It has become an article of faith in some quarters that racial discrimination in employment, housing and consumer markets was eliminated or has been/was massively reduced by passage of such laws as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Any remaining discrimination is actually "reverse discrimination" against white men and women via "affirmative action (AA) quotas", who have been wrongly made to feel "white guilt" about things they had nothing to do with. And if perchance racial discrimination is found, why its of minor consequence, and perfectly rational given bad black culture, genetics and so on- the "rational racism" defense. All of the above are dubious and have been debunked a number of times on this blog, as shown by the links below. But what about the actual hard data on racial discrimination today in employment, housing and consumer markets? Part 1 of our exploration looks at scholarly data, not random rants and fulminations off the web. Part 2 of the discussion looks at some conservative and libertarian responses.
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/09/1162103286/home-appraisal-racial-bias-black-homeowners-lawsuit
A black couple (Tenisha Tate-Austin and Paul Austin) got a shockingly low appraisal from a white appraiser for their home in a nice middle class neighborhood in "liberal" northern California, despite its excellent condition. They suspected bias and some time later had another appraisal with a pair of white friends standing in for the homeowners, including the use of the white couple's family pictures. For the same house, with white faces showing as owners, the subsequent appraisal increased by almost 40%. The black couple sued and won an out of court settlement. Bias in the appraisal industry is a well documented phenomenon.
A huge 2021 study by Freddie Mac, the government guarantor of home mortgages found clear bias in a survey of around 12 million appraisals nationwide, showing that even when researchers accounted for structural differences in homes and the unique characteristics of different neighborhoods, Black and Latino areas were still more likely to see lower appraisals. There was also no evidence that the disparity was caused by a small number of appraisers, the report said. (https://www.freddiemac.com/research/insight/20210920-home-appraisals)
A 2018 Brookings Institute study found the same overall results. (https://www.brookings.edu/research/devaluation-of-assets-in-black-neighborhoods/)
A 2018 Brookings Institute study found the same overall results. (https://www.brookings.edu/research/devaluation-of-assets-in-black-neighborhoods/)
Update 3: Article-Workplace discrimination is illegal- yet it persists.
QUOTE:
"[The] Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in Washington, DC, analyzed eight years of complaint data from the EEOC as well as its state and local counterparts. It reviewed hundreds of court cases and interviewed dozens of people who filed EEOC claims, which are made under penalty of perjury. What emerged is a picture of a system that routinely fails workers. Complaint data obtained from the EEOC for fiscal years 2010 through 2017 — a rare window into a largely obscured problem in America’s workplaces — shows that the agency closes most cases without concluding whether discrimination occurred. Sometimes, workers’ lawyers say, an EEOC investigation involves no more than asking the employer for a response..
A key part of the issue, according to experts and former EEOC employees, is that the agency doesn’t have the resources for its mammoth task. It has a smaller budget today than it did in 1980, adjusted for inflation, and 42 percent less staff. At the same time, the country’s labor force increased about 50 percent, to 160 million... The EEOC, in short, can’t come close to fulfilling the mission Congress gave it more than 50 years ago. The agency was the Civil Rights Act’s attempt to eradicate job discrimination from a nation plagued with it, but it’s never had the money and support to do it."
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/28/18241973/workplace-discrimination-cpi-investigation-eeoc
QUOTE:
"[The] Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in Washington, DC, analyzed eight years of complaint data from the EEOC as well as its state and local counterparts. It reviewed hundreds of court cases and interviewed dozens of people who filed EEOC claims, which are made under penalty of perjury. What emerged is a picture of a system that routinely fails workers. Complaint data obtained from the EEOC for fiscal years 2010 through 2017 — a rare window into a largely obscured problem in America’s workplaces — shows that the agency closes most cases without concluding whether discrimination occurred. Sometimes, workers’ lawyers say, an EEOC investigation involves no more than asking the employer for a response..
A key part of the issue, according to experts and former EEOC employees, is that the agency doesn’t have the resources for its mammoth task. It has a smaller budget today than it did in 1980, adjusted for inflation, and 42 percent less staff. At the same time, the country’s labor force increased about 50 percent, to 160 million... The EEOC, in short, can’t come close to fulfilling the mission Congress gave it more than 50 years ago. The agency was the Civil Rights Act’s attempt to eradicate job discrimination from a nation plagued with it, but it’s never had the money and support to do it."
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/28/18241973/workplace-discrimination-cpi-investigation-eeoc
Update 2- The biggest civil rights settlement in history- $2 billion- black farmers systematic discrimination by the US Department of Agriculture- yet assorted conservatives and libertarians keep telling us that systematic discrimination does not exist- its only individual "bad apples"..
What is interesting about the black farmers case is that it only covers discrimination AFTER the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had already passed, and yet a 2 billion settlement in aggregate. And most of those who suffered DON'T get anything. Who says the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "took care" of the racial discrimination problem?
What is interesting about the black farmers case is that it only covers discrimination AFTER the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had already passed, and yet a 2 billion settlement in aggregate. And most of those who suffered DON'T get anything. Who says the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "took care" of the racial discrimination problem?
--
Consider the "Pigford" case, where African-American farmers, who had suffered decades of discrimination, finally, after decades of litigation, won the hugest civil rights settlement in history, but saw relatively little money or satisfactory reform when the smoke cleared. Their struggle was dismissed and distorted as a "black giveaway" by right-wing media operatives, when in fact, in an exceedingly complicated case involving tens of thousands, the black farmers as a whole saw minimal amounts (what's $50,000 per head for example, when one farm combine may cost $300,000, or debt service might cost $10,000 per month), or no compensation at all. And what about the white wrongdoers still in place within the USDA who engineered the discrimination problem? Little of this is mentioned in the distorted right-wing "giveaway" narrative. As of this writing, many are still in place. As one detailed history notes:
“The civil rights and equal opportunity laws of the mid-1960s prompted USDA bureaucrats to embrace equal rights rhetorically even as they intensified discrimination. This passive nullification, voicing agreement with equal rights while continuing or intensifying discrimination, did not rely on antebellum intellectual arguments or confrontations but instead thrived silently in the offices of biased employees. Phone calls and conversations at segregated meetings and conventions left no racist fingerprints, but the accretion of prejudice festered and ultimately grew into a plan to eliminate minority, women, and small farmers by preventing their sharing equally in federal programs. Despite overwhelming evidence of discrimination, incompetence, and falsehoods in many offices, the USDA never cut off funds to those offices, and apparently no white person was fired and few were even relocated or reprimanded.”
--Pete Daniel 2015. Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights. Pp. xi – xii
https://flexpub.com/preview/dispossession
and
"Breitbart said he first became "obsessed" with the Pigford settlements for Black farmers in 2010... But our analysis of census data shows that [Breitbart's] arguments rested on specious numbers. They failed to account for the survey’s historical undercounts of Black farmers, which—along with other factors—led them to understate the number of potentially eligible claimants. Our reporting suggests that most Black people who farmed in the relevant period did not receive Pigford payments, and a closer look at those who did shows the payments were often inadequate.. ..many Black farmers do not feel the settlement helped “close a painful chapter in our collective history.”
--Nathan Rosenberg and Bryce Stucki. How USDA distorted data to conceal decades of discrimination against Black farmers.
https://thecounter.org/usda-black-farmers-discrimination-tom-vilsack-reparations-civil-rights/
and
"Unfortunately, the United States Congress, the Federal courts and the attorneys handling the Pigford case hailed it as the savior of black farmers in the media. This widely held perception of the case would be proven to be far from the truth . The high denial rates, the lack of adequatechange in USDA policies and procedures and the failure of the USDA and its Office of Civil Rights and Office of General Counsel to prevent ongoing acts of discrimination and protect the black farmers against retaliation demonstrate the shortcomings of the Pigford consent decree.
The primary goal of the Pigford consent decree was to pay black farmers quickly without much decision about how USDA would change its practices to ensure zero tolerance for acts of discrimination and the employees who perpetuate those illegal acts."
-- USDA Civil Rights Program- Subcommittee Hearings on Department Operations. No 107-23. 2002. US House of Representatives, US Congress.
Update 1- See recent EEOC case roundup:
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2019/01/blog-post.html
Now on to the main show- Discrimination is alive and kicking..
Here are some excerpts from Pager and Shepard, two college professors (Pager and Shepard. 2008. The sociology of discrimination- Racial discrimination in employment, housing, credit, consumer markets, Annu. Rev. Sociol 2008. 34:181–209)
QUOTE:
"Employment
"Although there have been some remarkable gains in the labor force status of racial minorities, significant disparities remain. African Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as whites (Hispanics are only marginally so), and the wages of both blacks and Hispanics continue to lag well behind those of whites (author’s analysis of Current Population Survey, 2006). A long line of research has examined the degree to which discrimination plays a role in shaping contemporary labor market disparities. Experimental audit studies focusing on hiring decisions have consistently found strong evidence of racial discrimination, with estimates of white preference ranging from 50% to 240% (Cross et al. 1989, Turner et al. 1991, Fix & Struyk 1993, Bendick et al. 1994; see Pager 2007a for a review). For example, in a study by Bertrand & Mullainathan (2004), the researchers mailed equivalent resumes to employers in Boston and Chicago using racially identifiable names to signal race (for example, names like Jamal and Lakisha signaled African Americans, while Brad and Emily were associated with whites).2 White names triggered a callback rate that was 50% higher than that of equally qualified black applicants. Further, their study indicated that improving the qualifications of applicants benefited white applicants but not blacks, thus leading to a wider racial gap in response rates for those with higher skill. Statistical studies of employment outcomes likewise reveal large racial disparities unaccounted for by observed human capital characteristics.
Tomaskovic-Devey et al. (2005) present evidence from a fixed-effects model indicating that black men spend significantly more time searching for work, acquire less work experience, and experience less stable employment than do whites with otherwise equivalent characteristics. Wilson et al. (1995) find that, controlling for age, education, urban location, and occupation, black male high school graduates are 70% more likely to experience involuntary unemployment than whites with similar characteristics and that this disparity increases among those with higher levels of education. At more aggregate levels, research points to the persistence of occupational segregation, with racial minorities concentrated in jobs with lower levels of stability and authority and with fewer opportunities for advancement (Parcel & Mueller 1983, Smith 2002). Of course, these residual estimates cannot control for all relevant factors, such as motivation, effort, access to useful social networks, and other factors that may produce disparities in the absence of direct discrimination. Nevertheless, these estimates suggest that blacks and whites with observably similar human capital characteristics experience markedly different employment outcomes.."
--snip--
QUOTE:
"Housing
Residential segregation by race remains a salient feature of contemporary American cities. Indeed, African Americans were as segregated from whites in 1990 as they had been at the start of the twentieth century, and levels of segregation appear unaffected by rising socioeconomic status (Massey & Denton 1993). Although segregation appears to have modestly decreased between 1980 and 2000 (Logan et al. 2004), blacks (and to a lesser extent other minority groups) continue to experience patterns of residential placement markedly different from whites. The degree to which discrimination contributes to racial disparities in housing has been a major preoccupation of social scientists and federal housing agents (Charles 2003).
The vast majority of the work on discrimination in housing utilizes experimental audit data. For example, between 2000 and 2002 the Department of Housing and Urban Development conducted an extensive series of audits measuring housing discrimination against blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, including nearly 5500 paired tests in nearly 30 metropolitan areas [see Turner et al. (2002),Turner&Ross (2003a); see also Hakken (1979), Feins & Bratt (1983), Yinger (1986), Roychoudhury & Goodman (1992, 1996) for additional, single-city audits of housing discrimination].
The study results reveal bias across multiple dimensions, with blacks experiencing consistent adverse treatment in roughly one in five housing searches and Hispanics experiencing consistent adverse treatment in roughly one out of four housing searches (both rental and sales).3 Measured discrimination took the form of less information offered about units, fewer opportunities to view units, and, in the case of home buyers, less assistance with financing and steering into less wealthy communities and neighborhoods with a higher proportion of minority residents.
Generally, the results of the 2000 Housing Discrimination Study indicate that aggregate levels of discrimination against blacks declined modestly in both rentals and sales since 1989 (although levels of racial steering increased). Discrimination against Hispanics in housing sales declined, although Hispanics experienced increasing levels of discrimination in rental markets.
Other research using telephone audits further points to a gender and class dimension of racial discrimination in which black women and/or blacks who speak in a manner associated with a lower-class upbringing suffer greater discrimination than black men and/or those signaling a middle-class upbringing (Massey & Lundy 2001, Purnell et al. 1999). Context also matters in the distribution of discrimination events (Fischer & Massey 2004). Turner & Ross (2005) report that segregation and class steering of blacks occurs most often when either the housing or the office of the real estate agent is in a predominantly white neighborhood. Multi-city audits likewise suggest that the incidence of discrimination varies substantially across metropolitan contexts (Turner et al. 2002).
