One of the most destructive errors of critical race theory is its insistence that racial disparities are caused by discrimination. The principle of CRT is that any discrepancy in racial outcomes calls for an explanation, and in the absence of any convincing explanation, they are forced to conclude that these discrepancies are caused by discrimination.

Many readers are familiar with Thomas Sowell’s refutation of this argument. By asserting that disparities do not prove discrimination, Sowell challenges the principle that, absent discrimination, we should expect all human beings to have equal opportunities, experiences, and outcomes in life. life. In his book, Disparities and discrimination So good”argues that there is an underlying assumption that if discrimination were absent, equality would prevail, which has historically been shown to be false. It is wrong to expect equal results from human beings – people have different skills, abilities and talents, so we would have no reason to expect that if they all received one point from an “equal” starting point, they would all exhibit uniform and equal behaviors. levels of achievement.

The gap between black and white

The civil rights industry relies on the debunked assumption that disparities are prima facie evidence of discrimination. Much of civil rights enforcement is now devoted to collecting statistics that will reveal achievement “gaps.” These shortcomings are then treated as alleged evidence of discrimination which, at the very least, merits investigation according to what Lew Rockwell called “anti-discrimination police”: the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

Collecting racial data to reveal achievement gaps is a well-funded industry. For example, in the context of educational attainment, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights had a budget of $178 million in 2024. Civil rights activists say this is not enough to monitor all the shortcomings and are calling for the budget to be double:

On behalf of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition charged by its diverse membership of more than 240 national organizations with promoting and protecting the civil and human rights of all people in the United States, and 91 organizations Undersigned, we urge you to double funding for the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) (“the Department”) to $280 million in your request to Congress for FY 2025. The Conference leadership appreciated the $178 million requested for fiscal year 2024; However, this vital office, at the heart of the ministry’s function as a whole, has been seriously underfunded for far too long.

The DOE Civil Rights Data Collection Office goals “to ensure that CRDC data is an accurate and complete description of student access to educational opportunities. » They also collect “data on access to and enrollment in math and science courses,” which can be used to demonstrate a racial “gap” in children’s “educational opportunities” in science.

Making a preemptive effort to avoid having statistics that reflect a racial gap can help schools avoid costly investigations by anti-discrimination police. This explains why, to prevent their statistics from revealing a racial gap in math, some schools have decreed that in “anti-racist math practice” there are no “correct” answers to math problems. This way all children’s calculations can be marked by teachers as correct and There—no statistical difference! Through this they propose to eradicate “iniquity in mathematics”:

Teachers across the country have condemned a “Dismantling Racism in Math” program that tells teachers not to push students to find the right answers to math problems because it promotes white supremacy.

The program is centered around a manual for teachers called “A Pathway to Equitable Mathematics Teaching” that argues that the American education system – even the teaching of mathematics – reinforces the dominant power structures of white colonizers.

Legal tricks and statistical quibbles

Achievement gaps result in legal sanctions through what Rockwell calls “legal chicanery”, or what Mr. Lester O’Shea calls “legal, statistical and verbal chicanery” – the concept of “disparate impact “. This concept was invented by the United States Supreme Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Co.401 U.S. 424 (1971). According to the DOJ Civil Rights Division, the purpose of this concept is to protect black people from the “repercussions of past discrimination”:

Disparate impact regulations are intended to ensure that programs accepting federal funds are not administered in a manner that perpetuates the impacts of past discrimination. As the Supreme Court has explained, even benignly motivated policies that appear neutral on their face can be traced to the country’s long history of abhorrent racial discrimination in employment, education, housing and much more. other areas. See Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 US 424, 430-31 (1971); City of Rome c. United States, 446 US 156, 176-177 (1980); Town of Gaston. v. United States, 395 US 285, 297 (1969).

Unlike the concept of disparity treatmentwhich concerns the way public institutions treat racial minorities, the concept of disparity impact focuses entirely on the effect on the “victim”. As the DOJ adds, “in a disparate impact case, the investigation focuses on the consequences of the recipient’s practices, rather than the recipient’s intent. » That’s why civil rights activists emphasize the role of data in revealing the impact of education policies on black students. Rather than looking at the curriculum or school attendance records, they can simply check the gap between white and black performance – this gap is treated as evidence that “educational opportunities” are not “meaningful” and “the Dr.” It is then said that MLK’s dreams are not yet “updated»:

OCR’s enforcement, policy, technical assistance, and data responsibilities have a significant impact on whether student access to equal educational opportunity is meaningful or not and whether the rights of marginalized students to receive the support and opportunities they deserve to achieve their dreams are actualized.

The result of this deception is that the civil rights framework does not require proof of “discrimination” as most people understand the term. It is based on statistical gaps. The government has turned the power given to it to eradicate “discrimination” into a bureaucratic industry based on data showing statistical disparities between racial groups. The reason people don’t object to it – despite Sowell’s work being widely known and despite cases of companies being driven into bankruptcy by racial discrimination claims based on nothing more than statistical quibbles – is that it is still socially unacceptable to be “racist”. Caldwell observes that “the innovations of the 1960s had given progressives control of the most important levers of government, control that would last as long as the public feared being called racist.”

Caldwell shows that declaring civil rights enforcement “unconstitutional,” far from resolving the dispute, only rephrases the problem in different terms. The problem is the dispute between the former de jure Constitution and new de facto “Constitution” of civil rights. Constitutional law is therefore not able to resolve the essential danger which had been correctly mentioned. identified by Lew Rockwell in 1995:

The Constitution has never stood in the way of the enforcement of civil rights. In the name of eradicating illegal discrimination, fundamental rights such as freedom of association are daily violated… Politicians promise to do something, but they have not understood the essentials. Our problems do not come from “quotas”, “set-asides” and the like; they arise from the presumption that government should primarily monitor “discrimination.” Pass all the anti-quota laws you want. Until the anti-discrimination law is repealed, nothing can stand in the way of big government.