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Another factor that accounts for the disparity in incomes is the purpose and function of
employment discrimination law. It is directed at identifying the perpetrator - the employer who
uses race as a hiring criteria or uses a criteria with a racially disparate impact and no relevance to
the job. But conditions not caused by the employer may diminish the pool of applicants qualified
for particular jobs. Two hundred and thirty years of slavery, one hundred and twenty years of
state sponsored segregation, one hundred and thirty years of discrimination condoned by the law
are not without effect in present society. Our history has produced an underclass that is
disproportionately black. The number of whites living in poverty may exceed the number of
blacks, but the proportion of blacks living in poverty is far higher than the proportion of whites
living in poverty. Individuals of either race, by luck or ability or a combination of factors, can
move out of poverty. Yet those individuals have surmounted enormous obstacles that restrain
most of their fellows. Poverty and prejudice produce ghettos - remote from new job openings as
businesses leave the city, subject to severe problems in urban educational systems, and
despairing of any solutions. Anti-discrimination laws produce a principle that protects everyone
from discrimination based on race, but no one from the effects of a history of discrimination.
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