Moving beyond evidence of exclusionary treatment, Roscigno and colleagues (2007) provide evidence of the various forms of housing discrimination that can extend well beyond the point of purchase (or rental agreement). Examples from a sample of discrimination claims filed with the Civil Rights Commission of Ohio point to the failure of landlords to provide adequate maintenance for housing units, to harassment or physical threats by managers or neighbors, and to the unequal enforcement of a residential association’s rules. Overall, the available evidence suggests that discrimination in rental and housing markets remains pervasive. Although there are some promising signs of change, the frequency with which racial minorities experience differential treatment in housing searches suggests that discrimination remains an important barrier to residential opportunities."
--snip--
As one study succinctly puts it as to housing policy:
"Literally, those authorized to make loans at banks would draw on a map a red line around a black community, and no one inside that red line could get a loan. Until 1949 the FHA also encouraged the use of restrictive covenants banning African Americans from given neighborhoods and refused to insure mortgages in integrated neighborhoods. Thanks to the FHA, no bank would insure loans in the ghetto, and few African Americans could live outside it. See Quadagno, Color of Welfare 24 25, and Massey and Denton, American Apartheid."
--Brander et al. 2001.The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness. p 135.
QUOTE:
"Credit Markets
Whites possess roughly 12 times the wealth of African Americans; in fact, whites near the bottom of the income distribution possess more wealth than blacks near the top of the income distribution (Oliver & Shapiro 1997, p. 86). Given that home ownership is one of the most significant sources of wealth accumulation, patterns that affect the value and viability of home ownership will have an impact on wealth disparities overall. Accordingly, the majority of work on discrimination in credit markets focuses on the specific case of mortgages. Available evidence suggests that blacks and Hispanics face higher rejection rates and less favorable terms in securing mortgages than do whites with similar credit characteristics (Ross & Yinger 1999). Oliver & Shapiro (1997, p. 142) report that blacks pay more than 0.5% higher interest rates on home mortgages than do whites and that this difference persists with controls for income level, date of purchase, and age of buyer.
The most prominent study of the effect of race on rejection rates for mortgage loans is by Munnell et al. (1996), which uses 1991 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data supplemented by data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, including individual applicants’ financial, employment, and property background variables that lenders use to calculate the applicants’ probability of default. Accounting for a range of variables linked to risk of default, cost of default, loan characteristics, and personal and neighborhood characteristics, they find that black and Hispanic applications were 82% more likely to be rejected than were those from similar whites. Critics argued that the study was flawed on the basis of the quality of the data collected (Horne 1994), model specification problems (Glennon & Stengel 1994), omitted variables (Zandi 1993, Liebowitz 1993, Horne 1994, Day & Liebowitz 1996), and endogenous explanatory variables (see Ross&Yinger 1999 for a full explication of the opposition), although rejoinders suggest that the race results are affected little by these modifications (Ross & Yinger 1999; S.L. Ross&G.M.B.Tootell, unpublished manuscript).
Audit research corroborates evidence of mortgage discrimination, finding that black testers are less likely to receive a quote for a loan than are white testers and that they are given less time with the loan officer, are quoted higher interest rates, and are given less coaching and less information than are comparable white applicants (for a review, see Ross&Yinger 2002).
In addition to investigating the race of the applicant, researchers have investigated the extent to which the race of the neighborhood affects lending decisions, otherwise known as redlining. Although redlining is a well-documented factor in the origins of contemporary racial residential segregation (see Massey & Denton 1993), studies after the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which outlawed redlining, and since the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which made illegal having a smaller pool of mortgage funds available in minority neighborhoods than in similar white neighborhoods, find little evidence of its persistence (Benston & Horsky 1991, Schafer & Ladd 1981, Munnell et al. 1996). This conclusion depends in part, however, on one’s definition of neighborhood-based discrimination. Ross & Yinger (1999) distinguish between process-based and outcome based redlining, with process-based redlining referring to “whether the probability that a loan application is denied is higher in minority neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods, all else equal” whereas outcome-based redlining refers to smaller amounts of mortgage funding available to minority neighborhoods relative to comparable white neighborhoods. Although evidence on both types of redlining is mixed, several studies indicate that, controlling for demand, poor and/or minority neighborhoods have reduced access to mortgage funding, particularly from mainstream lenders (Phillips-Patrick & Rossi 1996, Siskin & Cupingood 1996; see also Ladd 1998 for methodological issues in measuring redlining).
As a final concern, competition and deregulation of the banking industry have led to greater variability in conditions of loans, prompting the label of the “new inequality” in lending (Williams et al. 2005, Holloway 1998). Rather than focusing on rejection rates, these researchers focus on the terms and conditions of loans, in particular whether a loan is favorable or subprime (Williams et al. 2005, Apgar & Calder 2005, Squires 2003). Immergluck & Wiles (1999) have called this the “dual mortgage market” in which prime lending is given to higher income and white areas, while subprime and predatory lending is concentrated in lower-income and minority communities (see also Dymski 2006, pp. 232–36). Williams et al. (2005), examining changes between 1993 and 2000, find rapid gains in loans to underserved markets from specialized lenders: 78% of the increase in lending to minority neighborhoods was from subprime lenders, and 72% of the increase in refinance lending to blacks was from subprime lenders. Further, the authors find that “even at the highest income level, blacks are almost three times as likely to get their loans from a subprime lender as are others” (p. 197; see also Calem et al. 2004). Although the disproportionate rise of subprime lending in minority communities is not solely the result of discrimination, some evidence suggests that in certain cases explicit racial targeting may be at work. In two audit studies in which creditworthy testers approached subprime lenders, whites were more likely to be referred to the lenders’ prime borrowing division than were similar black applicants (see Williams et al. 2005). Further, subprime lenders quoted the black applicants very high rates, fees, and closing costs that were not correlated with risk (Williams et al. 2005).4
Not all evidence associated with credit market discrimination is bad news. Indeed, between 1989 and 2000 the number of mortgage loans to blacks and Hispanics nationwide increased 60%, compared with 16% for whites, suggesting that some convergence is taking place (Turner et al. 2002). Nevertheless, the evidence indicates that blacks and Hispanics continue to face higher rejection rates and receive less favorable terms than whites of equal credit risk."
--snip--
Pager and Shepard have much more to discuss, including consumer credit discrimination, but you get the picture from the snippets above, which many seem intent on denying, or minimizing - namely, that racial discrimination in employment, housing and credit markets is alive and well.
Pager and Shepard also note the continuing impact of white preferential "word of mouth" and other social networks, and the continuing effect of past discrimination in suppressing black opportunity, wealth and other things. This past cannot be simply airbrushed away as a factor in the current era.
Quote:
"Indeed, many organizational policies or procedures can impose disparate impact along racial lines with little direct influence from individual decision makers. The case of networks represents one important example... given high levels of social segregation (e.g., McPherson et al. 2001), the use of referrals is likely to reproduce the existing racial composition of the company and to exclude members of those groups not already well represented (Braddock & McPartland 1987). In an analysis of noncollege jobs, controlling for spatial segregation, occupational segregation, city, and firm size, Mouw (2002) finds that the use of employee referrals in predominantly white firms reduces the probability of a black hire by nearly 75% relative to the use of newspaper ads."
"The origins of contemporary racial wealth disparities, for example, have well-established links to historical practices of redlining, housing covenants, racially targeted federal housing policies, and other forms of active discrimination within housing and lending markets (e.g., Massey & Denton 1993). Setting aside evidence of continuing discrimination in each of these domains, these historical practices themselves are sufficient to maintain extraordinarily high levels of wealth inequality through the intergenerational transition of advantage (the ability to invest in good neighborhoods, good schools, college, housing assistance for adult children, etc.) (Oliver & Shapiro 1997). According to Conley (1999), even if we were to eliminate all contemporary forms of discrimination, huge racial wealth disparities would persist, which in turn underlie racial inequalities in schooling, employment, and other social domains (see also Lieberson & Fuguitt 1967). Recent work based on formal modeling suggests that the effects of past discrimination, particularly as mediated by ongoing forms of social segregation, are likely to persist well into the future, even in the absence of ongoing discrimination (see Bowles et al. 2007, Lundberg & Startz 1998). These historical sources of discrimination may become further relevant, not only in their perpetuation of present-day inequalities, but also through their reinforcement of contemporary forms of stereotypes and discrimination."
--Pager and Shepard. 2008. Sociology of Discrimination. Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2008.34:181-209.
Cumulative effects of discrimination and ostensible "race neutrality." Supposedly "race neutral" policies or practices may also perpetuate effects of discrimination by locking in the privileges and advantages gained from past discrimination. Barring blacks from decent housing markets and land purchases for generations for example, locks in the advantages gained by whites over those generations, and will produce people substantially locked out of the major source of wealth in the United States- home ownership, or out of jobs that are much easer to find, and to get to from once "off limits" white suburban locations. Discrimination can have accumulative effects. For example routing women to certain jobs at career entry will produce disparities in pay, promotions, income etc, years later down the road. Passage of a few laws, or declarations of a level playing field, will not magically erase these cumulative effects- some built up over generations. As Pager and Shepard further note:
QUOTE:
"These examples point to contexts in which ostensibly race-neutral policies can structure and reinforce existing social inequalities. According to Omi & Winant (1994), “through policies which are explicitly or implicitly racial, state institutions organize and enforce the racial politics of everyday life. For example, they enforce racial (non)discrimination policies, which they administer, arbitrate, and encode in law. They organize racial identities by means of education, family law, and the procedures for punishment, treatment, and surveillance of the criminal, deviant and ill” (p. 83). Even without any willful intent, policies can play an active role in designating the beneficiaries and victims of a particular system of resource allocation, with important implications for enduring racial inequalities.
Accumulation of disadvantage. This third category of structural discrimination draws our attention to how the effects of discrimination in one domain or at one point in time may have consequences for a broader range of outcomes. Through spillover effects across domains, processes of cumulative (dis)advantage across the life course, and feedback effects, the effects of 9The case of drug policy and enforcement is one area for which evidence of direct racial discrimination is stronger (see Beckett et al. 2005, Tonry 1995). discrimination can intensify and, in some cases, become self-sustaining. Although traditional measures of discrimination focus on individual decision points (e.g., the decision to hire, to rent, to offer a loan), the effects of these decisions may extend into other relevant domains. Discrimination in credit markets, for example, contributes to higher rates of loan default, with negative implications for minority entrepreneurship, home ownership, and wealth accumulation (Oliver & Shapiro 1997). Discrimination in housing markets contributes to residential segregation, which is associated with concentrated disadvantage (Massey & Denton 1993), poor health outcomes ( Williams 2004), and limited educational and employment opportunities (Massey & Fischer 2006, Fernandez & Su 2004).
Single point estimates of discrimination within a particular domain may substantially underestimate the cumulative effects of discrimination over time and the ways in which discrimination in one domain can trigger disadvantage in many others. In addition to linkages across domains, the effects of discrimination may likewise span forward in time, with the cumulative impact of discrimination magnifying initial effects. Blau & Ferber (1987), for example, point to how the channeling of men and women into different job types at career entry “will virtually ensure sex differences in productivity, promotion opportunities, and pay” (p. 51). Small differences in starting points can have large effects over the life course (and across generations), even in the absence of continuing discrimination [for a rich discussion of cumulative (dis)advantage, see DiPrete & Eirich (2006)]."
--Pager and Shepard. 2008. Sociology of Discrimination. Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2008.34:181-209.
Other data- employment- "Black sounding" names need not apply:
One study by economists at MIT found that even when job applicants are equally qualified in terms of experience and education, applicants with white-sounding names are 50 percent more likely than those with black-sounding names to get a callback for an interview. Another found that white male job applicants with criminal records are more likely to get called back for an interview than black men without one, even when all other qualifications are indistinguishable. Even more depressing ,the study fond that the prospective "black" applicants had to have EIGHT ADDITIONAL YEARS OF EXPERIENCE to get the same number of job callbacks as the prospective "white "candidate. The higher the quality of the resume, the stronger the racial bias became. As scholars of the study note: QUOTE:
One study by economists at MIT found that even when job applicants are equally qualified in terms of experience and education, applicants with white-sounding names are 50 percent more likely than those with black-sounding names to get a callback for an interview. Another found that white male job applicants with criminal records are more likely to get called back for an interview than black men without one, even when all other qualifications are indistinguishable. Even more depressing ,the study fond that the prospective "black" applicants had to have EIGHT ADDITIONAL YEARS OF EXPERIENCE to get the same number of job callbacks as the prospective "white "candidate. The higher the quality of the resume, the stronger the racial bias became. As scholars of the study note: QUOTE:
"We study race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate perceived race, resumes are randomly assigned African-American-or White-sounding names. White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. Callbacks are also more responsive to resume quality for White names than for African-American ones. The racial gap is uniform across occupation, industry, and employer size. We also find little evidence that employers are inferring social class from the names. Differential treatment by race still appears to still be prominent in the U.S. labor market."
