Where is H.L. Mencken When We Need Him?

There’s already a bit of a motte-and-bailey going on right now in this comment of yours compared to your last. Initially, you said being “woke” only means believing there are “remnants of racism and sexism” in society – whereas now you’re characterizing it as believing that society is systematically racist, which is a wildly different and much stronger claim.

And I’ll admit I’ve found arguments for systemic racism to be pretty underwhelming at best at painfully bad at worst. One of the biggest issues is that people often simply define systematic racism to be any system which does not produce identical results across various groups. But by this definition, it’s incoherent to then point to differences of outcomes across groups and claim that systematic racism is the cause of those disparate outcomes. The same phenomenon cannot be both an outcome and its own cause.

And in all the other domains you cited, the research asserting those claims has usually been very weak and open to serious challenges and rebuttals. To use just one, you talk about medical outcomes. A study in early 2024 made waves when it claimed that black babies get better outcomes when attended to by black doctors compared to white doctors, and this was immediately and uncritically accepted as Irrefutable Evidence That The Medical Establishment is Systematically Racist. But within a few months, that study was soundly rebutted, when George Borjas and Robert VerBruggen published an analysis showing the initial study failed to implement very basic controls. Simply controlling for babies with low birth weight (cases prone to negative outcomes, and ones disproportionately attended to by white doctors) was enough to eliminate the supposed effect. But you’ll still find the first claim being loudly and uncritically proclaimed to this day, as if it was the Absolute Unquestionable Truth.

Another reason I find the systemic racism arguments unpersuasive is because they virtually all claim that systemic racism has the effect of being particularly beneficial to whites over other racial groups. But if so, it’s doing a pretty mediocre job at best. As Mark Perry frequently points out, whites are nowhere near the most successful ethnic groups in America, by virtually anything you care to measure. If the systemic racism argument was meant seriously, and applied consistently, it would have to compel on to conclude that social structures are set up in a way that favors Asian Americans, Syrian Americans, Indian Americans, Nigerian Americans, among many others, who all significantly outperform white Americans. Scott Alexander, as is often the case, summed it up well:

The Standard Model of American Ethnicity says that there are whites and non-whites, whites are rich, non-whites are poor, and this is because of structural racism where whites are oppressing everyone else. Reality gets beaten and twisted until it can be shoehorned into this model – gifted programs that are 80% Asian “perpetuate whiteness”, etc. The reality is that every ethnic group is different from every other ethnic group, including in socioeconomic status, with white people usually somewhere around the middle.

If you dismiss every group that does better than whites, then you can tell a story where all inequality is caused by white people controlling everything and creating covert structures/institutions that favor whites. If you don’t dismiss those groups, the story becomes harder. Anti-Semites had their own story about problems caused by Jews controlling everything and creating covert structures/institutions that favored Jews. Nowadays we rightly reject that story. But in order to continue rejecting it, we have to come up with strained explanations to make Jewish achievement less interesting, because we’ve already committed to using the structural racism explanation for every group difference that seems relevant to us. I’m glad most people aren’t Nazis, but I would like them to be consistent, principled non-Nazis, who are able to remain non-Nazi for reasons other than that they scrupulously avoid thinking about the parts of their principles that inevitably imply Nazism.