Minority Report

A reader on our majority-minority future:

See George Yancey's book Who Is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide. This sparked a host of articles when it came out in 2005; the meme has been fairly present among demographers and academic sociologists.

The problem (or opportunity for the Steve Sailers of the world), is that the data are most suggestive of the persistence of out-group reactions to blacks rather than everyone feeling groovy about South Asians, Hispanics, and other minorities. that is - the dominant thread here is not that you and I are largely considered white, it's that Barack Obama never will be (except by Cornel West).

This sounds somewhat depressingly plausible to me -- I'll have to read the book.

Comments

Sorry to go OT right off the bat, but I have several brilliant things to say on the basketball thread below, yet it seems to be broken.

Posted by Antid Oto | May 17, 2007 3:15 PM

Or read Micheal Lind's old article The beige and the black

Posted by Ikram | May 17, 2007 3:39 PM

"Sorry to go OT right off the bat, but I have several brilliant things to say on the basketball thread below, yet it seems to be broken."

All the old threads are broken, and broken in this very bizarre manner where comment order is reversed and links go to something called "national_journal".

Posted by Petey | May 17, 2007 3:42 PM

"Or read Micheal Lind's old article The beige and the black"

This is a frustrating thread for me.

I'm curious about the topic, and all we have is an email talking about a book that I can't click to read more about, and Ikram's reference to a Lind column behind a pay firewall.

Links and excerpts please, folks!

Posted by Petey | May 17, 2007 3:45 PM

A little confused about what you mean here, MY...

Do you mean that asians and hispanics are going to be accepted into "white" (i.e. mainstream) America but blacks are not?

Posted by Mr. Noah | May 17, 2007 4:16 PM

For once, I'm more optimistic about America than Matt. White women will put an end to racism the same way they put an end to antisemitism. It's already far more accepted for a black man to marry a white woman than it was for a Jewish man to marry a Christian woman in my father's generation. Pretty soon idiot racists will be as rare as those three or four fat guys in Idaho who still hate Jews.

Posted by Gary Sugar | May 17, 2007 4:20 PM

"Pretty soon idiot racists will be as rare as those three or four fat guys in Idaho who still hate Jews."

They must get around a lot.

Posted by Njorl | May 17, 2007 4:30 PM

Mr. Noah -

the first time I read the sentence I thought it meant that those groups not currently considered "white" in the sociological sense had persistently prejudiced reactions to black people, but on rereading it I believe your interpretation is correct. Whether that's true or not, I have no clue, but it seems plausible to me, in that the whole concept of "white" (in the soc. sense) *requires* an other, and as far as the US is concerned (having largely dispatched of the indigenous people here and otherwise marginalized them) the Other was and remains black people. Asians, Latin Americans, non-Teutonic Europeans, are all later entries into the white/black dynamic, so their passage into "white"ness doesn't change the system. The acceptance of blacks into "white"ness would end the concept altogether, because there'd be no Other left. I believe this will eventually come to pass, but I don't know if it will be because eventually everyone gets absorbed into "white"ness, at which point the category becomes meaningless, or if the use and force of these categories is going to break down in some other fashion that changes the whole notion of a mainstream "white American" culture. Certain groups have become "white" without entirely mainstreaming; almost everyone would consider Italians "white" at this point, but Italian culture, while acceptable, is still Othered a lot more than, say, Irish or German culture is.

Posted by Quarterican | May 17, 2007 4:39 PM

I think Quarterican gets it essentially right (I'm Jewpanese, to nod to this notion of outing, and I pass for white all the time). Whiteness in America has been defined in response to blackness, so much so that critiques of white culture usually (mis)appropriate black forms - everything from minstrel shows to rock and roll. Accordingly, non-white, non-black immigrants to the United States have had a much easier time of assimilating, and Sam Huntington aside, most do, quickly approximating such obvious cultural attributes as salary and educational level, and some less obvious ones like colon cancer incidence (look at Japanese-born and Japanese-American cancer rates for a shocking primer into dietary oncofactors) and criminality.

Petey - I hate to give you yet another thing you can't link to, but you should read Eric Lott's book Love and Theft, for a passable introduction to this thesis.

As for Mr. Sugar's take - unfortunately, white/non-white intermarriage occurs far more frequently than white/black intermarriage. Moreover, the children of white/black admixtures generally either are raised black, or pass as white - very few identify as being of mixed race.

