Shouting ‘Racism’ Is a Career Move

Shouting ‘Racism’ Is a Career Move - WSJ:
Framing people for crimes they didn’t commit presumably is justified if it serves a policy or political agenda.
A House Financial Services Committee investigation last week does a good job exposing the multiple dishonesties behind the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau crackdown on supposedly racist auto loans.
But the report doesn’t get to the mind-set that would go to extremes to manufacture evidence of racism where it doesn’t exist.
America has, in some ways, become a culture of racial Stalinism.
To inoculate oneself against charges of racism, which can come from anywhere at any time based on anything, the best strategy is routinely to fling accusations of racism at others.
In turn, chiseling opportunists will always be prepared to exploit the instant if ersatz moral status that accrues to anyone who shouts charges of racism. That should be your starting point for understanding this story.
...It’s important to understand that such auto-lending cases, long before the CFPB came along, were already a hardy perennial for enforcement agencies looking to make a splash.
An apogee of silliness was a 2009 Justice Department case accusing two car dealers of favoring Asian over Hispanic car buyers because 600 of 1,300 “non-Asian” buyers were charged higher loan terms than the average of Asian buyers.
Notice that 600 is roughly half of 1,300.
When defendants noted that Justice was basically saying “half of one group is above average, which means that the other half is below average,” a court dismissed the case on grounds of statistical malpractice. 
Which is why agencies strive to make sure their auto-lending cases never see the inside of a court.
All this we touched on in previous columns, but a few things have become clearer thanks to the House report.
Read it all!