more ability to discriminate based on biases.

The data don't support racism being the causes of the disparate outcomes. That makes it unreasonable to start with the assumption that the "system is racist."

If you want to understand why, I'd encourage you to read Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell.

Here's one example:

> These various facts might be summarized as examples of racism, so that the causal question is whether racism is either the cause, or one of the major causes, of poverty and other social problems among black Americans today. Many might consider the obvious answer to be "yes." Yet some incontrovertible facts undermine that conclusion. For example, despite the high poverty rate among black Americans in general, the poverty rate among black married couples has been less than 10 percent every year since 1994.

> The poverty rate of married blacks is not only lower than that of blacks as a whole, but in some years has also been lower than that of whites as a whole. In 2016, for example, the poverty rate for blacks was 22 percent, for whites was 11 percent, and for black married couples was 7.5 percent.

> Do racists care whether someone black is married or unmarried? If not, then why do married blacks escape poverty so much more often than other blacks, if racism is the main reason for black poverty? If the continuing effects of past evils such as slavery play a major causal role today, were the ancestors of today's black married couples exempt from slavery and other injuries?

The problem is the language around "systemic racism" cites outcomes as proof of preexisting conditions. That is, it asserts a tautology without presenting causal links, or ruling out other factors as causes.

When you do consider other factors, the detection of systemic racism collapses into one of point-stupidities (bad policies) and fairly ordinary economic forces not subject to racial choice. This is especially so when you start examining things like South Africa during apartheid (which was an example of systemic racism), or America at the turn of the 20th century.

There are a bundle of assumptions rolled up into that term that each merit discussion. If we're going to ever seriously talk about what behaviors and policies we should adopt, we ought to at least get the causes straight rather than leaping to the conclusion that "it" exists.

Has anyone traced the history as to when equity, which has historically meant fairness, got corrupted to mean "equality of outcome", which is really the opposite of fairness?

I've recently discovered Thomas Sowell and I'm really itching to find time to read his book on the subject: Discrimination and disparities.

Best-selling authors seem to be aware of this trend, because I keep coming across excellent but very, very short non-fiction books. Among those I can remember reading and would recommend, these are published in the past <5 years and are <150 pages (or <5 hour audiobook):

- Discrimination and Disparities By: Thomas Sowell

- A Colony in a Nation: Chris Hayes

- Between the World and Me: Ta-Nehisi Coates

(three very different takes on race relations in America)

- Astrophysics for People in a Hurry: Neil deGrasse Tyson

- Seven Brief Lessons on Physics: Carlo Rovelli

- When Breath Becomes Air: Paul Kalanithi

- On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century: Timothy Snyder

- Requiem for the American Dream: The Principles of Concentrated Wealth and Power: Noam Chomsky

- Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now: Jaron Lanier

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I just started reading Thomas Sowell's newest book Discrimination and Disparities and on the first page I encounter this passage:

"When there is some endeavor with five prerequisites for success, then by definition the chances of success in that endeavor depend on the chances of having all five of those prerequisites simultaneously. Even if none of these prerequisites is rare—for example, if these prerequisites are all so common that chances are two out of three that any given person has any one of those five prerequisites—nevertheless the odds are against having all five of the prerequisites for success in that endeavor."

Sounds like... the Anna Karenina Principle. He goes on to point out that this simple and reasonable model produces extremely skewed distributions for success in any particular endeavor.

Thomas Sowell covers this exact topic in detail with data in his recent book Discrimination and Disparities. In summary, you are spot on and he explains why, using global and historical data. And why society is best served this way. In fact he says we shouldn’t be asking why there are differences in outcomes, but rather why would we expect outcomes to have even distribution among groups.

Other reasons? http://www.tsowell.com/Discrimination2.html '...challenges the very foundation of assumptions on which the prevailing “social justice” vision is based. The first two chapters of Discrimination and Disparities present a new framework of analysis, and back it up with empirical evidence from around the world, before proceeding to demonstrate why and how so much of the "social justice" vision is a house of cards.'