Posted by jr | May 17, 2007 5:07 PM

The tendency of whites to increasingly regard Latinos and Asians as "white" in reactive distinction to blacks is certainly a contributing factor in this assimilative process, but should not be over-emphasized.

For example, California has far and away the smallest black percentage of any large state, but exactly the same process is occuring there. Furthermore, prior to WW II CA's black percentage was negligible, but Latinos had always been regarded as "white" (at least "white" in the same way that e.g. Armenians or South Italians were "white").

And today, states like Hawaii and New Mexico continue to have miniscule numbers of blacks, but similar very strong tendencies toward Latino/Anglo/Asian social-cultural-matrimonal amalgamation.

Posted by RKU | May 17, 2007 5:11 PM

This reminds me of something Daniel Davies wrote about America being perhaps the most non-racist society yet created but one with a substantial & inconquerable "negro problem" that it will never get over. No matter how long they've been here, or who comes here next, Blacks will always be at the bottom of the American hierarchical tree.

Posted by DRR | May 17, 2007 5:13 PM

I find this scenario plausible, and it seems to be born out by data I've seen.

To me, the evidence of an extensive "othering" of blacks supports Affirmative Action (along with other programs). However, I know Yglesias mildly disagrees with Affirmative Action. I wonder what you would recommend we do about this problem.

Posted by MDtoMN | May 17, 2007 5:47 PM

A similar dynamic exists in Canada, except that the non-white Others are Indians (now correctly referred to as aboriginals or First Nations). I recall as long ago as 1990, a Mohawk warrior (blond and with plenty of European DNA) telling a Chinese-Canadian reporter, "You whites have been taking our land for 400 years." Neither of them thought anything of it.

Of course, it makes some sense that voluntar immigrants will be more easily assimilated.

Posted by Pithlord | May 17, 2007 6:01 PM

I hate to be the jerk in the room, but there is a cutural aspect that I think is too often not considered. For whatever reason, blacks are preceived as not sharing the same work ethic and desire to assimilate as other non-whites. Many whites, particularly of the working class, simply do not respect what they percieve to be a lazy attitude amongst american blacks that waits for a handout and fails to accept personal responsibility for its many problems. In contrast consider that working class white folks have negative feelings about Mexicans, but it is often offset by a grudging respect for their willingness to bust their asses with little complaint for the sake of their families. I believe Scorcese gave Nicholson a great line about this in the opening sequence in The Departed.

And as for the point made by some about the end of anti-semitism. I think you may be jumping the gun on that one a little bit. Try spending some time with some less enlightened folks. Perhaps anti-semitism is less virulent, but it is far from gone.

Posted by laborlibert | May 17, 2007 6:09 PM

Accordingly, non-white, non-black immigrants to the United States have had a much easier time of assimilating, and Sam Huntington aside, most do, quickly approximating such obvious cultural attributes as salary and educational level

Curiously, some African immigrants assimilate with Black American culture and become the "other", while others seem to assimilate with White American culture and define themselves against the "other".

I understand that in France, African immigrants are despised, but everyone loves African-American tourists.

Posted by JP | May 17, 2007 6:22 PM

I also hear that Dominicans define themselves as non-black in contrast with the black Haitian "other," even though everyone on the island looks pretty similar.

Posted by JP | May 17, 2007 6:24 PM

I hate to be the jerk in the room, but there is a cutural aspect that I think is too often not considered. For whatever reason, blacks are preceived as not sharing the same work ethic and desire to assimilate as other non-whites.

They said that or something very similar about every assimilating group every time. The wild Irish couldn't possibly be assimilated into civilized culture.

Posted by Gary Sugar | May 17, 2007 6:35 PM

The government and major institutions give affirmative action benefits to people who define themselves as non-white. Similarly, there are lots of sinecures available (e.g., Dean of Diversity) for ambitious people who define themselves as nonwhite, even if their ambiguous ethnic background would plausibly allow themselves to be called white.

So, many of the institutions of America that have emerged over the last 40 years work against the amalgamation of individuals of mixed descent into the majority.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 17, 2007 6:41 PM

True enough Sugar.

But the argument is that they have had enough time now to begin to assert themselves, and that as a general matter, they haven't taken the initiative or shown the desire for self-improvement or education, as other groups traditionally have done.

Irish-Americans were a major force less than 20 years after they began arriving in great numbers and I believe they were recognized as such even by those who saw us as savages.

