I said "racism" not "race." I agree with your that race is an empirically meaningful category, socially constructed to be sure, but with more or less clearly defined empirical meaning and boundaries i.e. there exists an empirical way of deciding whether an individual is or is not a member of a particular race.
The same cannot be said about "racism" however. The concept is so nebulous and so poorly defined that there is no way to empirically decide whether a particular phenomenon does or does not belong to this category, let alone to systematically examine its effects on other phenomena. To be sure, I am not saying that Blacks and other ethnic groups (such as Asians, Irish, Poles, or Jews) have not faced barriers, disadvantages, ill treatment and so forth, and that such barriers, disadvantages or ill treatment do not have a cumulative effect on their current socio-economic status (which I referred to as "path dependencies.") All I am saying that the concept of "racism" is extremely ill suited to explain these path dependencies because it does not allow analytical separation of various factors affecting those paths.
Such factors include (but are not limited to): - deprivation of indigenous institutions by slavery: most white immigrants brought their native institutions (c.f. religion, social organization) to the US, but the Black slaves were deliberately deprived of such institutions and indoctrinated with bastard versions of christianity; the question thus arise what cumulative effect (positive, negative), if any this deprivation had on the Black communities and the current socio-economic status of Blacks.
- attitudes and perceptions of Whites toward Blacks; Blacks toward Whites, and Blacks towards themselves;
- formal and informal rules of engagement (including public policies) between white and black populations; this furthermore includes patterns of institutional discrimination (aka Jim Crow), de facto segregation (e.g. post World War II urban development policies), labor market segmentation, housing and transportation policies, educational system, welfare system, service in the armed forces etc. Each of these factors should be analyzed separately and tested for various types of effects (not necessarily negative);
- environmental factors, especially types of communities, geographical and occupational mobility patterns, dwelling types, access to resources, home ownership etc.
- culture, such as culturally sanctioned norms of behavior and expectations, images of Blacks and Whites (and other ethnic groups) in popular culture, etc.
The concept of "racism" kills every rational inquiry into various possible effects of these factors by supplying a preconceived notion that Whites are somehow responsible for whatever happens to Blacks in the US. This is dogmatism, pure and simple.
A related issue, regarding Doug's earlier remark "Racism includes things like inherited wealth and expectations and school quality. You don't need to descend into culture of poverty explanations."
I think the above comments answer the first sentence by showing that the concept of "racism" is not a very useful analytical tool. As to the second sentence, far from being a "descent", the culture of poverty argument (in its original formulation, not a bastardized and distorted versions circulating in popular discourse) is in the best tradition of empirical sociology, ranging from the 1910s Thomas & Znaniecki's inquiry into Polish immigrant communities, to the 1930s Shaw & Mackay study of "zones in transition" to explain different crime rates in Chicago communities, and to the 1960s studies by Zimbardo or Milgram inquiring into the effects of situational environment (prison, science lab) on human behavior. The common trait of that tradition is a causal argument linking human behavior to empirically measurable environmental factors (community types, mobility patterns, interaction patterns) rather than unmeasurable mental states and dispositions. This is empirical social science at its best, especially that the discipline has the tendency of descending into literary criticism, metaphysics, or simply ideology.
Wojtek