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[taxwonk]

Okay, here's me taking another run at this, trying not to sound like I'm calling anybody out.

I read the article TM linked to a couple days ago, and I have read it a dozen times since then. It really troubles me. It's also something I realized about myself a couple years back, when I was looking for a new place to live. I'm ashamed to say this, but a large part of my choice was based on looking at the probable population of the closest Emergency Room at any given point in time, and I realized that part of what I was doing was looking at what police districts the hospital I was studying was located in and what the nearby police districts were.

I told myself I was just looking at response time and competition for scarce medical resources in a time of crisis. Ultimately, though, what that meant was my looking at where the shootings and stabbings were likely to exceed the broken arms and infants with fevers. I sliced and diced the data a million different ways, but it all boiled down to this: I didn't want to be closest to a hospital where there were likely to be a lot of crime victims. For better or for worse, those hospitals were the ones that had predominantly black neighborhoods nearby.

I can try and justify this a million different ways ("it's a matter of life and death!") But it all boiled down to this: predominantly black neighborhoods have more violent crime, so I want to live nears hospitals that are farther away from predominantly black neighborhoods.

My own algorithm was not set up consciously to avoid predominantly black neighborhoods, but once I thought about the metrics I used, it became pretty hard to ignore the obvious racial bias. It also became impossible to perform the same analysis in a colorblind way.

That's the source of my resistance to the notion that it's impossible to use data that reflect racial and economic bias without choosing that data based on economic and racial bias. I tried to dress it up. I told myself that it was just a health issue; if I didn't have a bad heart that put me in the ER a couple times a year, I wouldn't even be looking at race. But it's impossible for me to say that, ultimately, for whatever reason, I live where I do now because there is an acceptable mix of black and white.

I'm not proud of myself. But I am trying to learn from the experience.