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GENERAL RACE/RACISM

Racism Misconceptions

Racism Misconceptions

1. “How does institutional racism explain disparities?”

To understand how institutional racism explains disparities, it must first be understood that institutional racism is situated within a conceptual framework which acknowledges the role of racialisation. There are both conceptual and political advantages to adopting this conceptualisation. Analytically, according to Rattansi 2005, racialisation provides a multi-layered and multi-dimensional frame. It can encapsulate statements which explicitly denigrate or assume the inferiority of racialised groups as well as the more implicit common sense understandings which exist within institutions. Its dynamic, as opposed to static nature, allows the intersections of race with class, gender, sexuality and nation to be incorporated into any empirical investigation, as (Rattansi, 2005: 290) makes clear. Basically, in this regard, it accommodates intersectional understandings which recognise the significance of seeing individuals as multiply positioned, with each identity (race/ethnicity, gender or class) irreducible to a discrete category or experience. These multiple axes of differentiation and interacting levels of disadvantage and discrimination produce complex social relations (Crenshaw, 1993; Brah, Phoenix, Taylor, Gillborn and Ladson-Billings 2009). Analytically, such an approach can also better appreciate internal differentiation which avoids essentializing experience and recognises its historically and spatially contingent nature. This multilevel framework of racialisation at micro, meso, and macro levels (which includes institutional racialisation) can be applied to explain ethnic inequalities.

2. “There are only individuals racists, not the system.”

It’s kind of a reductive view to just say “oh well if individual ppl are racist against a certain group of ppl, is the system racist?’’ I mean systems are made of individuals, those individuals have implicit biases against certain groups of people then it’s kinda obvious that those people would have a direct link to a disproportionate outcome between two races. Before we point out specific people, we need to address the racist cultures, racist laws, and racist policies that produce racist individuals. There are four dimensions of racism: internalized, which speaks to your beliefs; interpersonal, which speaks to your behavior; institutional, which speaks to your organizational culture, and structural, which speaks to society. You can’t reduce these problems to individuals because you otherwise ignore the complexities of race; you obscure the four dimensions of racism.

3. “But racism has to be intentional!”

The concept of institutional racism emphasizes non-intentionality and normal institutional procedures. ‘Institutional racism is in its most profound instances, covert, resulting from acts of indifference, omission and refusal to challenge the status quo’ (Spears, 1978: 29). Distinctions need to be made between (a) those activities which are clearly racialist and supported by racist justifications, and (b) those activities which are in origin non-racialist and are justified by non-racist ideologies and (c) those activities which are non-racialist but are based upon unconscious or unadmitted racist justifications. What is important is that we keep an open mind about the relationship between racist intent, racial expression in practices and racial effect, i.e. forms of inequality. (a) Racist belief need not necessarily result in racially discriminatory practices and racial inequalities. (b) Racially discriminatory practices need not be justified in racist terms in order to produce unequal outcomes. (c) Racially discriminatory practices may continue after their racist justifications have been abandoned. (d) Racial inequality may be the result of other factors than intentional discrimination. Unless these different scenarios are accepted, then it is suggested that policies to alter racially discriminatory practices and institutional processes will either fail because they are based on a false set of assumptions or arouse an unnecessary backlash when people deny both their racist intents or their unconscious racism! If individuals are racist because of their uncritical participation in racist institutions, then this is the result of their actions rather than their intentions. It doesn’t matter the intent of individuals, it doesn’t matter whether individuals are racist or not, what matters is the outcome. If the system leads to an outcome that is disproportionate between two people (even when we are accounting for variables other than race) we can conclude that there is some barrier preventing one race from being successful over another race. And in this case it’s white people being more successful than black people when it comes to employment, sentencing, and in many other areas. In fact, accordingly a statistical approach geared toward testing whether race caused someone to behave differently has no necessary relation to the core elements in a disparate impact claim. As the Supreme Court noted in Watson v. Fort Worth Bank & Trust, “[t]he factual issues and the character of the evidence are inevitably somewhat different when the plaintiff is exempted from the need to prove intentional discrimination.” Additionally, McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green, 411 U.S. 792 (1973) showed that discriminatory intent can be shown through indirect or circumstantial evidence.

4. “I don’t see color/a color-blind society will fix racism.”

Although this assertion sounds intuitively plausible, the reality is that color-blind policies often put racial minorities at a disadvantage. For instance, all else being equal, color-blind seniority systems tend to protect White workers against job layoffs, because senior employees are usually White. Likewise, color-blind college admissions favor White students because of their earlier educational advantages. Unless pre-existing inequities are corrected or otherwise taken into account, color-blind policies do not correct racial injustice—they reinforce it. https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801426223/racism-and-justice/

In an ideal society, we would get to live colorblind, in which race has no meaning or impact whatsoever. However, we do not live in a color blind society so we should not act like race is insignificant. Ignoring the problems in our society does not make them automatically go away; rather, it allows these problems to fester while we do nothing about it. This is particularly the case for implicit bias, which will still exist even if we deny that it does.

Taking on a fully colorblind approach also neglects the role that racist policies and history have had in shaping our present. We are not detached from our past, but rather we are the product of it. As a result of past discrimination, we see communities and subdivisions divided up by race (an artifact of past segregation), inequalities in wealth and opportunity (a lasting result of discrimination past and present, among other things), and so on. Implementing a colorblind agenda RIGHT NOW would obviously not address the consequences of past racism, instead opting to ignore those consequences and shout “racism!” at anyone who actually does try to address those consequences.