Posted by laborlibert | May 17, 2007 6:46 PM

One fascinating effect of interracial marriage that whites tend to be clueless about is how much anger it generates among black women and East Asian men. The great majority of black-white marriages are black husband-white wife and the great majority of white-East Asian marriages are white husband-black wife, leaving black women and East Asian men left over without a spouse. My "Is Love Colorblind?" article of a decade ago explained this:

http://www.isteve.com/IsLoveColorblind.htm

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 17, 2007 6:49 PM

It's interesting. African Americans seem to excel and even dominate fields with low cost barriers to entry. Sports, Music, entertainment - fields without faux credentialing - are filled with high achieving black Americans.

Many black Americans succeed in other fields as well, of course. You could look at the glass as half-full or half-empty, but a lot of white people seem to insist on looking at it as all empty. This of course means something is wrong with black culture (it couldn't possibly be that white culture still has some racism problems).

It's true that black Americans as a group are less well-off than whites. However, when the barriers to competition are lowered, the gap decreases substantially. The education gap is narrowing. After passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, average black income went from 60% of average white income to 70%. There is substantial evidence that government interference, oriented towards lowering barriers erected by white society, can improve the condition of black Americans.

Maybe one problem blacks face is that drug laws are enforced much more harshly against them. Maybe another problem is that all people at the poorer end of the economic spectrum have had a rough time over the last 30 years. Maybe it's that white people assume they don't work hard. No, it must be some problem with black culture.

To be honest, American culture as a whole suffers from a lazyness problem. It's absurd that someone as utterly lazy as Bush managed to become President. We hold our elites to low standards, and they hold themselves to low standards too.

Personally, I would argue that there are problems with black culture, but I don't know enough about black culture to do an effective critique or make suggestions. From what I see of white culture, there's plenty I can suggest we do focusing on that.

Posted by MDtoMN | May 17, 2007 7:03 PM

How cool is that? Steve Sailer is like a genie - mention him on the internet, and he appears! To be fair, he's on point here. Multiculturalism, to a certain extent, was part of the end of the progressive consensus, but it no longer dominates American cultural life. That ship sailed, except in the academy, and Steve knows that. The article "Is Love Colorblind" is very funny, and not wholly inaccurate, although more East Asian men are knocking up white gals in the past decade since he wrote it, somewhat reducing the neat parallelism.

Re: JP, African immigrants may do well in America, but the data on their children isn't very promising, signifying that there is a strong cultural effect that starts to dominate outcomes. The Dominican/Haitian distinction is very tragic. It's one of those curses of liberalism, how freedom requires strong cultural institutions before its practice produces anything but anarchy - the Haitians were the first free blacks in the Western Hemisphere, first to "throw off the shackles of imperialism" or what have you, and look where they've ended up - the poorest people in the hemisphere, worse than their direct geographic neighbors.

Re: RKU, the othering of blacks doesn't require blacks to live next door - just that they signify opposition to the cultural norm.

Re: DDR/MDtoMN, if the entrapping and socially negative position of black culture, one extended by white othering of blacks in popular culture, is alleviated by Affirmative Action, then I think one would have to agree with racial preferences. However, AA is not a unicorn, and doesn't seem, net/net to help minorities assimilate. At elite institutions it mostly proxies for admission of cultural elites who happen to have racial minority status; at non-elite institutions, its of limited utility. At least - that's my over-represented minority take.

Posted by jr | May 17, 2007 7:27 PM

MDtoMN:

"It's true that black Americans as a group are less well-off than whites. However, when the barriers to competition are lowered, the gap decreases substantially."

This is almost exactly backwards. Most of the increase in black earnings is due to their increasing presence in the government sector, where they benefit from affirmative action preferences -- which are, effectively, barriers to competition from whites.

Your belief that any lack of achievement by blacks is the result of barriers to competition by whites reminds me of something a white writer said about reconciling his experience growing up in a working-class Detroit neighborhood with what he was taught about race as an undergrad at the University of Chicago. This writer saw how public services deteriorated when African Americans took over the Detroit city government, and he recollected how things were so bad in black neighborhoods that most black parents preferred to take their children trick-or-treating in his working class white neighborhood instead.

At the U. of Chicago, he was taught that blacks needed to be twice as good and work twice as hard as whites to get ahead. He went home thinking those professors were off by a factor of four.

Posted by Fred | May 17, 2007 8:07 PM

jr:

Arguing that the "othering of blacks" drives Anglos, Latinos, and Asians into amalgamation---even in regions where there are almost no blacks---seems stretching things a bit far.

If so, then why wouldn't the "othering of blacks" cause e.g. Korea and Japan to declare a national merger?

More seriously, there might be some plausibility in your argument in today's America, in which blacks are so massively (over-)represented in the media and in public consciousness (to the extent that polls show that the public over-estimate their proportion by a factor of two or more).

But prior to about 1960 or so, blacks were almost invisible in the media and received very little attention. Yet the social patterns I've noted certainly extend past that point.

Posted by RKU | May 17, 2007 8:39 PM

For a historical primer read "How the Irish became White." Also, a large number of Latinos are already white under the current racial construct even if they are not considered such under the cultural/Bhagat Singh Thind rules.
Thirdly, though I am white, my black friends often remark that I am on CP time. I wonder if perhaps some the white, working class will lose their claim to "whiteness" once it is redifined to include upwardly mobile Latinos and Asians.

Posted by dont trust whitey | May 17, 2007 9:36 PM

RKU says:

"For a historical primer read "How the Irish became White.""

Yes, these popular references to how non-WASPs were not white in the 19th Century always reminds me of the famous scene in Gone With The Wind where Scarlett O'Hara's Irish last name is discovered and she is immediately sold into slavery.

Similarly, in real life, every schoolboy knows how Judah P. Benjamin, who was Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State in the Confederate government, was discovered to be Jewish in 1863 and immediately made a slave for not being white.

Oh, wait, that all happened in Bizarro World. In this world, that didn't happen. People mostly make up this idea to indulge in the joys of ethnic self-pity or out of ideological tendentiousness.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 17, 2007 10:15 PM

RKU: Japan and Korea don't have, um, American popular culture or history. They also didn't enslave African-Americans. So the othering of blacks doesn't have its same place. Compare, for example, the far less radical reception of blackface in England (e.g., Queen Anne's Masque of Blackness) versus America's. Also - I don't know what California you live in, but the one I grew up in had Compton, Coketown, and Snoop.

DTW: How the Irish Became White is a dumb book. The Irish were the backbone of the New York Bowery minstrel theater (Dartmouth Rice, the Virginny Gentry, etc.) so their complaint about the dominant WASP culture was filtered through a black mask. If they weren't already subordinate caste whites, but rather treated some other race, I don't think they would have needed grease paint. The historian Rip Lhamon's book "Jump Jim Crow" is probably the best scholarly refutation of this theory of Irish non-whiteness by examination of Irish-American cultural production in the nineteenth century.

Steve: As the "reader" who MY quotes above notes, it's mostly the rejection of African-Americans, not the inclusion of Irish/Italians/Jews/Asians, that causes the divide. But Bizarro World is a bridge too far. There did exist white/non-white/black divides that were real and caused real discrimination against the middle tier - that they always collapsed into the binary hierarchy of not-black/black is a testament to the poisoned well of slavery rather than of the binary's accuracy.

Posted by jr | May 17, 2007 10:38 PM

It's a bit simplistic to say that the operative division in America is black/non-black. Hispanics may not be quite as "different" as blacks, but it's quite unlikely that they'll be subsumed into the white population anytime soon. Even if Hispanic immigration were to be greatly curtailed they'd remain a distinct group for a long time to come. That being said, in two crucially important respects Hispanics are not as different as blacks: the loathesome One-Drop Rule has never applied with respect to Hispanics, and Hispanic/white marriages do not have the huge gender imbalance that characterizes black/white marriages.

Posted by Peter | May 17, 2007 11:15 PM

jr:

Look, in 1940 California was just 1.8% black, while e.g. Florida was then 27% black. This seems like a pretty big difference to me.

CA's black percentage eventually peaked at around 7% and has recently been declining. By contrast, the black percentages of the other big states---NY, FL, IL, TX---have generally been about twice as large, as is the American national average.

Speculating on the broad social/cultural trends caused by demography without actually knowing any of the democraphic numbers seems like an exercise in futility to me.

Posted by RKU | May 17, 2007 11:16 PM

First, I'm not the biggest fan of AA. I prefer other anti-discriminatory programs we have (such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964). I would also prefer working to remove discrimination from government action (i.e. enforcing laws equally against whites and blacks). I would also prefer numerous other anti-poverty and pro-employment programs. However, I tend to support AA because it seems to have some positive affects, and abandoning it would not eliminate the other problems. Notably, the major opponents of AA seem relatively unconcerned that police officers using race in their investigations and enforcement priorities.

