Left narratives blame past bad actors rather than present policy design

Evidence

The political left, which does admit to our racist history, doesn’t do much better when it comes to understanding the situation. The left-wing narrative tends to center on blatant race discrimination by bad actors in the past: the FHA denying home loans to black Americans in the 1950s and ’60s, or subprime lenders targeting black Americans during the Great Recession. This past discrimination has led to a disproportionate percentage of black Americans (21 percent) living in poverty, compared with white Americans (8 percent). The economic gap has grown worse over time, the argument goes, simply because wealth begets more wealth, and black Americans are starting from behind. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 61

Categorization

• QUESTION: The book’s whole project is to show why the left’s ‘past discrimination + compounding’ frame is incomplete — tax-code provisions are not just historical residue but actively widening today. Worth chasing how Brown distinguishes her mechanism from the wealth-begets-wealth story.
• XREF: This sets up the pivot to the book’s core surprise: ostensibly race-neutral present-tense tax provisions, not just past bad actors. — connects to: Left romanticism about glorious failure blocks institutional learning; Progressives blamed corporations and bosses rather than structural economic forces — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 251