You mention racial differences and the sensitive point about biological differences. But I think there is another kind of racial differences that is not biological - the situational differences. The situation is different for every person, and - on average - for every race.

Depending on the situation the same people behave differently. So it's not the skin color in itself but the different context that makes races behave differently. Being poor or uneducated for example is a better prediction of defaulting on payments, but race, wealth and education are correlated.

The affordances of the context influence choices - how many good options vs bad options you have in your situation. For example, people who would behave perfectly OK in normal life might try to cheat the system to get vaccinated sooner. Because they only got bad options, they might pick a bad behavior. "I got no choice!" Equality of opportunity, and not of outcomes, seems to me the best approach.

The reverse of this is also happening - in the more developed and feminist leaning cultures fewer women choose to do scientific research. Why? They got better options, so many great choices to pick from. It's insulting to question people's choices when they are made in an abundance of good options, as if they were children who can't make their own decisions.

Doesn't need to be inherent to "races". Why wouldn't culture / way of living be the elephant in the room?

well, you could change your culture/way of living. But you can't change your race. If it turned out that race is indeed a component, with proven confidence and evidence, that indicates financial stability or security, then being the wrong race will cause problems for you.

But then on the flip side, if you look at say, athletic selection for a sport like basketball or athletics, you'd find that race is inherently a criteria, because certain races seems to have an inherent advantage (or more correctly, certain races seems to have a _disadvantage). But nobody ever says anything in those cases.

> if you look at say, athletic selection for a sport like basketball or athletics, you'd find that race is inherently a criteria, because certain races seems to have an inherent advantage (or more correctly, certain races seems to have a _disadvantage). But nobody ever says anything in those cases.

I think a charitable explanation for why this is, is sports is pretty much always a voluntary activity, so it's natural to not get as worked up over either implicitly or explicitly favoring a race, compared to, say, doing the same thing in employment or scoring someone's credit, which will almost certainly impact everyone in society involuntarily.

"races" is a cultural concept designed to denigrate certain people.

Using race captures an obvious group of people by how they've already been discriminated against