Fred - wow - I'm completely refuted. A white working class writer appears to have disagreed with his college professors. Trust me - I grew up in a majority black city, black families came to my mostly white neighborhood to trick or treat, and I'm fully aware that some black politicians can run corrupt political patronage systems that provide poor services (some white politicians do this as well! It's amazing!). I'm just also fully aware that white society has hardly moved beyond racism.

Which brings me to my final point - a lot of people invoke problems with black culture or black attitudes - and they are essentially making racist arguments. They seem to be saying - well, blacks act like X, so why should we expect anything different? I find this unnecessarily fatalistic and factually questionable, along with morally repugnant. First, a lot of people suggest that blacks act like X without any evidence that they do. Second, they may present anecdotal evidence, but they rarely make the effort of separating out other important factors in determining what the cause of X behavior is (poverty, "culture", etc.). Third, they don't have many suggestions about what we can do about solving these problems.

Posted by MDtoMN | May 18, 2007 12:51 AM

Read a book called "Yellow in America" between black and white.
It is written by a second generation Chinese.
He does make the claim that Asians are honorary Caucasians.
And backs it up.
You can email me for author's name and the publisher, the book is at home.

Posted by merlallen | May 18, 2007 3:09 AM

Read a book called "Yellow in America Between Black and White".
It is written by a second generation Chinese.
He does make the claim that Asians are honorary Caucasians.
And backs it up.
You can email me for author's name and the publisher, the book is at home.

Posted by merlallen | May 18, 2007 3:10 AM

MDtoMN:

Your apparent view that the main obstacle to black achievement is white racism flies in the face of reality. There is no institutional discrimination against blacks in this country, and in fact there is plenty of institutional discrimination in favor of blacks, in the form of affirmative action in academia and government jobs. In the professions and in the business world, exceptional blacks are recognized for their talent and are not held back by their color: No Archie Bunkers keep Benjamin Carson from doing brain surgery or Stan O'Neil from running Merrill Lynch.

Racism isn't why blacks haven't achieved in numbers proportionate to whites. There are simply disproportionately fewer blacks than whites capable of performing at Benjamin Carson or Stan O'Neil levels. This is clear from the results of every test which measures mental ability in some way. On every objective test, from the Armed Forces Vocational Battery, to the SAT, to standardized IQ tests, proportionately fewer blacks than whites perform at high levels, and blacks on average score much lower. For example, on the SAT, the average black score is nearly 200 points lower than the average white score. Whether this is due to more to hereditary factors or cultural/environmental factors is unclear, but it more plausibly explains black under-achievement in many fields than any conspiracy theory of white racism does.

Posted by Fred | May 18, 2007 4:04 AM

Your apparent view that the main obstacle to black achievement is white racism flies in the face of reality. There is no institutional discrimination against blacks in this country, and in fact there is plenty of institutional discrimination in favor of blacks

White employers in 21st Century America will, given the chance, hire an unqualified white felon in preference to a qualified black man.

Posted by BP | May 18, 2007 4:06 AM

"Jump Jim Crow" in no way refutes the theory of Irish non-whiteness. It in fact supports the premise that conceptions of race, in this case "blackness", has been malleable throughout American history. In "Jump Jim Crow", Lhamon examined the minstrel songs/plays that were popular during the 1830's and 40's. He argued that minstrel shows were both race-defying productions to the urban underclass as well as vehicles for those in power to perpetuate a negative conception of blackness. The book is in no way 'an examination of Irish-American cultural production in the nineteenth century.'

For those who think "How the Irish Became White" is dumb, perhaps you would enjoy "Whiteness of a Different Color."

Posted by dont trust whitey or jr | May 18, 2007 4:10 AM

The problem with the culture argument is a complete lack of specificity. A culture is a collection of habits, rituals, practices etc. Citing "black culture" as a problem effectively damns all of the practices without delineating which ones, have which effect.

If you said to me that the well-documented prevelance of single-motherhood in the black community was part of the problem, I'd likely agree. That, at least, points to a specific behavior. People seem to think that the citing of white racism over culture has to do with some PCish inability to tell the truth. But the fact of the matter is that cutlure is just a broad and lazy argument. If you think there are "cultural factors" at work in the black community that are retarding progress, then be decent and sharp enough to identify them and cite how they retard progress.

