Anti-CRT Hysteria

[Gospel]

Perhaps you have a better term to describe discrimination based on race

Affirmative Action?

Funny. But a little like defining “car” as “Yugo”. You know what a Yugo is, don’t you?

Notably, the Yugo is (was? Does it still exist??) a car. You're trying to laugh off the fact that affirmative action is a form of racism.

Affirmative action was put in place by a bunch of white people to protect black people from discriminative practices. Saying it's a form of racism is true at face value however misleading when not within context. It's funny watching white people blame black people for something white people did.

Who was blaming black people?

​

Jarhyn was close. Solely blaming black people (aka African Americans) for a culture that doesn't solely belong to them. Our ancestors were stripped of our names and culture and what we have today is a bunch of black people making the best out of the crimes of white people.

Edit: Specifically, anyone who uses statistics to point out problems while not offering solutions is the type of people I'm talking about that are blaming black people for our problems. While it's true that it is our problem it is not only our problem.

Edit2: the people blaming black people are not limited to what's described in the first edit.

 

[Ford]

Perhaps you have a better term to describe discrimination based on race

Affirmative Action?

Funny. But a little like defining “car” as “Yugo”. You know what a Yugo is, don’t you?

Notably, the Yugo is (was? Does it still exist??) a car. You're trying to laugh off the fact that affirmative action is a form of racism.

The Yugo was the only car to ever actually fall off the Mackinaw Bridge.

That's not exactly true. The Yugo in question saw it's reflection in a truck side mirror, realized "wait...I'm a Yugo?" and actually jumped off the bridge in despair.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Old joke.

The Yugo has heated rear windows. So you can keep your hands warm when you have to get our and push it.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Off the top of my head, I've already pointed out that locally it's entirely the location of the house that matters, not the race of the borrower--and it only applies to low down mortgages, not 80/20 mortgages. Occam's razor, it's economic (one factor: bankers evaluated the expected future loan to value, this was not in the data the government used and so it's a very easy factor), not racial (why do they discriminate against these blacks but not other blacks? A much more complex factor.) I haven't seen this proven on a national scale but given how hard they tried to claim racism here I think the national picture must be no better--if they have any substantial actual proof of discrimination they're not going to be trying to make something of bogus claims. You can tell a lot about how solid a position is by how solid the evidence they promote is. They're going to put their best evidence forward, so if what they put forward is shaky it's unlikely they have anything better.

Another one off the top of my head: blacks receiving inferior care in the ER. Oops--control for the hospital and the effect goes away. Everyone receives inferior care in overloaded, underfunded inner city ERs.

The pattern repeats itself--control for economic factors and race drops out of the picture. Notably, the research that "proves" widespread discrimination almost universally fails to control for economic factors.

You tell us, "off the top of your head", that borrower's race is "irrelevant" — (wasn't the claim that neighborhood race was the correlation?) — but do you have academic citations?

That was from the local newspaper reporting on a big report about supposed redlining. The archives are paywalled and I no longer subscribe so I wouldn't be able to find the article anyway.

Any given house: Borrower's race had no effect on the chance of approval. 80/20 mortgage: Neither race nor location mattered. Low-down mortgage in two zip codes = lower chance of approval. The article did not mention that those two zip codes are the only two where housing prices were basically flat, but it was easy enough to look up. Yes, those two zip codes have a high proportion of blacks. More important, though, is that those two zip codes are a bad part of town. At the time, the only places I would worry about walking at night.

I've attached some top Google hits that use real-world data to allege systemic racism in housing prices. Can you cite academic paper(s) showing the flaws in these studies? Or must we rely strictly on the "top of your head"?

Once again, disparate outcome doesn't prove discrimination!

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The dates are entirely relevant because the current incidence is what matters.

Systemically racist acts that happened in the past, are no longer active, and have no current institutional support should get less airtime than systemically racist acts happening right now and that not only have institutional support, powerful institutions are leading the practice.

Congratulations, current America! We've overcome racism! There is none of it now, and there will never be racism again! Because Obama!

Wow...we're so diverse! Here's a fun activity...ask your POC neighbor at the office how they feel about no longer being discriminated against! I'm sure they'll say "gosh darn it...you're right! As a (fill in the blank minority) I'm totally no longer experiencing discrimination!"

Yep. It's all fine now. Nothing to see here.

Sorry, but he's right. We can't change the past, what has happened has happened. All we can change is the future. Making a big issue of past lynchings isn't going to save anybody from a noose. Making an issue of present discrimination can keep others from being discriminated against.

