Doug, this is precisely the kind of reasoning thak makes good headlines but poor science. Income disparity has been relatively well studied. It naturally yields itself to regression that allows the separation of the effects of different variables. These studies were able to seprate the effects of industry, qualifications, position, or seniority from those of sex or race. It turned out that the effect of sex and race were not as strong as they appeared to a naked eye, but still statistically significant. That led to the formation of the segmented labor market theory basically claiming the existence of two labor markets: one with decent pay and opportunity for a promotion, and the other one comprising mainly of low paying dead end jobs.
Further studies demonstrated that "matching" people with those two labor markets is indeed a two way street. On the one hand, it depends on the assessment of a job candidate by the employer, but on the other - by the self assessment of one's own skills by the candidate and seeking work in one segment of the market but not the other.
There is also plenty of literature on how the qualifications are assessed by the audience. That process involves "status generalization" - or the projection of salient characteristics associated with social status on the not-yet-demonstrated technical skills. While some of those "status cues" include gender or race, others do not. Moreover, some combinations of status may "exclude" the other (e.g. a graduate degree may exclude the effect of gender or race).
The bottom line is that while racial or gender stereotypes may play some role in pay inequality, there is also plenty of other factor that have demonstrably larger role but nothing to do with race or gender. The role of social science or responsible journalism is to separate these effects. Blaming it soleley on the "US institutions" - which btw are among most equitable in the world (excpet, as you said, in the Scandinavian countries) - is simply poor logic.
I am pretty sure that similar factors explain the imprisionment rates, although my knowledge in this area is limited.
>the Scandinavian ones). But since the U.S. is the world's chief
>imperialist power, and since a good bit of imperial power is
>justified on racialized grounds, on a world scale no one rivals the
>U.S. for creating racialized categories and abusing the racialized
>inferiors.
>
I do not know what "racialized" mean - it sounds to me like pseudo-social-scientific newspeak - but if it denotes the proposition that US government attempts to dominate other countries, because it considers peoples who live there as an inferior race - that is the most pathetic simplification I've heard for long time. Making policy decision is really a complex thing that I cannot even start addressing here, and reducing it to simplistic attitudes toward other people is on a par with National Enquirer style journalism, pure and simple. A reverse proposition, that peoples are demonized and portrayed as an inferior "race" because they happen to live in countries hostile to the US government is quite defensible - but it does not explain US policies (imperial or otherwise), nor does it have anything to do with "race" (which is a very vague concept anyway).
wojtek