> And a common rebuttal to the objection is that systemic racism is often difficult to untangle in a way that produces a neat chain of cause and effect (not least of which because discrimination can happen unconsciously or secretly)

We have a "disparate impact" and nobody can prove what proportion of it is due to things like parental income or childhood education as opposed to racism on the part of the employer. Because the former considerations are real contributors, the metric can regularly be expected to exceed the threshold even if the contribution of racism by the employer was zero. Doesn't that imply that we're essentially accusing people of racism at random?

> because the impact exists whether intent can be shown or not, the desire remains to ameliorate that impact.

The median household income for Asian Americans of Indian ethnicity is more than double those of Burmese ethnicity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

This is objectively a disparate impact and likely shows up in several other metrics in addition to income. Disparate results can almost universally be obtained by arbitrarily segmenting the population into different groups and comparing the midpoints. Americans of Australian ancestry have a higher median income than those of Irish ancestry, Bolivians higher than Cubans. The result is often because the lower down group has a history of being oppressed.

What reasoned means can we use to determine which groups get the benefit of these methods to ameliorate the disparity and which don't? What should be done about the inherent impossibility of doing them simultaneously, e.g. because hiring a South African woman over a Haitian man would reduce the disparity on one axis while increasing it on another? Notice that considering each group separately could result in unconditional liability because either available alternative puts you over the threshold for one group or the other.

> If the issue happens upstream of the defendant to a claim - generally an organization being sued by an individual with fewer resources - it incentivizes such entities to push for changes upstream, so that they don't get stuck with the bill.

Do we want to apply this logic to other things? The median income in California and New York are significantly higher than they are in Alabama or West Virginia and they have higher ranked public schools. We can correspondingly expect that when applicants from different states apply for the same job, the ones from California and New York (even if they're the same race etc.) are more likely to be selected because they had more advantages growing up, even though none of them chose where they were born.

By the same reasoning we should then have the federal government penalize employers for hiring the applicants from the more affluent states so that it "incentivizes such entities to push for changes upstream, so that they don't get stuck with the bill." Does it make sense to do that?

What evidence would disprove the claim that systemic racism is the cause of a persistent disparity?