Are blacks equal to Italians, Irish, Polish and other white people? The answer is probably a big fat no, and the pretense or assumption that we are equal -- or should be equal -- is foolhardy and creates mischief.
There are many other inequalities and disproportionalities. Asian-Americans routinely score the highest on the math portion of the SAT, whereas blacks score the lowest. Population statistics for South Dakota, Iowa, Maine, Montana and Vermont show that not even 1 percent of their respective populations is black. By contrast, in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, blacks are over-represented in terms of their percentages in the general population.
Soft-minded and sloppy-thinking academics, lawyers and judges harbor the silly notion that but for the fact of discrimination, we'd be proportionately distributed by race across incomes, education, occupations and other outcomes. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere, at any time, that proportionality is the norm anywhere on earth; however, much of our thinking, many of our laws and much of our public policy are based upon proportionality's being the norm.