“Systemic Racism” Can’t Explain the USA—but Class Mobility Can

Tim Pierce from Berlin, MA, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The first law of prejudice: The rich look down on the poor.

1. Basic data

Identitarians and universalists agree the US racial hierarchy looks like this:

from https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-270.pdf

For identitarians, the racial hierarchy is all you need to understand who has power in the United States. They wave away the fact that Asian Americans make more money than European Americans by declaring Asians are “white adjacent”. This chart omits Indigenous Americans, who are about 3% of the population—in 2018, they had “the highest poverty rate among all minority groups. The national poverty rate for Native Americans was at 25.4%, while Black or African American poverty rate was 20.8%. Among Hispanics, the national poverty rate was 17.6%.” Some identitarians simply ignore American Indians. Others speak of BIPOC (black and indigenous people of color) to keep the focus on race.

Universalists see a hierarchy that includes two other important factors, religion: