Causal Racism: An Explanatory Framework

We present a conception of race as counterfactual property determined by phenotypic and cultural information and show that the sources of racial disparities are separable, identifiable, and measurable. Individual racism, as an important source of racial disparities, is understood here as the direct application of racial knowledge under the influence of certain cognitive states. This understanding of racism as a theoretically observable phenomenon allows for its operationalization in the language of bias and noise, statistical concepts which must be supplemented with an appropriate causal analysis. We present a formal model for the structure of racial disparities and use the model to analyze disparities and racism in two contexts: the application process for 8 specialized high schools in New York City (SHSAT), and records of traffic stops by police conditioned on driver race. At the conceptual level, our framework distinguishes the components of racial disparities generated contemporaneously by racism (and other sources) from those conveyed from the past. It follows that because the strategies best suited to the reduction of racism per se may sometimes be in conflict with the reduction in racial disparities generally, a deep understanding of the context dependent structure of disparities should be prioritized.