Martin Luther King didn’t have statistics, studies to lean on, any spreadsheet either, and yet is universally hailed as addressing a variety of issues. Although he was heavily criticized at the time.
So we don’t really have a standard for perceiving an issue, only acknowledging an area ripe for abuse and aiming to mitigate it.
I think he did have data? There were literally laws that explicitly banned black people from using certain schools and facilities. So - there were a lot areas where he could say that black people are discriminated against with 100% certainty.
I don't know enough about the issue in the article to determine how widespread it is - but I don't think it is fair to compare them.
> "To separate [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone."
> The Court supported this conclusion with citations—in a footnote, not the main text of the opinion—to a number of psychological studies that purported to show that segregating black children made them feel inferior and interfered with their learning.
I think that in general if a bunch of people say they're experiencing a problem than that's enough evidence that there is really a problem. But the Civil Rights movement did have objective factual support from the beginning.
So is the caste system of India. It is in books, it is in public transportation, it is in job market, it is in kitchen, it is schools. To have formal statistics, you first need to acknowledge that the issue exists and then to investigate it. By the same token, the absence of the formal statistics does not disprove discrimination, quite the opposite, it proves that the systematic discrimination is not yet recognized as a problem. Which is systematic discrimination "by definition".
But we’re talking about California. For obvious reasons, I find it a bit problematic to accuse immigrants of bringing a negative cultural practice to the US with them without concrete data.
So we don’t really have a standard for perceiving an issue, only acknowledging an area ripe for abuse and aiming to mitigate it.