As for the immigrant vs. black deal, Gladwell's piece in the NYer a few years back was quite illuminating:

http://www.gladwell.com/1996/1996_04_29_a_black.htm

Posted by TC | May 18, 2007 7:40 AM

Fred's made it clear that he thinks black Americans cannot perform as well as white Americans, in general. Does anyone want to be the black person interviewing with Fred for a job? Does anyone want to be the black person applying to a school or program where Fred is the admissions officer?

Personally, I think the existence of statutes like Title VII, which force employers to think critically about what qualifications are required and ensure that they are hiring qualified black applicants proportionally, are great, because they help ensure that this type of thinking doesn't harm minorities as much as it otherwise would.

As for black performance on aptitude tests, I would guess that lower performance by blacks probably relates to a ton of issues - including class differences, different educational opportunities, different achievement by parents, etc.

Notably, I never said that white racism was the only or main reason for the educational and economic achievement gaps between the races. I simply have been arguing that racism is real and does need to be addressed.

I personally think that anti-discrimination statutes are only part of the solution because discrimination is only part of the problem. But I think discrimination is a significant problem, so anti-discrimination statutes are part of the solution.

Notably, Fred doesn't think discrimination is a problem AT ALL! In fact, the main discrimination in our society is entirely in favor of minorities, in Fred's mind. He then invokes a bunch of cultural and hereditary stuff, waves his hands, and argues that we need to give up. He then follows us with assertions that affirmative action is therefore counterproductive and unlikely to succeed (maybe true). It sounds like Fred thinks that blacks will always be lower performers, and we should all just accept that fact. Fred doesn't see a problem, because he thinks the results gap is the product of actual difference on the basis of race.

Posted by MDtoMN | May 18, 2007 9:16 AM

There is no institutional discrimination against blacks in this country

Hahaha! Whew, that was a funny one.

Posted by rb | May 18, 2007 3:04 PM

MDtoMN:

I wrote a fairly long response to your last post which referred to me in the third person for some reason instead of addressing me. It is waiting for moderator approval, perhaps because of a few HTML links I put in the post. I think you may find it interesting, if and when Matt approves it.

In the meantime...

rb:

"Hahaha! Whew, that was a funny one."

Please feel free to give examples of institutional racism against blacks in America today.

Posted by Fred | May 18, 2007 3:58 PM

MDtoMN:

I'm right here -- no need to put words in mouth or refer to me in the third person.

Racism doesn't explain why there are, for example, proportionately fewer black physicians than there are whites; black under-performance, on average, on standardized tests does. Now, you can say you doubt there are any hereditary causes of this, and you can also say you are suspicious of cultural explanations, but you can't plausibly blame this on racism with zero evidence. You can insist, damn the facts, that we should lower standards to shoe-horn more blacks into professions like medicine, whatever it takes, but then you will end up with more Patrick Chavises than Benjamin Carsons. And black patients will be the ones who suffer the consequences of this affirmative action.

"As for black performance on aptitude tests, I would guess that lower performance by blacks probably relates to a ton of issues - including class differences, different educational opportunities, different achievement by parents, etc."

You can guess (and make spurious accusations about me), or you can do a little research on this, if you are interested in facts. If you research this you will find that the black-white test score gap persists even factors like income and parental education are taken into account.

I do believe we should attempt to help increase African American achievement, but if you assume, wrongly, that racism is the primary cause of black under-achievement, you won't be able to come up with effective solutions, and -- as in the case of Chavis -- you may do more harm than good.

Charter school programs such as KIPP have demonstrated effectiveness at increasing black academic achievement (perhaps to your chagrin, the founders of KIPP deigned to notice cultural differences among black and Hispanic students and designed their program with those differences in mind). I think more resources should be put into similar programs. I also think employers and schools should be barred from discriminating (either positively or negatively) on the basis of race.

I do not believe, however, that unequal outcomes are prima facie evidence of racism. I think the vast majority of Americans is not racist, and even the rare racists usually act in their own rational self-interest. The late Marge Schott, for example, was rightly censured for racist comments she made about blacks -- and yet, she still hired black athletes and paid them handsomely. Why? She couldn't afford not to -- they were too good. Even a notorious racist like Schott was willing to hire blacks when they were the best qualified applicants, because she was acting in her own rational self interest.

Posted by Fred | May 18, 2007 7:03 PM