Here is a gift-wrapped, real-world case of systemic racial inequity — one for which the Times can’t summon much enthusiasm.
In January, a study conducted by economists in coordination with the Treasury Department alleged that the Internal Revenue Service relied on algorithms that ended up targeting black Americans with audits at disproportionately high rates. On Monday, IRS commissioner Daniel Werfel acknowledged the truth of the allegations in a letter to Senate Democrats: Black filers were between three and five times more likely to be flagged for potential errors by claiming common tax credits.
With this, we have an honest-to-goodness case of systemic discrimination by one of America’s most disliked federal law-enforcement agencies. The allegations are specific. They relate to both algorithmic racial antagonisms, of which anti-racism activists have long warned, and the agency’s supposedly crippling resource deficit. This should have been the New York Times’ bread and butter. So how did the paper of record cover the story? With as little enthusiasm as the institution could muster.
In all of eleven paragraphs, the Times presented just the facts. The conspicuously colorless copy summarizes Werfel’s confession. It made note of Democratic displeasure, observing that Senator Elizabeth Warren, in particular, hopes to see the IRS reform its racial data-collection methods. It indicated that the IRS intends to use at least some of the $80 billion Congress allocated to it last year to “improving outreach” to minority communities and to “reduce disparities in tax enforcement.” And that was that.
It’s hard to imagine the paper would have published such a perfunctory product if the risk that Republicans could “pounce” on this news wasn’t so pronounced. Historically, allegations of systemic discrimination enliven the paper’s reporters and give way to sprawling, multidisciplinary explorations of America’s cultural defects — at least, it does when the allegations are nebulous and the blame falls on the tides of history.
The investment bank JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s pledge to contribute $30 billion to advance racial equity — a “down payment” on racial restitution, according to Urban League president Marc Morial — was subjected to a sprawling Times exploration. Where would the money go, and how would it “improve financial health and access to banking in Black and Latinx communities?” Partly as a result of this reporting, those funds were eventually subjected to an audit, which anti-racism activists denounced as inadequate because the famous auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, was deemed insufficiently tethered to the equity industry.
Allegations of systemic racism afflicting the public-health industry enjoyed a full examination at a time when justifying the legitimacy of protests and street action during the height of the pandemic. So, too, did the implicit bias afflicting influential medical journals. Their editors, most of whom are “white and male,” rarely accept papers exploring “how systemic racism shapes the care experiences of black and brown people,” experts insisted.
The paper profiled the activists at the helm of Color for Change, which has devoted itself to campaigns against “systemic racism” in Hollywood, the technology and prison industries, and among elected officials. The Times has highlighted the comprehensive hold racism has over the American theater and the activist class’s desire to “start over the American systems that were made in hopes of keeping black people out of the picture” — systems that include “capitalism,” “politics,” and even Broadway.
Systemic racism maintains a shadowy grip on home loans, the disbursement of which are withheld from black homebuyers due to vestigial factors inherited from the Roosevelt and Johnson administrations. New York’s child-welfare services have become a “predatory system that specifically targets Black and brown parents.” Systemic racism impoverishes “the whole economy,” Christian theology, and “our institutions,” according to the paper’s contributors. Even the New York Times is systemically racist, according to New York Times reporters — or, rather, “racial disparities in performance evaluations” that consequently deprive minority reporters of the remuneration they are due.
When the allegations are hazy, the malefactors are vague, and the victims are defined by class rather than their individuality, the New York Times pushes all its chips in on the coverage of America’s “systemic racism.” The IRS’s case, however, is different insofar as it involves an exquisitely specific claim, a defined set of victims and a distinct wrongdoer, and a public institution that long ago lost the public’s trust. Here is a gift-wrapped, real-world case of systemic racial inequity — one for which the Times can’t summon much enthusiasm. As editorial priorities go, heading off the prospect that Republicans might “seize” on our shared reality apparently outranks the scourge of systemic racism.