So as the old saying goes, "those who don't learn from history....actually, never mind. History is not important. We don't need to learn from it or even consider it. If your parents or grandparents or everyone you know was discriminated against, you need to pull up your bootstraps and get over it, snowflake.!"

Yes, denying that there was any history of discrimination is the best way to prevent it today.

I can't wait to tell my Native American friends that white people have decided that all is forgiven!

Goalposts!!

I didn't say we shouldn't learn from it. I'm saying that we should focus our efforts on ongoing problems, not past problems.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Perhaps you have a better term to describe discrimination based on race

Affirmative Action?

Funny. But a little like defining “car” as “Yugo”. You know what a Yugo is, don’t you?

Notably, the Yugo is (was? Does it still exist??) a car. You're trying to laugh off the fact that affirmative action is a form of racism.

Affirmative action was put in place by a bunch of white people to protect black people from discriminative practices. Saying it's a form of racism is true at face value however misleading when not within context. It's funny watching white people blame black people for something white people did. Then demand black people stop blaming today's white people for the shit white people did in the past while ignoring the problems of today which was caused by said white people in the past. You're getting blamed for ignoring what caused the problems that exist today ya big dummy!

At the time it was implemented I think affirmative action was the right approach. It's a bad thing but it was being used to overcome a worse thing. The problem is continuing to apply it to stamp out every last bit of supposed racism when this is inherently impossible as you're creating racism in the process and also ignoring any racism not coming from whites.

Think of using a backfire against a wildfire. It's a useful technique if the fire isn't being driven too hard. However, once you've broken the main fire do you go deal with the remains with a drip torch?!?!

 

[Gospel]

Perhaps you have a better term to describe discrimination based on race

Affirmative Action?

Funny. But a little like defining “car” as “Yugo”. You know what a Yugo is, don’t you?

Notably, the Yugo is (was? Does it still exist??) a car. You're trying to laugh off the fact that affirmative action is a form of racism.

Affirmative action was put in place by a bunch of white people to protect black people from discriminative practices. Saying it's a form of racism is true at face value however misleading when not within context. It's funny watching white people blame black people for something white people did. Then demand black people stop blaming today's white people for the shit white people did in the past while ignoring the problems of today which was caused by said white people in the past. You're getting blamed for ignoring what caused the problems that exist today ya big dummy!

At the time it was implemented I think affirmative action was the right approach. It's a bad thing but it was being used to overcome a worse thing. The problem is continuing to apply it to stamp out every last bit of supposed racism when this is inherently impossible as you're creating racism in the process and also ignoring any racism not coming from whites.

Think of using a backfire against a wildfire. It's a useful technique if the fire isn't being driven too hard. However, once you've broken the main fire do you go deal with the remains with a drip torch?!?!

Nope. You stay on it until the fire is out and then move on to controlled burns to prevent major fires breaking out in the future. What those controlled burns in this metaverse manifest themselves as in the real world are is everyone's choice if we can get there.

Edit: CRT (IMO) is an attempt at that controlled burn. Obviously the arrogance and ignorance that made slavery a thing in the first place, rises up in the form of resistance within the hearts of those folks who share similar characteristics as those in the past that were A OK with slavery. That's just my take.

 

[Ford]

The dates are entirely relevant because the current incidence is what matters.

Systemically racist acts that happened in the past, are no longer active, and have no current institutional support should get less airtime than systemically racist acts happening right now and that not only have institutional support, powerful institutions are leading the practice.

Congratulations, current America! We've overcome racism! There is none of it now, and there will never be racism again! Because Obama!

Wow...we're so diverse! Here's a fun activity...ask your POC neighbor at the office how they feel about no longer being discriminated against! I'm sure they'll say "gosh darn it...you're right! As a (fill in the blank minority) I'm totally no longer experiencing discrimination!"

Yep. It's all fine now. Nothing to see here.

Sorry, but he's right. We can't change the past, what has happened has happened. All we can change is the future. Making a big issue of past lynchings isn't going to save anybody from a noose. Making an issue of present discrimination can keep others from being discriminated against.

So as the old saying goes, "those who don't learn from history....actually, never mind. History is not important. We don't need to learn from it or even consider it. If your parents or grandparents or everyone you know was discriminated against, you need to pull up your bootstraps and get over it, snowflake.!"

Yes, denying that there was any history of discrimination is the best way to prevent it today.

