Inequalities, the left is keen to tell us, are entrenched. When more blacks are stop-searched by police it is used as proof of institutionalised racism. If women are paid less than men it is ascribed to patriarchal sexism. If transsexuals have high suicide rates it is because of discrimination. If some are poor and some are rich it is because the capitalists are exploiting the working class. Outcomes are, in other words, not down to individual choices, behaviour and ability, but have structural explanations.
You question this orthodoxy at your peril. Just ask James Damore, who got into trouble with his employer, Google, when in 2017 he wrote a memo that pointed out that personality traits more often seen in males than females could help explain why there was a predominance of male programmers in the company. His refutation of the structural explanation, that sexism in upbringing, education and hiring policy is behind the female under-representation, duly got him fired.
Prejudices exist. Racism, sexism and other ‘isms’ are facts of life. But they are not the institutionalised, dominant characteristics of Western liberal democracies that the left claims. These societies have done more than any other in history to level the playing field. Most modern Western institutions, whether public or private, are fully invested in the philosophy of equality of opportunity. But the left, obsessed with equality of outcome, refuses to recognise that behaviour, rather than systemic oppression, drives outcomes.
Let us look at policing. If you are black in Britain, you are eight times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than if you are white. In 2014, then Home Secretary Theresa May described that as ‘unfair’. On the surface it may seem that British policing is driven by racial prejudice, but the police have long argued that their approach is crime driven. Numbers from the Home Office show that stop-and-search resulting in further action (the police found what they were looking for) is just above 20% for both blacks and whites (slightly higher for blacks). In London, the prevalence of stop-and-search for blacks being four times higher than for whites must be seen in the light of the fact that more than half of all London street crime is committed by black perpetrators, who also account for two thirds of gun crime. Policing is, as you would hope, responding to behaviour, not race.
What about sexism in the workplace? Despite the regular outrage over the gender pay gap, the disparity in pay can largely be explained away when adjusting for job level, function and employer. But while that lays to rest the notion of unequal pay for equal work, the question obviously remains why more men end up in higher paid jobs? The left wants to ascribe this to the glass ceiling, a patriarchal road block preventing women from career advancement. But men and women do not chose the same jobs and prioritize their careers in different ways. If they didn’t, why are only 11.4% of nurses in the UK men, while only one in 10 construction workers are female? The claim that in a world free of discrimination men and women would make the exact same career choices is absurd.
The left is keen to celebrate diversity, impressing upon us that we are all unique and that this is something we should embrace and promote. Perversely, if this lauded diversity manifests itself in a variation in outcomes, the very same people cry foul. The collectivist agenda of government intervention depends on the acceptance of structural explanations for why some people are doing worse than others. Those structural inequities can be addressed by the political machine, which on the other hand has little power over people’s individual choices and motivations. But people are different. Different people make different choices. And different choices lead to different outcomes.
If the left really is motivated by genuine concern for those at the bottom of society, they must stop feeding them a victim narrative and start advising them to make choices that will have a positive impact on their lives. Instilling the virtues of hard work, honesty, ambition and personal responsibility can make an instant and tangible difference, as opposed to waiting in perpetuity for a benevolent government to remove imaginary obstacles for advancement in life. By all means, point the finger at real unfairness if you see it, but routinely ascribing variety in outcomes to discrimination is a recipe for the entrenchment of inequalities. How can you succeed if you believe the lie that it’s not even worth trying?