So I am not clear enough, huh? OK, then:
There are several issues at stake here:
(i) a scientific determination of the contribution of various factors, such as socio-demographic characteristics, institutional behavior, wealth, skills etc. to social inequalities in the US;
(ii) popular perceptions of the contributions of the said factors;
(iii) my own cognitive biases in interpreting (i) and (ii) above; and
(iv) my own cognitive biases affecting my attitude toward other people.
RE. (i) I stated that such determination is very difficult, if at all possible, and not very useful politically. I did not state the reasons, but these include definitional problems , time-sequencing problems (i.e. what comes first, what comes next and in what time interval. Which is crucial for any cause-effect modeling), measurement problems (many of the said factors cannot be measured with reasonable reliability and validity), non-linearity (certain effects can be exponentially compound over time), temporal inter-correlations (e.g. X affects Y at time T1, but Y affects X at time T2) - to name a few. Is that clear enough, or further clarifications are needed?
RE (ii) I merely hinted popular interpretations of the causes of social inequalities, assuming that these are generally known. These include mainly the "personal responsibility" (they are lazy), "human capital" (they are lacking skills i.e. too stupid) arguments favored by the right, and the variants of racism argument (the top dog(s) makes(s) the underdogs do bad things and keep(s) them from getting to the top). As I stated time and again on this forum, I find such perceptions (as well as many other popular myths) and interesting subject of study of human cognitions, but otherwise of little or no value for explaining social behavior and institutions. Is that sufficiently clear?
Re (iii) My personal bias is that I favor materialistic explanations of over cultural ones, and multi-factor models over single cause explanations. That is why I am not a big fan of pop-culture and populist discourse that loves simplistic explanations, buzzwords and soundbites.
Re (iv) I strongly dislike people with certain behavioral characteristics which include, but are not limited to being violent, rowdy, rude, self-righteous or arrogant. I have no sympathy toward such individuals and generally avoid them as much as I can. This normally is of little interest to anyone but a handful of personal friends and relatives, but sometimes it affects my reaction toward other people as well, hence I mentioned that. Specifically, it pisses me off when someone tries to portray such behavioral characteristics as virtues or excuse them as legitimate reactions. To be even more blunt, an asshole is an asshole and those who say otherwise are either full of shit, do not know any better, or have some unresolved emotional or psychological problems. This, of course has nothing to do whatsoever with (i) (ii) or (ii) above, but it does affect my postings to this list from time to time. That should be sufficiently clear, no?
Wojtek