-- Bertrand and Mullalinathan 2004. Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? American Economic Review. Sept 2004- 991-1013
QUOTE:
"Research buttresses this evidence of wage discrimination with findings of significant race- and gender-based discrimination in hiring... a multi-year, national study on race and sex discrimination in large and midsized private businesses found that intentional discrimination exists in every region of the country and in each of nine occupational categories ...” (Blumrosen and Blumrosen 2002). Even as recently as this year [2012], the U.S. Department of Labor Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs found that FedEx engaged in discrimination against 21,000 applicants in 15 states (U.S. Department of Labor 2012). In short, although the American ideal may be to judge individuals by the content of their character, we have not yet guaranteed equal opportunity in all cases."
--Source: Economic Policy Institute (2012) The Public Sector jobs crisis. http://www.epi.org/publication/bp339-public-sector-jobs-crisis/
"Controlled experiments, using matched pairs of bogus transactors, to test for discrimination in the marketplace have been conducted for over 30 years, and have extended across 10 countries. Significant, persistent and pervasive levels of discrimination have been found against non-whites and women in labour, housing and product markets. Rates of employment discrimination against non-whites, in excess of 25% have been measured in Australia, Europe and North America. "
-- Riach and Rich 2002. Field Experiments of Discrimination in the Market Place. The Economic JournalVolume 112, Issue 483, pages F480–F518.
"Controlled experiments, using matched pairs of bogus transactors, to test for discrimination in the marketplace have been conducted for over 30 years, and have extended across 10 countries. Significant, persistent and pervasive levels of discrimination have been found against non-whites and women in labour, housing and product markets. Rates of employment discrimination against non-whites, in excess of 25% have been measured in Australia, Europe and North America. "
-- Riach and Rich 2002. Field Experiments of Discrimination in the Market Place. The Economic JournalVolume 112, Issue 483, pages F480–F518.
and
As to white criminals- they seem preferable to black NON-criminals. One study by Pager et al. (2009), for example, found that employers, when given the choice between whites and blacks with and without criminal records, were more likely to give callbacks to whites with criminal records over blacks with no criminal records. (Pager, D., Western, B., & Bonikowski, B. (2009). Discrimination in a low-wage labor market: A field experiment. American Sociological Review, 74, 777-799.)
Also interesting is the fact that race discrimination measured went UP, the more qualified the black candidates were. As another study summarizes:
"The researchers found that race-linked name assignments yielded major variations in callback rates. Specifically, they discovered that "a 'white' applicant would need to send out eight resumes to get one call back, [while] a black applicant would need to send out fourteen resumes," nearly twice as many. Moreover, they also found that increasing the positive information in the resume did raise the odds of a callback for a "white" applicant but had no effect on the callback odds for a "black" applicant, Hence, Bertrand and Mullainathan conclude that "small increases in observable skills of applicants cause a rise in discrimination."
Two major implications follow from this study. First, this evidence of race-linked, name-based differential treatment weakens the empirical basis for the statistical theory of discrimination. In a context where the researchers exercise complete control over the information flow to the prospective employer about the "applicant," additional information signaling greater skills on the part of the "black" applicant fails to equalize labor market outcomes between the two racial groups. Second, Bertrand and Mullainathan's finding that anti-black discrimination relatively increases with resume improvement for the "black" job candidate suggests that the degree of discrimination is sensitive to the applicant's competitive characteristics. Thus, the study hints at the possibility that as blacks become better qualified, labor market discrimination against them may intensify."
--FROM: Race, Liberalism, and Economics -David Colander, et a (Editors) -(2004)-pp 193-194
Skin color and job market discrimination.
Several detailed studies have found labor market discrimination based on skin color even after adjusting for the standard factors: experience, training education, etc. As one study notes:
"Audit studies and skin-shade studies also provide compelling evidence of racial discrimination in the labor market. Skin-shade studies take advantage of the fact that African Americans and Latinos have a variety of skin shades and phenotypes, ranging from dark complexions and African or Native American features to light complexions and European facial features. To the extent that there is racial discrimination in the labor market, we would expect that African Americans and Latinos with the darkest and most nonEuropean phenotype would obtain lower income, employment, and occupational status than African Americans or Latinos with the lightest and most European phenotype. Audit studies are labor market experiments where carefully matched pairs of individuals (black–white or Hispanic–non-Hispanic white) who are otherwise equal, except for their racial identity, are sent into the labor market to obtain employment at the same set of businesses.
Typically, audit studies find rates of employment discrimination against African Americans and Latinos in excess of 25 percent (Riach and Rich 2002). For example, Bendick, Jackson, and Reinoso (1994) report that in a 1990 audit experiment carried out in Washington, D.C., testers found that black applicants were treated less favorably than equally qualified whites more than 71 percent of the time.2 Raich and Rich (2002) summarize a series of audit studies that report similar results. In 1992, Hispanic testers in Washington, D.C., were treated less favorably than whites 25 percent of the time. Hispanic discrimination occurred in the process of individuals trying to obtain an interview, whereas discrimination against African Americans occurred as individuals attempted to obtain a job offer. In 1989, Hispanic testers in Chicago encountered interview discrimination 21 percent of the time. Hispanic testers in a 1990 San Diego audit faced job Persistent Racial Discrimination in the Labor Market 147discrimination 11 percent of the time. Black testers in a 1990 Chicago study faced interview discrimination 8 percent of the time but were confronted with job discrimination 10 percent of the time in a 1990 Washington, D.C., study.
Finally, a 1998 San Francisco audit study revealed that African Americans were confronted with job discrimination 38 percent of the time that they attempted to obtain employment. Skin-shade studies have demonstrated sizable racial penalties within the labor market for those having a dark complexion. Keith and Herring (1991) examined the impact of skin-tone differences on individual and family income, years of education, and occupational status. Their data are taken from the 1979–1980 National Survey of Black Americans. They divided their sample into five skin-tone groups: very dark, dark brown, medium brown, light brown, very light. They found that an association between groups when comparing their relative physical similarity to “whiteness”—that is, comparing otherwise identical dark-brown African Americans with very dark African Americans, medium-brown African Americans with dark-brown African Americans, and so forth.
Those who were “closer” to whiteness had higher levels of educational attainment, greater occupational status, larger personal income, and larger family income. The skin-tone effects on income, education, and occupation are in addition to other factors that also affect social status: parental education, sex, age, region, urban location, marital status, and personal education and occupation.
Indeed, Keith and Herring found that skin tone had a larger impact on educational attainment than sex, region, or urban location did. Except for the individual’s education, skin tone is the major determinant of occupational status. Similarly, skin tone has a larger impact on personal income and family income than parental education or urban location does.3 Among many others, Mark Hill (2000) confirms the results of Keith and Kerring’s work. Specifically, he examined the occupational achievements of a sample of African American men who were young children in 1920. He divided his sample into “black” and “mulatto” according to the racial identity given by the head of household on the 1920 census. Mulattoes have very much lighter skin tones than blacks do. Hill found that mulattoes have more than two-and-ahalf times greater odds of attaining a white-collar job than blacks do. Further, he found that differences in the social origins of blacks and mulattos are responsible for only 10 to 20 percent of the color gap in adult occupational attainment."
--Conrad, Whitehead, Mason, and Stewart. African Americans in the U.S. Economy. (2008). pg 147-148
A pattern of strangely missing analysis and data shows up in discussions of discrimination by libertarians and conservatives. One prominent example is Thomas Sowell in his recent books Intellectuals and Race (2013) and Wealth and Poverty: An International Perspective. He frames a good part of his discussion of discrimination for example to say that race may not be the only factor that causes discrimination, and gives several factors. But is this blinding insight anything new? What serious people for example, "ignore" the fact, that say, people in urban areas, generally make higher wages than people in rural areas? Yes people vary for different causes, but that does not mean racial discrimination is absent, or that it is insignificant, nor does it mean that claimants to racial discrimination have no burden of proof on their shoulders- far from it- they carry a heavy burden. Sowell, like some other libertarians and conservatives, also has little in the book to say about the impact of the Civil Rights Act of 1964- an interesting omission since a number of conservative public intellectuals like Dinesh D'souza attempt to poo-poo the Civil Rights Act of 1964, want to repeal it, or attempt to dismiss its importance by claiming it has been rendered "null" or ineffective because (a) blacks are "disillusioned" since instant racial nirvana did not happen, or (b) liberals "abandoned" color blindness in favor of "quotas and collectivism", or that (c) private individuals or companies were wrongly targeted for anti-discrimination measures rather than government (D'souza- The End of Racism: 170-184). Some of the same arguments are made by white racialist hereditarian Jared Taylor in his numerous writings such as the book "White Identity."
But such claims are dubious as detailed in previous posts. Few blacks expected any instant racial nirvana. In media interviews for example, even the prototypical progressive "dreamer" Martin Luther King struck a note of grim realism at the slow pace of change in the face of white resistance- noting that mere passage of laws would not win all battles. Said King, it was relatively easy for white America to allow desegregated restaurant or bus seating, (after well nigh a decade of turmoil and struggle), but when it came to SUBSTANTIAL issues that govern wealth, poverty, housing, jobs, schools, access to opportunity etc, white America, was not in a hurry. King came to realize that his "I have a Dream" speech served white America well, with its optimistic gloss. The Kennedy Administration loved it. And it played well to international audiences who wondered about white America's claims to moral leadership and democracy, while a significant slice of Americans who happened to be black, could get neither democracy or fair treatment. But behind the flowery phrases, grim struggle remained. King is worth quoting:
"Now I’m not one to lose hope; I keep on hoping. I still have faith in the future. But I’ve had to analyze many things over the last few years and I would say over the last few months I’ve gone through a lot of soul-searching and agonizing moments and I’ve come to see that, uh, that we have many more difficult days ahead and some of the old optimism was a little bit superficial.. I think that the biggest problem now is that we got our gains over the last 12 years at bargain rates, so to speak. It didn’t cost the nation anything.. but we can’t get rid of slums and poverty without it costing the nation something." --(Martin Luther King, Jr. interview by Sander Vanocur- NBC - 1967 - https://mackenzian.com/blog/2014/09/29/transcript-realism-and-nonviolence)But for all that, Black Americans overwhelmingly welcomed the protections and relief gained by the "Big Three" of civil rights- The Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights-Open Housing law of 1968. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most prominent, and blacks and progressive whites, including independent thinking conservatives, embraced it. Contrary to claims of racialist hereditarians, for blacks desegregation was not a "problem" or "failure", but rather often HOW desegregation was implemented by whites in certain areas- such as malicious white closing of good black schools and firing of black teachers, coaches and administrators. And while there have been some abuses, the post civil rights era is not simply a question of "liberals" "abandoning" "colorblindness" as right wing spin like that put forth by Shelby Steele would have it.
