Part 3 -- The Many Causes of Disparities
A Critique of Kendi, DiAngelo, Hannah Jones, and Critical Race Theory
In previous essays (see Part 1 and Part 2), I’ve described the false narrative based on the notion that all disparities among people grouped by race are due to racism as a trick coin: it comes up racism every time. In this essay, I’ll describe some of the elephants in the room: the factors social science has found to be some of the most determinative of various social disparities, but which Kendi and DiAngelo dismiss or ignore.
Solutions aimed at changing any particular outcome are likely to fail if those solutions don’t account for influential other systems operating on the same outcomes at the same time. For example, Kendi dismisses the “panic around the reported numbers of [black] single-parent households” but fails to acknowledge the vast body of social science showing the disadvantages of being raised by one, not two, caring parents. As to the “reported numbers,” as summarized by Roger Clegg:
Late last year, the final [federal] data for 2018 were published here (the key is Table 9 on page 25), and here’s what we learn: For all racial and ethnic groups combined, 39.6 percent of births were out-of-wedlock … For blacks, the number is 69.4 percent; for American Indians/Alaska Natives, 68.2 percent (Native Hawaiians/Other Pacific Islanders were at 50.4 percent); for Hispanics, 51.8 percent; for whites, 28.2 percent; and for Asian Americans, a paltry 11.7 percent.
And as to the social science, as researchers at the Brookings Institution and Princeton University concluded, “most scholars now agree that children raised by two biological parents in a stable marriage do better than children in other family forms across a wide range of outcomes.”
As Kay Hymowitz reported in City Journal, a recent:
study by demographer John Iceland concludes that differences in family structure are the most significant variable in explaining the black–white affluence gap. In fact, its importance has grown over time relative to other explanations, including discrimination. Unable to pool earnings with a spouse, to take advantage of economies of scale, and to share child care, black single parents have a tougher time than their married counterparts building a nest egg.
Iceland “estimates that female-headed households can now explain about one-third of the black-white poverty difference, age comes in second at 16%, and education at 15%; all-in-all, the three characteristics can explain two-thirds of the poverty gap between blacks and whites.”
Within the black community, kids from two-parent homes tend to do better on a variety of metrics. Researcher Van C. Tran of Columbia University examined cultural differences between West Indian second-generation young people and native black young people in New York City to determine what might explain the greater success of those West Indian second-generation young people. As Tran writes:
[T]here has been a dearth of research examining the neighborhood experiences of second-generation West Indians who grew up in similar neighborhoods and often live in close proximity to native blacks … [I] document the different ways in which second-generation West Indians and native blacks navigate their neighborhood environments, with the former reporting stricter parenting … In their daily life, [West Indian second-generation youth] are also as likely as blacks to experience discrimination and prejudice from native whites and others … Overall, data … confirm the second-generation advantage among West Indians across eight measures: high school dropout, unemployment rate, NEET6 rate [which accounts for those who are “not engaged in education, employment, training, or caregiving”], college graduate, professional attainment, arrest rate, incarceration rate, and teenage pregnancy … Native blacks reported the most disadvantaged outcomes, while West Indians reported outcomes similar to those of native whites … [A] key difference was family structure. West Indians also grew up with more adult figures in the household because they were more likely to grow up in two-parent households and their household tended to include both kin and non-kin adults. In contrast, native blacks were more likely to grow up in single-parent households where the father was absent and the mother bore the burden of parenting, disciplining, and supervision … This closer supervision has several implications for delinquency among the second generation, from drug use to skipping school … These cultural strategies are neither specific to a particular ethnic group nor to a particular social class, though the qualitative data presented here suggest they were more prevalent among West Indians than native blacks … More broadly, these findings suggest that race is “more than just black” and the complex link between ethnicity and culture deserves further research.
Regarding school performance, as Frederick Hess writes:
Parent involvement matters a lot for student success. A 2017 study of 11,000 households analyzed the impact of sending parents half a dozen reminders during the year about the importance of student attendance. The result: a big drop in absenteeism, especially chronic absenteeism. A study of Title I elementary schools found that sending materials home, face-to-face parent-teacher meetings, and phone check-ins boosted academic performance. As one influential survey of the research concluded, “No matter their income or background, students with involved parents are more likely to have higher grades and test scores, attend school regularly, [and] have better social skills.”
