Inequality Has Become Its Own Explanation

“Systemic Racism” can’t be explained by pointing to disparities

INEQUALITY HAS BECOME ITS OWN EXPLANATION

“Systemic Racism” can’t be explained by pointing to disparities

Dave Gilbert

Lee Jussim, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University whose work focuses on stereotypes, prejudice, and research methods in the social sciences, has a new paper in Theory and Society, “The Discrimination Paradox,” that struck me as one of the most important and clarifying contributions to debates about race, inequality, and discrimination in years.

As someone who does not follow these debates in the social science literature especially closely, I found Jussim’s careful and methodical review particularly helpful.

The paper’s central contribution is to resolve what Jussim calls the Discrimination Paradox—the apparent conflict between studies that find large disparities and those that find low rates of discriminatory acts. What most interests me here, however, is how Jussim uses that resolution to mount a sustained critique of how claims about “systemic racism” are often defined and operationalized in the academic literature. If systemic racism is meant to refer to institutional policies or practices, then those systems must be clearly identified and shown—independently—to cause unequal outcomes.

As Jussim puts it, if systemic racism is invoked as an explanation, then “at minimum, two criteria must be met to justify the conclusion that systemic racism causes inequality: (1) the particular racist system has to be identified independent of the inequality; and (2) one must provide evidence that the particular system so identified caused inequality.” Pointing to inequality and labeling it “systemic racism” without specifying the mechanism is not explanation; it’s a tautology. Jussim captures this circular logic succinctly:

“Why is there a racial gap? Because of systemic racism.

How do you know there is systemic racism? Because there is a racial gap.”

Jussim reviews several influential examples from the literature to show how this slippage occurs, including work by Banaji et al. and by Bonilla-Silva. Some accounts define systemic racism as inequalities said to be intrinsic to “societal structures,” but then offer no concrete description of which structures are racist or how they causally operate. Others treat the mere existence of racial gaps as evidence of systemic racism, collapsing explanation into restatement. As Jussim observes, invoking systemic racism in this way “explains” inequality only in the same sense that answering a question with “it was God’s will” explains anything—without identifying policies or practices, the claim is scientifically vacuous. Still others re-label individual-level phenomena—such as prejudice or bias, and sometimes even widely shared ideologies when those ideologies are treated as properties of a “system” itself—as “systems,” even though systems, strictly speaking, consist not of idiosyncratic individual behaviors but rather of rules, policies, incentives, or institutional practices. Jussim is explicit on this point: individuals have attitudes and biases; systems have rules and incentives. As he notes elsewhere, “an individual’s beliefs, attitudes, or behavior are not a system,” and absent identification of a specific causal system, re-labeling individual psychology as structure does no explanatory work. Conflating the two treats personal psychology as institutional structure—a category error that collapses an important analytic distinction.

Part of why this move is so common, Jussim argues, has to do with what he calls the Discrimination Paradox. Well-designed studies often find that acts of discrimination are relatively rare, while outcomes and experiences of discrimination can nonetheless be large. There is no contradiction here: in competitive settings like hiring or admissions, even a small number of biased decisions can have outsized downstream effects.

Jussim illustrates this with a stark example. Imagine that 500 black and 500 white applicants are competing for just four jobs. With no discrimination, two jobs would go to each group. But a single discriminatory decision would mean three white applicants and only one black applicant are hired. As Jussim notes, white applicants would then be 200% more likely to receive a job offer (three versus one), even though discrimination occurred in only one out of 1,000 decisions (or one out of 500 if you focus only on black applicants). In highly competitive selection processes, minimal discrimination can therefore generate very large disparities.

Crucially, this dynamic does not, by itself, establish the existence of a discriminatory system—only that rare instances of discrimination can matter a great deal.

Finally, the paper asks a practical question: what actually reduces discrimination? Jussim reports that decades of research show weak and inconsistent effects from implicit bias training and DEI programs, in part because discriminatory acts may already be rare—leaving little room for such interventions to work.

Jussim suggests that the most promising approach, supported by a broad literature, is far less fashionable but more effective. Drawing on decades of research, Jussim points to classic work by Kunda and Thagard (1996) on how individuating information about a person displaces stereotype-based judgments, as well as more recent field evidence such as Nødtvedt et al.’s Airbnb study, to support the claim that “when perceivers have and attend to a great deal of relevant individuating information, they overwhelmingly use that information rather than stereotypes of demographic categories.” Accordingly, he argues for designing decisions so that evaluators must attend to specific, job-relevant information about individuals—their qualifications, experience, performance, and demonstrated skills—rather than relying on group-level categories or proxies. When decision-makers are given concrete, relevant information and are required to base judgments on it, discrimination drops sharply, sometimes to zero.

Overall, Jussim’s analysis is best understood not as a denial of the impact of discrimination, but as a demand for conceptual and scientific rigor and discipline. If “systemic racism” is to function as an explanatory concept in social science, it must refer to identifiable systems—policies, practices, or institutional rules—and those systems must be shown to causally produce the outcomes they are invoked to explain. Without that specificity, the term risks becoming a catch‑all label for inequality itself rather than an explanation of it. Jussim’s critique is thus less about politics than about standards: insisting that explanations of racial inequality meet the same evidentiary and conceptual requirements we would expect in any other domain of serious social science. It is precisely this insistence on clearer concepts and better explanations—not looser ones—that offers the most promising path toward understanding both discrimination and inequality accurately, and toward addressing them more effectively.

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Dave Gilbert is a technologist and former visiting assistant professor of communication with interests at the intersection of technology, culture, and identity. Originally from rural Tennessee, he now lives in northern California with his photographer girlfriend and their four cats. Dave finds his greatest joy in bicycling through Big Sur and camping in the Mojave Desert. He is a founding member of Free Black Thought. He shares his views on X here.