5. NBA Comparison/”The NBA/NFL is dominated by black players who have made fortunes in the sport”

First of all, the NBA literally used to block black players in its early years. This is not a valid comparison because there’s no point of human treatment and racism has to have a subject and an object in which both are humans/human institutions. The NBA and NFL are just demographics. A demographic in and of itself can’t be racist. The point of action where someone either interacts with an institution or another human being, that’s when it’s racist. There’s not enough information to conclude whether the NBA or NFL is racist. Who’s hired in the NBA and NFL comes down to beating the clock, scoring, and yardage. Those three things have no opinions nor feelings.

6. Critiques on Thomas Sowell’s “Disparity ≠ Discrimination”

7. “Show me a law or policy that is racist in intent.”

The problem with this argument is that it assumes “in order for systemic racism to exist then it must be codified within the law” when in reality systemic racism exists in a variety of social contexts and the law because systemic racism is de facto, not de jure. The laws don’t reference race because they don’t need to. The basic structural layout of the US means that Black populations can be disproportionately harmed by a theoretically and ostensibly race neutral measure.

A bit off-topic but here’s a fun gotcha for conservatives/republicans when it comes to laws with racist intent: many republicans argue both that systemic racism ended in the 60s (with the civil rights acts) and that the 1994 crime bill (which Joe Biden contributed significantly to) was racist and had a racist impact (because Joe Biden is racist). The gotcha comes when you ask them if the crime bill was racist, answering yes suggests that racist legislation was implemented in 1994, much more recently than the 60s. That starts to open questions about what other laws we might be forgetting about which have come about since the 60s.

8. “White privilege isn’t real, American privilege is the REAL privilege.”

Invoking American privilege, seems to undermine the larger argument because it actively acknowledges that a person can have a level of privilege as a result of arbitrary factors that you yourself might not be in control of. In this case it’s nationality but by that logic why not then race? Secondarily, when you look at the data, it’s really hard to make a case that there isn’t a level of privilege afforded to white Americans.

9. “Black privilege is real.”

Even if this were true, this undermines the argument because it actively acknowledges that a black person can have a level of privilege as a result of arbitrary factors that they might not be in control of. In this case it’s being black but by that logic why not then being white? Secondarily, when you look at the data, it’s really hard to make a case that there isn’t a level of privilege afforded to white Americans.

10. “Get over slavery because it happened in the past!”

The psychic hold of slavery is not a set of mental manacles that hold us back from imagining a postracist America. The psychic hold of slavery is understood as a tool, helping us get a grip on the systemic racial inequalities and restricted liberties that persist in the present day.

11. “Why does everything have to be about race?”

If you have such a problem about hearing race 24/7, take it up with the founders of this country and their descendants who benefit from it.

Subconscious Bias

Subconscious Bias

Even disregarding forms of overt racism, subconscious bias has been demonstrated by a number of studies and undoubtedly affects others forms of discrimination against black people. Neuroscience studies have shown that different regions of the brain are activated in conscious versus unconscious processing, suggesting that unconscious processes are distinct mental activities. Implicit biases are more likely to drive behavior under conditions of ambiguity, high time pressures and cognitive loads, or inattentiveness to the task.

Housing/Lending

Housing/Lending

While racial disparities/discrimination have declined in some forms here, it is still persistent in others. Historically, housing discrimination was big against black people, and the effects of such have carried on into the present day.

Jobs and Hiring

Jobs and Hiring

Black people have less access to good jobs than whites, and experience a disproportionate amount of job hiring discrimination compared to whites.

1. “It’s illegal for employers to discriminate based on race.”

2. “The welfare state made black people unemployed.”

The link between welfare and joblessness is groundless and blinds us to what actually happened, leading to a distorted and dehumanizing understanding of both racism and poverty in the US. For unemployment rates to reach the massive rates they did (around 40-50% for the lowest-skilled Black working-age men from 1980-2000, compared to 20-25% among the same demographic from 1940-1960,) there is almost always a problem with the number of jobs available, not simply how many people want to work. So what would decrease the number of jobs available? First, there was a large wave of Black migration from the rural south to the urban north and west—as well as the urban south—in the 1940s and 50s, and the cities from the urban north were never able to provide enough jobs for all of these folks (who were seeking reprieve from the brutality and economic exploitation of the Jim Crow south). Racism drove them to these cities, where they were segregated into neighborhoods of other poor Black folks. Even though there weren’t enough jobs to go around, the manufacturing boom gave enough employment to improve the lot of many fleeing the south, reducing poverty during the ’60s. Then, deindustrialization. The economy began to transition from an industrial and manufacturing economy—where most of the Black folks in these cities worked—to a deindustrialized, service-based economy in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Capital (and the affluent, disproportionately white population, as well as the small Black middle class) moved out of cities and into suburbs, and the employment system Black folks had relied upon and which had already strained under the number of jobseekers finally collapsed. The welfare state policies of the War on Poverty were not useless, but they did not come anywhere close to the scope of the problems caused by these other structural factors. The knock-on effects of this concentration and subsequent deindustrialization were the rise in crime and decline in marriage that people often erroneously pin on welfare state programs. If a huge proportion of working-age men in your community cannot find any work, you can expect that many of them might seek out less legitimate ways of earning money through crime, and this would cyclically break down social networks of care and trust. The loss of tax dollars from the affluent residents of cities who had moved to the suburbs meant that services and infrastructure that were most necessary were crippled. You might expect that women would struggle to find men they were willing to marry if jobs were scarce. It certainly did not help that means-tested benefits would often drop off sharply if you were married, but this is not an inevitable feature of the welfare state. It’s the result of a badly designed policy. Universal benefits—say, a child allowance—that do not change if you get married would not have this disincentive effect. Pointing to the moment when the War on Poverty programs started and then pointing at the rise of unemployment and crime in the latter half of the 20th century is exactly the problem with correlation not being the same as causation and it’s a post hoc fallacy too. The problem is that the story basically ignores any structural factor other than welfare—and quite a number of things happened in the lead-up to the dramatic rise of unemployment and crime that you link to the welfare state. Popular videos on the internet again and again show the problem of correlation: there’s no time spent establishing that the welfare state was the primary cause, you’re just simply asserting it to be so. International comparisons also cast doubt on this story. If welfare disincentivizes work, you would expect that countries that spend a lot on welfare also have lower rates of work. But this is not at all what we find: employment rates and workforce participation rates are consistently high in countries like the Nordics where welfare spending is also much higher than in the US. We’ve gotten it wrong and blamed poor and Black people for social problems that would not exist without massive structural factors working against them. If we want to know how to help the least of these, we must first know why things are the way they are. In the case of this phenomenon, racism and deindustrialization—not the growth of America’s modest welfare state—were the driving forces.

Education

Education

Voting and Voter ID

Voting and Voter ID

Voter ID isn’t inherently racist but can and has been strategically used before to target racial minorities. Strict Voter ID laws tend to disproportionately impact minorities.

Specific Instances:

Youth

Youth

Focusing on black youth is particularly important as racial discrimination can still impact them even in these more formative years, setting them up for a worse future compared to their white peers.

Affirmative Action

Affirmative Action

Affirmative action is about accounting for the inequality experienced in school systems. Despite studies showing that students benefit from having teachers who look like them, the overwhelming majority of teachers are white, even in areas with a high percentage of racial minorities and black people aren’t treated well in the school system either. Many children enter the public school system without knowing English and somehow manage to make enough progress to graduate high school with high GPAs. Not to mention the differences between ethnicities that have low levels of parent involvement in education due to systemic racism. Affirmative action isn’t about skin color, it’s about accounting for struggles overcome that other students haven’t dealt with. Overlooking these factors would not only be unfair to minorities, but it would mean that colleges wouldn’t always get the best students.

1. “Affirmative Action is reverse discrimination against white people.”

2. “Affirmative action is discrimination against Asians.”

A 2016 study found that eliminating affirmative action would not increase the number of Asian Americans in elite colleges. When you completely eliminate Black and Latinx applicants from the Harvard admissions pool, the admissions rate for all remaining Asian American and white students only increases by 1%. This means that rejected Asian American and white applicants were unlikely to be admitted even with the omission of race.

Affirmative action opponents don’t have the interests of Asians in mind. Rather, Asian students are being weaponized against marginalized college hopefuls. They intentionally invoke the model minority myth by portraying all Asians as highly successful individuals unfairly hurt by affirmative action. This advances the false narrative that Asian American students are a monolith, and completely ignores Asians who do not fit the model minority stereotype. There are also large discrepancies between various subgroups in the Asian American community. For example, only 27% of Vietnamese Americans and only 17% of Hmong and Cambodian Americans hold a bachelor’s degree or higher.

While conservatives will claim they are protecting the interests of Asian Americans, the overwhelming majority — 69% — of Asian Americans actually agree with affirmative action. It’s no surprise, then, that more than 150 Asian American organizations banded together to support affirmative action.

3. “Under affirmative action, minorities receive preferences.”

Most supporters of affirmative action oppose this type of preferential selection. Affirmative action does not require preferences, nor do women and minorities assume that they will be given preference. Race, gender, and national origin are factors that can be considered when hiring or accepting qualified applicants. Hiring qualified women and minorities is similar to the preferences given to veterans in hiring and to children of alumni in college admissions. There are also other preferences used in selecting qualified candidates. For example, when private colleges and universities value geographic diversity on their campuses, an out-of-state student may be admitted before an in-state student. Some colleges and universities consider athletic abilities and/or evidence of leadership skills in addition to academic qualifications. Only 3% of institutions indicate race has “considerable influence” in admissions decisions. Instead, there were 14 other criteria, such as test scores, grades, writing samples, and extracurricular activities, which were more likely to be considered than race. Only 11% of institutions reported that race had moderate influence, while 19% reported limited influence on admissions decisions. Overall, only one-third of four-year public and private institutions consider race in any way, minor or major, when evaluating applicants.

4. “Affirmative Action is about quotas.”

  1. Under existing law, quotas are illegal.
  2. Federal contractors are required to establish goals and timetables, and to make a good- faith effort to meet them. Race, national origin, and gender are among several factors to be considered, but relevant and valid job or educational qualifications are not to be compromised. Further, the Supreme Court has made clear that affirmative action or programs that claim to be affirmative action are illegal if: (1) an unqualified person receives benefits over a qualified one; (2) numerical goals are so strict that the plan lacks reasonable flexibility; (3) the numerical goals bear no relationship to the available pool of qualified candidates and could therefore become quotas; (4) the plan is not fixed in length; or (5) innocent bystanders are impermissibly harmed.

5. “Unqualified people get accepted under affirmative action.”

Only affirmative action plans that do not compromise valid job or educational qualifications are lawful. Plans must be flexible, realistic, reviewable, and fair. The Supreme Court has found that there are at least two permissible bases for voluntary affirmative action by employers under Title VII: (1) to remedy a clear and convincing history of past discrimination by the employer or union, and (2) to cure a manifest imbalance in the employer’s work force. Thus, affirmative action programs are intended to hire the most qualified individuals, while at the same time achieving equality of opportunity for all.

6. “It should be based on income, not race.”

Income-based approaches don’t yield equal results when it comes to increasing the number of Black and Brown faces on campus. The suggestion to replace race with income dangerously and falsely signals that race is a negligible factor that has very little impact on students’ educational and broader social experiences. Additionally, income-based approaches won’t account for racial differences for students from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Black, Latino, and White students from similar income backgrounds have considerable differences in their enrollment at highly selective postsecondary institutions. And the racial differences become more profound as family income increases. Income-based affirmative action would ignore these differences by race, and would place another hurdle in the path of many Black and Latino Students. In the fourth income quartile, Black students trail White students by 8 percentage points, and by the fifth income quartile, the gap grows to 26 percentage points. The enrollment gap clearly shows that income is not enough: Colleges and universities need to continue using race as a factor in admissions.

7. “Affirmative Action doesn’t work.”

Black Culture

Black Culture

Culture is still an institution/system. Implicit learning of culture is largely subliminal but people pick up on certain cultural cues throughout the course of their life and learn certain behaviors based on how those around them act. This comes as a direct or indirect result of their material conditions; in fact in order to change the “culture”, the environment would have to change completely.

Common Black Culture Myths

Common Black Culture Myths

1. “It has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with culture.”

2. “Black culture doesn’t value education so that’s why it sucks in the black community/they’re not graduating high school and dropping out.”

This is blatantly not true, African Americans value education; however, there are other factors that makes the education they experience lower quality

Which Black people specifically would they be referring to who aren’t graduating? Because Black people are graduating in fact the black and white graduation rate is similar and only differ by 3 percentage points (85.8% vs 88.8%). Not to mention how 88% of black people have their high school diploma.

3. “Just don’t break the law.”

This would make sense if there was actually differential offending, which there’s little evidence that there is. Instead there is differential police presence, patrolling, and profiling, combined with discrimination in the courts and correctional systems which leads to more Black people being arrested, convicted, and incarcerated more frequently which is not necessarily indicative of differential offending. Indeed, It is correct that Black people are disproportionately convicted of crimes. However, the main problem lies in the idea that convictions are one-to-one equivalents of perpetrated crimes, especially in the context of racist police and legal systems.

4. “Blacks have a gang culture/rap that makes them commit crimes.”

Multiple studies have found that a variety of factors influence gang membership, and those factors usually are closely related to poverty, bad schooling environments, and bad upbringings - certainly not exclusively cultural, but in a lot of ways reflective of the amount of poverty and hardship a community is going through

Although Rap emerged in the 1970s gangster rap emerged around 1985. Early rappers like Sugar Hill Gang and Run-D.M.C mixed rock music and funk and told stories about their lives. But if you look at the crime rates for these periods, crime increased in the 60s and 70s whereas it plateaued in the 80s and it’s fallen consistently despite the fact rap has stayed just as “violent” as it was in the 80s and 90s. Various criminologists have done studies into this and found that it is bad criminology and sociology to conclude rap music causes violence. They even go as far to say it’s racist since it is attributing something bad to black culture that doesn’t cause the bad thing. Other studies have found that media consumption has no effect on children’s violence. https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/does-rap-music-contribute-violent-crime-taking-sides-clashing-views https://www.christopherjferguson.com/LYOJPed.pdf

5. “Whites have no responsibility in the development of black culture, blacks have been on their own for a while now so any burden on them is their fault, not that of whites.”

The conditions in which black culture started out happened to be in a situation in which they were constantly beaten down and discriminated against and this continued over the course of centuries - through slavery, jim crow, etc. they haven’t had a lot of time to work outside of these overt forms of discrimination, either - plenty of black boomers were direct victims of jim crow. Thus, white-instigated racism still has had a huge influence on black culture today. If we take this argument to be the case — that Black culture produces behaviors that further their disadvantaged economic position — this is not something created by any individual Black American, but rather inherited as a set of cultural circumstances. Can they be blamed for acting in a way that gains them what anyone is looking for — social acceptance and getting their needs met — within that cultural setting? A person of average willpower would, in aggregate, behave the same given that cultural environment as the average Black person. To say otherwise is, ultimately, to claim that Black people as a whole have behaved more poorly given their inherited culture than other people would. To make such a move would be to assign an essential racial inferiority to Black people.

6. “The welfare state is to blame for black culture.”

Why would it be that Black culture would adapt to the material conditions of the welfare state but not the material conditions of, say, housing discrimination and deindustrialization leading to unemployment? The rational conclusion is that people who make this argument want to downplay the history of material deprivation and inequality that led to the behaviors they want to condemn and magnify the role welfare had to play in those behaviors because they have an ideological predisposition to oppose welfare.

7. “Black people are just bad at spending their money.”

8. The “Model Minority” Argument, aka “Asian-Americans have become highly successful in spite of past discrimination, so why can’t black people also succeed?”

This article offers a broad rebuttal to this point, if you need a quick resource.

There are a number of problems with this argument, which we will address one at a time. First of all, this argument assumes that Asian-Americans are a monolithic group which has categorically succeeded in America. However, this population can actually be broken down into a wide variety of different groups, each with varying levels of success economically, academically, and socially. This goes against one of the most fundamental assumptions made by the model minority myth. Pew Research and the Urban Institute have both talked about this in further depth. Here are some of their visual graphics:
Net worth of various Asian groups in Los Angeles (Urban Institute) % of people in each group who has a Bachelor’s degree or higher (Pew Research) Median household income and % poverty of groups (Pew Research)

When comparing African-Americans to Asian-Americans, you also have to remember that these groups came to America in very different circumstances. Most African-Americans were shipped to the US as part of the trans-atlantic slave trade, and went on to experience centuries of brutal discrimination by the American government. As a result, most black communities struggled to build wealth and prosper.

The story for Asian-Americans is very different.

Immigration from Asia was historically suppressed by legislation like the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and the Immigration Act of 1924. It wasn’t until the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965 that immigration from Asia boomed. In just over 50 years, the population of Asian Americans went from 980,000 in 1960 to 20.4 million in 2015. Today, 72% of the adult US Asian population was born outside of the US, and the majority of America’s Asian population is only one or two generations removed from legal immigrants who came to America for merit-based citizenship.

Being a heavily-immigrant population, Asian Americans on average have a better education and background compared both to the average white or native-born American and compared to the general populations in their country of origin, due to selection processes by America’s immigration system. When the immigration system selects for merit, this automatically puts immigrants, on average, at an advantage – even over middle class white Americans. In other words, most Asian-Americans did not “make it” in the way the model minority myth would suggest – rather, wealthy Asians were pre-selected by the US immigration system which led to the Asian-American population being primarily made up of wealthy people. Going back to the original question, ask yourself: how is this a reasonable critique of black failure? How could black people possibly replicate something like this?

Of course, remember that not all Asian-American immigrants arrive on the basis of merit. Focusing on the average numbers will lead you to ignore that a significant subgroup of immigrants do not come from a wealthy, high-education background. Many are political refugees or immigrated to America via the green card lottery, e.g. most Bhutanese-Americans and Burmese-Americans. These immigrants usually have less wealth, less education, and worse english proficiency, and help to show that the Asian-American population is not as monolithic as the model minority myth would suggest. These worse-off groups also have specific needs which the model minority myth leads people to ignore. This is impactful when legislators – using the assumptions from the model minority myth – assume Asian-Americans don’t need any specialized support, when many Asian-American subgroups struggle with issues with poverty, poor education, and lack of proficiency in English.

All in all, this provides a clear picture of how the Asian-American population is very different from the African-American population, and asking “if Asians made it why can’t black people make it?” misses the nuances that are key to why those differences exist.

9. “Jewish people were oppressed so why aren’t they as bad off as blacks are?”

This is not comparable because:

10. “Black immigrants are successful in America and they’re black, why aren’t they as bad off as blacks are?”

The syllogistic format of this argument is as follows:

Multiple hypotheses have been formulated for P3 including Cultural Distinction Theory, Black Immigrants Privilege, Immigrant Selectivity Theory, Queuing Theory, Lateral Mobility Hypothesis, etc. Specifically, the Cultural Hypothesis was advanced in 1978 through a paper by Thomas Sowell, Three Black Histories. He basically posits that the differences we see in the data between African Americans and Black immigrants are to be attributed to a diversity in customs and cultures.

However, the Immigrant Selectivity Hypothesis instead conjectures that the observed differences between Black Immigrants and African Americans are due to immigrant selectivity. Immigrant selectivity is the stylized fact that immigrants aren’t selected at random from their population of origin. Instead they exhibit different traits with respect to individuals who do not immigrate. This would mean that Black immigrants have more “hard” and “soft” skills than those they join at the new destinations and those left behind in their country of origin, see Model 1995.

Another hypothesis is the Lateral Mobility Hypothesis which conjectures that immigrants do better if they had socioeconomic conditions that were higher than average in their countries of origin. The underlying assumption is that socioeconomic status replicates itself, over and above, group differences in skills, see Darity 2003.

Ultimately, the hypothesis that gets the most traction in the literature is the Immigrant Selectivity one (Hamilton 2014; Ifatunji 2017). Additionally, this argument runs into a problem. In fact we see through reports that these two groups diverge through time and can be dated back to 1925, see Domingo 1925. In addition, the data used for Thomas Sowell’s Cultural Hypothesis is in 1970. Should we accept this argument, would that mean that systemic racism was minimal in 1970? 5 years after Jim Crow was outlawed? What about in 1925? Even if we granted that African Americans and Black Immigrants differ in culture, which is the minimal position held in the scientific community, why would that imply that systemic racism is minimal? Assuming systemic racism exists, both Black immigrants and African Americans could earn a lot more if systemic racism were not holding them both down. Ultimately the premises don’t support the conclusion so it’s a non sequitur.

10a. Nigerian-American Immigrants

https://aninjusticemag.com/but-what-about-nigerian-americans-b5e846b85479

11. “The black single motherhood rate jumped from 20% to 70% after the welfare state was implemented.”

11a. Great Society Act

The Great Society Act was not to blame for the rise in African American fatherlessness.

  1. Rates of fatherlessness for white people have always been lower than for black people, but fatherlessness among whites still rose between 1960 and 2012. 6% of white children lived in a single-mother household in 1960, a figure that rose to 18% in 2013. that’s a tripling, which was proportionately an even bigger percentage increase than what was observed for black children.

  2. Douglas J. Besharov, a public policy professor at the university of Maryland, said the official data on black marriage from the early-to mid-20th century is unreliable. it was not uncommon, he said, for black mothers to tell survey-takers that they were separated, when in fact they had never been married, he said. The data for white women is similarly misleading, since many young white women got married as teens and divorced a few years later – a “shotgun wedding” pattern that doesn’t suggest long-term stability for children. This pattern would mean that the frequency of non-marital births among African Americans have been higher than what the early 1960s statistics officially indicated, and the white rate of non-marital births have been artificially low.

  3. The welfare rules of the 1960s may have imposed a “marriage penalty” on recipients. benefits that could be earned as a single person would disappear once a recipient got married. but such a pattern should have become evident well before the Great Society Act. Timothy M. Smeeding, director of the Institute for research on poverty at the university of wisconsin said, “‘welfare’ was part of the new deal in the 1930s,…it was designed for widows with kids who didn’t qualify for social security, but it soon became a single-parent program for divorcees and later unmarried mothers.”