For one thing, it took years of hard litigation, political lobbying and voting, administrative arm-twisting (such as threatening to withhold federal funds from Jim Crow hospitals) and even follow-up street protests to make good the "colorblind" provisions of the CRA. Indeed the post-CRA years saw stubborn battles by many whites to delay or nullify those provisions. It was those stubborn battles that forced the use of things like "affirmative action" by courts, and even exasperated Republican presidents. The notion that all was suddenly "colorblind" on the part of white America after 1964 is cynical deception and propaganda. It took until 1988, some 20 years AFTER the Open Housing Act of 1968 for strong enforcement provisions to be enacted and implemented to combat housing discrimination. In took almost until 1990, some 26 years AFTER the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for state governments like the Alabama State Police to finally begin hiring qualified blacks in meaningful numbers, and even this was due to a court decision where a federal judge, tired of white stonewalling, simply ordered the hiring of qualified blacks, including those who had been turned away for years. This was an ugly solution, but the judge had before given YEARS of leeway for white administrators to voluntarily recruit qualified blacks. Quote:
"Take the example of Alabama. In the late 1960s, a federal court found that only 27 out of the state’s 3,000 clerical and managerial employees were African American. Federal Judge Frank Johnson ordered extensive recruiting of blacks, as well as the hiring of the few specifically identified blacks who could prove they were victims of discrimination. Nothing happened. Another suit was filed, this time just against the state police, and this time a 50 percent hiring quota was imposed, until blacks reached 25 percent of the force. As a result, Alabama’s state police quickly became the most thoroughly integrated state police force in the country.”*
--William Shaw. 2010. Business Ethics 2010, p 404
Scholar Joseph Crespino's book (Joseph Crespino. 2008. In Search of Another Country- Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution) details the strategy of much of the white south after the passage of civil rights laws- a move from OPEN racism and sandbagging of blacks to a subtle web of "neutral" barriers and blockages, that eschewed open racialism in favor of noble sounding colorblind barriers. If you want to blokcade black employment for example, the new game avoided posting armed guards to stop blacks from filing job applications (as happened in some auto plants- Gavin Wright 2013- "Sharing The Prize"), nor do white union bosses need to mobilize white workers to go on strike if a few blacks are hired (as happened several times during WW2 and elsewhere), you simply manipulate existing or new rules behind the scenes, such as "word of mouth" advertising for new jobs or impossibly short application deadlines, where only white candidates get "the word." Presto-a "negro-free" applicant pool.. Or, as in the case of the the public utility Duke Power (Griggs vs Duke), you implement "new qualifications" for particular jobs where none such had existed before. Since white workers would have better educations, many negro applicants who could have well done the job before the new "qualifications", simply "disappear." Crespino is focused more on the state level and national links, but such things on the ground level fit neatly into the larger pattern of white manipulation. Race is not the only factor in subsequent changes after the 1960s civil rights era, as noted in Crespino's balanced analysis, but it is a dominant one.
https://ir.una.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1044&context=nahr
Furthermore announcing "colorblindness" meant little when years of embedded an consolidated white advantage, oft built unfairly at the expense of blacks, was simply entrenched and left in place. For example telling black railroad workers held back for decades that: "oh, we are now colorblind. We have shifted the goalposts by the way, so remain in your lower level slots as you have for years, and one day you may be moved up without regard to color," is a rather hollow "victory" for "colorblindness." As shown in the Griggs case, it was only after civil rights legislation was passed that the white employer suddenly found "colorblind religion," and then it cunningly moved to still entrench white advantage, by grandfathering white incumbents into the slots they had enjoyed for years while freezing out black workers. CRA enforcement efforts sought and gained TANGIBLE relief for those long mistreated workers. In short enforcement in the name of colorblindness, required tangible results, not mere platitudes. Have there been abuses or overly-hasty use of things like targets and goals when candidate pools were not substantial for example? Certainly. But the claim of "color blindness" being "abandoned" because hard-nosed enforcement mechanisms were at times necessary rings hollow when the total picture is considered.
It should also be noted that the primary beneficiaries of such measures are white women, a fact hidden by a barrage of continual propaganda smoke-screening to make blacks serve as "unqualified" or "undeserving" scapegoats.
"Make-whole"measures for those suffering discrimination are nothing unusual, nor are then an argument for unfettered head count quotas far removed from those who have suffered discrimination directly. White union members gained tangible relief- such as reinstatement or promotion when discrimination on the basis of union membership was made illegal. And few charged that capitalism had been "abandoned" as a result. Its only when a black man shows up looking for the same, that some right-wingers, and liberals, suddenly discover the noble rhetoric of "colorblindness." Indeed as credible historians show (see Taylor Branch's Trilogy on the Civil Rights years such as "At Canaan's Edge for example, or Crespino 2008 above) "colorblindness" rhetoric was an explicit strategy used by segregationists to continue business as usual and route blacks to the back of the opportunity line- chiefly by locking in years of white advantage, while mouthing soothing platitudes about "race neutrality" or "we don't see color." See discussions of court case, Griggs vs Duke for example in previous posts.
Sacred private cows: Ironically, popular libertarian and right wing intellectuals and pundits like Dinesh D'souza, while mouthing platitudes about colorblindness, would actually REPEAL key parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964- which, if implemented would BRING BACK legalized color discrimination. QUOTE: "Am I calling for a repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Actually, yes. The law should be changed so that its nondiscrimination provisions apply only to government." (Dsouza, 1996. The End of Racism, p 544). Black women thrown off private buses for sitting in the "wrong" seat? Shrug.. Its private, so all is OK. Black railroadmen murdered for working at the "wrong" "white only" jobs at private employer? Oh well, too bad.. let the negroes find jobs at other private employers- why worry about it? Private unions working on government contracts (meaning government funding) still blocking and discriminating against black workers? So what if black taxpayer dollars are going to white unions or other private entities hurting black efforts and opportunities? Hey. No worries- after all unions are private entities. Black people routed to run down ghetto areas by private white realtors, or denied loans by private white banks, or bounced from their seats by private airlines to make room for white passengers? Chuh! That's OK, cuz its all PRIVATE discrimination. Heavens if government got involved. This would still be America for blacks if D'souza's "colorblind" model is followed.
Another debunking to the libertarian argument that private entities should not be prosecuted or scrutinized for racial discrimination, is that Jim Crow race discrimination was put in place by PRIVATE entities in the first place, right after the civil war. Many segregation practices on street cars for example, were put in place WITHOUT any government mandate to do so. Segregation also occurred in the supposedly more "enlightened" North. The abolitionist Frederick Douglas for example was assaulted and beaten by whites in the "liberal" north when he dared ride on streetcars with the good white folk. And when government mandates were imposed, this was done at the behest of white consumers and clientele, expressing their preference to hold back blacks, via the political process.
The black couple above had their home attacked repeatedly for the "crime" of buying house in a "white" area. But hey, not to worry its "only" private discrimination.
"Babe, how lucky we are to have PRIVATE groups or entities attacking our
home or denying blacks loans rather than those 'oppressive' government bureaucrats."
But discrimination was not merely a "feeling" or "mere" personal preference as to restaurants, or mode of transport. Black women for example were routinely insulted, manhandled and mistreated on transportation in many parts of America. It is no accident that the arrest of Claudette Colvin and more particularly Rosa Parks, (both women) sparked the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott, culmination of years of resentment. And the same city buses that served a mostly black ridership did not hire black bus drivers. In his biography, Thomas Sowell, who spent most of his life safely up north beginning as a teenager when he moved there, and benefitting from pro-civil rights actions measures such as Truman's historic 1948 Desegregation of the Armed Forces, ducks and avoids substantive discussion of such grim realities of segregation by trying to portray segregation as mostly a matter of avoiding "restaurants run by rednecks" - a variant of the poo-poo approach used by many white libertarians. But it was a lot more than "mere" "inconvenience." It was ill-treatment, insult, and violent assault. On the housing front, routing blacks to the worse properties not only means worse physical deterioration, but that they do not have access to decent schools or jobs (increasingly shifted to the suburbs as major road constructions destroyed or disrupted older urban neighborhoods), and thus have less chance to acquire the major source of wealth in contemporary America- home ownership. It also means blacks will pay higher prices for things like substandard housing, a fact exploited by whites in creating systems of housing segregation, many of them deliberately constructed, as Richard Rothstein documents in his book The Color of Law (2017)
And unlike the misinformed (or deceptive) D'souza's claim, private individuals and entities were not the "wrong" target of civil rights enforcement or activism. While millions of private entities may have more flexibility in discrimination, because of their sheer number (compared to governments), they also represent among the severest and most pernicious agents in America's racial apartheid system. In fact, PRIVATE individuals and entities constantly invoked and used the power of government, to carry out THEIR private discriminatory agendas. In the brutal realities of race, government agency and action are not only captured by private interests, but at times are often indistinguishable. The notion that "private" discrimination is somehow OK and that it can be separated from similar government action is not only laughably naïve on the part of some, but cynically deceptive as well, on the part of others.
The missing Civil Rights Act.
As noted above re his books, libertarian author Thomas Sowell has been often critical of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Nothing wrong with a critique but Sowell's problem is that he often delivers a distorted critique- setting up a strawman of false premises that can then be "rebutted" later. His biography lays out his reasoning as follows:
"These were historic times for civil rights and for racial issues in general. While I welcomed the dismantling of the old Jim Crow laws in the South, I was increasingly disenchanted with the Utopianism which I had first noted back on the day when the Supreme Court announced its decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The idea seemed to be that white people’s sins were all that stood between us and economic and social parity throughout American society. The enormous amount of internal change needed within the black community—in education, skills and attitudes—seemed wholly un-noticed, as people rhapsodized about the brave new world to come, if and when white people became less sinful, courtesy of the federal government. Neither whites nor blacks had run out of room for improvement, but I expected no dramatic change in the relative economic positions of the races as a result of civil rights laws. Civil rights were important in and of themselves, and we should have equality before the law as a matter of justice."
But to expect civil rights to solve our economic and social problems was barking up the wrong tree, it seemed to me. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became a big political issue, my hope was that it would pass without any crippling amendments, not only for its own sake, but also in order that we could turn our attention away from such distractions and toward our own self-development as a people. In February 1964, I wrote to a friend:
'Perhaps if the omnibus civil rights bill goes through Congress undiluted, the bitter anti-climax that is sure to follow may provoke some real thought in quarters where slogans and labels hold sway at the moment.'
Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 wrought dramatic legal and political changes across the South, its economic consequences were in fact a bitter anti-climax. Economic progress continued, but at no faster pace than in the past. Additional blacks entered professional and other high-level positions in the five years following passage of the Civil Rights Act—but these additions were fewer than in the five years preceding passage of the Act. "
--Sowell, A Personal Odyssey p 268-269
Had the above laid out some detailed reasons as to why the CRA was "bad" it might have had the beginnings, arguably, of a conservative critique of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But typical of Sowell's cherry-pick and strawman approaches, there are several distortions. Seven points come to mind:
1) First, Sowell is ether ignorant of, or misrepresents data on black progress. He says:
"Additional blacks entered professional and other high-level positions in the five years following passage of the Civil Rights Act—but these additions were fewer than in the five years preceding passage of the Act. " --Sowell, A Personal Odyssey p 268-269
It is interesting that Sowell gives no supporting evidence to back this statement. But hard empirical data by other scholars shows the claim to be shaky. As scholars Devey and Stainback note:
"Even more striking is the rapid increase in white women’s access to managerial jobs after 1971. White women move from being underrepresented in managerial jobs by 70 percent to being underrepresented by only 12 percent at the turn of the century. While they have not yet reached parity, white women have made remarkable and consistent gains. Black males also have made gains in private sector managerial employment, although their advances are not as dramatic or consistent. Black males were barely represented among managers in this EEOC reporting sample in 1966, being underrepresented by 90 percent relative to their employment in the sector. They made sustained improvements through 1983, although they were still substantially underrepresented at –54 percent of their general labor market employment. No further progress was made through the 1980s, but progress began again across the 1990s."
[FROM: --Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Kevin Stainback. 2007. Discrimination and Desegregation: Equal Opportunity Progress in U.S. Private Sector Workplaces since the Civil Rights Act. Ann Amer Academ PolSci 609:49-84]
The astute reader will notice that the biggest beneficiary from the Civil Rights Act is white women, but that the blacks though still substantially underrepresented, did make measurable progress better than before the Act, for the managerial level jobs, debunking Sowell's claim. Other scholars noted below also show the same pattern of black gains after the Civil Rights Act. The Act did not "cause" ALL the gain- no one piece of legislation can claim that- but it did aid the large pool of qualified blacks who had been frozen out of the market before the Act. This pool of people is somewhat analogous to black baseball players before Jackie Robinson's era- more than qualified, and in some cases better qualified than whites, and/or more competitive,, but still locked out of the game by white racism and protectionism, despite a lot of hypocritical talk about "merit" and "free markets."
2) Second, most blacks had no "utopian" illusions that the mere passage of the bill would erase centuries of disadvantage and/or Jim Crow. In fact even ML King had no such illusions. To be sure, somewhere among some 20-25 million blacks there were some "utopianists" but both "responsible" civil rights leadership and surging "black nationalists" saw passage of the bill as only on step in a long process that had much more struggle to come. Neither Malcolm X (who mocked the bill as a fraud given white America's racism) or Stokely Carmichael are on record with any "utopian" visions, nor are people like the era's NAACP leader Roy Wilkins. See also the interview with ML King quoted above in 1967 which specifically disavows "utopianism."
3) The third distortion is Sowell's progress indicators. He says he expected no dramatic change in the relative economic position between blacks and whites as a result of the Act. OK, but who credible expected that massive economic advantages accrued by whites over blacks during 200 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow would be magically erased by a law on paper 1964? Or a 5 year span between 1964 and 1969? As already shown above, few credible civil rights leaders held such notions, nor most likely most serious competing black nationalist/militant leaders, or even most ordinary black citizens on the street. Hopeful yes. Expecting instant nirvana? Hardly.
4) Sowell then tries a 4th distortion as already seen above, claiming "bitter" economic consequences after the Act, that whatever legal or political changes gained, would yield only "bitter" economic fruit. Far from yielding "bitter" fruit however, the Civil Rights Act can be credited with rather beautiful blooms as huge swathes of opportunities were opened up for blacks. See the hard data above but also below by Gavin Wright and others for example, particularly in the South, refuting Sowell's attempt to confine Civil rights progress to only the legal and political spheres. Much of this hard data was around at the time or before Sowell's book, so he has no excuse for not dealing with it, except, in an all too common pattern, he avoid evidence contrary to his ideological theme, or resorts to cherry picked factoids or anecdotes-some of only limited relevance, scope or context.
It is also curious that Sowell chooses such a short time period to measure his alleged "bitter" fruit. His standard pattern is again revealing- he cherry picks his method of measuring the impact of the Civil Rights Act- making comparisons to 5 years before, with five years after. But why a mere 5 years before/after comparison given 100 years of Jim Crow? So in 5 years, the massive black disadvantages in education, employment etc imposed by whites was supposed to magically disappear? How is that even remotely supposed to be possible in the real world? Here again is the distorted strawman aspect of Sowell's work. By selecting a crude and short 5 year "before and after" comparison, the progress made can be obfuscated and downplayed. But some of the data in Sowell's own work shows the flaws in his argument. For example in an earlier book: "Civil Rights, Rhetoric or Reality," he points out that single continuously working black women had achieved wage parity with white women by 1969. How would this be possible under his alleged "bitter" fruit scenario of empty gains after the Act?
And assuming his before/after comparison is correct for the sake of argument, there were a number of factors that pulled black men out of the immediate workforce in the five years directly after the law, such as the Vietnam War which in the main began in 1965 for the US. And what about those black men leaving the Vietnam era army AFTER 1965 with their GI Bil education benefits, and VA housing loan benefits (still dogged by the discriminatory "redlining" policies of the federal government) in hand who began a new working life? Five years after 1964 is not enough time to fairly gauge how they fared in moving up into professional jobs given that such jobs need education and often years of experience. In fact, a black veteran taking 3-4 years out of the workforce to use his GI Bill benefits to get that education would NOT be counted in Sowell's magical professionals/high level category. One can see the disingenuousness of Sowell' selection of a 5-year "after" comparison- by choosing a brief 5 year span, he can, again obfuscate and downplay the progress made.
5) Sowell also conveniently skirts around the fact that civil rights "agitation" was a significant force PRIOR to 1964, that in fact, led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Progress made before 1964 is not ALL due to "rights agitation" - but such civil rights activism is itself, ALSO part of what stimulated progress.
This "civil rights agitation" was active in the 1940's, and it was necessary. IN WW2 time and time again whites went on strike, sometimes violently to block blacks from getting better paying defense industry jobs even though there was a war on. During the war, a significant slice of white people put blockading black employment AHEAD of defeating Nazi Germany or the Japanese, and ahead of so-called "free markets." When black folk got jobs due to "free market" hiring, whites moved to shut it down. When war production was urgently needed whites moved to shut this down too. Why, when production was urgently needed at the front to defeat the evil Axis enemies of democracy? Why? Because black folk were finally getting a tiny piece of the action. QUOTE:
"On May 24, 1943, Alabama Dry Dock employed nearly 7,000 black workers, none of them in skilled occupations. Suddenly, in compliance with a six-month-old directive from the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPc), the once-recalcitrant company upgraded 12 blacks to welding jobs. The next morning, after the twelve men had gone home, the yard erupted. Responding to cries to "get every one of them Niggers off this island," enraged whites assaulted their black co-workers with pipes, clubs, and other weapons from their workaday world. Some blacks sus-tained serious injuries in the melee, and virtually all of them experienced hours of terror, which ended only when United States Army troops from nearby Brookley Field arrived on Pinto Island to restore order." --FROM: Nelson, Bruce. 1993. Organized Labor and the Struggle for Black Equality in Mobile during World War II. The Journal of American History volume 80, issue 3
or:
"Many [strikes] were based on racism as whites objected to African Americans getting new jobs in defense plants. Perhaps the most shameful occurred in Baltimore, where black employees rose from 2 percent to 29 percent at a Western Electric plant in the first two years of the war.. 'twenty-two white women walked off their after one black woman was transferred into their formally all white department.' Their objection focused on integrated toilet facilities which previously had been segregated by race. When the War Labor Board ruled in favor of integration, 'about 70 percent of the company's workers' struck- a percentage that included almost all white workers both men and women.. Army troops took over the company for the first three months of 1944 -until the company gave into the white workers and re-segregated restrooms." -- Doris Weatherford 2009, American women during World War 2: An Encyclopedia. pg 436
Problems like this made A. Phillip Randolph threaten to lead a black March On Washington. Such a dangerous civil rights demonstration threat forced embarrassed white officials to begin opening up more defense jobs, and begin some halting anti-discrimination enforcement. After all how could they be boosting "democracy" against facism when they could not even guarantee basic decency for negroes in their own back yard, or keep war factories open? And so it went. In the 1940s it was civil rights agitation and lawsuits that helped force open defense industry jobs for blacks, and helped create the positive trend lines, including forcing southern state regimes to finally pay black teachers same as whites. It was civil rights agitation after black soldiers were attacked on buses that finally moved Truman to his landmark desegregation of the armed forces. In short, the dual pressure of war need AND civil rights activism, including the relentless filing of court cases forced changes, so that by the end of the war almost 9% of the defense industry's workers were black. (See- Black Labor and the American Legal System: Race, Work, and the Law By Herbert Hill, 1985). Thus "civil rights" did not begin at the 1964 CRA, but was an ongoing high-pressure struggle decades before, that played a significant part in moving the trend lines positively for blacks before 1964. Sowell's simplistic "before and after" comparison is designed to obfuscate this important point.
6) Sowell also skips over a common pattern that occurred when 1960s civil rights laws were passed. The "bitter fruit" experienced by some blacks was often a function of white INSTRANGIENCE AND OBSTRUCTIONISM when it came to IMPLEMENTATION of the law. Memoirs of blacks from this era, along with numerous government reports, lawsuits, etc all testify to this, and show some demoralized blacks lamenting that whites were not willing to wholeheartedly or in good faith implement the new laws. It took more marches, protests, lawsuits, federal arm-twisting and even threats of abandoning non-violence to get whites to live up to their responsibilities. Memoirs of civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer for example show her not only lamenting that progress was so slow after the Civil Rights laws, but that fact of some whites, on both local and national levels, sandbagging and obstructing that progress. (See The Senator and the Sharecropper- The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer- By Chris Myers Asch 2011). Likewise histories of the famous Deacons For Defense and Justice (see Lance Hill, 2006. The Deacons For Defence) show bitter laments about white opposition including KKK assaults, beatings, shootings, and economic intimidation when blacks attempted to actually eat in restaurants or use local parks after 1964. It took armed self-defense and protest in some areas to eventually pressure the federal government to act and begin a tough crackdown on white terrorism, a crackdown that could have occurred years earlier. (See US vs Original Knights of the KKK, c 1965). The FBI however was too busy with other things to be bothered with domestic terrorism, what with surveillance even of conservative groups and leaders like the NAACP's Roy Wilkins, and never deployed its huge apparatus to build cases against or hound white terrorist leaders as it did against black organizations.
Even the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott, hailed precursor of the post-war civil rights era, failed to bring about substantial desegregation, for whites used both intimidation and subterfuge after the court decision, removing OPEN segregation ordinances and transferring enforcement to private bus companies whose drivers had full power, backed by the city, to regulate passenger seating. Southern cities using this manipulation, including Birmingham, could thus claim "plausible denial" when white bus drivers pushed around black passengers, including ordering them to the back of the bus. What can we do? said white officials piously.. It's a private company making private operating rules for "safety and efficiency"? Wink.. wink.. There even had to be follow-up lawsuits to get white people to live up to court rulings by white judges: (see Bowman vs Birmingham Transit 1962- https://casetext.com/case/boman-v-birmingham-transit-compan) But this was not all. After the boycott victory the local black organization imploded as the city declared all other services would remain segregated, and white terrorists unleashed a bombing and intimidation campaign that almost killed Martin Luther King. It was only until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that southern cities like Montgomery, or Birmingham, finally desegregated, despite well publicized protest campaigns, and even after 1964 some residual arm-twisting via protests and lawsuits was required for minimal compliance. There was thus plenty for blacks to be "bitter" about during and in the immediate post-civil rights era, but that bitterness was not merely a function of finding things too complicated to manage after removal of formal Jim Crow, but by continued white opposition, subterfuge and deception deployed to sandbag new black opportunities and rights. Sowell of course, conveniently skips this part of the story about "bitter" fruit.
7) Finally, Sowell is just plain wrong when how says that economic progress proceeded at no faster pace as in the past. Numerous credible scholars debunk this assertion as detailed below. Indeed it is only by using the distorted "5-year comparison" that Sowell can support his shaky assertion. Other right-wingers have attempted to extend a simplistic "before/after" model into the 1970s, but the 1970s were a time of GENERAL economic decline, recession, oil embargoes and stagflation- hence of course after the booming 1960s, a "decline" would set in, but this was a GENERAL economic decline for the ENTIRE economy not any "bitter" fruit of the Civil Rights Act. Let's look at hard, detailed evidence rather than simplistic, cherry-picked methods.
Civil Rights Laws had nationwide impact, but most significant, was their impact where discrimination was most severe- that is, the South. Sowell, who so often comes up with the most obscure factoids (such as suicide rates of Chinese in 1800s Cuba), carefully avoids even a basic regional comparison. Let's take a look at just one example among tens of thousands. In South Carolina for example blacks and whites were forbidden to work together in the same room or department - a nice deal for white people, who got to monopolize all the better paying, less dirty jobs in offices and factories. As one history notes:
"Heller’s company provided employment to hundreds of single and married women in Greenville, mostly employed as machine operators. Like all manufacturing plants in South Carolina, the company was segregated into departments by race, a policy established by state law. Custom dictated that even Christmas parties be segregated. In 1960, a local newspaper article pictured Heller presenting awards to several black female employees. The caption noted that a company party was held “Tuesday night for its Negro employees . . . A similar party will be held for White employees Friday at the plant..”
(--Hasia Diner 2018. Doing Business in America: A Jewish History)
While the boss of the above company, Heller, made the courageous decision to desegregate restroom facilities shortly before the civil Rights Act of 1964, other employers were less inclined. It took the coming of the Civil Rights Era and its forcing open of basic equal access and treatment, to make solid, ongoing progress. The CRA of course did not act alone- other factors such as the post-war economic expansion played a part, but both worked together to measurably improve black employment, income, education, and other crucial life variables like health. "Heckman and Payner (1989) use microdata from textile plants in South Carolina to study the effects of race on employment between 1940 and 1980, concluding that federal antidiscrimination policy resulted in a significant improvement in black economic status between 1965 and 1975." (Pager and Shepard 2008) Likewise detailed data such as Gavin Wright's Sharing the Prize (2013) illustrate the same point of significant black gains under after Civil Rights Laws, not only for things like employment, but in educational attainment, occupational status and even health. The forcing open of Jim Crow southern hospitals (through threat of withholding federal funds) for example was a boon to black health. See Gavin Wright's- Sharing the Prize for more detail.
Devy and Stainback show white women are the primary Civil Rights legislation gainers..
In addition, detailed analyses do show that the Civil Rights Movement era saw significant overall increases in black job growth and occupational status. As one scholarly study by Harvard Economics Professor Richard Freeman shows-QUOTE:
"(1) Relative demand for and income of black workers were raised in the postwar period by governmental and private antidiscrimination activity following the 1964 Civil Rights Act and possibly by a general societal decline in individual and market purchases of discrimination relative to levels of productivity.
(2) The black occupational distribution improved greatly in the 1960s as a result of the significant supply response of black workers to economic opportunities, as well as of the increased relative educational attainment of the black population. Black workers shifted occupations rapidly in response to reduced discrimination and improved opportunities.
(3) Black women advanced more rapidly relative to their white counter-parts than black men in part because declines in discrimination have greater effects on job markets, such as those for women, where on-the-job training and cumulated experience are less important and where gross turnover of the work force is rapid. Such markets allow older as well as younger workers to take advantage of new opportunities, and, moreover, they are the special province of women..."
and
".. the federal law extends to the South, accounts for one-half of black employment and exhibits the greatest differences between black and white incomes. One indication of the extent of the federal effort in the South is the fact that two-thirds of employer-union-agency cases before the EEOC in 1970 originated there, with Texas, Florida, and Louisiana having the largest number of charges investigated."
