So, when it comes to the claim that the central claim of social
justice, disparities are proof of discrimination.
Therefore, we need a state to coercively intervene and
violently control interactions between consenting adults.
We generally have 3 theories that two that are competing with
the social justice theory. Social justice, loosely referred
to as critical theory, is that disparities are the result of
discrimination, genetic determinism.
The oldest of these theories is that disparities are either the
result of God designing the races to be different or the the
process of evolution that took place for thousands of years on
different geographical areas yielded a different type of
person in each area. That's why we see disparities
between the races. However, there is 1/3 approach
that is not explicitly racist. It's referred to as culturalism.
This is the claim that disparities are the result of
different groups embracing different cultural norms.
This was summarized by Thomas Soul in a book Economic Facts
and Fallacies. Soul says many of the social or
cultural differences between American blacks and American
whites nationwide today were an antebellum times pointed out as
differences between white southerners and white
northerners. These include ways of talking,
rates of crime and violence, children born out of wedlock,
educational attainment, and economic initiative or lack
thereof. Well, only about 1/3 of the
antebellum white population of the United States lived in the
South. At least 90% of American blacks
lived in the to the South on into the 20th century.
In short, the great majority of blacks lived in a region with a
culture that proved to be less productive and less peaceful for
its inhabitants in general. Moreover, opportunities to move
beyond that culture were more restricted for blacks.
Another term for this is institutional theory, summarized
by Niall Ferguson in his book Civilization, the West and the
Rest. He Says institutions are of
course in some sense the products of culture, but because
they formalize a set of norms, institutions are often the
things that keep a culture honest, determining how far it
is conductive to good behavior rather than bad.
To illustrate the point, the 20th century ran a series of
experiments imposing quite different institutions on 2 sets
of Germans in the West and E, 2 sets of Koreans in North and
South, and two sets of Chinese inside and outside the People's
Republic. The results were very striking
and the lesson crystal clear. If you take the same people with
more or less the same culture and impose communist
institutions on one group and capitalist institutions on
another, almost immediately there will be a divergent in the
way they behave. Other examples used by Seoul
would be England was once the most prosperous industrial
nation on the planet in late 1700s through the 1800s.
However, before that, Greece and Italy during the days of the
Roman Empire or Alexander the Great, the beautiful buildings
of Athens, the brilliance of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates.
If you go even further back, Greece and Italy were far more
prosperous than Britain then Britain was far more prosperous
later on. If just race was the
explanation, we'd see all the races more or less stagnant and
then moving at a similar pace. But we don't see anything like
that. If you look at the Japanese
Empire, relatively stagnant until after the Second World
War. If you look at India, after
embracing free market reforms in 1991, we saw a drastic decrease
in the overall poverty level. When Deng Xiaoping embraced a
much more free market approach to economics in China, we saw
people in China increase in their overall standard of
living. So the the problem is cultures
and institutions, not race, not gender, not a critical theory.
One more note on critical theory is from racism didn't cause the
new problems of today. From Wilfred Riley's book Taboo,
10 Facts You Can't Talk about. He says the Black Lives Matter
movement alone has staged 2406 major marches against racism
during the past few years. However, any serious claim that
contemporary or recent bigotry is the cause of phenomena such
as 75% black illegitimacy rate founders on three rocks.
First, these problems did not exist among blacks or anyone
else when racism was much worse. 2 these problems do not exist
for successful dark skinned African and Asian immigrants to
the United States. And three, many or most such
problems do exist among poor whites, perhaps the most
genuinely neglected group in America, to roughly the same
extent that they do among blacks.
Another book promoting the idea of culturalism or institutional
theory is Civil Rights Rhetoric or Reality, by Thomas Sowell.
He says Japanese immigrants to the United States also
encountered persistent and escalating discrimination,
culminating in their mass internment during World War 2.
But by 1959, they had about equaled the income of whites,
and by 1969, Japanese American families were earning nearly one
third higher incomes than the average American family.