Ch. 2 Racial Fallacies
Racial and ethnic issues have often produced vehement assertions in various times and places around the world
Genetic determinism:
-early 20th century America proclaimed that “race is everything”
-race was used as an explanation of group differences in economic and social outcomes
-at the end of the century, racism was the primary explanation of such group differences in economic and social outcomes
Different beliefs is not unusual, but has become dangerous:
1-the extent to which such beliefs prevail without being subjected to tests of either facts or logic
2-the extent to which people who present empirical evidence counter to prevailing beliefs are met with ad hominem denunciations and with efforts to suppress their evidence, by means ranging from censorship to violence, especially on academic campuses
-these are dangers to the basic functioning of a free society of fallible human beings, whose differing beliefs must be put to some test
***a free society can either destroy freedom or destroy itself in internal conflict
Assertions versus Evidence:
-the fundamental issue is NOT whether employer discrimination–or societal discrimination in general–cab be a cause of different economic and social outcomes among racial or ethnic groups
-most often discussed disparities in the United States have been disparities between black and white Americans
Questions:
1-Whether differences between black and white Americans are unusual, or are of any unusually larger magnitude than differences among other groups in the United States or elsewhere?
2-Whether there are any other discernible reasons for those differences besides race–that is, genetics–or racism?
-the median black American family income has been lower than median white American family income for generations
-official government data going back as far as 1947 show that the disparity has not been 2:1 in any of those years
-Asian ethnic groups are twice as high as the median per capita income of Mexican Americans
-Asian groups have a higher median per capita incomes than the median per capita income of white Americans
-Asian Indians are three times the median per capita incomes of Mexican Americans
-Asian Indian males earned over $39,000 a year more than while male full-time, year-around workers
***Is this the “white supremacy” we are often warned about?
2020 census data:
-9 million black Americans with high incomes than the median incomes of white Americans
-there are thousands of black millionaire families
-there are several black billionaires, including Tiger Woods and Oprah Winfrey
-today, the image of the oppressed black American is all part of the media, academia, and political rhetoric
-this rhetoric is a taught mindset
***a younger generation of blacks is to educate themselves for opportunities that are clearly available, and to advance themselves even more than previous generations of black people have
Economic differences:
-the poverty rate among black American families as a whole has long been higher than the poverty rate among white American families as a whole
-since 1994, in no year has the annual poverty rate of black married-couple families been as high as 10 percent
-in no year in more than half a century since 1959 has the national poverty rate of Americans as a whole been as low as 10 percent
***if black family poverty is caused by systemic racism,” do racists make an exception for black who are married? Do racists either know or care whether blacks are married?
-single-parent families have much higher poverty rates than married-couple families whether black or white
-white female-headed, single-parent families have had a poverty rate more than double the poverty rate of black married-couple families in every year from 1994-2020
***If “white supremacists” were so powerful, how can this happen?
-male-headed, single-parent families are rarer than female-headed, single-parent families among both blacks and whites
-white, male-headed, single-parent families have a lower rate of poverty than white, female-headed, single-parent families
-white, male-headed, single-parent families have a higher rate of poverty than black married-couple families in every year from 2003-2020
***statistical differences between races are not automatically due to race–either in the sense of being caused by genetics or being a result of racial discrimination
-differences in proportion of single-parent families among various racial groups are other differences that affect differences in income
-so are the differences in median age and in education
-income disparities are by no means unique among American racial or ethnic groups, neither disparities within such groups necessarily any less than disparities between these groups
Ex. New York City
-2017-2018 school year there were dozens of places in low-income minority neighborhoods where public charter school and traditional public schools served the same local community and housed in the same buildings
-black and Hispanic students in both kinds of schools took the same statewide test in mathematics
-charter school students achieve the official “proficient” level in mathematics more than 6 times as often as children of the same ethnicities in traditional public schools housed in the very same buildings
-these are huge disparities within the same groups, so that neither race nor racism can account for these huge differences
-nor are these culturally biased tests
1930’s Study
-the black community in Chicago found that the delinquency rate within the that community ranged from more than 40 percent in some black neighborhoods to less than 2 percent in some other black neighborhoods
-these were disparities within the same racial group in the same city at the same time
-these disparities were also found within the white population
1851
-the white population in the South was about half as large as the white population in other regions
-only 8 percent of the patents were issued in the United States went to residents of the Southern states
-Southern whites also lagged behind other whites in various work skills
Ex.
