| This "racism is a system" always sounded to me a bit a rhetorical voodoo, because it allows people to claim that there's still "racism" even if they have no evidence beyond what's in their heads besides the difference in socioeconomic outcomes between different races. This, however, is absurd. In economics, there's a crucial distinction between historical processes (e.g. accumulation of wealth or economic development) and general economic processes (e.g. the pricing of a good) in that historical processes are not mean-reverting. They're subject to certain rules (e.g. preferential attachment, positive feedbacks, increasing returns) which make them generally path dependent[0]. As a result, initial differences will perpetuate themselves for an indefinately long time. For example, a familial lineages might remain poor or rich for an arbitrarily long time purely through inheritance. New York might remain more populous than Dallas for an undefined amount of time since the economic benefit of moving into any of those two cities is a function of their population (through economies of agglomeration[1]). And Peru might remain much poorer than the United States for an eternity, because how much capital and labor countries draw to themselves if proportional to how much innovation going on there, which is itself a function of those variables. History, even as completely blind process, will still produce self-sustaining inequalities. But none of this has anything to do with "racism", but with the fact that the past matters and we live in a world of crucial events. In a mean-reverting world, in all likelihood, there wouldn't even be such a thing as an European colonization of America. In a sense, you might be right in thinking that non one wants all this. But calling these process a result of "racism" is beyond stretching the meaning of the word. There's no way to maintain a reasonable expectation that different entities (nevermind races) should attain equal outcomes unless the "Just World Hypothesis" is assumed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration |