“Disparate Impact” -- Part 6
The real causes of disparities among people grouped by race, continued.
Harvard professor Orlando Patterson writes the following in his conclusion to the book “The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth”:
If there is no such thing as the culture of poverty, the fact remains that for disadvantaged black youth, like all people, culture is the fundamental component of social life—that which separates the behavior of Homo sapiens from other species. The question, then, is not whether culture matters but how … Indeed, as Marshall reminds us, a turning point in the history of American mainstream popular culture was achieved during one week in October 2003 when all of the top ten positions on Billboard’s pop chart were filled by black artists, nine of them in the inner-city created rap genre. It is hardly surprising that the typical Euro-American imagines the African American population to be somewhere between 23 and 30 percent of the U.S. population, or over twice its actual size … When asked to evaluate the problems facing black men, 92 percent of black youth, aged eighteen to twenty-four, say that “young black men not taking their education seriously enough” is a “big problem,” while 88 percent say likewise for “not being responsible fathers.” … [B]lack youth are more likely than white youth to say that black men are to blame for their own problems … Asked whether or not they think the problems facing black men are more a result of what “white people have done to blacks” or more a result of what “black men have failed to do for themselves,” 16 percent of black youth cite the former, while 67 percent choose the latter (with 18 percent saying both factors are equal). In comparison, white youth are more likely to say the problems facing black men are due to what “white people have done to blacks” (31 percent), while 41 percent blame young black men, and 28 percent say both are equally important reasons … black youth also think that incarceration is, at least in part, due to the fact that black men are less likely to think committing crimes is wrong (43.4 percent) and that “many black parents aren’t teaching their children right from wrong” (57.4 percent) … [T]here will be no substantial change among the millions of disadvantaged youth and their families in the inner cities until black Americans assume full responsibility for the internal social and cultural changes that are essential for success in the broader mainstream capitalist society … We pointed out earlier that black youth are likely to agree with President Obama’s recent injunction to reject the view that circumstances beyond their control define them and their future.
Disparities in outcome are often only selectively attributed to racism in ways that ignore the influence of culture. As Coleman Hughes has written:
Here’s a clear example of the disparity fallacy: a recent study by researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the Census Bureau found that, “[a]mong those who grow up in families with comparable incomes, black men grow up to earn substantially less than the white men.” A New York Times article attributed this disparity to ‘the punishing reach of racism for black boys.’ But the study also found that black women have higher college attendance rates than white men, and higher incomes than white women, conditional on parental income. The fact that black women outperformed their white counterparts on these measures, however, was not attributed to the punishing reach of racism against whites. Economic disparities that favor blacks have been reported for decades, yet they have rarely if ever been attributed to anti-white systemic bias. A 1994 New York Times article reported that, among college graduates, black women earned slightly more money than white women did. In addition, the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out that, as early as 1980, U.S. census data show black college-educated couples out-earning their white counterparts … [I]ntuitive examples of the importance of culture are all around us. Disparities in athletic achievement, for instance, are inexplicable without reference to culture. Although blacks make up 14 percent of the U.S. population, they account for only 8 percent of MLB baseball players. This relatively small disparity has been enough to prompt articles in US News, NPR, and Vox that blame the decline in black baseball representation on everything from mass incarceration to racial bias to a generic sense among white fans that ‘baseball culture should stay white,’ as the Vox piece summarized it. Meanwhile, blacks account for a staggering three-fourths of all NBA basketball players, while whites account for a mere 18 percent. Curiously, progressives have not seen the under-representation of whites in basketball as requiring any explanation whatsoever. When whites are under-represented somewhere, it is assumed to be a choice or a cultural preference. But when blacks are under-represented somewhere, progressives descend on the issue like detectives to the scene of an unsolved murder, determined to consider every possible explanation except for the ‘lazy’ one: that in black culture, basketball is more popular than baseball.
Indeed, a 15-year study of 10,000 youth baseball players found baseball is drawing many fewer black children than it once did, but that’s because, as the researchers found, 95 percent of college baseball players were raised in families with both biological parents at home. According to researcher David Ogden, “We’re looking at a generation who didn’t play catch with their dads, and that’s at the core of the chasm between baseball and African Americans.”
Coleman Hughes has written several articles further exploring how understanding cultural influences may be far more important than raw racial disparities, including his observation that:
Nor can historical racism explain wealth disparities between groups of the same race. A 2015 survey of wealth in Boston found that the median black household had only 8 dollars of wealth. Newsweek reported this fact under the heading “Racism in Boston.” But the 8 dollar figure only pertained to black Bostonians of American ancestry; black Bostonians of Caribbean ancestry had 12,000 dollars of wealth, despite having identical rates of college graduation, only slightly higher incomes, and being equally black in the same city.