-in the South, 1860, has 40 percent of the nation’s dairy cows
-there was a higher rate of illiteracy among Southern whites in the antebellum South than among their Northern white contemporaries
Twenty-first century:
-there are counties in the Appalachian regions of Kentucky that are more than 90 percent white whose median household income is less than half the median household income of white Americans in the country as a whole
-but also thousands of dollars less than the median household income of black Americans in the country as a whole
-Owsley County, according to the Census Bureau, found it to be the lowest-income county in any American state in 2014 whose population is 99 percent white
-in 2014, the six of the bottom ten counties in poverty were in eastern Kentucky with the populations being more than 90 percent white
-from 1969-2020, these counties show similar patterns of median household incomes that is far below the median household incomes of whites and blacks nationwide
***geography pointed out how people of the same race, living in geographic settings, can have radically different economic and social outcomes
-influences of environment appear in every part of the world, in every race and every age
-people living in mountains and foothills, hillbillies in American terminology, have usually lagged both economically and in terms of social development
-high levels of high-school dropouts and low levels of college graduates among American hillbillies are obvious examples of neglected social development
-what we learn from persistent and severe poverty in hillbilly communities can be helpful in sorting out factors involved in the poverty lagging progress of other peoples, including racial minorities
-people in low-income American hillbilly counties already face zero racism, because these people are virtually all white yet they have lower incomes than blacks
-in a world where nobody believes that all racism has been eliminated, black married couples have consistently had a lower poverty rate than the national average, and less than half the poverty rate among white, female-headed, single-parent families
***Some behavior patterns seem to pay off, more than an absence of racism. Emphasis on racism can even be counterproductive
Ex. Barack Obama told a story of a young black man who wanted to be a pilot, so he thought about going into the Air Force, but didn’t because he thought the Air Force “would never let a black man fly a plane.”
Problem:
-this kind of thinking is reinforced somewhere because this thinking was said decades after there was a whole squadron of black American fighter pilots during World War II
-there were two black pilots who became generals in the U.S. Air force
****whoever indoctrinated this young man did him more harm than a racist could have by keeping him from trying to become a pilot in the first place
-there are many reasons why different people are in poverty but what is currently being pushed as the only reason is discrimination by race or sex
History:
-today, there is an automatic conclusion on the basis of rhetoric and repetition using phrases like “white supremacy” and “blaming the victim"
-Alexis de Tocqueville set a precedent in the nineteenth century when he attributed differences between Southern whites and Northern whites to the existence of slavery in the South
-Frederick Law Olmsted and Hinton Helper echoed this untruth
-truth: the very same range of differences existed between the ancestors of white Southerners and the ancestors of white Northerners when they lived in different parts of Britain
***Before either side had ever seen a slave
-this is the very same unsubstantiated assumption would be used again in the twentieth century
***today, we still try to explain behavioral differences between blacks and whites by “a legacy of slavery
-the higher incidence of children being born to unmarried women among black Americans is among many other things attributed to a “legacy of slavery”
-for more than 100 years after the end of slavery, most black children were born to women who were married and the children were raised in two-parent homes
-by 1963 23.6 percent of black children were born to single mothers up by 16.8 percent from 1940
-the rate of births to unmarried women among whites also rose suddenly and sharply in the 1960s
***for neither blacks nor whites does this pattern suggest a “legacy of slavery”
-when the upturn in births to unmarried women began for both races rose the expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s
-this pattern has now persisted for more than half a century
-2008: births to unmarried women among white Americans reached almost 30 percent
-births to unmarried black mothers as the end of the twenty-first century greatly exceeded the proportion among unmarried white mothers as a whole
-among white mothers they had less than 12 years of education
-the rate of non-marital births in the early years of the twenty-first century was just over 60%
-disparities and differences between race are not necessarily racial differences, either in the sense of being caused by genes or being caused by racial discrimination