I can't wait to tell my Native American friends that white people have decided that all is forgiven!

Goalposts!!

I didn't say we shouldn't learn from it. I'm saying that we should focus our efforts on ongoing problems, not past problems.

Your car has come to rest in the intersection. Your front bumper is in the front seat of the minivan. How did it get there?

That's not important. We need to focus our efforts on directing traffic around the wreck, not the fact that you ran the red light, were speeding, and driving under the influence!. That's all in the past!

 

[Swammerdami]

I've attached some top Google hits that use real-world data to allege systemic racism in housing prices. Can you cite academic paper(s) showing the flaws in these studies? Or must we rely strictly on the "top of your head"?

Once again, disparate outcome doesn't prove discrimination!

We must admire your sheer arrogance. You dismiss — unread — scholarly papers in favor of your own unsourced pontifications. Bravo!

The papers I cited above provide a much more nuanced view. They do NOT support the over-enthusiastic claims of discrimination we hear from progressives. But they do not support your overly dismissive view either.

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/rp3ed

Black house prices may also be depressed by discrimination in home appraisals, where appraisers consciously or subconsciously appraise homes that contain markers indicating a Black family lives there as less valuable than they otherwise would (e.g., Kamin 2020; Howell and Korver-Glenn 2020).

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29306/w29306.pdf

These findings are surprising in light of a previously documented pattern in which minority homeowners pay higher prices for homes, but subsequently suffer diminished home values as a result of discriminatory market forces (e.g. white flight; Akbar et al. 2019; Perry et al. 2018; Bayer et al. 2017).
... The racial gap in housing returns is not driven by differences in demographic characteristics across racial groups such as income or family structure. While racial gaps in housing returns are larger for lower-income and single-headed households, large gaps exist even within narrow demographic categories. This finding indicates that differences in demographics may exacerbate the racial gap in housing returns, but they do not fully explain it.

https://americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/BorrowersOfColor-report.pdf

Despite the economic and political gains that African Americans have achieved since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, significant disparities still exist between African Americans and non-Hispanic whites in terms of access to homeownership, quality education, and employment, among other assets. These disparities are reflected in persisting residential segregation and a racially segmented housing market and they have significant implications for African Americans' economic mobility. Segregation, disparate access to credit and homeownership, and the consistent devaluation of homes in black neighborhoods [6] combine to constrict the ability of African Americans to build equity and accumulate wealth through homeownership.
... Despite a steady decline since the peak levels of the 1960s and 1970s, residential segregation still persists in U.S. metropolitan areas, and African Americans continue to experience the highest segregation levels among all racial and ethnic groups.[7] Empirical studies show that today, the typical African American resides in a neighborhood that is only 35 percent white. That is not any better than what was common in 1940, when the average black resident lived in a census tract where non-Hispanic white residents represented 40 percent of the total population.[8] The patterns of residential segregation observed today have not emerged by chance. As Richard Rothstein wrote in his book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, "the public policies of yesterday still shape the racial landscape of today." [9] This is particularly true in the housing realm, as legal forms of discrimination and racially biased federal government policies have played a critical role in the creation and endurance of segregated African American neighborhoods during a significant portion of the 20th century. [10] In particular, a two-tier approach to housing policies that emerged as a response to the Great Depression functioned largely in favor of white middle-class families, while intentionally harming people of color.

https://www.hocmn.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/REPORT_UnderstandingHomeownershipDisparities.pdf

Beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1950s and 60s, FHA and Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) federal mortgage programs, included race-based rating systems that linked race and ethnicity to geographic risk in lending. Additionally, FHA recommended racially restrictive covenants as a way to ensure racial stability (or segregation) within neighborhoods. A dual housing policy system emerged that supported homeownership for middle and upper-class White families and rental housing for racial and ethnic minorities (Rheingold, Fitzpatrick & Hofeld, Jr., 2001). This deliberate, restricted access to homeownership for non-White households continued until the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s. ... While the 1968 legislation made it possible for non-White households to purchase homes it also created opportunities for Whites to purchase new homes in the suburbs. As non-White households purchased homes in inner city neighborhoods, White households continued to move out, reinforcing racially segregated housing patterns and leaving households of color with a reduced ability to accumulate wealth (Gotham, 2000).

