https://thedispatch.com/p/how-both-sides-distort-the-debate
After the civil rights movement achieved its legislative goals in the 1960s, formal, legal racism was largely abolished. Yes, there was cleanup work to do in various states. But broadly speaking, deliberate discrimination was no longer protected by the law. There was still cultural racism, of course—and there still is. But looking at the big picture, the tumor of deliberate racism has shrunk on a staggering scale.
This was the result of a massive legal, social, and educational effort. And it was a huge success that all Americans should take pride in. Racism isn’t an American phenomenon; it’s a human one that exists everywhere. But few societies have worked as hard to battle it as the United States has over the last half-century.
And yet, disparities persist. Black Americans comprise 13 percent of the population but fall short of that percentage in a number of important areas—the ranks of affluent, the college educated, and a large number of professions we normally associate with affluence and education.
CRT, structural racism, institutional racism, etc., represent efforts to explain why.
It’s no accident that law schools and lawyers were at the vanguard. If you wanted to sue a business or agency for “disparate impacts”—e.g., the underrepresentation of minorities in certain jobs or unequal lending by banks—you needed to show that these disparities were the result of deliberately bigoted policies. The problem: Evidence of the disparities remained abundant while evidence of racist intent largely vanished.