"White clicktivism: why are some Americans woke online but not in real life?"

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Well, maybe, maybe not. Megan Rapinoe's claims as to why one sport is more popular than another are pure speculation. Any statistician (as, of course, you, a mathematician, know) will tell you that correlation does not imply causation. And I had to smile at the solemn way in which we are then told that Sue Bird "agrees with her girlfriend" (Rapinoe) about this. Person agrees with her significant other. What a shock!

Note similarly the comment in the previous article about how "several of the non-white players on the US Copa America roster grew up overseas." What does "several" mean. Three? Six? Out of how many? Is "several" statistically significant? In what other walk of life would such slipshod terminology be assumed to indicate any meaningful correlation?

Articles like these, I'm afraid, are preaching to the converted. They appeal to readers who assume that any difference is prima facie evidence of discrimination or prejudice; and who will accept any anecdote as proof of the thing they wish to have proved. They are usually written, one supposes, either as elements of a defensive performance (of the kind indicted in the earlier article) enacted by white liberals consciously anxious to burnish their anti-racist credentials, or by middle-class people of colour (like the author of the earlier article) either consciously or subconsciously anxious to ensure that the conversation does not actually shift onto the territory of class.

I don't, I should make clear, deny that racism is a real problem; and there is of course an atavistic component to it. But after forty years of neoliberalism, I think modern racist sentiments are often expressions of economic anxieties. If we lived in a society with full employment, people would not worry so much about whether themselves and their children (which is to say, "people like them" ) were first in line for jobs. In a more equal society, there would be less competition for well-paid jobs, and certain groups would feel less need to try and monopolise them. Much racism would wither away, I think, if old-fashioned social democratic principles were implemented.

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Of course I am a white man, but as a gay man, I have a certain insight into (and occasional experience of) some forms of discrimination. Needless to say, these aren't identical to those experienced by people of colour - apart from anything else, if I don't want someone else to know about my sexuality, I don't have to tell them. In terms of what I can learn from experience, I suppose I feel that I have more of a sense of how it might feel to be Jewish (I am of course part-Jewish by ancestry), this being a minority status which is not usually immediately visible. At the same time, the trouble with founding a politics on people's "lived experience" is that "lived experience" is by definition inaccessible to others - hence the proliferation of so-called "conversations" ( "We need to have a conversation about race..." ) which turn out to be lectures in which the listener is expected passively to submit to the claims made by the speaker. There is of course no way of arguing with "lived experience". (Actually, could we drop this cliched phrase? Experience is lived by definition).

I would make the following observations:

1) If white people in the West have a vested interest in playing down the extent of racism in our societies, people of colour have a vested interest in exaggerating it, especially if they are arguing for reparations, positive discrimination, and so forth. I don't accuse either set of people of doing this consciously, incidentally.

2) To respond to the example you give, I'm not sure that "racism" is an appropriate term to describe what happened in Yugoslavia. Serb nationalists weren't precisely motivated by "racism", since Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats are clearly members of the same race, with the same physical appearance, the same skin colour, the same ancestors; they also speak essentially the same language. The difference was not racial but ethnic and religious (not in the sense that religious adherence was actually high among Yugoslavs, but in the sense of that the differing cultures of the three groups had been shaped by historic religious affiliation).

3) Disparity is widely seen as evidence of discrimination in itself; this leads anti-racists to adopt, as a fundamental goal, eliminating the disparity. Usually this takes a statistical form (e.g., are there enough people of a particular group represented in a particular profession or environment?). Much energy is devoted to making the statistics come out right; little is devoted to addressing the actual reasons why the disparity might exist in the first place. The university in which I work is anxious because it is disproportionately white compared to the wider society, and especially because there are disproportionately few black students. A number of strategies have been adopted to counter this: students of colour are displayed prominently on the website and in open day marketing; screens around campus depict historical black heroes and heroines; the valectorian has been, for the last several years a person of colour. Enrollment stubbornly remains disproportionately white. This is a case where I think the nub of the matter really is economic: I happen to be based in one of the UK's most expensive cities; the black minority in particular is disproportionately poor; why would poorer students choose to study in a city known to be unusually expensive? If this hypothesis is accepted, then one has to reach the conclusion that the strategies listed above are close to useless.

4) Nobody seems to think it is a problem when a minority group is over-represented in a particular profession or organisation. The fact that in Britain, South Asians are substantially overrepresented among hospital doctors and nurses does not seem to worry anyone. But by mere statistical logic, it must be the case that they will therefore be underrepresented in other professions. As a gay man, I am conscious of being a member of a minority that is certainly overrepresented in both academia and the arts, and it seems that people of my orientation have long found this milieu and field, for whatever reason, congenial. I presume gay men are thus (it's a logical corollary) underrepresented in the sciences, but I have no reason to believe that this testifies to homophobic bias in that field.

5) In general, the whole notion that the distribution of minorities in a particular working environment should closely mirror their distribution in the wider society seems wrongheaded, since it assumes that differences in ethnicity, sexuality, etc, are otherwise incidental to a person's personality, interests and preferences. This is surely false. For instance, the overrepresentation of gay men in the arts surely has something to do with the fact that artistic milieux for centuries have provided a relative safe haven for homosexuals. By contrast, one might logically expect Muslims to be underrepresented in the arts, at least as regards the religiously devout and particularly where the visual arts are concerned, since Islam is traditionally iconoclastic. Even as regards racial differences, these are likely to have an impact on people's interests and preferences precisely in so far as race is a category of self-definition. I recently was puzzled when an article about the underrepresentation of people of colour among opera singers solemnly claimed that the Western musical tradition had served as a vehicle for white supremacy, but seemed oblivious to the fact that this claim itself might discourage non-white people from aspiring to be part of it! If people of colour are taught to think of opera as racially exclusive, why would they wish to participate in it? Why should one be surprised if they chose instead to gravitate disproportionately to non-Western musical traditions?