... They posit that anticipated differences in treatment in the mortgage application may discourage Black families from applying (p.30). ... A recent study prepared for HUD used paired testers to detect discrimination in the housing search process. The study found that Black and Asian homebuyers were shown significantly fewer homes and given less information and assistance than equally qualified Whites, however there were no differences in treatment between Hispanic/Latino and White homebuyers (Turner et al., 2013).

https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/discrimlend_final.pdf

the US Department of the Treasury found that, as of 2000, "borrowers in black neighborhoods [were] five times as likely to refinance in the subprime market than borrowers in white neighborhoods," even when controlling for income.[4] Indeed, "Borrowers in upper-income black neighborhoods were twice as likely as homeowners in low-income white neighborhoods to refinance with a subprime loan." [5] Scholars have identified these dynamics as creating a "dual mortgage market," characterized by "a different mix of products and by different types of lenders," allowing subprime lenders to "disproportionately target minority, especially African American, borrowers and communities, resulting in a noticeable lack of prime loans among even the highest-income minority borrowers."

 

[Politesse]

Once again, disparate outcome doesn't prove discrimination!

If measurable outcomes that vary considerably and predictibly in relation to racial identifiers are not a valid means of determing whether systemic discrimination is occurring, what is?

To put it another way, if there is no situation in which you would concede the point, why should anyone listen to you at all? You may be pretending to engage in analysis, but it's obvious you're just stamping your foot and asserting a political opinion, not making a valid point with a solid empirical basis. It means nothing to say, "there's not enough evidence that this is the case" if no amount of evidence would cause you to say anything else.

 

[laughing dog]

Technically, LP is correct - disparate outcomes do not PROVE anything. Disparate outcomes provide evidence not proof.

Of course, disparate outcomes are used all the time as evidence to rebut any theory in any field. It is the basis for the scientific method: set up an experiment that controls for all possible influences but one and look for disparate outcomes. Taking LP's claim literally, he is denying the validity of the scientific method.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

At the time it was implemented I think affirmative action was the right approach. It's a bad thing but it was being used to overcome a worse thing. The problem is continuing to apply it to stamp out every last bit of supposed racism when this is inherently impossible as you're creating racism in the process and also ignoring any racism not coming from whites.

Think of using a backfire against a wildfire. It's a useful technique if the fire isn't being driven too hard. However, once you've broken the main fire do you go deal with the remains with a drip torch?!?!

Nope. You stay on it until the fire is out and then move on to controlled burns to prevent major fires breaking out in the future. What those controlled burns in this metaverse manifest themselves as in the real world are is everyone's choice if we can get there.

Edit: CRT (IMO) is an attempt at that controlled burn. Obviously the arrogance and ignorance that made slavery a thing in the first place, rises up in the form of resistance within the hearts of those folks who share similar characteristics as those in the past that were A OK with slavery. That's just my take.

Nope. Yes, you stay on the fire until it's out. You don't continue to use backfires, however. Backfires are only for major blazes, not the mop-up. I'm not saying not to fight racism, but that affirmative action is now far too big and crude of a hammer for the job. And while you're at it, you want to fight all aspects of racism, not merely white vs black/hispanic.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So as the old saying goes, "those who don't learn from history....actually, never mind. History is not important. We don't need to learn from it or even consider it. If your parents or grandparents or everyone you know was discriminated against, you need to pull up your bootstraps and get over it, snowflake.!"

Yes, denying that there was any history of discrimination is the best way to prevent it today.

I can't wait to tell my Native American friends that white people have decided that all is forgiven!

Goalposts!!

I didn't say we shouldn't learn from it. I'm saying that we should focus our efforts on ongoing problems, not past problems.

Your car has come to rest in the intersection. Your front bumper is in the front seat of the minivan. How did it get there?

That's not important. We need to focus our efforts on directing traffic around the wreck, not the fact that you ran the red light, were speeding, and driving under the influence!. That's all in the past!

At such a scene there will be two things going on:

There will be police focused on figuring out what happened. But there will also be police focused on getting traffic past the wreck and getting the wreck out of the road. Obsessing with what caused the wreck very well might end up with a secondary collision because someone didn't realize traffic wasn't moving right.

 

[Elixir]

we should focus our efforts on ongoing problems, not past problems.

... unless they're the same problem, maybe?
We can't fix the past harms caused by "the problem" but we can certainly learn about preventing harms today by studying harms of the past.
Or, we could have, if Republican snowflakes didn't make it illegal.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I've attached some top Google hits that use real-world data to allege systemic racism in housing prices. Can you cite academic paper(s) showing the flaws in these studies? Or must we rely strictly on the "top of your head"?