****Behavioral patterns affect poverty
-behavioral patterns produce similar outcomes in groups that differ by race, so that these disparities in outcomes can reflect disparities in behavior without implying either genetic determinism or societal discrimination
***European nations were at least 40 percent of the births are to unmarried women and these nations have no “legacy of slavery” BUT they have expanded welfare state
Genetic Determinism:
-this is automatic victimhood based on genetics
-progressivism moved in in the early decades of the twentieth century
-progressivism is now a major force among American intellectuals and in politics
-progressivism's central tenets was genetic determinism
***a belief that less successful races were genetically inferior
-today, progressives took this view into the role of government, environmental protection, and legal philosophy
***the twist is that less successful races were now seen as being automatically victims of racism
(shift from being considered as automatically inferior
-progressives express certainty in their conclusions and dismisses critics as uninformed at best, confused, or dishonest at worst
Early Progressivism:
-genetic determinism did not begin with the progressives
-historically, some have considered themselves superior as a class or a race due to royal blood
Ex. Military
-empirical evidence became available during World War I in the U.S. Army
-mental test scores were collected from 100,000 soldiers
-these tests showed that black soldiers as a whole scored lower than white soldiers as a whole on those tests
-this was treated as irrefutable evidence that genetic determinism was proven fact
-internal breakdown of the mental test data showed that the black soldiers scored higher if they came from Northern states such as Ohio, Illinois, New York, or Pennsylvania
-internal breakdown of the mental test data showed that the white soldiers scored lower if they came from Southern states such as Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and mississippi
***If the reason for the over-all test score differences between the races were genetic, people’s genes do not change when they cross a state line
-Southern politicians of that era loudly proclaimed their determination to keep things unequal
-this went beyond an unwillingness to spend equally on black and white schools
-as far back as the end of the Civil War, thousands of white volunteers from the North went into the South to teach the children of newly freed slaves
-these teachers were mostly young women who were ostracized by Southern whites and even harassed and threatened
-Southern whites did not want blacks to be educated
-education policies of Southern state governments reflected that
-wealthy white Northerners like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Rosenwald sent money into the South to help create schools for black children
***Southern states like Georgia passed a law, taxing donations to schools by people of a different race from the race of the students in those schools
-genetic determinists of the past and progressives today twist the evidence to fit their preconceptions
The Key to Mental Acuity is Isolation:
-white people living in canal boat communities in Britain with IQ test scores similar to those of black Americans
-the whites have in common to black Americans was isolation
-either geographic or social isolation
-social isolation from the larger society has also long been common among black Americans
-other studies of life in isolated mountain and foothill communities around the world show similar patterns of both poverty and lagging human development
Inferior:
-in a 1976 study showed that black orphans raised by white families had significantly higher average IQ than other black children and slightly above the national average
Ex. George Washington Carver, one of the first notable black scientists, was an orphan raised by a white family
-genetic determinism in the early twentieth century was by no means simply an issue about black and white Americans
-genetic determinism literature was widely accepted: blacks were genetically inferior, but also people from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe were genetically inferior to people from Western Europe and Northern Europe
-among the massive new wave of immigrants were Eastern European Jews
-Carl Brigham, creator of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), stated that the Army mental test results tended to “disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent”
-H.H. Goddard, who tested children of these Eastern European and Southern European immigrants at the Ellis Island immigrant receiving facility, declared that “These people cannot deal with abstractions.”
-Francis A. Walker, a prominent economist, described immigrants from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe as “beaten men from beaten races,” a “foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe,” originating in places where “no breath of intellectual life has stirred for ages.”
