I was listening to a NY Times interview of Ibram X. Kendi, by Ezra Klien.

Kendi says:

To be anti-racist is to say that racial groups, not individuals, but groups, are equal. There is no group that is inferior or superior. Therefore the cause of a disparity or inequity must be policies or practices that we see or don’t see. To be anti-racist is to identify and challenge them.

There is a possible conflation that happens here:

“There is no racial group that is inferior or superior.”

I agree that no racial group is morally, or ontologically, inferior or superior.  And when we talk about superiority/inferiority, that is the natural definition to assume. So when he says no race is inferior or superior, that seems like an obviously true statement. In a moral or ontological sense, it is! But there is a second way of thinking about superiority/inferiority that is demanded by the next sentence.
That is, in terms of outcomes in specific categories that are measurable, it would seem nearly impossible that different groups of people will have exactly equal outcomes.

This is true because in any category that can be measured, there will be higher and lower scores. According to that metric then, higher scores are superior, lower are inferior.

For example, if Asians score higher in math than white people, they can be legitimately considered ’superior’ in math. That isn’t a moral or ontological judgment of superiority, it is simply the case that in terms of math test scores, Asians would be superior to whites, and whites would be inferior to Asians.

The language sounds offensive because we naturally tend to associate superiority with the moral or ontological categories.  

This question is important, since Kendi’s argument really hinges on the truth of this statement…..in the measurable sense.
His argument is about disparities of outcomes. Since moral or ontological worth aren’t measurable categories, it seems to me that he must be talking about equality in the statistically measurable sense. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but it seems like he is saying that every racial group is, in fact, statistically equal in every sense. IF that is true, then it would be fair to conclude that the cause of disparities must be policies or practices that are racist.

So are all races statistically equal in every respect?

Clearly cultural differences are going to impact this. Different groups will score higher or lower due to the influences of their cultural norms. This would be fairly obvious between, for example, groups of people from India, South America, Africa, and Europe. There are many various cultural components that would contribute to statistically meaningful differences in outcomes.

To my mind, even these don’t have a moral value per se. In the previous example of Asians outperforming whites in mathematical ability, perhaps that’s due to an increased stress on scholastic performance. Let’s assume white families prioritize seeking personal fulfillment through non-scholastic activities over academic achievement. That tradeoff may be considered by whites to be more beneficial to the overall health and well-being, so they are willing to accept scholastic inferiority, in the statistically measurable sense, in order to achieve what they want. These disparate priorities will naturally cause disparities in outcomes in the two groups. Both have chosen freely what they want and accept the consequences of their choices. There is no moral or ontological superiority or inferiority in those choices.  

But what about different races in a multiracial society?

In such a society, we don’t have as wide a variance in cultural norms, and we are closer to eliminating cultural influence variance from the equation, so that we can see if there really is no other explanation for lower outcomes than discrimination.

One of the tenets of critical race theory is that race is truly a ‘social construct’. I actually agree with that. It’s obvious that there are some physiological differences among races, but I would agree that those can be counted an irrelevant trait, like eye color, so that we’re really just talking about “people”. If this is true, then there shouldn’t be any difference in performance between black and white Americans, at least those in the same geographic areas.  

Yet, I think we all believe there ARE cultural factors even among people in the same geographical area. Different racial groups still have different outlooks on life, different priorities, different ways of speaking and thinking about their surroundings, and those influences can have impact on the metrics of any measurable outcome, as noted earlier in the discussion of disparate priorities.  

It might be a good measure to check if racism were really the culprit to test between groups of black people of US black culture, and black people who have immigrated here, to see if there are differences. IF black people from immigrant cultures have the same difficulties, then it may be clearer that skin color is indeed the only factor to explain the difference.

Returning to Kendi’s hypothesis, if there really are no differences between racial groups, then it would be a reasonable hypothesis that racism may be the only way to account for disparities in outcomes. But cultural differences in priorities will certainly affect measurable outcomes and cause disparities all by themselves.