So, when it comes to the claim that the central claim of social justice, disparities are proof of discrimination. Therefore, we need a state to coercively intervene and violently control interactions between consenting adults. We generally have 3 theories that two that are competing with the social justice theory. Social justice, loosely referred to as critical theory, is that disparities are the result of discrimination, genetic determinism.
The oldest of these theories is that disparities are either the result of God designing the races to be different or the the process of evolution that took place for thousands of years on different geographical areas yielded a different type of person in each area. That's why we see disparities between the races. However, there is 1/3 approach that is not explicitly racist. It's referred to as culturalism.
This is the claim that disparities are the result of different groups embracing different cultural norms. This was summarized by Thomas Soul in a book Economic Facts and Fallacies. Soul says many of the social or cultural differences between American blacks and American whites nationwide today were an antebellum times pointed out as differences between white southerners and white
northerners. These include ways of talking, rates of crime and violence, children born out of wedlock, educational attainment, and economic initiative or lack thereof. Well, only about 1/3 of the antebellum white population of the United States lived in the South. At least 90% of American blacks lived in the to the South on into the 20th century. In short, the great majority of blacks lived in a region with a culture that proved to be less productive and less peaceful for
its inhabitants in general. Moreover, opportunities to move beyond that culture were more restricted for blacks. Another term for this is institutional theory, summarized by Niall Ferguson in his book Civilization, the West and the Rest. He Says institutions are of course in some sense the products of culture, but because they formalize a set of norms, institutions are often the things that keep a culture honest, determining how far it is conductive to good behavior rather than bad.
To illustrate the point, the 20th century ran a series of experiments imposing quite different institutions on 2 sets of Germans in the West and E, 2 sets of Koreans in North and South, and two sets of Chinese inside and outside the People's Republic. The results were very striking
and the lesson crystal clear. If you take the same people with more or less the same culture and impose communist institutions on one group and capitalist institutions on another, almost immediately there will be a divergent in the way they behave. Other examples used by Seoul would be England was once the most prosperous industrial nation on the planet in late 1700s through the 1800s.
However, before that, Greece and Italy during the days of the Roman Empire or Alexander the Great, the beautiful buildings of Athens, the brilliance of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates. If you go even further back, Greece and Italy were far more prosperous than Britain then Britain was far more prosperous later on. If just race was the explanation, we'd see all the races more or less stagnant and then moving at a similar pace. But we don't see anything like
that. If you look at the Japanese Empire, relatively stagnant until after the Second World War. If you look at India, after embracing free market reforms in 1991, we saw a drastic decrease in the overall poverty level. When Deng Xiaoping embraced a much more free market approach to economics in China, we saw people in China increase in their overall standard of living. So the the problem is cultures and institutions, not race, not gender, not a critical theory.
One more note on critical theory is from racism didn't cause the new problems of today. From Wilfred Riley's book Taboo, 10 Facts You Can't Talk about. He says the Black Lives Matter movement alone has staged 2406 major marches against racism during the past few years. However, any serious claim that contemporary or recent bigotry is the cause of phenomena such as 75% black illegitimacy rate founders on three rocks. First, these problems did not exist among blacks or anyone
else when racism was much worse. 2 these problems do not exist for successful dark skinned African and Asian immigrants to the United States. And three, many or most such problems do exist among poor whites, perhaps the most genuinely neglected group in America, to roughly the same extent that they do among blacks. Another book promoting the idea of culturalism or institutional theory is Civil Rights Rhetoric or Reality, by Thomas Sowell.
He says Japanese immigrants to the United States also encountered persistent and escalating discrimination, culminating in their mass internment during World War 2. But by 1959, they had about equaled the income of whites, and by 1969, Japanese American families were earning nearly one third higher incomes than the average American family.