The increased prevalence of single parent households generally has resulted from a variety of relatively recent causes. The decline in two-parent families in the black community is not the result of slavery. The most comprehensive study of American black families from Emancipation to 1925, Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925, concluded that
At all moments in time between 1880 and 1925 – that is, from an adult generation born in slavery to an adult generation about to be devastated by the Great Depression of the 1930s and the modernization of southern agriculture afterward – the typical Afro-American family was lower-class in status and headed by two parents … The two-parent household was not limited to better-advantaged Afro-Americans … It was just as common among farm laborers, sharecroppers, tenants, and northern and southern urban unskilled laborers and service workers. It accompanied the southern blacks in the great migration to the North that has so reshaped the United States in the twentieth century.
In a review of the book on its cover, John Hope Franklin states “Gutman has successfully challenged the traditional view that slavery virtually destroyed the Afro-American family.”
As Thomas Sowell explains in Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, the experience of low-income British people under modern welfare state incentives mirrors the experience of low-income Americans under the same welfare state incentives, but without the racial component. As Sowell explains:
The retrogressions in educational achievement among blacks in parts of the United States, as well as the retrogressions represented by family disintegration, rising rates of drug addiction, violence and criminal behavior in general, have been strikingly similar among lower-class whites in England. Moreover, these and other social retrogressions proliferated during the same time period— from the 1960s onward— on both sides of the Atlantic. A whole way of life among lower-class whites in England is remarkably similar to the way of life in black ghettos in the United States … In the schools, a common expression of social disapproval of those students who seriously try to learn is beating them up— the same treatment meted out in America to some ghetto children who are accused of “acting white.” … In England, as in the United States, crime rates had been going down for years, before they suddenly reversed and rose sharply during the second half of the twentieth century, as the social vision of the intelligentsia triumphed in both countries— not only as regards the welfare state but also as regards a more lenient, non-judgmental attitude toward criminals and rioters. In England, this was combined with severe restrictions on police that a writer for London’s Daily Telegraph referred to as “politically correct policing” that has police acting “more like social workers than upholders of law and order.” For example, as Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm of George Mason University reported in the Wall Street Journal: “Police have been instructed by the British Home Office to let burglars and first-time offenders who confess to any of some 60 crimes— ranging from assault and arson to sex with an underage girl— off with a caution. That means no jail time, no fine, no community service, no court appearance.
Differences in something as simple as median age can also have significant effects on income disparities among different people grouped by race. As Sowell explains:
Within a given nation, incomes vary greatly with age, and wealth even more so. Moreover, these disparities among age cohorts have increased over time, as the value of the physical strength and energy of youth counts for less when mechanical sources of power have rendered human strength less important, and more complex technology has made knowledge, experience and analytical skills more valuable. The net result is that the age at which people receive their highest incomes has shifted upward in the United States. Back in 1951, most Americans reached their peak earnings between 35 and 44 years of age, and people in that age bracket earned 60 percent more than workers in their early twenties. By 1973 people in the same 35-to 44-year-old bracket earned more than double the income of the younger workers. Twenty years later, the peak earnings bracket had moved up to people aged 45 to 54 years, and people in that bracket earned more than three times what workers in their early twenties earned. None of this should be surprising, because people accumulate human capital as they grow older, whether in the form of specific knowledge and skills or just maturity in dealing with other people and with the responsibilities of their work.
Professor William Julius Wilson of Harvard University, in his book “The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, Second Edition,” also writes that
the black migration to urban centers—the continual replenishment of urban black populations by poor newcomers—predictably skewed the age profile of the urban black community and kept it relatively young. The higher the median age of a group, the greater its representation in higher income categories and professional positions. It is therefore not surprising that ethnic groups such as blacks and Hispanics, who on average are younger than whites, also tend to have high unemployment and crime rates … In the nation’s inner cities in 1977, the median age for whites was 30.3, for blacks 23.9. The importance of this jump in the number of young minorities in the ghetto, many of them lacking one or more parents, cannot be overemphasized. Age correlates with many things. For example, the higher the median age of a group, the higher its income; the lower the median age, the higher the unemployment rate and the higher the crime rate (more than half of those arrested in 1980 for violent and property crimes in American cities were under twenty-one) … In short, part of what had gone awry in the ghetto was due to the sheer increase in the number of black youth.
A failure to understand the significance of differences in median ages among grouped populations has led to false attributions of racism in voting laws. Take the example of the Department of Justice’s letter declining to “preclear” South Carolina’s voter identification law in 2011, a decision effectively nullifying the law and declaring it racist. The Department claimed in the letter that “minority registered voters were nearly 20% more likely to ... be effectively disenfranchised” by the law because they lacked a driver’s license. But the difference between white and black holders of a driver’s license was only 1.6 percent. The Justice Department used the 20% figure because, while the state’s data showed that 8.4% of white registered voters lacked any form of DMV-issued ID, as compared to 10.0% of non-white registered voters, the number 10 is 20% larger than the number 8.4. It’s true mathematically that 10 is 20% larger (actually, it’s 19% larger -- the Justice Department rounded up) than 8.4, but it clearly exaggerates the reported difference in driver’s license rates. In any case, data show that younger people among both blacks and whites tend to be the least likely to have drivers’ licenses. Consequently, if blacks have proportionately more young people in their demographic group, there will be a disproportionate number of blacks without drivers’ licenses, a result having nothing to do with racism.