The reader should note the large gains in the South, where Civil Rights had more impact- something Sowell skips discussing substantively in multiple books. The data also shows a significant, measurable impact of Civil Rights Activity in the first 7-9 years after the CRA of 1964. QUOTE:
"The most important finding of Table 6 is that the post-1964 period did, in fact, witness an exceptional increase in black incomes, unaccounted for by previous trends, cyclical boom, or increased black educational attainment, and linked to civil rights activity. In regressions (1) and (4), the EEOC measure has a sizable significant coefficient, which implies that anti-discriminatory activity was responsible for increases in the black-white income ratio, from 1965 to 1971, of 15 percent for males and 27 percent for females, or 9 and 16 percentage points, respectively, from levels of about 60 percent in the early sixties."
--Richard Freeman, Economics Professor Harvard University, University of Chicago- 1973- Changes in the labor market for black Americans, 1948–72, Brookings Institution. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, No 1, 1973.
and- data on more progress before the general economic slowdown of the 1970s for ALL workers:
And there it is- Sowell's claims refuted by hard data. Sowell in his book "Wealth and Poverty" 2015 proffers the same distorted pattern as to any discussion of CONTEMPORARY discrimination against blacks. It is as if such a thing barely exists, and the main problem is "liberals" stirring up trouble. But as we have seen in previous blog posts, contemporary discrimination is very much alive and well. And contemporary studies such as Pager and Shepard 2008 above, (The sociology of discrimination- Racial discrimination in employment, housing, credit, consumer markets.) illustrate this in detail, whether by careful statistical analysis, "tester" audits of employers or landlords, or studies of EEOC claims and court cases. Sowell' standard method- across many books- to poo-poo the effects of Civil Rights Laws by using a simplistic macro, national level comparison -such as income shortly before Civil Rights laws, versus income after fails.
Furthermore announcing "colorblindness" meant little when years of embedded an consolidated white advantage, oft built unfairly at the expense of blacks, was simply entrenched and left in place. For example telling black railroad workers held back for decades that: "oh, we are now colorblind. We have shifted the goalposts by the way, so remain in your lower level slots as you have for years, and one day you may be moved up without regard to color," is a rather hollow "victory" for "colorblindness." As shown in the Griggs case, it was only after civil rights legislation was passed that the white employer suddenly found "colorblind religion," and then it cunningly moved to still entrench white advantage, by grandfathering white incumbents into the slots they had enjoyed for years while freezing out black workers. CRA enforcement efforts sought and gained TANGIBLE relief for those long mistreated workers. In short enforcement in the name of colorblindness, required tangible results, not mere platitudes. Have there been abuses or overly-hasty use of things like targets and goals when candidate pools were not substantial for example? Certainly. But the claim of "color blindness" being "abandoned" because hard-nosed enforcement mechanisms were at times necessary rings hollow when the total picture is considered.
It should also be noted that the primary beneficiaries of such measures are white women, a fact hidden by a barrage of continual propaganda smoke-screening to make blacks serve as "unqualified" or "undeserving" scapegoats.
"Make-whole"measures for those suffering discrimination are nothing unusual, nor are then an argument for unfettered head count quotas far removed from those who have suffered discrimination directly. White union members gained tangible relief- such as reinstatement or promotion when discrimination on the basis of union membership was made illegal. And few charged that capitalism had been "abandoned" as a result. Its only when a black man shows up looking for the same, that some right-wingers, and liberals, suddenly discover the noble rhetoric of "colorblindness." Indeed as credible historians show (see Taylor Branch's Trilogy on the Civil Rights years such as "At Canaan's Edge for example, or Crespino 2008 above) "colorblindness" rhetoric was an explicit strategy used by segregationists to continue business as usual and route blacks to the back of the opportunity line- chiefly by locking in years of white advantage, while mouthing soothing platitudes about "race neutrality" or "we don't see color." See discussions of court case, Griggs vs Duke for example in previous posts.
Sacred private cows: Ironically, popular libertarian and right wing intellectuals and pundits like Dinesh D'souza, while mouthing platitudes about colorblindness, would actually REPEAL key parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964- which, if implemented would BRING BACK legalized color discrimination. QUOTE: "Am I calling for a repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Actually, yes. The law should be changed so that its nondiscrimination provisions apply only to government." (Dsouza, 1996. The End of Racism, p 544). Black women thrown off private buses for sitting in the "wrong" seat? Shrug.. Its private, so all is OK. Black railroadmen murdered for working at the "wrong" "white only" jobs at private employer? Oh well, too bad.. let the negroes find jobs at other private employers- why worry about it? Private unions working on government contracts (meaning government funding) still blocking and discriminating against black workers? So what if black taxpayer dollars are going to white unions or other private entities hurting black efforts and opportunities? Hey. No worries- after all unions are private entities. Black people routed to run down ghetto areas by private white realtors, or denied loans by private white banks, or bounced from their seats by private airlines to make room for white passengers? Chuh! That's OK, cuz its all PRIVATE discrimination. Heavens if government got involved. This would still be America for blacks if D'souza's "colorblind" model is followed.
Another debunking to the libertarian argument that private entities should not be prosecuted or scrutinized for racial discrimination, is that Jim Crow race discrimination was put in place by PRIVATE entities in the first place, right after the civil war. Many segregation practices on street cars for example, were put in place WITHOUT any government mandate to do so. Segregation also occurred in the supposedly more "enlightened" North. The abolitionist Frederick Douglas for example was assaulted and beaten by whites in the "liberal" north when he dared ride on streetcars with the good white folk. And when government mandates were imposed, this was done at the behest of white consumers and clientele, expressing their preference to hold back blacks, via the political process.
The landmark "Civil Rights Cases" of 1883, in which the US Supreme Court invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875, with its provisions for non-discrimination in public accommodations is an excellent illustration. Black plaintiffs often brought suit not against "government bureaucrats" but against PRIVATE white owned businesses: hotels, theaters, transit companies etc that had excluded them from "white only" facilities. Often these facilities, controlled by whites, were the only viable way to get transportation, or lodgings or to do business. It was not merely a matter of "choosing" to "avoid" them. Viable black alternatives were not allowed or were sandbagged. The white business owners contended in court that they were simply exercising their private property rights to discriminate against negroes, despite the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and argued that the Act should be invalidated. The white court overwhelmingly agreed in an 8-1 decision, and stripped blacks of these civil rights protections enacted by Congress in 1875. This set the stage for state and local regimes to enact a slew of "official" Jim Crow laws. As the years passed. the same court drove home the final nail of white privilege and advantage, and declared segregated "separate but equal" the official law of the land in Plessy vs Ferguson.
This decision, which scholar Randall Kennedy calls "a unique brand of American corruption and hypocrisy," relegated blacks to over half a century of legal second class citizenship, and paved the way for almost a century of unrest and turmoil, including weakening of America's credibility overseas during the Cold War, on the civil rights issue. Justice Harlan dissented from Plessy's majority, noting among other things that the private white companies like railroads were common carriers that had an obligation to serve all the public equally. But the decision allowed them to flout even such minimal standards, and implement the corrupt adjustments of Jim Crow where blacks were indeed served separately, but never equally.
In real estate sales, private white entities used "restrictive covenants" without any government prompting to lock blacks out of property markets. Such restrictive covenants at one time covered almost half of all new housing construction in the US. PRIVATE real estate agents, mortgage brokers and banks also did quite nicely in racial discrimination, earning premium rents and prices on third-tier rundown properties that they "steered" blacks to. The blacks had nowhere else to go of course, restrictive covenants sandbagged them into "negro zones" chock full of toxic waste dumps, noisy industrial plants or railroad marshalling yards, floodplains and even even cemeteries. To get any kind of relief, blacks, and the law, had to confront PRIVATE white entities.
All the above has been well known for over a century, and was put in place by PRIVATE white individuals, groups and enterprises, before any substantial "bad" government got involved. The libertarian notion that "private" white entities should be exempt from from anti-discrimination measures or enforcement is either profoundly ignorant, or a cynical propaganda exercise. Of course when the restrictions above did not work, PRIVATE alternatives were at hand. There were rock and firebomb throwing members of white "civic" associations seeking to exclude "the negro" from "reserved" areas, as well as your standard KKK cross-burner, bomber and thug. These too are/were private entities, not "government bureaucrats".
The black couple above had their home attacked repeatedly for the "crime" of buying house in a "white" area. But hey, not to worry its "only" private discrimination.
"Babe, how lucky we are to have PRIVATE groups or entities attacking our
home or denying blacks loans rather than those 'oppressive' government bureaucrats."
"Mere" private discrimination also has damaging spillover effects. Sending black people to the back of the bus for example or excluding them from restaurants sends a message that blacks are not worthy of citizenship- stoking a poisonous resentment and bitterness that still has not dissipated in America. Black troops during WW2 for example, sometimes watched in astonishment as white German prisoners (POWs), fresh off battlefields killing Americans, were allowed access to restaurants, facilities, stores etc and even US Military PXes that excluded US citizens, who happened to be black. And such treatment on into the Cold War era had a negative impact on US credibility and foreign policy during the 1950s ad 1960, as credible scholars show. See Mary Dudziak's book- Cold War Civil Rights (2000).
But discrimination was not merely a "feeling" or "mere" personal preference as to restaurants, or mode of transport. Black women for example were routinely insulted, manhandled and mistreated on transportation in many parts of America. It is no accident that the arrest of Claudette Colvin and more particularly Rosa Parks, (both women) sparked the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott, culmination of years of resentment. And the same city buses that served a mostly black ridership did not hire black bus drivers. In his biography, Thomas Sowell, who spent most of his life safely up north beginning as a teenager when he moved there, and benefitting from pro-civil rights actions measures such as Truman's historic 1948 Desegregation of the Armed Forces, ducks and avoids substantive discussion of such grim realities of segregation by trying to portray segregation as mostly a matter of avoiding "restaurants run by rednecks" - a variant of the poo-poo approach used by many white libertarians. But it was a lot more than "mere" "inconvenience." It was ill-treatment, insult, and violent assault. On the housing front, routing blacks to the worse properties not only means worse physical deterioration, but that they do not have access to decent schools or jobs (increasingly shifted to the suburbs as major road constructions destroyed or disrupted older urban neighborhoods), and thus have less chance to acquire the major source of wealth in contemporary America- home ownership. It also means blacks will pay higher prices for things like substandard housing, a fact exploited by whites in creating systems of housing segregation, many of them deliberately constructed, as Richard Rothstein documents in his book The Color of Law (2017)
And unlike the misinformed (or deceptive) D'souza's claim, private individuals and entities were not the "wrong" target of civil rights enforcement or activism. While millions of private entities may have more flexibility in discrimination, because of their sheer number (compared to governments), they also represent among the severest and most pernicious agents in America's racial apartheid system. In fact, PRIVATE individuals and entities constantly invoked and used the power of government, to carry out THEIR private discriminatory agendas. In the brutal realities of race, government agency and action are not only captured by private interests, but at times are often indistinguishable. The notion that "private" discrimination is somehow OK and that it can be separated from similar government action is not only laughably naïve on the part of some, but cynically deceptive as well, on the part of others.
Examples are legion- from white unions that used government power to sandbag blacks into poorly paying "negro jobs," to the kangaroo courts and corrupt law enforcement that railroaded thousands of black men and women on bogus or trumped up charges- who were then "leased out" to private employers in a system of semi-slavery for decades. In terms of civil rights however, it made little difference. Both government AND private entities worked hand in hand to oppress and discriminate- BOTH had to be tackled. The notion that private discrimination should be left alone, and only government touched is sheer nonsense, not only as far as principle, but because private entities were/are the BIGGEST agents of discrimination in aggregate, and far from being distant from government, were and are the most vocal advocates of insisting that government discriminate on THEIR BEHALF.
The fact that some right wing conservatives like D'souza would exempt private discriminators, shows their true colors. ML King's famous Birmingham Campaign etc, was targeted heavily against PRIVATE entities for very good reasons. Furthermore, when government actually mandated non-discriminatory "colorblindness," it is precisely numerous PRIVATE individuals or entities that rejected any such government action. The private people wanted to CONTINUE discriminating. In the North for example, state level civil rights laws were routinely flouted in education, private housing, and accommodations and services by private entities who were licensed to supposedly serve the general public. Books such as Martha Biondi's To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in New York (2003) detail the sometimes dismal picture in the supposedly more "liberal" North.
Discriminators, north and south ran a game of "NON colorblindness," precisely on the basis of PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS, to discriminate, and routinely claimed government could and should do nothing about segregation because it was PRIVATE parties who discriminated. Private white parties said: "We private people can't do anything about discrimination- its up to government." On the other side of the game loop, government parties would say, "we can't do anything about discrimination because its private." It was a perfect circular, cynical delaying tactic, serving as a classic excuse for whites to do nothing about America's apartheid state. In the meantime, America's image took severe damage overseas because of that apartheid state, and poisonous spillover effects festered internally to be manifested over generations. So where does the facile D'souza get his claim about "wrongly" targeting private parties for civil rights enforcement or activism? Stifle laughter...