-Professor Edward A. Ross, an official of the American Economic Association and President of the American Sociological Association, coined the term “race suicide”
***Race Suicide was used this term to describe the prospect of a demographic replacement over time of the Western Europeans and Northern Europeans by the Eastern Europeans and Southern Europeans because both had a higher birth rate
-he called new immigrants “oxlike men” and descendents of backwards people, whose very physical appearance “proclaims inferiority type”
-Professor Ross lamented an “unanticipated result” of widespread access to medical advances–namely “the brightening of the survival prospect of the ignorant, the stupid, the careless and the very poor”
***Roscoe Pound, dean of the Harvard law school, promoted judicial activism to free government from Constitutional restrictions, leaving judges with a more expansive role to play in promoting Progressive social policies
-Who led the crusade for genetic determinism:
-founders of scholarly organizations
-American Economic Association
-American Sociological Association
-the president of Stanford University
-president of MIT
-renowned professors at leading universities
-in England, John Maynard Keynes was one of the founders of the eugenics society at Cambridge University
-most intellectuals were on the political left in both countries
-But, there were also conservatives such as Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain
Eugenics:
-today, there are hundreds of courses on eugenics in colleges and universities across the United Stated
-today, there are hundreds of courses on college and university campuses that promote very different ideologies as regards to race, but with a very similar sense of mission
***a very similar intolerance toward those who do not share their ideology or their mission
-”Eugenics” was a term coined by Sir Francis Galton
-it describes an agenda to reduce or prevent the survival of people considered genetically inferior
“There exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an inferior race” (Galton).
“We must give to the most hopeless classes left behind in our social progress custodial care with the highest possible development and with segregation of sexes and confinement to prevent reproduction” (Professor Richard T. Ely, one of the founders of American Economic Association).
-Professor Irving Fisher of Yale, the leading American monetary economist of his day advocated the prevention of the “breeding of the worst” by “isolation in public institutions and in some cases by surgical operation”
-Professor Henry Rogers Seager, of Columbia University, stated “we must courageously cut off lines of heredity that have been proved to be undesirable,” even if that requires “isolation or sterilization”
-Professor of economics Frank Taussig, of Harvard, said of a variety of people he considered inferior, that if it were not feasible to “chloroform then once and for all,” then “at least they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented from propagating their kind.”
***bottom line = eliminate the inferior
***these leading scholars advocated imprisoning people for life, who had committed no crime, and depriving them of a normal life
-the book, Passing o the Great Race by Madison Grant, declared that “race lies at the base of all the manifestation of modern society” and deplored “a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life” when that is used “to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community.”
***this book was translated into other languages, including German and Hitler called it his “Bible”
Progressives:
-economist Richard T. Ely, rejected free market economics because he saw government power as something to be applied “to the amelioration of the conditions under which people live or work.”
-Ely didn’t see government power as a threat to freedom
-Ely stated “regulation by the power of the state of these industrial and other social relations existing among men is a condition of freedom.”
-Ely favored “public ownership” of municipal utilities, highways, and railroads
-he declared that “labor unions should be legally encouraged in their efforts for shorter hours and higher wages” and that “inheritance and income taxes should be generally extended”
***eugenics was to him just another social benefit he wanted provided by government
-Professor Ely was clearly a man on the left, and has been called “the father of institutional economics”
***this branch of economics is long noted for its opposition to free-market economics
-John R. Commons (student of Professor Ely) became a leading institutional economist at the University of Wisconsin, rejected free-market competition because “competition has no respect for the superior races,” so that “the race with the lowest necessities displaces others.”
-President Woodrow Wilson, student of Ely, too saw some races as inferior
-he approved of the annexation of Puerto Rico by President William McKinley who stated this in reference to those annexed:
“They are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice.”
-Wilson’s own administration segregated black employees of federal agencies in Washington
-he showed the movie, “Birth of A Nation”---glorifying the Ku Klux Klan in the White House
***Wilson say no dangers to freedom in an expansion of government power–whether through the creation of new federal agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve System during his own administration, or through the appointment of federal judges who would “interpret” the Constitution so as to loosen what President Wilson regarded as excessive restriction on the powers of government
-Wilson’s book, The New Freedom, arbitrarily defined government benefits as a new form of freedom
-Wilson dismissed any concerns about expanding powers of government being a threat to people’s freedom
***this redefinition of freedom has persisted today expanding welfare state powers
-Professor Edward A. Ross, who is regarded as one of the founders of sociology in the United States
-Ross referred to “us liberals” as people who speak up “for public interests against powerful selfish private interests.”