As Thomas Sowell describes in Wealth, Poverty, and Politics: “This implicit assumption of equal outcomes [at the group level] in the absence of external restrictions [the assumption of racism underlying Kendi’s view, for example] flies in the face of evidence from around the world that geographic, demographic, cultural and other factors influencing outcomes are not even approximately equal.”
Even rates of "food insecurity" vary by race, but in ways independent of income that seem more related to how questions are interpreted than material hardship. As Angela Rachidi explains:
it is important to understand how the USDA and Census Bureau measure food insecurity. Every month, the Census Bureau administers a survey to a representative group of American households—the results of which are used to calculate the unemployment rate, income changes over time, and much more. As part of this survey, once per year the Census Bureau also asks households a series of 18 questions about household members’ experiences of food-related hardships. If the household notes that they have experienced a certain number of hardships, then that household is classified as food insecure. It should come as no surprise that economically disadvantaged groups—such as American Indian, black and Hispanic Americans—reported substantially higher food insecurity rates than other racial and ethnic groups. For example, only 5.4 percent of Asian households were classified as food insecure, compared to 23.3 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) and 21 percent of black households. However, these racial disparities persisted even when comparing those within the same income or education group. For instance, 41.3 percent of black households with incomes below the federal poverty line (FPL) were food insecure. But among Asian households below the poverty line, just 18 percent were food insecure. The same was true at the top of the income distribution. Just 2.4 percent of Asian households (and 4 percent of white households) with household incomes greater than 185 percent of the FPL were food insecure, compared to 12.5 percent of AIAN and 11.5 percent of black households with similar incomes. it is important to understand how the USDA and Census Bureau measure food insecurity. Every month, the Census Bureau administers a survey to a representative group of American households—the results of which are used to calculate the unemployment rate, income changes over time, and much more. As part of this survey, once per year the Census Bureau also asks households a series of 18 questions about household members’ experiences of food-related hardships. If the household notes that they have experienced a certain number of hardships, then that household is classified as food insecure. It should come as no surprise that economically disadvantaged groups—such as American Indian, black and Hispanic Americans—reported substantially higher food insecurity rates than other racial and ethnic groups. For example, only 5.4 percent of Asian households were classified as food insecure, compared to 23.3 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) and 21 percent of black households. However, these racial disparities persisted even when comparing those within the same income or education group. For instance, 41.3 percent of black households with incomes below the federal poverty line (FPL) were food insecure. But among Asian households below the poverty line, just 18 percent were food insecure. The same was true at the top of the income distribution. Just 2.4 percent of Asian households (and 4 percent of white households) with household incomes greater than 185 percent of the FPL were food insecure, compared to 12.5 percent of AIAN and 11.5 percent of black households with similar incomes ... These results raise the question: if food insecurity is intended to reflect material hardship, why would food insecurity rates vary so greatly between racial and ethnic groups with similar incomes and education levels? Although the USDA report does not speculate as to why these within-income and within-education level disparities emerge by race, there are at least a few plausible explanations. One of the most likely reasons, as we have previously noted, involves the subjectivity of the food insecurity questions. That is, individuals with similar economic circumstances seem to interpret and respond to certain questions differently. Some of the questions on the Food Security Supplement capture severe food-related hardships (e.g. “Did you or any of your children not eat for a whole day because there wasn’t enough money for food?”) while others are less severe (“[Could you] afford to eat balanced meals?”). Research has shown that households do not vary in their interpretation of the most severe questions, but vary in their interpretation of less-severe questions. For example, individuals seem to hold varying beliefs about what constitutes a balanced meal, or what it means to worry about food. These discrepancies mean that a household’s food security status may be influenced as much by their interpretation of these conditions as it is by their actual material hardship.
If under any objective analysis the assumption that racism is the sole cause of disparities in outcomes among racial groups today isn’t true (and it isn’t), then proponents of that false assumption must necessarily reject the very concept of objectivity. Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo do just that, as will be explored in the next essay.
Links to all essays in this series: Part1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10; Part 11; Part 12
Collected essays in this series
Short video documentary on problems with popular critical race theory texts
Harvard Law School flashback