Because any set of people grouped by race will inevitably come from statistically different backgrounds, ethnic wealth gaps are inevitable, and they are found between Asian-Americans, Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans, Irish-Americans, and all other hyphenated Americans.
Wealth gaps are inevitable, but also complex. Using census figures, IRS tax returns and other data, researchers Raj Chetty and Nathanien Hendren (the Stanford and Harvard scholars referred to earlier by Coleman Hughes) examined how race affects economic mobility, defined as the ability to do better or worse than one’s parents. By and large they found that race is not determinative. The New York Times, which partnered with the researchers, reported that “the gap between Hispanics and whites is narrower, and their incomes will converge within a couple of generations if mobility stays the same. Asian-Americans earn more than whites raised at the same income level ...” The study also found that black women “earn slightly more than white women” from comparable families. Black women also have higher college attendance rates than white men who come from comparable families.” Black boys fare worse than white boys, but one reason the racial gap in economic mobility for boys is so large is that so many black boys live in single-parent homes with one income and so many white boys live in two-parent homes with two incomes.
What other factors might then explain differences in outcomes among demographic groups? There are thousands of potential explanations. To just take a few, vocabulary is essential to complex thinking, and data show that children’s vocabularies are based on the number of words to which they are exposed in the home. Fewer parents mean children will be exposed to fewer words, and consequently have smaller vocabularies, which will affect their ability to do all sorts of things throughout life.
As Thomas Sowell writes in his book Discrimination and Disparities:
children raised in families where the parents have professional occupations hear nearly twice as many words per hour as children raised in working- class families, and more than three times as many words per hour as children raised in families on welfare.
Sowell, writing in the early 1980’s in his book The Economics and Politics of Race, also makes the following points regarding how disparities among racial, cultural, or other groups are the result of a myriad of factors among which racism is only one:
The younger generation of Chinese Americans carried into the schools the same sense of purpose and perseverance that characterized the Chinese in many activities in countries around the world. As school children, they were better behaved and more hard-working than white students. Later, in colleges and universities, the Chinese specialized in the more difficult and demanding and lucrative fields such as medicine, the natural sciences, and engineering. As of 1940, the proportion of Chinese who worked in professional-level occupations was less than half that among whites. But by 1960, the Chinese had passed whites, and by 1970 they had widened the gap, now having higher proportions in such occupations than any other American ethnic group. Among Chinese males, 30 percent worked in professional and technical fields, double the proportion among white males. Moreover, a higher percentage of Chinese men were engineers and college teachers of physics, mathematics, and chemistry. The income of Chinese Americans passed the national average in 1959, and that gap has also widened. In the wake of these economic achievements came more social recognition … [Regarding the Irish], [w]riting in the 1830’s, Gustave de Beumont said “I have seen the Indian in his forests and the Negro in his chains and thought as I contemplated their pitiable condition that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness. But I did not then know the condition of unfortunate Ireland.” This was not mere exaggeration for effect. The average slave in the United States had a life expectancy of 36 years. The average Irish peasant, 19 … When the slaves were freed, they were destitute by American standards, “but not as poor as the Irish peasants,” according to W.E.B. DuBois … [In America,] when the Irish moved into many neighborhoods, the exodus of non-Irish residents began. In parts of nineteenth-century New York, Negroes were preferred to the Irish as tenants. Employment advertisements, even for lowly jobs, often used the stock phrase “No Irish need apply.” More delicate advertisers would ask for a Protestant applicant, but others more bluntly said “Any color or country, except Irish.” … The growing acculturation of the Irish slowly produced tangible economic results [in America] although the Irish the slowest rising European ethnic group in the United States … [T]he second-generation Irish were increasingly white collar workers who were occasionally professionals … Irish-Americans today have equaled or exceeding the American national average in income and IQ … Historically, it represents one of the great social transformations of people … [Regarding Jewish-Americans,] [b]arriers went up against Jews in general in various occupations, businesses, and industries, as well as in social settings such as clubs, or hotels. Jews crowded not those sectors that were open to them and created their own industries … By 1969, Jewish family income in the United States was 72 percent above the national average. More than one-fourth of all Nobel Prizes won by Americans had been won by Jewish-Americans … [Regarding blacks in Brazil,] [t]hough racism as such is not as prominent a feature of Brazilian society as of other multi-racial societies, Brazil has highly rigid class lines and a distribution of income that is much more unequal than that of the United States, for example … For all its more relaxed race relations, Brazil has larger black-white disparities than the United States in education, and in political participation … [In America,] [a]nother historic factor was the American ideology of freedom and democracy … The morality