  4. Just because rates of fatherlessness rose after Johnson and the great society act doesn’t mean they caused the increase. Lots of other factors were at play. besharov said the focus on johnson is off-base. he said that the broader social currents of 1960s “liberalization” - more permissive sexual mores, easier divorce laws and greater financial independence due to rising rates of female employment, for instance, did play a role in higher rates of single-motherhood for all races, but “if you define ‘the great society’ as the things johnson did, then there was very little impact” on single motherhood rates. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2014/mar/25/facebook-posts/facebook-meme-blames-great-society-large-rise-afri/

12. “Black people need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and work harder.”

“I believe we ought to do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps but it’s cruel to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.” - MLK

We understand from a social science perspective and a psychological perspective that people put in certain environments elicit predictable outcomes. To tell everyone to overcome circumstance is to ask an entire dataset to become outliers which is literally impossible.

Furthermore, white families with a head that is unemployed have nearly twice the median wealth of black families with a head that is working full-time.

12a. The “follow 3 simple rules to join the middle class” argument

Haskins and Sawhill overlook a lot in their path to arrive at these figures, and they admit that their study has serious methodological flaws. The first is that the data is not considering one’s likelihood of poverty in general, but rather specifically focusing on the incidence rate of poverty in 2007. There is no attempt to develop causality, and no explanation for why there are more poor people who followed all three rules than poor people who did not.

Beyond that, subsequent research and re-evaluation by Brookings found that the “three rules” break down when accounting for race. Even among black people who followed all three rules, only 59% defined as “middle income” or above, and 75% were at or below 500% of the poverty line (compared to 58% of whites). It’s also difficult to determine the degree of choice involved in full-time employment, which was the most important of the “three rules” by far. https://www.vox.com/2015/7/24/9027195/haskins-sawhill-norms-marriage https://www.brookings.edu/research/following-the-success-sequence-success-is-more-likely-if-youre-white/

13. “Black people have a victim mentality.”

This argument presumes that persons of color are too stupid to already know what it is they’re experiencing. Those who bemoan the so-called victim mindset appear to believe that no one would think about racism were it not for the constant presence of liberals and leftists raising the issue.

The argument also suggests that black and brown folks are so weak-willed that if they really understood the obstacles in their way, they would crumble like pie crust. The truth is, folks of color (especially African Americans) are well aware of the negative stereotypes held about their racial group by an early age. Indeed, recent evidence indicates an awareness of these stereotypes by as soon as the third grade, and rarely later than the fifth: around the age of, say, eleven.

This awareness–which is not due to liberals bringing it up, but rather, the result of black and brown folks living with the mistreatment that stems from the stereotypes and being exposed to them in media and elsewhere–has been found to dramatically impact academic performance. Even (and especially) among highly capable and motivated students of color, the fear of living down to a stereotype has been shown to generate such anxiety that it can suppress performance, relative to ability, thereby perpetuating the very performance gaps that feed the stereotypes about black intelligence in the first place. In other words, whether or not white racism is discussed, the knowledge of its existence is sufficient to negatively impact black and brown success. Talking about racism isn’t the problem: racism itself is.

14. Stereotype Accuracy

This topic also wraps into the work of researcher Lee Jussim, who has heavily advocated for the concept of stereotype accuracy.

Racial Segregation (Historical)

Racial Segregation (Historical)

Compilation of historical documents and sources regarding racial segregation across the globe

“The genesis of race — its various elaborations and proliferation throughout imperial rule — is a heuristic angle and a valid reason for detecting correspondences between contemporary segregating mechanisms and colonial segregation rationales” (Picker 17)

1. “Africans sold their own into slavery.”

The Africans who were placed on board the ships of the Atlantic Slave Trade were prisoners of war from other African Tribes, people deemed criminals, and poor members of society traded to pay off their debt. It’s important to remember that being a prisoner of war or a poor member of society traded for goods is not the same as being held in inter generational hereditary chattel slavery. I.e generations of children being born into bondage.

2. “Anthony Johnson was the first slave owner and he was black.”

This specific response is pulled from this r/badhistory post but a more detailed response can be found here

“The man being referred to is Anthony Johnson, who was an indentured servant who earned his freedom. He purchased a couple of indentured servants of his own, and in 1653, those servants either ran away or were let go. In 1655 Johnson won a court case against one of those servants who was ordered back into service with Johnson as a “servant for life”. This is the basis for the claim that Anthony Johnson was the first slave owner in America. Several problems with this.

  1. The first non-natively owned slaves in the Americas were native peoples in South America
  2. The first slaves in North America were also native peoples enslaved by Europeans.
  3. The first African slaves in the Americas were enslaved by the Spanish in Portuguese in South America.
  4. The first African slaves in North America were Spanish slaves as part of the San Miguel de Gualdape which was established in 1526. Other Spanish sites in North America had African slaves long before Anthony Johnson came along.
  5. The first indentured servants arrived in America within the first decade after the settlement at Jamestown.
  6. The first black people in English colonies in Jamestown arrived in 1619 as indentured servants.
  7. John Winthrop of Massachusetts and Samuel Maverick of Massachusetts both owned slaves before 1630. Winthrop arrived by 1630, Maverick was in Massachusetts by 1625.
  8. In 1638 some Pequot Indians taken in raids were exchanged for African slaves/servants in the West Indies. This would not be the last time this would happen.
  9. In 1641 Massachusetts would pass it’s first slave law.
  10. In 1640 John Punch was sentenced to indentured servitude for life by a Virginia court for attempting to run away to Maryland.
  11. Anthony Johnson would not win his case against Castor until 1655, at *least* 15 years after the first confirmed court case of indentured servitude for life.
  12. The United States didn’t exist in 1655.

So, no matter what way we look at it, there’s absolutely no way in which Anthony Johnson can be considered the first slave owner in the United States.”

