Pants-of-dog wrote:It has been argued that the negative impacts disproportionately experienced by BIPOC people and communities is due to classism and therefore can not be due to systemic racism. This assumes that classism and racism are mutually exclusive.
This is a straw man.
The claim is not that they
cannot be due to systemic racism but that they
are not due to systemic racism as some claim.
Pants-of-dog wrote:Since history shows us that classism, capitalism, and racism are heavily intertwined in the USA (and all the other British colonies), we know that merely showing the effects of one does not disprove the effects of the other two. In fact, most of these negative impacts disproportionately experienced by BIPOC people and communities are caused by a mixture of these. Some of course, will only be caused by one or two.
But this does not mean that one cannot distinguish between effects. There are two population groups that allow us to distinguish between the role of class and race: Poor white people and rich nonwhite people.
Pants-of-dog wrote:To focus on the situations where a black person has superseded one of these obstacles to a significant degree and assume we can generalize from their experiences is to ignore the fact that the systemic impacts of classism and racism are mutually supporting.
So if you want to get rid of one of these, it means getting rid of the others as well.
To consider the situations of both rich black people and poor white people in any analyses on this matter provides us with comparison groups that allow us to distinguish between the effects of class and race.
I would also be unsure that getting rid of one would necessarily imply getting rid of the other. They are correlated, yet distinct phenomena. After all, didn't the US actually have lower income inequality in the 1960s and earlier than today, despite the fact that the process of proscribing systemic racism federally was (at best) at its early stages at the time? Doesn't this show an explicitly institutionally racist society can actually have less income inequality than a society where racial discrimination by public and private institutions is legally forbidden and discrimination by individuals is at least heavily punished by civil society?
I will note the statistics on this matter are often pointed out by American progressives themselves to complain about how high socioeconomic inequality - be it in income or wealth - is today. Isn't there a contradiction between belief and claimed facts here?
What I can imagine, though, is that a conscious effort to root institutional discrimination out by legislation and providing the material means for people to get remedies would help in that regard, but addressing social issues like poverty, crime, etc requires their own specialized solutions that specifically target each problem. There could be positive externalities from one to the other (i.e. an anti-poverty strategy may
help lower crime, forbidding the government from discriminating against African Americans may
make it easier for them to leave poverty) but these are not guaranteed to be large at all (i.e. one cannot
guarantee ending poverty would end crime - in fact, this is unlikely to address middle and upper class crime, particularly white collar crime, although violent crime also exists in middle and upper class America despite the stereotypes -, ending governmental discrimination against African Americans does not
guarantee they will be able to overcome poverty if there are other causes for it besides ongoing discriminatory treatment by government bodies).
You also mentioned capitalism as a cause somewhere, but it seems whatever equalization taking place under socialism is at best temporary:
Alesina et al (2021) wrote:ABSTRACT
Can efforts to eradicate inequality in wealth and education eliminate intergenerational persistence of socioeconomic status? The Chinese Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution aimed to do exactly that. Using newly digitized archival records and contemporary census and household survey data, we show that the revolutions were effective in homogenizing the population economically in the short run. However, the pattern of inequality that characterized the prerevolution generation re-emerges today. Almost half a century after the revolutions, individuals whose grandparents belonged to the pre-revolution elite earn 16 percent more income and have completed more than 11 percent additional years of schooling than those from non-elite households. We find evidence that human capital (such as knowledge, skills, and values) has been transmitted within the families, and the social capital embodied in kinship networks has survived the revolutions. These channels allow the pre-revolution elite to rebound after the revolutions, and their socioeconomic status persists despite one of the most aggressive attempts to eliminate differences in the population.
Note the above considers basically class only as the Chinese population has always been largely Han.
One could also consider the USSR, where there was a rather explicit racial/ethnic discrimination and one could consider class as well if one thinks of the old Nomenklatura as a "class", which it seems consisted of former tsarist officials who joined the Communist Party and submitted to its rules. It seems something similar happened in China as well.