The fact that some right wing conservatives like D'souza would exempt private discriminators, shows their true colors. ML King's famous Birmingham Campaign etc, was targeted heavily against PRIVATE entities for very good reasons. Furthermore, when government actually mandated non-discriminatory "colorblindness," it is precisely numerous PRIVATE individuals or entities that rejected any such government action. The private people wanted to CONTINUE discriminating. In the North for example, state level civil rights laws were routinely flouted in education, private housing, and accommodations and services by private entities who were licensed to supposedly serve the general public. Books such as Martha Biondi's To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in New York (2003) detail the sometimes dismal picture in the supposedly more "liberal" North.
Discriminators, north and south ran a game of "NON colorblindness," precisely on the basis of PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS, to discriminate, and routinely claimed government could and should do nothing about segregation because it was PRIVATE parties who discriminated. Private white parties said: "We private people can't do anything about discrimination- its up to government." On the other side of the game loop, government parties would say, "we can't do anything about discrimination because its private." It was a perfect circular, cynical delaying tactic, serving as a classic excuse for whites to do nothing about America's apartheid state. In the meantime, America's image took severe damage overseas because of that apartheid state, and poisonous spillover effects festered internally to be manifested over generations. So where does the facile D'souza get his claim about "wrongly" targeting private parties for civil rights enforcement or activism? Stifle laughter...
Meanwhile up north- formal anti-bias laws on the books did not prevent widespread flouting or mistreatment. The anti-black demonization "message" was driven home in a thousand ways, every day. This is one of the reasons activists pushed for a nationwide civil rights law not merely local measures. Says one memoir:
"This discrimination takes a thousand shapes and forms. It ranges from shutting Negroes out altogether and making no bones about it, to admitting them, but thereafter “letting them have it” in ways expected to keep them from trying again. In hotel and motel, reservations are often said always to be required; they are made but not honored (“There simply are no more rooms available”), or only the highest priced ones are; or “Try down the street or around the corner”; or, “Come back later,” if you’d like.
In restaurants, Negroes can be admitted but ignored by the hostess; hidden away in the back, near the kitchen, the far corner, the private booths, or the small private dining room upstairs; assigned to the busboy, not a waitress; served in a such a hurry that they are certain to get the message; or served slowly, indifferently, or sloppily, so as to make the same point; served warm butter or water, or cold food, or hot food but with an extra dash of salt, or provided the food on cracked dishes. In the bar or tavern, the ugly ways with Negroes are many too. They can be told that the place is a membership club, they are too drunk for another drink, or they look like minors. Once they are in and seated, they can be overlooked, the brands they prefer are said not to be carried, the service can be slowed, and the drinks for them poorly mixed, or the prices for them raised beyond reason. Plainest of punishment is to break the glasses they’ve used before they leave and to make the crash a loud one."
--George Nesbitt. 2021. Being Somebody and Black Besides_ An Untold Memoir of Midcentury Black Life. pp 211-212
The missing Civil Rights Act.
As noted above re his books, libertarian author Thomas Sowell has been often critical of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Nothing wrong with a critique but Sowell's problem is that he often delivers a distorted critique- setting up a strawman of false premises that can then be "rebutted" later. His biography lays out his reasoning as follows:
"These were historic times for civil rights and for racial issues in general. While I welcomed the dismantling of the old Jim Crow laws in the South, I was increasingly disenchanted with the Utopianism which I had first noted back on the day when the Supreme Court announced its decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The idea seemed to be that white people’s sins were all that stood between us and economic and social parity throughout American society. The enormous amount of internal change needed within the black community—in education, skills and attitudes—seemed wholly un-noticed, as people rhapsodized about the brave new world to come, if and when white people became less sinful, courtesy of the federal government. Neither whites nor blacks had run out of room for improvement, but I expected no dramatic change in the relative economic positions of the races as a result of civil rights laws. Civil rights were important in and of themselves, and we should have equality before the law as a matter of justice."
But to expect civil rights to solve our economic and social problems was barking up the wrong tree, it seemed to me. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became a big political issue, my hope was that it would pass without any crippling amendments, not only for its own sake, but also in order that we could turn our attention away from such distractions and toward our own self-development as a people. In February 1964, I wrote to a friend:
'Perhaps if the omnibus civil rights bill goes through Congress undiluted, the bitter anti-climax that is sure to follow may provoke some real thought in quarters where slogans and labels hold sway at the moment.'
Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 wrought dramatic legal and political changes across the South, its economic consequences were in fact a bitter anti-climax. Economic progress continued, but at no faster pace than in the past. Additional blacks entered professional and other high-level positions in the five years following passage of the Civil Rights Act—but these additions were fewer than in the five years preceding passage of the Act. "
--Sowell, A Personal Odyssey p 268-269
Had the above laid out some detailed reasons as to why the CRA was "bad" it might have had the beginnings, arguably, of a conservative critique of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But typical of Sowell's cherry-pick and strawman approaches, there are several distortions. Seven points come to mind:
1) First, Sowell is ether ignorant of, or misrepresents data on black progress. He says:
"Additional blacks entered professional and other high-level positions in the five years following passage of the Civil Rights Act—but these additions were fewer than in the five years preceding passage of the Act. " --Sowell, A Personal Odyssey p 268-269
It is interesting that Sowell gives no supporting evidence to back this statement. But hard empirical data by other scholars shows the claim to be shaky. As scholars Devey and Stainback note:
"Even more striking is the rapid increase in white women’s access to managerial jobs after 1971. White women move from being underrepresented in managerial jobs by 70 percent to being underrepresented by only 12 percent at the turn of the century. While they have not yet reached parity, white women have made remarkable and consistent gains. Black males also have made gains in private sector managerial employment, although their advances are not as dramatic or consistent. Black males were barely represented among managers in this EEOC reporting sample in 1966, being underrepresented by 90 percent relative to their employment in the sector. They made sustained improvements through 1983, although they were still substantially underrepresented at –54 percent of their general labor market employment. No further progress was made through the 1980s, but progress began again across the 1990s."
[FROM: --Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Kevin Stainback. 2007. Discrimination and Desegregation: Equal Opportunity Progress in U.S. Private Sector Workplaces since the Civil Rights Act. Ann Amer Academ PolSci 609:49-84]
The astute reader will notice that the biggest beneficiary from the Civil Rights Act is white women, but that the blacks though still substantially underrepresented, did make measurable progress better than before the Act, for the managerial level jobs, debunking Sowell's claim. Other scholars noted below also show the same pattern of black gains after the Civil Rights Act. The Act did not "cause" ALL the gain- no one piece of legislation can claim that- but it did aid the large pool of qualified blacks who had been frozen out of the market before the Act. This pool of people is somewhat analogous to black baseball players before Jackie Robinson's era- more than qualified, and in some cases better qualified than whites, and/or more competitive,, but still locked out of the game by white racism and protectionism, despite a lot of hypocritical talk about "merit" and "free markets."
2) Second, most blacks had no "utopian" illusions that the mere passage of the bill would erase centuries of disadvantage and/or Jim Crow. In fact even ML King had no such illusions. To be sure, somewhere among some 20-25 million blacks there were some "utopianists" but both "responsible" civil rights leadership and surging "black nationalists" saw passage of the bill as only on step in a long process that had much more struggle to come. Neither Malcolm X (who mocked the bill as a fraud given white America's racism) or Stokely Carmichael are on record with any "utopian" visions, nor are people like the era's NAACP leader Roy Wilkins. See also the interview with ML King quoted above in 1967 which specifically disavows "utopianism."
3) The third distortion is Sowell's progress indicators. He says he expected no dramatic change in the relative economic position between blacks and whites as a result of the Act. OK, but who credible expected that massive economic advantages accrued by whites over blacks during 200 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow would be magically erased by a law on paper 1964? Or a 5 year span between 1964 and 1969? As already shown above, few credible civil rights leaders held such notions, nor most likely most serious competing black nationalist/militant leaders, or even most ordinary black citizens on the street. Hopeful yes. Expecting instant nirvana? Hardly.
4) Sowell then tries a 4th distortion as already seen above, claiming "bitter" economic consequences after the Act, that whatever legal or political changes gained, would yield only "bitter" economic fruit. Far from yielding "bitter" fruit however, the Civil Rights Act can be credited with rather beautiful blooms as huge swathes of opportunities were opened up for blacks. See the hard data above but also below by Gavin Wright and others for example, particularly in the South, refuting Sowell's attempt to confine Civil rights progress to only the legal and political spheres. Much of this hard data was around at the time or before Sowell's book, so he has no excuse for not dealing with it, except, in an all too common pattern, he avoid evidence contrary to his ideological theme, or resorts to cherry picked factoids or anecdotes-some of only limited relevance, scope or context.
It is also curious that Sowell chooses such a short time period to measure his alleged "bitter" fruit. His standard pattern is again revealing- he cherry picks his method of measuring the impact of the Civil Rights Act- making comparisons to 5 years before, with five years after. But why a mere 5 years before/after comparison given 100 years of Jim Crow? So in 5 years, the massive black disadvantages in education, employment etc imposed by whites was supposed to magically disappear? How is that even remotely supposed to be possible in the real world? Here again is the distorted strawman aspect of Sowell's work. By selecting a crude and short 5 year "before and after" comparison, the progress made can be obfuscated and downplayed. But some of the data in Sowell's own work shows the flaws in his argument. For example in an earlier book: "Civil Rights, Rhetoric or Reality," he points out that single continuously working black women had achieved wage parity with white women by 1969. How would this be possible under his alleged "bitter" fruit scenario of empty gains after the Act?
And assuming his before/after comparison is correct for the sake of argument, there were a number of factors that pulled black men out of the immediate workforce in the five years directly after the law, such as the Vietnam War which in the main began in 1965 for the US. And what about those black men leaving the Vietnam era army AFTER 1965 with their GI Bil education benefits, and VA housing loan benefits (still dogged by the discriminatory "redlining" policies of the federal government) in hand who began a new working life? Five years after 1964 is not enough time to fairly gauge how they fared in moving up into professional jobs given that such jobs need education and often years of experience. In fact, a black veteran taking 3-4 years out of the workforce to use his GI Bill benefits to get that education would NOT be counted in Sowell's magical professionals/high level category. One can see the disingenuousness of Sowell' selection of a 5-year "after" comparison- by choosing a brief 5 year span, he can, again obfuscate and downplay the progress made.
5) Sowell also conveniently skirts around the fact that civil rights "agitation" was a significant force PRIOR to 1964, that in fact, led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Progress made before 1964 is not ALL due to "rights agitation" - but such civil rights activism is itself, ALSO part of what stimulated progress.
This "civil rights agitation" was active in the 1940's, and it was necessary. IN WW2 time and time again whites went on strike, sometimes violently to block blacks from getting better paying defense industry jobs even though there was a war on. During the war, a significant slice of white people put blockading black employment AHEAD of defeating Nazi Germany or the Japanese, and ahead of so-called "free markets." When black folk got jobs due to "free market" hiring, whites moved to shut it down. When war production was urgently needed whites moved to shut this down too. Why, when production was urgently needed at the front to defeat the evil Axis enemies of democracy? Why? Because black folk were finally getting a tiny piece of the action. QUOTE:
"On May 24, 1943, Alabama Dry Dock employed nearly 7,000 black workers, none of them in skilled occupations. Suddenly, in compliance with a six-month-old directive from the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPc), the once-recalcitrant company upgraded 12 blacks to welding jobs. The next morning, after the twelve men had gone home, the yard erupted. Responding to cries to "get every one of them Niggers off this island," enraged whites assaulted their black co-workers with pipes, clubs, and other weapons from their workaday world. Some blacks sus-tained serious injuries in the melee, and virtually all of them experienced hours of terror, which ended only when United States Army troops from nearby Brookley Field arrived on Pinto Island to restore order." --FROM: Nelson, Bruce. 1993. Organized Labor and the Struggle for Black Equality in Mobile during World War II. The Journal of American History volume 80, issue 3
or:
"Many [strikes] were based on racism as whites objected to African Americans getting new jobs in defense plants. Perhaps the most shameful occurred in Baltimore, where black employees rose from 2 percent to 29 percent at a Western Electric plant in the first two years of the war.. 'twenty-two white women walked off their after one black woman was transferred into their formally all white department.' Their objection focused on integrated toilet facilities which previously had been segregated by race. When the War Labor Board ruled in favor of integration, 'about 70 percent of the company's workers' struck- a percentage that included almost all white workers both men and women.. Army troops took over the company for the first three months of 1944 -until the company gave into the white workers and re-segregated restrooms." -- Doris Weatherford 2009, American women during World War 2: An Encyclopedia. pg 436
Problems like this made A. Phillip Randolph threaten to lead a black March On Washington. Such a dangerous civil rights demonstration threat forced embarrassed white officials to begin opening up more defense jobs, and begin some halting anti-discrimination enforcement. After all how could they be boosting "democracy" against facism when they could not even guarantee basic decency for negroes in their own back yard, or keep war factories open? And so it went. In the 1940s it was civil rights agitation and lawsuits that helped force open defense industry jobs for blacks, and helped create the positive trend lines, including forcing southern state regimes to finally pay black teachers same as whites. It was civil rights agitation after black soldiers were attacked on buses that finally moved Truman to his landmark desegregation of the armed forces. In short, the dual pressure of war need AND civil rights activism, including the relentless filing of court cases forced changes, so that by the end of the war almost 9% of the defense industry's workers were black. (See- Black Labor and the American Legal System: Race, Work, and the Law By Herbert Hill, 1985). Thus "civil rights" did not begin at the 1964 CRA, but was an ongoing high-pressure struggle decades before, that played a significant part in moving the trend lines positively for blacks before 1964. Sowell's simplistic "before and after" comparison is designed to obfuscate this important point.
