Osler's Razor

Yesterday in Memphis, there was a great panel looking at race and poverty. There was one point that really stuck out for me, and a further thought of my own that builds on it.

One of the panelists, Dorian Warren (pictured above), made a fascinating point: That African-Americans spent 25 decades in slavery. Then, for the next 10, they lived with the severe restrictions  on opportunity that went with Jim Crow and court-approved segregation. It has only been five decades since that era of segregation really began to wind down. 25/10/5. Looked at in its full scope, we are not far away from a world where race consistently restricted opportunity.

Some will tell you that now we have an "opportunity society" that alleviates the effects of racism. It is true that legal restrictions based on race--at least on the surface-- are gone. However, the easy phrase "easy opportunity" ignores a lot. One is the fact that differential treatment in the past has robbed black families of wealth accumulation in the present; they did not have parents with the same  financial resources as white parents, and that goes back in time with greater severity (largely owing to the disparities in home ownership, which was shaped by government policy).

But what of those opportunities? There are two things about opportunities that matter here.

One is that for any of us to succeed, we needed not just one opportunity, but many. Those necessary opportunities, too, are often sequential and dependent upon one another like a row of falling dominoes.  For me, I needed a good pre-school experience, and then a great elementary and high school, financial and emotional stability at home, and then going to college without worrying all the time about how to pay for it. THEN, I needed several more opportunities: the opportunity to take a risk and go to law school, knowing that there was a safety net within my family that would catch me if I failed. And then, I got some more breaks, too numerable to count. Had any one of those not been present, I likely would have been derailed. Yes, there were obstacles along the way to overcome, but I always had the opportunity to do so because of what other people did and chose.

All of the valves have to align. And if just one closes, the "opportunity society" fails for any of us, making the effects of bias that much more severe.

Second, only some opportunities are offered out in the open subject to legal scrutiny. College admissions, for example: we can see the data and know if a school is discriminating. Some, though, happen in darker corners. A family friend offers a job. A parent gives you seed money. An employer gave you a chance. Your family stability survived a brush with the law. And it is, of course, in these darker corners that bias lurks.

Inevitably in this conversation, someone will assert that they or someone they knew didn't have the advantages of, say, accumulated family wealth, and they succeeded anyways. And of course, that is often true-- there is some of that in my own family. But that does not rebut my point, because I am not talking in absolutes but in the aggregate. After all, going the other way, many black Americans with fewer opportunities succeeded as well. And--let's be frank-- lots of folks of any race fail even though they have had every opportunity. So your grandfather grew up poor and died rich? Great! (especially for your own opportunities). But there were people of all races who grew up rich and died poor, and black men and women who also overcame poverty or other challenges. But, in the aggregate, these things matter.

Our society has a long way to go. A starting point should be honesty about where we are right now.