of slavery had seldom been a serious issue in most slave societies in history, but because of the American ideal of freedom the institution of slavery was an anachronism embroiled in controversy from the outset. The American Revolution heightened awareness of the contradiction, and most states outside the South abolished slavery in the decades immediately following independence … Most whites in the United States did not own slaves and even those who did seldom had the number of slaves or the kind of affluence depicted in such fictional works as “Gone with The Wind.” In 1790, nearly one-fourth of all free American families owned slaves, but by 1850, that was down to ten percent … As in South Africa, the masses of ill-educated, poorly skilled whites were the most vehement and violent in their assertions of white superiority. And like South Africa, Brazil, and other slave societies, the American South developed among its free white population an aversion and disdain for hard work, which was associated with slaves. The South was and has remained the poorest region of the United States, its white population being perennially poorer than other white Americans, and especially so in those states in the Deep South where slaves were concentrated. DeToqueville noted in the 1830’s that although white Americans in the South had the same racial and cultural background as those who settled other regions of the country, the colonies in which there were no slaves became more populous and more prosperous than those in which slavery flourished. Sailing down the Ohio River between the slave state of Kentucky and the free state of Ohio with similar climate and soil, deTocqueville found the white population ignorant and apathetic on the one side and full of activity and intelligence on the other, with the land of the slave state being visibly less cultivated than that of the free state … [Since then,] [b]lacks have had higher than average incidences of crime, disease educational problems, and families on welfare. Rates of crime and violence among blacks have been so high that in some years there were more black than white murder victims in absolute numbers though blacks are only about 11 percent of the population … Blacks remain below the national average economically, but despite historically unique forms and degrees of discrimination and oppression, blacks are not today economically unique. Blacks do not have the lowest incomes or occupations, or the highest incidence of broken homes. Blacks are today one of a number of low-income American racial or ethnic groups with a number of number of serious economic or social problems … Much contemporary social philosophy proceeds as if different patterns of group representation in various occupations, institutions, activities, or income levels must reflect discriminatory decisions by others -- that is, as if there were no substantial cultural or other differences among the various groups themselves. Yet this key assumption is nowhere demonstrated and is in many ways falsified, even in activities in which no discrimination is possible. People are not proportionately represented. Activities solely within the discretion of the individual, choices among television programs to watch or card games to play, the age of marriage, or the naming of children, show widely differing patterns between different racial, ethnic, and national groups … American racial and ethnic groups differ enormously in characteristics ranging from age to regional distribution to diverse cultural backgrounds. Many of these characteristics have a major impact on the economic conditions of racial and ethnic groups, even though they attract much less attention than race or racism … Among non-white Americans, some groups, Japanese and Chinese, earned more than whites. Some, Filipinos and West Indians, earned about the same. And others, Indians and native blacks, earned substantially less. Still other groups with a majority classified as white, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, earned substantially below the national average. In short, non-white groups are spread across the income spectrum, just as white groups are. On the whole, whites earn more than non-whites, but only because, statistically, about 90 percent of non-whites in the United States are native black Americans, not because non-white groups are all consigned to lower economic positions. Japanese-Americans earn higher incomes than Americans of German, Italian, Irish, Polish, or Anglo-Saxon ancestry. So do second-generation black West Indians … The pervasive Jim Crow laws that confronted generations of blacks in the South were unique. But the worst years of anti-Asian laws and policies on the West Coast were a close second, featuring vigilante violence as well as legal discrimination and public hostility. Yet what is surprising is the cold fact that there has been little correlation between the degree of discrimination in history and the economic results today … It would be even more difficult to claim that Puerto Ricans have historically encountered a level of discrimination comparable to that of blacks, who have higher occupational status and 20 percent higher incomes. There may well be color prejudice against the multi-colored Puerto Ricans, but it would be hard to claim that it is stronger than color prejudice against black West Indians, who have 50 percent higher family incomes.
A recommended video, especially starting at the 53:00 minute mark, explaining why racism (or sexism) should not be inferred from disparities of outcome can also be found here (it’s part of a lecture by Jonathan Haidt, co-author of the best-selling book The Coddling of the American Mind).
The bottom line is that all sorts of disparate impacts cut in all sorts of ways based on hundreds of factors other than racism. In the next essay in this series, we’ll look at another especially important but often overlooked factor in disparities among people grouped by race, namely differences in median age.
Links to all essays in this series: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9