I read this paper too, and overall I think it has some very important insights, but I don't think your presentation of it is necessarily the whole story.

The reason is--and IIRC they didn't pick up on this either--that when something is suppressed and then the suppression is relieved, you tend to get a rebound effect.

Consider a case where you have Oompas and Loompas. Oompas naturally range from 90 to 110 cm tall, as do Loompas. Oompas and Loompas reproduce by budding, producing an offspring that grows to the same size. However, if you starve them as they grow, they grow to 10 cm shorter (but this won't propagate to their children unless the children are also starved).

Historically, the Oompas were oppressed, as the elite propagated the narrative that a group name starting with a vowel was a sign of degeneracy. So historically, the distribution looked like this:

OOOOOLOLOLOLOLOLOLLLLL

where O is an Oompa, L is a Loompa, and they're just sorted from shortest to tallest.

After a successful Oompa Justice Movement, we feed everyone the same, the Oompas and Loompas are all the same size, and when we stratify by parent height we get a dramatic upward shift for Oompas (about 15% in this case).

When oppressed, they kept their ranking. After being liberated, the children keep the ranking of the liberated parents. But during the transition, the next generation does anomalously well because it was being kept small through starvation.

Now, I've smuggled in an assumption here: I said that Oompas and Loompas grew to the size of their parents. That is, we have complete genetic and/or cultural determinism.

But this highlights what's wrong with presuming that black women actually aren't being affected by prejudice any longer: obviously, unlike the Oompas' starvation status, parental wealth does impact the wealth of children.

But the only way that this graph says that there's not some ongoing problem is if no other systematic factor matters. Parental wealth is everything, full stop.

Once you admit anything else, your prediction is that a suppressed population rebounds to an extent, once the suppression is gone. And that's not what the data shows (to any meaningful extent--1% is basically nothing).

So I would tentatively conclude that, as numerous studies indicate that genetic and non-wealth-based environmental factors (e.g. culture) play some role in individual income, there is likely still some oppressive factor that isn't accounted for.

This doesn't allow us to conclude that the oppressive factor is racism. It only casts doubt on the idea that "classism and wealth is everything, and racism is functionally gone".