-he denounced those who disagreed with his views as unworthy “kept” spokesmen fo especial interests, a “mercenary corps” as contrasted with “us champions of the social welfare”
-Progressives can be very sincere when presupposing their own superiority
-Progressives past and present advocated for social justice
-Progressives are activists with progressive causes
***while these different generations of Progressives reached opposite conclusions on the reasons for racial differences in economic and social outcomes, they shared very similar views on the role of government in general and judges in particular
-both remained largely impervious to evidence or conclusions contrary to their own beliefs
Cultures:
-Ancient times had racial segregation
-Southern Europeans (the Roman Empire) was much more advanced
-Cicero warned his fellow Romans not to buy British slaves because they were hard to teach
-in regards to the Southern and Eastern European immigrants being unable to deal with abstractions is to deny the talents of the ancient Greeks
-the Greeks did not simply learn mathematics but were among the creators of mathematics
-Euclid in geometry
-Pythagoras in trigonometry
-there was no belief that there was some biological superiority of the ancient Greeks in southeastern Europe
***low scores on ment tests on abstract questions is hardly surprising since abstractions didn’t play a major role in all people’s lives–especially not among the low-income, working-class people
-Greek elite achievements included mathematics, philosophy, literature, and architecture
-ancient Greeks created magnificent buildings in the Acropolis that has served as models for iconic buildings in many other countries
Ex. the Capitol building in the United States, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington
-the Greeks created exquisite statues and busts of human beings that people still marvel at and admire in museums in various countries today
-we still look to ancient Greek thinkers like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and Pythagoras
Who are the Britons:
-unlike the the ancient Greeks there is not one Briton name written in the pages of history
-in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries A.D., the Britons led the world into the industrial revolution
-their scientific breakthrough preceded centuries before the industrial revolution
-this included the scientific achievements of Sir Isaac Newton who was also one of the creators of calculus
***These undisputed facts of history argue against genetic determinism, when peoples in different parts of Europe were clearly more advanced in different centuries.
-such radical changes over millennia suggest reciprocal inequalities on a grand scale, from very different historical epochs
-the reality of vast differences in specific capabilities of different peoples, at different times and in different places, is no capitulation to genetic determinism
-a thousand years ago, the Chinese were more advanced than Europeans in many endeavors
-but later, their positions were reversed
-there is no evidence that the genetic makeup of either the Chinese or the Europeans had changed
-1994, millions of overseas Chinese produced as much wealth as the billion people in China
-the race was the same, but the production of wealth per capita was radically different
***genetic determinists of the early Progressive era took a remarkably narrow sample of the evidence available to them
-mental test pioneer, Carl Brigham, asserted in 1923 that the Army mental test provided an “inventory” of “mental capacity” with “a scientific basis”
-in 1930, Brigham, recanted his findings
-he pointed out that immigrants who were tested by the Army were raised in homes where the language spoken was not English
-he declared that his previous conclusions were–in his own word–”without foundation”
-more and more evidence accumulated that undermined the conclusions of these Army IQ tests
2021:
-Charles Murrey published data showing that the mean black IQ was now 91 up from the usual 85 in earlier times
-this meant that black improvement on IQ tests has not simply kept pace with other people’s improvement but has improved more
Professor Flynn:
-his research destroyed the central rationale for the concussions of early twentieth-century
-progressive-era genetic determinists, who had proclaimed an urgent necessity to prevent people with lower IQs from reproducing
-the assumption that such people were genetically incapable of reaching the same average intellectual level that was then current
-in this assumption, the intelligence of the nation as a whole would decline over time
-implicit in genetic determinism is there was a genetically determined ceiling of intelligence fo some groups, making it imperative that they be prevented from reproducing
***The IQ ceiling was disproved as Professor Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley asked, “why should anyone be surprised to find that there are Negro children having IQs of 115 or higher, or that they should be concentrated in the affluent integrated neighborhood in Los Angeles?”