3. “White people were slaves too.”

The claim that Irish people were enslaved in the British American Colonies stems from a misrepresentation of the idea of “indentured servitude.” Indentured servants were people required to complete unpaid labor for a contracted period. While the majority of Irish people who became indentured servants in the Colonies did so willingly (why they felt they had to so is, of course, another question), a not insignificant number were forcibly deported and sold into indentured servitude. Many indentured servants in the British colonies were working-class white immigrants from the British Isles, including thousands of Irish people. Indentured servants were often treated horribly by their masters, many dying before they were set free. Crucially, indentured servants were considered human beings under the law. African slaves were seen as property rather than people; Africans were racialized as Black to cement this enslaved status as permanent, inheritable and justifiable in the natural order. An indenture implies two people have entered into a contract with each other but slavery is not a contract. It is often about being a prisoner of war or being bought or sold bodily as part of a trade. That is a critical distinction. This lack of legal and social personhood, as well as accompanying racist ideologies, let slave owners justify the many horrors inflicted on African slaves at mass scale. Millions of Africans were shipped to the Americas and forced into unprecedentedly cruel conditions, both in terms of scale and severity. African slaves had no legally recognized rights. They were regarded as private property over which owners claimed absolute authority, a fundamental characteristic of slave status in all New World slave societies.

3a. Barbary Slave Trade

The Barbary Slave Trade was not a parallel to white European/Americans’ enslavement of black Africans. The Barbary city-states allowed, encouraged their captives to be ransomed back to Europe (and in a couple cases later on, America) for money. Judging by names on the records, 40-60% of corsair captains doing the actual raiding and enslaving were white Europeans who had nominally converted to Islam for profit and marauding. The actual period of enslavement for labor was relatively short, ending in the 17C, although kidnapping for ransom continued and tapered off in early 19C. (ETA) The Barbary trade was not limited to western European slaves. They labored alongside sub-Saharan Africans, eastern Europeans, and perhaps non-Muslim central Asians. There is no discernible impact on Europe’s economy from the (temporary) loss of people, or money paid out in ransom, or even really the hit to company and military coffers from the loss of ships. (This is actually kind of a mystery to historians, leading many to doubt whether the Barbary slave trade was as numerically large as other scholars have calculated.) The trans-Atlantic slave trade represented the systematic, long-term, broad-scale destruction of nations, peoples, and people. Slavery as an institution has existed for a very long time. What differentiates the transatlantic slave trade from the Barbary slave trade, Saharan slave trade, and other large scale movements of chattel slavery was the racial nature of the trade and the sheer volume of the trade. As a way to justify slavery, which was viewed negatively by Christian religious texts, white European slavers pushed the idea that black African slaves were subhumans who needed to be civilized through slavery. This is an idea that was unique to the European slave trade compared to other large scale slave trades. European powers also shipped nearly 13 million African slaves to the new world, an unthinkably massive number and much larger than other slave trades. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/44a46l/are_there_any_records_of_white_people_being/

4. “People in the past didn’t know slavery was wrong.”

Slavery was a contentious issue from the start. In the original draft of the declaration of independence, Thomas Jefferson called slavery and the slave trade a crime against humanity and condemned it. This was cut out of the document due to South Carolina and Georgia’s objection. At the Constitutional Convention, southern states said that if slavery was abolished or if the slave trade was regulated, they wouldn’t join the union. In fact, this debate got so heated that the South nearly walked out of the convention. Around the time of the convention, 7 of the 13 states had abolished slavery already and 10 of them had banned the slave trade. Immediately following the convention, Black men could vote in 6 states. The House of Representatives which was controlled by the South for a bit censored the mail to prevent abolition pamphlets from going to the South and they instituted a gag rule on slavery so that it couldn’t be discussed in congress. The idea that no one knew slavery was wrong is false and to say that those who opposed it were a minority is also false. To say that is to ignore a lot of things the Founders said, the North’s opposition to it, and that Europe had abolished slavery long before America. https://socialequity.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/7.2.20-how-america.pdf https://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/07/opinion/l-some-of-the-founding-fathers-vigorously-opposed-slavery-444686.html http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1005153,00.html https://www.npr.org/2015/07/03/419824340/scrapped-declaration-of-independence-passage-denounced-slavery https://www.history.com/news/declaration-of-independence-deleted-anti-slavery-clause-jefferson http://inside.sfuhs.org/dept/history/US_History_reader/Chapter2/Winning%20the%20VoteA%20History%20of%20Voting%20Rights%20Gilder%20Lehrman%20Institute%20of%20American%20History.pdf https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/188838/rpa%20honor%202007.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/arts/a-refusal-to-compromise-civil-war-historians-beg-to-differ.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/books/review-war-before-war-fugitive-slaves-civil-war-andrew-delbanco.html

5. “Only a small percentage of white people owned slaves.”

The number was between 20 and 25%, and in some states, the rate was twice as high. According to the 1860 census every third white person in those states had a direct commitment to slavery. https://socialequity.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/8.10.20.pdf https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/30/facebook-posts/us-was-one-last-countries-abolish-slavery/

Defending Juneteenth

Defending Juneteenth

This is a relatively minor issue, but worth including just for when it comes around on the calendar (also because most of the arguments against Juneteenth are embarrassingly bad, so it’s more fun to rebut them)

  1. “It’s a race-based holiday and that’s bad!” Juneteenth is a celebration of racial progress (a good thing to celebrate), and we already have MLK day, which also has a focus on race and racial progress. If people opposed Juneteenth for being race-related, these people would also be consistent to oppose MLK day, even though none of them seem to have a problem with that holiday (suggesting race-related holidays aren’t necessarily bad).

