With all due respect, I'm not sure the BI graphs are great support for the thesis. All of the economic ones are essentially the same: if you're poor, you have less savings, are less likely to be employed, less likely to be CEO, less likely to have health insurance, and so on. They're expected to be correlated, so in some sense they are not as informative as a whole as one might guess from the large amount of them. It's also not clear that this has anything to do with racism, economists would point to a whole load of confounders which mags like BI tend to skip over.

The one I found interesting was marijuana, where at least we have two measurements of the same thing, smoking up and getting caught with the stuff. That could be expanded on, as there's a thesis out there that police focus their resources unreasonably on black people.

A really good study that investigated this would be something like the essays in Steven Levitt's books. A load of numbers, a load of potential explanations, dig into the numbers and every explanation falls (eg if abortions reduced crime it would be correlated across other datasets, ie countries) except for one or two.

At the moment my leaning is actually with you, but mainly from anecdotal evidence. Almost every trip I've had to America has has this weird race-vibe to it at some point. I go to a wedding, and everyone is 95% a minority race. I go to a comedy night, comedian jokes about my race. I hear someone talking, I somehow know what colour they are before I see them. So something about the society has race coded into it.

And then of course there are these horrendous incidents that we hear about every now and again, where some poor black man has been shot by police. I'm sure far more have simply been mistreated, because just by it coming up in conversation with other people, it turns out one of them witnessed such a beating.

But what we need is proper statistical evidence. The BI charts you've got there would be torn apart by an economist in a second.