What I want to know is how you're supposed to prove racism to a criminal standard unless someone messes up.
Racists see people as a group and not as individuals and they assign that group a lot of negative characteristics —or positive ones! and judge everyone in that group according to those characteristics that they, the racists, have assigned to them.
Which doesn't address my point one bit. How do you prove any given situation is racism short of an admission?
You don't but moreover you don't have to with AA.
It doesn't have to be overt or even conscious racism. It doesn't even have to be current racism for AA measures to work.
The reality here is that you, Loren, have been busy assuming some component other than the howls of racism and the echos of those howls through time has been behind the ongoing trend.
The situation at hand may not even be directly racist at all; some third party's old racism could be contributing to it, too: everything is cat piss and
you can't even find the cat. Instead of bothering entirely with whose fault it is, it just works better to try and fix it after the fact best as we are able.
The only way that works in our current society where you need a job to get an education for your kids, and you need an education from your parents to get a job, the answer is to either educate the kid or give the parent a job and deal with the cost of whichever one you choose.
Because educational funds for kids are based on a community's parents' jobs (property taxes), that's not going to happen on the school side.
Of course it's not easy when you have a culture which largely organized to prevent any kind of breakout from happening there, with everything from opposing interracial marriages (if there ever was any sort of genetic component, intermarriage would allow that to dissipate), to opposing integration and inclusion into professional fields or prestigious universities, to bottling up poor people in specific districts and voucher programs to keep wealthy parents from having to contribute to the public schools, creating segregation even where outright segregation is illegal.
This all happened, and some of it continues to happen with the segregation of schools using the public/private divide.
All of that is because of racism and the awareness of why and how has faded for most to the point where people are doing racist things without any direct racist intention anymore, but it's still fucking racist.
It doesn't have to be explicit for it to be bad. There doesn't need to be an intention for people to be doing the wrong thing, nor for our need to stop them to be real.
To do that, we have to disrupt the cycle and yes, Loren, that feels disruptive. Because it's supposed to be.