In recent decades, “racial disparity” has become the central framework for discussing inequities affecting African Americans in the United States. In this usage, disparity refers to the disproportionate statistical representation of some categorically defined populations on average in the distribution of undesirable things—unemployment, low wages, infant mortality, poor education, incarceration, etc. And by corollary logic, such social groupings are also found to be statistically underrepresented in desirable things—wealth, income, educational attainment, etc.

The most common categorical markers here have to do, not surprisingly, with race and gender—though they aren’t the only domains of disparity; but even so, these foundational discriminations often form the template for it. Identifying and parsing disparities have become the default setting of the language of social justice in the United States. Even commentary on the impact of calamities like hurricanes or earthquakes seems to mandate that we track just how they displace and harm discrete subpopulations in order to assess their true magnitude.

This way of thinking about injustice and what does and doesn’t call for remedial action has its roots in enforcement of anti-discrimination law in the 1960s and 1970s. Identifying disparate treatment or outcomes that correlate with racial difference can be a critical step in validating a complaint. However, the inclination to fixate on such disparities as the only objectionable form of inequality can create perverse political incentives. We devote a great deal of rhetorical and analytic energy to the project of determining just which groups, or population categories, suffer or have suffered the worst. Cynics have sometimes referred to this brand of what we might term political one-downsmanship as the “oppression Olympics”—a contest in which groups that have attained or are vying for legal protection effectively compete for the moral or cultural authority that comes with the designation of most victimized.

Even short of that cynical view, a central focus on group-level disparities can lead to mistaken diagnoses of the sources and character of the manifest inequalities it identifies. And those mistaken diagnoses, in turn, can reflect damaging class and ideological biases that ultimately undercut the struggle for social justice and equality. In this column and later ones, I will examine facets of this problem and its entailments. A key point of departure here is the study I published in 2012 with Columbia University public health Professor Merlin Chowkwanyun, explicating how what we call the “disparitarian perspective” has distorted discussion of the impact of the New Deal on black Americans.

People who embrace anti-racist politics now regularly denounce the New Deal as a model for universalist social and economic reform on the grounds that many of its signature programs discriminated against African Americans. Some of these detractors simply dismiss the New Deal as racist and have gone further to argue that all universal programs—i.e., initiatives that are officially designed to benefit everyone—are racist and will not help black Americans. They argue instead that only government and market interventions targeted solely to African Americans should count as benefits for black people.