-The implicit assumption of a low IQ ceiling by the early Progressive-era genetic determinists are now gone
-But, its enduring significance for our era is as a painfully urgent warning against intolerant ideological stampedes even when these stampedes are led by leading scholars and intellectuals, and spread by a wide range of institutions
Progressivism:
-today it is no longer genetic, but it is economic and social outcomes
-mental tests once exalted as an embodiment of “science,” supposedly proving genetic determinism are now dismissed as biased
-Today, the ACT and SAT college admissions tests produced results that conflicts with the new social justice agenda of imposed demographic representation of various social groups in various institutions and endeavors
***this new progressive era is statistical disparities between blacks and whites in any endeavor
-any endeavor is now used as sufficient to produce a conclusion that racial discrimination was the reason success or unsuccess
-Asian American data are almost invariably omitted by media, academic scholars, and universities
Job Market:
-black employees may in fact be terminated during an economic downturn, sooner or to a greater extent than white employees
-data shows that white employees are often let go before Asian American employees
***Can this be attributed to racial discrimination against whites?
-Are we to accept statistical data as evidence when these data fit existing preconceptions, but not accept such data when they go counter to those same perceptions?
***Or are we to be spared such problems by those who simply omit facts that go against their vision or agenda?
Housing:
-the housing boom and bust causing an economic crisis was created because of the widespread belief that there was rampant racial discrimination by the banks and other lending institutions against blacks applying for mortgage loans
-statistics from different sources showed that although most black and white applicants for conventional mortgage loans were approved, black applicants were turned down as a higher rate than white applicants for the same loans
-Omitted was the statistical data showing that whites were turned down for those same loans more often than Asian Americans
Credit Ratings:
-the average credit rating of whites was higher than the average credit score of blacks
-the average credit rating of Asian Americans was higher than the average credit score of whites
-there were other economically relevant difference but not included
-were white mortgage lenders discriminating against white applicants?
-were black mortgage lenders discriminating against black applicants by black-owned banks?
***black applicants for mortgage loans were turned down at an even higher rate by black-owned banks
Lowered Standards:
-outraged demands in the media, in academia, and in politics that the government should do something about racial discrimination by banks and other mortgage lenders
-the government responded by forcing mortgage lenders to lower their lending standards
-this made mortgage loans risky and many people warned that the housing market could “collapse” like a house of cards
-when the housing market crashed the whole economy collapsed
-low-income blacks were among those who suffered
Student discipline in public schools:
-statistics show that black males have been disciplined for misbehavior more often than white males
-the prevailing preconception that the behavior of different groups themselves cannot be different so this is automatically is an example of discrimination
-this became a literal federal issue
-the Dept. of Education and the Dept. of Justice warned public school officials that they wanted what they characterized as a racially discriminatory patterns ended
Landmark Study: No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (Abigail & Stephen Thernstrom)
-this was a study of American education
-it showed that black students were disciplined two-and-a-half times as often as white students
-it showed that white students were disciplined twice as often as Asian students
-Were predominantly white teachers biased against white students?
-the disciplining of black students didn’t include if it correlated with the teachers involved being black or white
***all these statistics by race, that does not necessarily means that the employers, lenders, or teachers made decisions on the basis of race
Points:
-black, white, and Asian employees had different distributions of jobs
-these jobs are distributed differently at different levels in the same occupations
-decisions are made as to which kinds of jobs are needed or job performances that are required
-any economic downturn could result in the racial disparities seen during that time
-banking officials who decided whose mortgage applications to accept or reject are unlikely to have actually seen the applicants themselves
-applicants are more likely interviewed by lower-level employees
-employees then pass on the individual credit rating to higher officials who decide to reject or approve
-in public schools, teachers would obviously see the students misbehavior they reported, but the fact that black and white teachers made similar reports, suggests that race is not likely to be the key factor in this case either
American History:
-there was the widest consensus on racial issues, across racial lines, was the occasion of the historic speech by Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963
He had given his dream speech of a world where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
-his message was equal opportunity for individuals, regardless of race
-the agenda and wide consensus it had begun eroding in the years to follow
-the goal changed from equal opportunity for individuals, regardless of race, to equal outcomes for groups, whether these groups were defined by race, sex or otherwise
***what has risen in dominance is the social justice agenda, which included equalized outcomes in the present and reparations of the past
1963: equal opportunity for individuals regardless
Today: equal outcomes for groups, reparations for the past, goals of the social justice agenda