It's not simply "some cultures devalue educational achievement and success", because that implies that there is some discrete unit that can be measured called "success". My point is that what "success" means varies dramatically from person to person. When you claim that any variance in numeric results must stem from racism, you are attempting to distill humans down into numbers that can be sorted on a linear scale, and denying the amazing amount of cultural diversity in the world.
The amazing amount of cultural diversity in the world is not the reason non-white racial groups disproportionately lack access to opportunity and wealth and you know it.
> You can invent whatever system you want, like the one you proposed here, but if the outcome is disproportionate then it is, by definition, a racist system.
> Why? Because race is a construct. It’s fake. Factually speaking, the only differences between these constructed racial groups are things like hair texture and skin pigmentation. Anyone saying otherwise is lying to preserve the construct.
I read this as saying that any difference in outcomes is due to racism. My understanding of your argument is that if it were not for racism then all outcome curves would be identical across all racial categories, because there are no real differences between racial groups.
If that was misunderstanding, I apologize!
I understand that there are differences between cultures. But saying that a culture difference is the reason that a culture disproportionately lacks access to the things deemed of value in the society is blaming the disadvantaged for their disadvantage. That is literally racism. “You do not have the same access to education that white people do because your black culture prevents you from having it.” That is obviously preposterous. What prevents none-white races from having proportional access to education (or anything of value in the society) is the racist system. People do not inflict racism onto themselves. It is inflicted onto them by the race in power.
Unless you think the 'characteristics' have a strong genetic component, and so we are back to racism.
I resent the implication that any claim of genetic differences amounts to racism. We need to be able to have a reasonable discussion about genetics that doesn't come with all the value judgments that people assign to different genotypes. It's a bald fact that there are genetic differences, and that shouldn't be controversial. The inferences we draw from that fact can be racist, but the fact itself is just a fact.
The only conclusion that I'm arguing for is that people are born and raised differently, and we should expect to see different outcomes as a result. It's pretty obvious that we have not yet reached the point where the differences in outcomes are due exclusively to different choices, but we should expect to eventually reach such a point!
While race may be a social construct, it has correlations with a number of other, less artificial factors. A random sample of people with the characteristics we associate with Asian race will tend to have more ancestry that traces back to Asia than would a random sample of people with Caucasian characteristics. This ancestry brings with it cultural and genetic factors that do affect outcomes and are in no way artificial.
This isn't to say that we can just shrug and say that people are different and therefore there's no racism. We absolutely need to be trying to actively eliminate racism. But it's absurd to try to claim that all people are essentially identical across all ethnic groups, and it's frankly offensive to a lot of people who take pride in their culture and ancestry.