> The argument therefore isn't that the US is distinctively racist. It's not! Japan, for instance, is far more racist: it's an overt part of the culture. No, th

> The argument therefore isn't that the US is distinctively racist. It's not! Japan, for instance, is far more racist: it's an overt part of the culture. No, the issue is instead that racism germinated and produced toxic effects in the US to a greater degree than it did in other countries. I think this is completely fair, but I also wonder if it's just because of America's inherent exposure. In Latin America, for example, "race" isn't as pointed (see the notion of a Mexican race), but skin color sure as hell does matter on a lot of levels, and that's because the rulers (Spanish) were light-skinned. That divide is still endemic and the cause of many issues in those countries. Is that any less toxic than what's happening in America? If you are one of those affected there, obviously not, and even to those not directly affected, it is arguable, or rather, it can't be argued at all. > We're still grappling with those effects. We incarcerate a huge percentage of our population, and almost 45% of our prison population is black. Absolutely. The system targets African-Americans. But what might be even more important is what % of our prison population is poor. Poor people go to prison because the system doesn't care about them, whether that's due to skin color or being born into the wrong family in a small town or any number of issues. > The median income of a black family is just over half that of a white family. Black people are poorly represented in executive ranks. Look around you: they're poorly represented in technology as a whole! This is undoubtedly true, but keep in mind that African-Americans are only about 12% of the population, in other words, they should be 1/10th of your co-workers (if we're going by ratio of the entire US population), which isn't as extreme as the racial disparities we might expect. Hey, in the Southwest, the bigger disparity lies with Hispanics - they are not represented fairly in tech, but we often don't think about them to the same extent. If I'm trying to make a point, it's that these issues are endemic, and they are hugely problematic, but we have an undue focus on different parts of our society, whereas the problems that create them are often much wider in scope. We're looking for a bug in function B when it's really in function A and it's causing problems in function C, too... What's happening is our modern economic system is balanced against a lot of people. If you are poor, your condition sucks, no matter your skin color. African-Americans see this disparity and it enrages them (as it should), and that creates movements (political or not). Poor whites see their condition and their (incorrect) recourse is to fight against this vague notion of "political correctness", and then you see the rise of Trumpism and other bad things. I think trying to focus too much on race is to miss the larger systematic issue in our society, which is crony capitalism combined with globalism, and that doesn't care about your race.