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If it was easy to get rid of racial inequality, we'd have done it already.
Instead, we get endless moaning and groaning about the unfairness of it all... and endless statistics that prove that the moaning and groaning is completely justified.
Humans can take hunger, illness, poverty, and all kinds of other hardships in good spirits. But few things eat away at the soul more than unfairness. It's demoralizing and destructive to Bermuda.
Bermuda gets reminded of this unfairness early each September, when the annual Employment Survey results are released.
Every year it's there on the news and the front page of the papers, with the tones of shock and horror as if this were being discovered and revealed for the first time.
This has been going on since the mid-1990s, when the annual employment survey - in a move that seemed highly controversial at the time - started asking a few basic questions about race.
It's hard to do exact comparisons over time because detailed surveys only began in 1999, the questions and methods have changed.
But it's pretty clear that over the last four years, at any rate, that the gap between black and white incomes has remained big and unmoving.
For the 2003-4 year, the median black income was $42,165, while median white income was 41.2% higher, at $59,539.
For the year 2007-8, the median black income was $50,539, while median white income was 41.7% higher at $71,609.
Is this all what we get for all our efforts?
There has been public anguish, big conversations, surveys, workshops, sensitivity training, consciousness raising, scholarships, bursaries, race-based electioneering, and the government has offered carrots, sticks and cudgels.
For all that we get just a 0.5 per cent change in the wrong direction?
Years ago, a lot of us believed that if only we could convince people there was a problem, and stop deliberately discriminating against other people, then the problems would gradually sort themselves out.
Now its clear that discrimination is more devious and complicated that we suspected, perpetrated by negligence and unthinking systems much more than ill will.
Destructive psychology
And it's confused and compounded by layer upon layer of traditions, habits, destructive psychology and, most of all, decades and decades of poor education.
A bad education system is a self-perpetuating problem.
Everywhere in the world, poorly educated people are more likely to have poorly educated children. If things don't work out, the kids quit school and get low-paying jobs or get into trouble.
People who have money and good jobs, by and large, put their children in expensive private schools (more than half the island's children are in independent schools). And if things don't work out, they send them to even more expensive private schools overseas.
Now, after decades of neglect, incompetence and good intentions gone completely awry, serious efforts are being made to shake our public school system into shape.
But it hasn't produced results yet. So it's not surprising that business leaders, who bear the brunt of discrimination complaints when Employment Survey results are released each September, are quick to blame the education system.
"The root cause for differences in income is a correlation between job/income and education and skills," the Association of Bermuda International Companies said in a statement this week.
The Bermuda Employers Council, meanwhile, complained that the survey results are open to "misleading and provocative" interpretations - meaning, presumably, that they malign the integrity of employers by implying they are racists.
The Employers Council argues that the real reason for income inequality is differences in education - white Bermudians are more than twice as likely to have undergraduate degrees, for example.
They say Government statisticians ought to be providing figures for specific job categories - so we are comparing the income of a black Bermudian and white Bermudian in the same kind of position, with the same kind of education.
It's important to know what the Employment Survey has told us, that white incomes are significantly above black incomes.
But we knew that already.
Clearly we need to know more. Government needs to publicize and discuss the kinds of information the employers are talking about - not to shift blame, but to help us do a better job of finding and fixing the problems.
We haven't done a good job - at least, not good enough - so far.
Click here for Cordell Riley's take. [[In-content Ad]]

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