I think this is an illustrative example of how abstract ideas like "systemic oppression" can compete with their original concrete meanings for attention. I see it a lot in business, too - buzzwords that become detrimental anti-concepts after acquiring an existence separate from what they referred to.

The proper way of phrasing this argument is that the systemic oppression was mediated by lead exposure. Meaning that if you intervene to mitigate the latter, you've managed to deal with a significant chunk of the former.

The problem with using lead-rich environment as an example of systemic oppression, and the reason why activists are taking very little about lead these days, is that unlike “systemic oppression”, lead exposure is something very concrete, and it can be tested and studied. We did a lot of studies, in fact, on this particular issue, and the results are pretty clear: differences in lead exposure explain very little fraction of the outcome gap here. It turns out that in many places, exposure to lead is either overall minimal, or there is no big difference in exposure to it across races, but the gap is just as big as everywhere else. This is inconvenient for the lead blaming narrative, and so the narrative is abandoned in favor of more magical, less well specified theories, that cannot be studied as easily.

Or perhaps "systemic oppression" is being used to refer to all the little things that add up in aggregate.

Perhaps lead levels contribute only a small amount. But then also, micro-aggressions have a tiny affect. Testing bias might also be very small. Maybe less income also leads to being less likely to get glasses when you need them. Perhaps food deserts in minority communities leads to poor nutrition and poorer outcomes, but only a negligible amount. Then there are poorer, urban neighborhoods that might be loud at night causing children to not get quite enough sleep.

And sure, you could blame a lot of this just on poverty in general, but then of course, you have to acknowledge our racist history that lead to so much less wealth in minority families.

It goes on and on and pretty soon you have death by a thousand cuts and a phenomenon that is far too complex to explain in anything less than an entire encyclopedia so you sum it up with "systemic racism".

> differences in lead exposure explain very little fraction of the outcome gap here

Note that tiny fractional differences in the median outcome gap will turn into big differences at the left- and right-wards tails of the distribution. In practice, those are the differences that everyone will ask about. Why are so many X's (relative to Y's) living in socially marginalized settings, resorting to crime, ending up in the justice system? Why are there so very few X's in very high-skill, high-effort occupations like computer programming and other hard-STEM fields? The X's and Y's will vary by time and place, of course. And societal oppression of various sorts is always playing a role in these dynamics, if only as an amplifying feedback. But either way, these are questions about uncommon, tail outcomes not average or median ones!

> Note that tiny fractional differences in the median outcome gap will turn into big differences at the left- and right-wards tails of the distribution.

That's true, but the gap is already huge at the median. As a rough approximation, the distribution of outcomes has same variance, but mean is shifted left by 1 sigma.

Where is that research? http://ippsr.msu.edu/research/inequality-lead-exposure-and-b... says the opposite.

It would be if politicians opted not to fix the problem because of who lived there. But doesn’t oppression generally require action/choice by some party? Or are we inferring that a choice simply “must” have been made not to help?