Once again, disparate outcome doesn't prove discrimination!

We must admire your sheer arrogance. You dismiss — unread — scholarly papers in favor of your own unsourced pontifications. Bravo!

I didn't look at all of them but what I did look at suffered from the same problem: Showing there is a difference in house prices doesn't show discrimination. As always, it's trying to prove discrimination by observing a disparate result with no regard for whether there's some other factor at work. And once again most of what you're providing is simply showing disparate outcome, not why it happened.

The papers I cited above provide a much more nuanced view. They do NOT support the over-enthusiastic claims of discrimination we hear from progressives. But they do not support your overly dismissive view either.

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/rp3ed

Black house prices may also be depressed by discrimination in home appraisals, where appraisers consciously or subconsciously appraise homes that contain markers indicating a Black family lives there as less valuable than they otherwise would (e.g., Kamin 2020; Howell and Korver-Glenn 2020).

Hint: Signs that a black family lives there means showing signs a family lives there. Standard real estate advice is to scrub signs of who lives there--you don't want anything that will not match the prospective buyers and since said buyers come in all shapes and sizes you can never expect to match them. Is it any surprise that appraisers are vulnerable to this? Also, a fairly basic failure like this suggests that there are likely other factors that make the house not present itself as well as possible.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29306/w29306.pdf

These findings are surprising in light of a previously documented pattern in which minority homeowners pay higher prices for homes, but subsequently suffer diminished home values as a result of discriminatory market forces (e.g. white flight; Akbar et al. 2019; Perry et al. 2018; Bayer et al. 2017).
... The racial gap in housing returns is not driven by differences in demographic characteristics across racial groups such as income or family structure. While racial gaps in housing returns are larger for lower-income and single-headed households, large gaps exist even within narrow demographic categories. This finding indicates that differences in demographics may exacerbate the racial gap in housing returns, but they do not fully explain it.

And herein we see the assumption that white flight is due to racism. Nope, white flight is parents reacting to an influx of inferior students. It typically happens from minority students but you would see the same thing with a bunch of immigrants from any country that doesn't speak English.

Optimum education will be obtained when students are as closely matched in ability as possible. The greater the mismatch the more time the teacher spends with the students who are behind and the more the material is lowered so as to not leave them utterly behind. You see an influx of students who need more help, parents who care enough will move. Also, you'll see people who don't even have kids in school leaving because they can see that house prices are going to go down. The more this happens the more prone others are to get out--and any locality suffering heavy emigration is in trouble. It doesn't matter what triggers it as the ones that see the writing on the wall and are willing/able to act on it are above average. Remove enough of them and what's left behind is decidedly below average. (This is part of why Jews tend to be above average--again and again the smart ones got out of dodge and the ones that didn't got removed from the gene pool. It's a pretty strong evolutionary pressure.)

 

[ZiprHead]

Wow...

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Once again, disparate outcome doesn't prove discrimination!

If measurable outcomes that vary considerably and predictibly in relation to racial identifiers are not a valid means of determing whether systemic discrimination is occurring, what is?

To put it another way, if there is no situation in which you would concede the point, why should anyone listen to you at all? You may be pretending to engage in analysis, but it's obvious you're just stamping your foot and asserting a political opinion, not making a valid point with a solid empirical basis. It means nothing to say, "there's not enough evidence that this is the case" if no amount of evidence would cause you to say anything else.

No. If you find a disparate outcome you look for why it happened. This is what the discrimination warriors virtually never do.

Take, for example, the inferior medical treatment blacks get in the hospital. Dig into it and it's purely a function of the hospital, not the patient. On average, hospitals with more black patients provide inferior treatment. Well, duh, overworked, underfunded hospitals (all too often they have patients they can't hope to collect from) provide inferior care!

Or the oft-claimed bit of police being more likely to shoot blacks. Nope, there are two problems here:

1) Once again, it's the environment. Control for the city and the pattern disappears. What it's actually seeing is that cops of any race are more likely to shoot in cities with more blacks.

2) And as usual it's compared to the wrong population. Most people do not have hostile encounters with the cops--and the shooting discrepancy goes away if you compare against arrests rather than population.

Again and again I see "research" showing "discrimination" that fails to consider obvious confounding factors--and when a good effort is made to control for them the supposed discrimination goes away or even reverses.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Technically, LP is correct - disparate outcomes do not PROVE anything. Disparate outcomes provide evidence not proof.

