Racism — is there anything it can’t explain? As Theodore Dalrymple has written, so-called “anti-racists” are obsessed with race. “Every event or social phenomenon” is “a manifestation of racism”, even when alternative explanations are obvious.
If whites flee suburbs and pull their children from schools with a high percentage of blacks, it’s never obvious things like, y’know, the crime and drive-by shootings. Nothing else can explain it but “racism”.
And when insurers charge more to insure cars in non-white neighbourhoods, what else could it be but “racism”?
Hundreds of thousands of people of colour may be paying an “ethnicity penalty” of at least £280 a year each in higher car insurance costs, an investigation by Citizens Advice has claimed.
The national charity said its year-long investigation had uncovered a “shocking trend” of people of colour paying a lot more for motor cover than white people, and that the penalty was up to £950 in some locations.
I’ve noticed a “shocking trend”, too: my (white) relatives in Queensland pay exponentially more for house insurance than I do. It must be racism, I suppose: Queensland’s habit of flooding every few years couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it.
Just as there’s no possible way that higher rates of car-theft could affect insurance premiums.
Working with the research agency Europe Economics, Citizens Advice carried out 649 mystery shops for car insurance quotes using six different customer names across eight postcodes in England. The aim was to compare areas with a high white population with those where there was a high proportion of people of colour […]
Citizens Advice said it found that in some areas “the difference in price was more than 100%,” and that common risk factors such as crime rates and deprivation levels could not account for this. “We’re concerned this suggests that areas with large communities of colour may be identified as more risky, even when objective risk factors are controlled,” it said.
Really? Something as simple as overlapping Britain’s highest car-theft postcodes with the density of the non-white population shows a pretty clear correlation.
Their own methodology undermines their “racism” assumptions.
For the “customers” the researchers picked names often associated with certain ethnic groups, though Citizens Advice said these ended up not having much impact on the prices being quoted. “This suggests this penalty is paid by everyone who lives in an area, regardless of their ethnicity. However, people of colour are [statistically] far more likely to pay it,” it added.
The Guardian
Maybe they should try living in less crime-ridden areas. Or maybe their “POC” bruvs should stop stealing cars.