Impactful

There is, in legalese, a concept called "disparate impact." It refers to practices that are formally neutral, yet result in adverse effects for one or more groups protected under the law. In effect, it's a practice that is discriminatory in application or in its real-world effects. The point behind the concept is that intent to discriminate need not be shown. A good example of this might be the literal grandfather clauses that were used to prevent people from voting. Technically, they applied to everyone equally. But since they were enacted within two generations of the end of slavery in the United States, they prevented Black Americans from voting.

Of course, as with many Jim Crow-era restrictions of the type, the discriminatory intent was pretty clear. But the purpose of disparate impact rules was that intent was completely irrelevant. Take the Internal Revenue Service's algorithm for auditing taxpayers. From what researchers were able to determine, there are a number of factors that result in Black taxpayers being audited more often. But the IRS does not collect any data on the race of taxpayers; the selection criteria have the effect of targeting specific groups. In this case, because a single male with dependents and no business income who claims an Earned Income Tax credit is more likely to be audited, the fact that they are also much more likely to be Black results in a disparate impact.

But one of the things that I've noticed is that Black people, especially academics and intellectuals, seem to be loath to talk about disparate impact as such, preferring to prefer to such outcomes simply as racist, and to tie them to the more deliberate racism of the past and of modern individuals. And this, I think, is unhelpful.

One of the recurring criticisms of Black America leveled by conservatives, especially Black conservatives, is that Black people in the United States are too likely to hold a victim mentality. I don't see it being nearly as bad as many conservatives make it out to be, but it's not difficult to see a significant strain of learned helplessness in the way that a lot of people deal with the world, and a constant harping on racism can exacerbate that. When I listened to the episode of the Plant Money/Code Switch podcasts where they spoke to Georgetown Law Professor Dorothy Brown, whose work inspired the Stanford study, I figured that it might be enlightening. Instead, it was simply fatiguing. Professor Brown talks about a chapter in a book she wrote as being "the most depressing" because it notes that some 60% of Black students who start college don't finish. But to be honest, the entire book seemed like a series of downers.

The language of disparate impact may seem dry and clinical (legalese usually does), but that's better than being actively draining. At least as far as I'm concerned. The lingering aftereffects of the discriminatory attitudes and practices of the past do not strike most people as an American problem. One can make the point that vast human resources are going to waste on a daily basis; but one will have difficulty being heard over the sound of one of the highest per-capita incomes on Earth. And so while Black people may not have had much, if anything, to do with their current situation, it's a problem that we, as a broader community, are the only ones who have a real interest in solving. And a constant litany of woe gets in the way of doing that, especially when it hints at the idea that much of the rest of America actively benefits from, and therefore maintains the status quo. Walking away from the language of racism to describe every ill that befalls us won't solve the problem. But it may make it seem less daunting to work towards a solution.