The “structural racism” conspiracy theory is everywhere nowadays. Most media consumers take it for granted that white people are to blame for black and brown economic and academic underachievement. But people trained in psychological science, who understand the real causes of behavioural phenomena, know this theory is crap. This essay explains how they know.
Any quality scientist will tell you that the value of a scientific theory is a function of its predictive power.
This has always been the case. Back in the day, when learned people discussed astronomical phenomena, the greatest among those scholars were able to accurately predict solar and lunar eclipses. The theories that correctly predicted eclipse seasons were praised and committed to memory or written down; the theories that incorrectly predicted eclipse seasons, or failed to predict them, were denounced and forgotten.
This ongoing process of refining theories, based on which ones best predicted the outcomes of experiments, evolved into the scientific method. Today, the scientific method involves taking multiple different theories and subjecting them to experiments with various conditions. Then the scientist compares the theories to see which best fits the resulting data.
When the Western World opened its borders to mass immigration from Far East Asia in the 1990s, there were two major theories about how successful it would be.
The structural racism theory predicted that these immigrants would do poorly. This theory held that the low economic and academic achievement of blacks and browns was the result of white prejudice, and, since those whites had no reason to be less prejudiced against Asians, those Asians would also have low economic and academic achievement.
The biological realism theory predicted that these immigrants would do well. It had been known since shortly after World War II that Japanese, Korean and Chinese populations scored as highly as European ones on psychometric measures of intelligence. Because economic and academic achievement is primarily a function of intelligence, biological realists predicted that Asian immigrants would have high economic and academic achievement.
In fact, the majority of Far East Asian immigrants did very well upon immigrating to the West. They all faced some degree of prejudice from the native populations, but few of them were impacted heavily enough by this to remain poor; Asian Americans have the highest net wealth and highest average income of any American racial group.
This outcome repudiated the structural racism theory, and supported the biological realism theory. But this is not the only case where the latter showed itself to have more predictive power than the former.
