Of course I would have doubts about pulling causality out of something as complicated as this, but here is an interesting paper that talks about a few possible mechanisms [1]. The big ones it seems are:
- Inflexibility in when people may vote; The types of jobs people have access to has a racial bias. Black people tend to have jobs where they literally aren't allowed to leave during they which means they can't stop by the polling location during off hours. This can make polling places deal with larger peaks in predominantly black areas.
- Partisan resource allocation; predominantly black regions tend to lean democrat and so in republican areas they may receive fewer resources to deal with voting.
- Voter ID laws; These also have a racial lean and can clog up regions where they are enacted. Minorities also tend to have a more difficult time gaining access to IDs for voting and so people may have to come back multiple times or be turned away.
- State voting laws; Regions vary with who has access to early voting, vote by mail, etc. These tend to have a racial bias as well.
Discrimination due to working times, location, and ability to show ID are not racist. They may affect black people disproportionately, but they also affect millions of whites and other races too. Those things seem to have more to do with economic status than race to me.
I’m fed up seeing this kind of shallow dismissal. This is a particularly egregious example; you are a hair away from saying “discrimination that affects <race> disproportionately is not racist”.
I mean, you’re basically describing redlining (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining) - a textbook case of a “we all already agree that this is racist and it’s not particularly controversial” concept.
You don’t need a law that says “Black people can’t vote” in order to have racist policies!
The mechanism by which modern racists work is to find categories that are not strictly racial but which have a very strong racial correlation and then apply restrictions and barriers on this correlated category while claiming to not be acting with racial bias. What is changing is that people are starting to see right through these and courts are also starting to exhibit basic statistical literacy with regards to these tactics.
73% of all arrests are male[0]. This imbalance does not mean that there is systemic bias against men, though. It means they commit more arrestable actions.
- Inflexibility in when people may vote; The types of jobs people have access to has a racial bias. Black people tend to have jobs where they literally aren't allowed to leave during they which means they can't stop by the polling location during off hours. This can make polling places deal with larger peaks in predominantly black areas.
- Partisan resource allocation; predominantly black regions tend to lean democrat and so in republican areas they may receive fewer resources to deal with voting.
- Voter ID laws; These also have a racial lean and can clog up regions where they are enacted. Minorities also tend to have a more difficult time gaining access to IDs for voting and so people may have to come back multiple times or be turned away.
- State voting laws; Regions vary with who has access to early voting, vote by mail, etc. These tend to have a racial bias as well.
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w26487?sy=487