Ian Tuttle gets at a sense of a lot of us who are skeptical about findings of racial profiling and such, in this case talking about ticketing practices and a study of Ferguson, Missouri:

The complex question of the relationship between wealth and race comes into play here, but it might reasonably be said that this practice — of police and prosecutors and courts together — disproportionately affects black communities not because they are black, but because they are poor. They do not have the means to escape the justice apparatus, unlike the comparatively wealthy, who can pay a fine and be done with the matter — or hire an attorney, and inconvenience courts that prefer the ease of collecting fees to the challenge of arbitrating cases. To this effect, Balko quotes Thomas Harvey, an attorney for ArchCity Defenders, a St. Louis–based legal-aid group: “These are people who make the same mistakes you or I do — speeding, not wearing a seatbelt, forgetting to get your car inspected on time. The difference is that they don’t have the money to pay the fines. . . . When you can’t pay the fines, you get fined for that, too. And when you can’t get to court, you get an arrest warrant.”

For a variety of reasons, I’ve been thinking, lately, how dumb identity politics make us.  I mean that: literally dumb.  Concentrating on race, gender, or whatever other categorization we wish to group people by is almost always a distraction from the underlying issues that are harming people or making them uncomfortable.  Look at the disaster of a president identity politics led us to elect; look at the unbelievably ridiculous candidate lining up to take his place on the same claim.

The difficulty is, frankly, that those underlying issues are mainly being caused by progressive policies, and progressives dominate education, news media, entertainment, and other cultural institutions.  Therefore, they prefer to distract from their flawed, harmful worldview and blame mysterious forces for the consequences.

And they prefer to make us dumb.  How else could they get away with an argument that is essentially, “The system is racist and irredeemably bigoted; we have to give more power to the system”?