Of course, disparate outcomes are used all the time as evidence to rebut any theory in any field. It is the basis for the scientific method: set up an experiment that controls for all possible influences but one and look for disparate outcomes. Taking LP's claim literally, he is denying the validity of the scientific method.

No. As you say, control for all possible influences. With discrimination "research" there's almost always no attempt to control at all. It's just documenting the difference and pretending that proves something.

 

[Politesse]

Once again, disparate outcome doesn't prove discrimination!

If measurable outcomes that vary considerably and predictibly in relation to racial identifiers are not a valid means of determing whether systemic discrimination is occurring, what is?

To put it another way, if there is no situation in which you would concede the point, why should anyone listen to you at all? You may be pretending to engage in analysis, but it's obvious you're just stamping your foot and asserting a political opinion, not making a valid point with a solid empirical basis. It means nothing to say, "there's not enough evidence that this is the case" if no amount of evidence would cause you to say anything else.

No. If you find a disparate outcome you look for why it happened. This is what the discrimination warriors virtually never do.

Take, for example, the inferior medical treatment blacks get in the hospital. Dig into it and it's purely a function of the hospital, not the patient. On average, hospitals with more black patients provide inferior treatment. Well, duh, overworked, underfunded hospitals (all too often they have patients they can't hope to collect from) provide inferior care!

Or the oft-claimed bit of police being more likely to shoot blacks. Nope, there are two problems here:

1) Once again, it's the environment. Control for the city and the pattern disappears. What it's actually seeing is that cops of any race are more likely to shoot in cities with more blacks.

2) And as usual it's compared to the wrong population. Most people do not have hostile encounters with the cops--and the shooting discrepancy goes away if you compare against arrests rather than population.

Again and again I see "research" showing "discrimination" that fails to consider obvious confounding factors--and when a good effort is made to control for them the supposed discrimination goes away or even reverses.

So your data shows that majority-Black neighborhoods in the United States are disproportionately poor, violent, hounded by the police, and medically underserved, while majority-White neighborhoods are relatively affluent, peaceful, and healthy?

 

[Ford]

So as the old saying goes, "those who don't learn from history....actually, never mind. History is not important. We don't need to learn from it or even consider it. If your parents or grandparents or everyone you know was discriminated against, you need to pull up your bootstraps and get over it, snowflake.!"

Yes, denying that there was any history of discrimination is the best way to prevent it today.

I can't wait to tell my Native American friends that white people have decided that all is forgiven!

Goalposts!!

I didn't say we shouldn't learn from it. I'm saying that we should focus our efforts on ongoing problems, not past problems.

Your car has come to rest in the intersection. Your front bumper is in the front seat of the minivan. How did it get there?

That's not important. We need to focus our efforts on directing traffic around the wreck, not the fact that you ran the red light, were speeding, and driving under the influence!. That's all in the past!

At such a scene there will be two things going on:

There will be police focused on figuring out what happened. But there will also be police focused on getting traffic past the wreck and getting the wreck out of the road. Obsessing with what caused the wreck very well might end up with a secondary collision because someone didn't realize traffic wasn't moving right.

Six years ago I was in a 7 car accident that shut down a major freeway for 3 hours. Yes, the police were there directing traffic onto the nearest exits, onto the surface streets, and around the wreck. Yes there were also officers doing a very thorough investigation of what happened. Interviewing everyone (well, everyone not transported to a hospital) that was in the accident as well as multiple witnesses. Were they "obsessing" with what caused the wreck? Yes. In fact the police report (I got a copy) was 42 pages long, included statements from victims, witnesses, diagrams, and photos. They did a thorough investigation of the person who caused the wreck, the events leading up to it, and other factors which might be relevant in the criminal investigation which eventually led to 10 felony charges against the guy.

By your reasoning, all that should have been more or less ignored, because once the freeway traffic was moving again 3 hours later, the problem had been solved!

Is there a larger problem with impaired driving? No, says LP. That's in the past. Do we have a problem with excessive speed? That contributed, but "we just need to move on." The perpetrator's history of drunk driving, assault, and general shitfuckery? Irrelevant, because it's all in the past!

What you seem to be saying with regards to race, racism, race relations, etc. is "we don't need to look at what happened in the past that may have led to this. We just need to look at what's happening now. If what's happening now can be excused as the actions of individuals, then we simply do not have a systemic problem. Everything is fine. There's nothing to see here. Move along."