  2. “It’s part of the democrat/marxist/CRT agenda!” Unsurprisingly, you can celebrate the abolition of slavery without supporting marxism or CRT or whatever. You can even paint the holiday in a pro-republican light if you wanted to (in the 1800s, republicans were the anti-slavery party). Even if it is democrat/marxist/CRT, republicans (who oppose democrats, marxism, and CRT) certainly didn’t view the holiday like that - it had strong bipartisan support in congress, with every single senate republican voting in favor and almost every house republican. Even Trump wanted to make Juneteenth a national holiday, something he included in his Platinum Plan for Black Americans. In fact, many GOP-oriented commentators had no problem with Juneteenth until this year - Charlie Kirk, for example.

  3. “Juneteenth detracts from July 4th! It’s another summer holiday and gives black people their own independence day!” Though Juneteenth does celebrate the advancement of black independence and freedom (that’s what ending slavery does), it does not try to redefine the independence day for the country as a whole, nor does it try to obfuscate July 4th. Again, plenty of republican representatives and commentators (people who are usually pretty nationalist and really care about July 4th) understood this in the past or continue to understand that today, see the above response.

  4. “It’s a pointless virtue signal that doesn’t lead to actual meaningful change.” For once, this is true. We should work towards meaningful policies which actually work to improve the condition of minority communities. However, it is worth noting that if Juneteenth doesn’t really change anything, getting it repealed won’t change anything either - so saying it’s a virtue signal isn’t a very compelling argument for removing the holiday. It’s also worth noting that holidays in general are virtue signals that don’t have much of an impact on the country - July 4th, for example, is essentially a virtue signal in support of American independence, but the fact that it’s just a virtue signal is not a compelling argument to stop celebrating July 4th.

  5. “It’s another pride day that we don’t need. We already have gay pride month, black history month, and so on. Why do we need more pride celebrations?” Celebrating the abolition of slavery isn’t necessarily something only black people can take pride in, but rather it’s something everyone can take pride in as a step forward for America as a whole. Also, we can brand plenty of holidays as “pride days” and then use that as a pretext to oppose them. Going back to July 4th, we could easily rebrand that as “American pride day” and then ask why we have yet another unneeded pride day on our calendars. What’s essentially happening with Juneteenth in this case is the rebranding of “celebrating slavery’s abolition” into “celebrating black pride” so it can be dismissed as another pride day.

Responses to Common Questions about Discrimination Studies

Responses to Common Questions about Discrimination Studies

1. “This study says they can’t verify racist intent or to interpret the results with caution regarding intent (they can’t conclude outright that discrimination exists even if the evidence points in that direction).”

Studies can’t empirically verify intent. Put simply you just don’t know off of your five senses what another person is thinking. So the most accurate thing is to say that: you don’t know. You can’t conclude whether or not they have discriminatory intent or not. The way these studies work is that they make scientific conclusions based off of the available evidence, however, they never make sociological conclusions because they’re criminological studies. When these studies say the conclusion shouldn’t be drawn, what they’re indicating is that these are criminological studies that can be used only to describe patterns in data. These patterns are that black people are treated unfairly when you isolate race as a variable. Scientists very rarely use absolute terms even when something has a 99.9% chance of happening it is still overwhelmingly likely.

We see this in published biomedical literature as well yet they’re still used in the biomedical field. A cursory scan of published biomedical literature reveals close variants of the phrase: “These results, however, should be interpreted with caution.” Searching PubMed abstracts for the phrase “interpret∗ caution” retrieves 555 citations published between January 2010 and August 2011, and screening the first 100 abstracts reveals that 90 indeed contain this phrase in full and in 79 of them it appears in the conclusion sections of abstracts for primary studies and systematic reviews, potentially leaving in the mind of the reader the lingering and unsettling feeling of uncertainty in comprehending the results. This poses the obvious question to the many authors who rely on closing with this ineffectual and weakening phrase and to all editors who allow its persistence: what precisely does it mean to interpret with caution? There is no standard by which the reader can know how to interpret the results with caution and furthermore, how to modify future decisions (either in clinical practice or for future research) based on this universal warning. Of course, to interpret results with caution means, the authors claim that, though the methods are valid, they are based on some moderately unsound principles or assumptions. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, as the warning to interpret with caution is nearly always coupled with reasons why. (Those that close with this phrase but without qualification are especially egregious in giving their open-ended warning.) However, these reasons are different within every publication despite that the exact same warning is given again and again. This phrase has been so overused that it has truly lost its function and moreover its meaning. I contend that if the burden of final interpretation lies with the reader (as is certainly the case), the phrase “interpreted with caution” ought to be dropped altogether. If reasons are provided for limitations or stretches in logical steps, then this is sufficient for any reader to make his or her interpretation, because ultimately, to “interpret with caution” is an ambiguous undertaking.

2. “This study didn’t take (x minor variable) into account.”

If someone makes this claim, they’re making a positive statement. In order for a study to have a statistically significant variable, they need to have a very low p-value which means that there’s usually a low 5% probability we would have gotten the data that we did randomly if the null hypothesis was true i.e “there’s no discrimination”. To prescribe the not controlled variable as an explanatory variable, they’d have to establish a link to disparate outcomes. Anything could theoretically account for a disparity in multivariate regression, unobserved or not, but unless the counter explanation is backed up, we still say the racial discrimination hypothesis is consistent. So they’d have to do a few things:

Systemic racism is a field of study that uses inductive reasoning. Including too many variables in a model can lead to overfitting which can produce biased results. In disparate impact testing, the primary statistical concern is most often “included variable bias” – the worry that the statistical estimates of disparate impact are biased because the regression inappropriately includes non-race variables.

Additional Resources

Additional Resources