If something is a political belief you do not share it is easy to call it a myth. If something is a political policy you think is wrongheaded or unfair you can always claim that someone benefits unfairly from that policy.

As such your theory really doesn’t tell you anything, or at least anything interesting. It’s just worthless. A nice story, nothing more.

The actual interesting thing happens when you engage with the content of political beliefs and policies.

And of course we should engage the content of political beliefs. But we should also seek to understand politics as a phenomenon in itself. Our understanding of the beliefs is otherwise hollow.

So “invent a necessarily preposterous myth” is out. It’s now just about some belief, doesn’t matter how it came to be or what it is. Can be true, can be false, can be anything.

If that’s the starting point then all the rest falls apart, really. It’s senseless.

You can talk about the role of signaling or whatever, but the connective tissue is missing and the entire interesting and potentially insightful part of the theory is missing.

There's substantial evidence for both of these though, which you're not going to address. And minorities were kept down by force of law until at least the 1960s; have the systems put in place to do so been fully dismantled?

You seem very sure about what I will and won't address. Why don't we find out? What is this evidence?

> And minorities were kept down by force of law until at least the 1960s; have the systems put in place to do so been fully dismantled?

I'd say yes. The right to vote is firmly protected (as for voter ID laws, I think they're very reasonable). Racial-based government policy making is prohibited. This prohibition is enforced except for in cases where the discrimination helps minorities. Private discrimination is a serious legal issue, sometimes pursued to the point of absurdity. The current shakedown of the car loan industry over racial discrimination is a good example, and many other cases pursued under the doctrine of "disparate impact". We don't hose down peaceful protesters anymore either, and even in the 60s that was appalling to people outside of the South. The contrast between Birmingham in 1963 and Ferguson in 2014 is instructive.

The War on Drugs is disproportionately hurting minorities, and I think it's a terrible policy on many counts, but I don't think you can frame it as the machinery of minority oppression.

The welfare state is definitely hurting minorities, but again, I think it's just bad policy-making, not intentional subjugation.

EDIT: Responding to fnovd here, because Hacker News is throttling me:

I happen to think that people should be free to put whatever they want into their bodies. This philosophical debate is not a racial issue. So let's assume that we decide to ban drugs, like we've banned stealing cars. If minorities are more likely to steal cars, and more likely to end up in jail because they were stealing cars, or more likely to be poor because their dad was in jail for stealing cars, or more likely to sucked into stealing cars because it's an easy source of profit in a poor neighborhood, that doesn't make banning stealing cars a racist policy.

Agreed.

> I don't think you can frame it as the machinery of minority oppression.

Erm, what? So you're saying that, while the War on Drugs disproportionately hurts minorities, it's not a machine of minority oppression? I can't wrap my head around that.

Any discussion I hear about race always takes me back to the old Atwater quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#Atwater_on_the_Sou...

Let's go for the reductio ad absurdum.

We have a choice between two policies. The first says if you're accused of being a child's parent and you can prove with a genetic test that you aren't then you don't have to pay child support. The second says if you're accused of being a child's parent then you have to pay child support even if you can prove you're not.

Suppose we know that there is a sex disparity in impact for this policy. The people falsely accused of being a child's parent are disproportionately men and single parents with custody are disproportionately women. If we let the accused parent prove the facts then it will benefit men to the detriment of women.

Therefore, by your logic, it is a sexist policy to not force people who can prove they aren't a child's parent to pay child support anyway. Which is absurd.

No, the form of my argument is that a policy can be implicitly racist without being explicitly racist. A law banning rap music from the radio won't appear racist if your only criteria for a racist policy is explicitly mentioning race. This is why I included the Atwater quote.

An explicit policy like officially-segregated schools is objectively racist. "Implicitly racist" is completely subjective.

The Atwater quote kind of makes the point. Is lowering taxes a racist policy? Nothing about the policy is different just because you can find some racist who supports it specifically because they know it will have a disparate impact. So you are implying that any policy with a disparate impact is "implicitly" racist, because a racist might support it for only that reason.

But that makes the definition of "racist" so broad that it loses all meaning. It makes the law against marijuana racist but also the law against speeding and the law against felons possessing a handgun.

"Implicitly racist" is far from being completely subjective. A law banning US citizens whose ancestors lived in Africa 500 years ago from voting isn't explicitly racist: one could argue that it's based purely on geography and that ancestry and geography are only incidentally linked. It's implicitly racist given an understanding of the context in which it is applied.

Taken out of context, the War on Drugs can presented as race-neutral. You can describe the laws as they are written and stop there. This is not an honest discussion of the War on Drugs. We're not just talking about laws, we're talking about enforcement. Look at the data. Look at the statistics. I'm not just saying that.

http://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUHresultsP... 2013 Drug usage rates, by race

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/... 2014 Drug abuse violation rates, by race

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/... 2014 Drug abuse violations, by category

http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf 2010 US Census, by race

This tells me that the ratio of Whites to Blacks in the U.S. is roughly ~6:1. The ratio of drug use between Whites and Blacks is ~1:1. The ratio of drug abuse violations between Whites and Blacks is ~2:1. Do you agree that these figures are correct? If so, how do you explain the discrepancy between usage vs violations between Whites and Blacks? Looking for an honest analysis. My conclusion was that the laws and policies which constitute the War on Drugs have disproportionately affected Blacks. CMV.