The 3/5ths Doctrine
By 
Here’s the kind of question that only the Last Honest Journalists of the Intellectual Substack Web dare to ask: Given that systemic racism in America was eliminated by the civil rights laws enacted in the 1960s, what accounts for numbers like these?
Median Household Income of White Households:
2019: $77,494
1967: $7,357
Median Household Income of Black Households:
2019: $46,734
1967: $4,275
That sure looks to me as if the median Black household was making just 3/5ths of the income of the median white household back when we still had Systemic Racism, while today, after more than a half century of an America with no Systemic Racism, the ratio has become . . . let’s see, four carry the seven divided by two . . . wait a minute, it’s still 3/5ths!
Now where have I seen that ratio before? Maybe in one of those Toni Morrison novels they made me read at my Politically Correct College instead of truly great American authors like Shakespeare and Moliere.
By the way every time I encounter the literary effluvia of the Intellectual Dark Web I’m reminded of Moliere’s dictum, which remains the wisest insight anyone has ever crafted about our his (our) profession:
Writing is like prostitution: First you do it for love, then for a few select friends, and then for money. (Loose translation)
Anyway, what could explain this astounding coincidence?
Some theories:
(1) Systemic racism ended in June of 1964 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, so the absence of any shift in the gap between white and Black household incomes since 1967 (the Census Bureau’s race-stratified household income stats begin that year, which is why I’m using it) simply reflects the Natural Economic Order of the Races in a Free Market, once racism has been removed from the equation.
(2) The Cadillacs, T-Bone steaks, and Obamaphones provided to Those People by the Welfare State has made them more shiftless and lazy than they would otherwise be.
(3) They’re animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.
There are probably some others, but these are the main contenders, which we can call Team Sailer, Team Murray, and Team Zaluchi.
Right wingers were on Team Murray back in the 1980s, but then Bari’s friend Andrew Sullivan pushed hard to get all Brave Iconoclastic Thinkers Who Dare to Ask Politically Incorrect Questions onto Team Sailer, so we had that for awhile.
In the age of Trump, it’s all Team Zaluchi all the time.