6) Sowell also skips over a common pattern that occurred when 1960s civil rights laws were passed. The "bitter fruit" experienced by some blacks was often a function of white INSTRANGIENCE AND OBSTRUCTIONISM when it came to IMPLEMENTATION of the law. Memoirs of blacks from this era, along with numerous government reports, lawsuits, etc all testify to this, and show some demoralized blacks lamenting that whites were not willing to wholeheartedly or in good faith implement the new laws. It took more marches, protests, lawsuits, federal arm-twisting and even threats of abandoning non-violence to get whites to live up to their responsibilities. Memoirs of civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer for example show her not only lamenting that progress was so slow after the Civil Rights laws, but that fact of some whites, on both local and national levels, sandbagging and obstructing that progress. (See The Senator and the Sharecropper- The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer- By Chris Myers Asch 2011). Likewise histories of the famous Deacons For Defense and Justice (see Lance Hill, 2006. The Deacons For Defence) show bitter laments about white opposition including KKK assaults, beatings, shootings, and economic intimidation when blacks attempted to actually eat in restaurants or use local parks after 1964. It took armed self-defense and protest in some areas to eventually pressure the federal government to act and begin a tough crackdown on white terrorism, a crackdown that could have occurred years earlier. (See US vs Original Knights of the KKK, c 1965). The FBI however was too busy with other things to be bothered with domestic terrorism, what with surveillance even of conservative groups and leaders like the NAACP's Roy Wilkins, and never deployed its huge apparatus to build cases against or hound white terrorist leaders as it did against black organizations.
Even the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott, hailed precursor of the post-war civil rights era, failed to bring about substantial desegregation, for whites used both intimidation and subterfuge after the court decision, removing OPEN segregation ordinances and transferring enforcement to private bus companies whose drivers had full power, backed by the city, to regulate passenger seating. Southern cities using this manipulation, including Birmingham, could thus claim "plausible denial" when white bus drivers pushed around black passengers, including ordering them to the back of the bus. What can we do? said white officials piously.. It's a private company making private operating rules for "safety and efficiency"? Wink.. wink.. There even had to be follow-up lawsuits to get white people to live up to court rulings by white judges: (see Bowman vs Birmingham Transit 1962- https://casetext.com/case/boman-v-birmingham-transit-compan) But this was not all. After the boycott victory the local black organization imploded as the city declared all other services would remain segregated, and white terrorists unleashed a bombing and intimidation campaign that almost killed Martin Luther King. It was only until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that southern cities like Montgomery, or Birmingham, finally desegregated, despite well publicized protest campaigns, and even after 1964 some residual arm-twisting via protests and lawsuits was required for minimal compliance. There was thus plenty for blacks to be "bitter" about during and in the immediate post-civil rights era, but that bitterness was not merely a function of finding things too complicated to manage after removal of formal Jim Crow, but by continued white opposition, subterfuge and deception deployed to sandbag new black opportunities and rights. Sowell of course, conveniently skips this part of the story about "bitter" fruit.
7) Finally, Sowell is just plain wrong when how says that economic progress proceeded at no faster pace as in the past. Numerous credible scholars debunk this assertion as detailed below. Indeed it is only by using the distorted "5-year comparison" that Sowell can support his shaky assertion. Other right-wingers have attempted to extend a simplistic "before/after" model into the 1970s, but the 1970s were a time of GENERAL economic decline, recession, oil embargoes and stagflation- hence of course after the booming 1960s, a "decline" would set in, but this was a GENERAL economic decline for the ENTIRE economy not any "bitter" fruit of the Civil Rights Act. Let's look at hard, detailed evidence rather than simplistic, cherry-picked methods.
Civil Rights Laws had nationwide impact, but most significant, was their impact where discrimination was most severe- that is, the South. Sowell, who so often comes up with the most obscure factoids (such as suicide rates of Chinese in 1800s Cuba), carefully avoids even a basic regional comparison. Let's take a look at just one example among tens of thousands. In South Carolina for example blacks and whites were forbidden to work together in the same room or department - a nice deal for white people, who got to monopolize all the better paying, less dirty jobs in offices and factories. As one history notes:
"Heller’s company provided employment to hundreds of single and married women in Greenville, mostly employed as machine operators. Like all manufacturing plants in South Carolina, the company was segregated into departments by race, a policy established by state law. Custom dictated that even Christmas parties be segregated. In 1960, a local newspaper article pictured Heller presenting awards to several black female employees. The caption noted that a company party was held “Tuesday night for its Negro employees . . . A similar party will be held for White employees Friday at the plant..”
(--Hasia Diner 2018. Doing Business in America: A Jewish History)
While the boss of the above company, Heller, made the courageous decision to desegregate restroom facilities shortly before the civil Rights Act of 1964, other employers were less inclined. It took the coming of the Civil Rights Era and its forcing open of basic equal access and treatment, to make solid, ongoing progress. The CRA of course did not act alone- other factors such as the post-war economic expansion played a part, but both worked together to measurably improve black employment, income, education, and other crucial life variables like health. "Heckman and Payner (1989) use microdata from textile plants in South Carolina to study the effects of race on employment between 1940 and 1980, concluding that federal antidiscrimination policy resulted in a significant improvement in black economic status between 1965 and 1975." (Pager and Shepard 2008) Likewise detailed data such as Gavin Wright's Sharing the Prize (2013) illustrate the same point of significant black gains under after Civil Rights Laws, not only for things like employment, but in educational attainment, occupational status and even health. The forcing open of Jim Crow southern hospitals (through threat of withholding federal funds) for example was a boon to black health. See Gavin Wright's- Sharing the Prize for more detail.
Devy and Stainback show white women are the primary Civil Rights legislation gainers..
In addition, detailed analyses do show that the Civil Rights Movement era saw significant overall increases in black job growth and occupational status. As one scholarly study by Harvard Economics Professor Richard Freeman shows-QUOTE:
"(1) Relative demand for and income of black workers were raised in the postwar period by governmental and private antidiscrimination activity following the 1964 Civil Rights Act and possibly by a general societal decline in individual and market purchases of discrimination relative to levels of productivity.
(2) The black occupational distribution improved greatly in the 1960s as a result of the significant supply response of black workers to economic opportunities, as well as of the increased relative educational attainment of the black population. Black workers shifted occupations rapidly in response to reduced discrimination and improved opportunities.
(3) Black women advanced more rapidly relative to their white counter-parts than black men in part because declines in discrimination have greater effects on job markets, such as those for women, where on-the-job training and cumulated experience are less important and where gross turnover of the work force is rapid. Such markets allow older as well as younger workers to take advantage of new opportunities, and, moreover, they are the special province of women..."
and
".. the federal law extends to the South, accounts for one-half of black employment and exhibits the greatest differences between black and white incomes. One indication of the extent of the federal effort in the South is the fact that two-thirds of employer-union-agency cases before the EEOC in 1970 originated there, with Texas, Florida, and Louisiana having the largest number of charges investigated."
The reader should note the large gains in the South, where Civil Rights had more impact- something Sowell skips discussing substantively in multiple books. The data also shows a significant, measurable impact of Civil Rights Activity in the first 7-9 years after the CRA of 1964. QUOTE:
"The most important finding of Table 6 is that the post-1964 period did, in fact, witness an exceptional increase in black incomes, unaccounted for by previous trends, cyclical boom, or increased black educational attainment, and linked to civil rights activity. In regressions (1) and (4), the EEOC measure has a sizable significant coefficient, which implies that anti-discriminatory activity was responsible for increases in the black-white income ratio, from 1965 to 1971, of 15 percent for males and 27 percent for females, or 9 and 16 percentage points, respectively, from levels of about 60 percent in the early sixties."
--Richard Freeman, Economics Professor Harvard University, University of Chicago- 1973- Changes in the labor market for black Americans, 1948–72, Brookings Institution. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, No 1, 1973.
and- data on more progress before the general economic slowdown of the 1970s for ALL workers:
"In
the 1960s, for example, under the impact of sustained economic growth, the
civil rights movement, and government-sponsored affirmative action hiring
programs, there was a significant increase in the number of blacks in high-level
occupations. Between 1960 and 1969, the number of black men over twenty-five
years old in professional and technical occupations increased by 1.07 percent. In
managerial occupations, the number increased by 117 percent. Other large
increases occurred in employment as trade workers (52 percent) and sales
personnel (42 percent). All of these percentage increases were greater than the
percentage increase in black men over twenty-five years of age in the labor force
as a whole. During the 1970s, in a stagnant economy and a changed political
environment, these gains largely ceased."
--Conrad, Whitehead, Mason, and Stewart. African
Americans in the
and data on black female progress- greatest after the CRA before general 1970s economy slowdown:
--Conrad,
Whitehead, Mason, and Stewart. African Americans in the
And there it is- Sowell's claims refuted by hard data. Sowell in his book "Wealth and Poverty" 2015 proffers the same distorted pattern as to any discussion of CONTEMPORARY discrimination against blacks. It is as if such a thing barely exists, and the main problem is "liberals" stirring up trouble. But as we have seen in previous blog posts, contemporary discrimination is very much alive and well. And contemporary studies such as Pager and Shepard 2008 above, (The sociology of discrimination- Racial discrimination in employment, housing, credit, consumer markets.) illustrate this in detail, whether by careful statistical analysis, "tester" audits of employers or landlords, or studies of EEOC claims and court cases. Sowell' standard method- across many books- to poo-poo the effects of Civil Rights Laws by using a simplistic macro, national level comparison -such as income shortly before Civil Rights laws, versus income after fails.
Note- this does not mean that a critique of naïve notions about what the Civil Rights Law could or could not do is not of value, nor does it mean that the INTERNAL work that needed to be done among blacks has received enough attention. Sure. Black nationalists and such related folk have made such arguments for 5 decades, as have a number of black liberals. But at least, if you are going to throw down a critique, put an honest one on the floor.
It is difficult to say whether Affirmative Action head count QUOTA plans in the 1970s (such as in higher Education for example) had as much impact as the opening up of equal opportunities under the Civil Rights Act. AA head count Quotas and Civil Rights Equal Opportunities, while related (such as in courts requiring discriminating employers to finally start promoting women or blacks after rights legislation or cases), are not the same thing. Claiming body-count quotas to be "essential" for black advance some 3 decades after the 1970s is a shaky exercise, especially given rising black educational attainment, and economic changes. But whatever the complex mix of factors, hard data debunks some of Sowell's persistent attempts, and more directly, attempts by such right-wing public intellectuals as Dinesh Dsouza or Charles Murray, to poo-poo or dismiss civil rights legislation and policies as a significant factor in black gains in the 1960s.
It should also be noted that the1964 Act was the culmination of decades long struggle with numerous small and large battles continuously fought, on multiple fronts, in the north and south. The 1940s for example saw court decisions equalizing the pay for white and black teachers. Constant agitation and threatened march disruptions, combined with labor shortages during WW2, forced open much needed employment for blacks. The 1954 Brown Decision, while it did not cause much integration over 10 years, did force the white south to begin UPGRADING and BUILDING NEW black schools, and pumping money into black education, not out of the goodness of white hearts, but so whites could AVOID the tsunami of litigation and court decisions for school integration coming down the pipeline after WW2. (Klarman 2004- From Slavery to Civil Rights). These investments did aid blacks in positioning themselves to seize better opportunities opened up by the CRA. Likewise the desegregation of the armed forces, after decades of civil rights "agitation", a courageous decision by President Harry Truman, was a boon for blacks. Even Thomas "poo-poo" Sowell who to be a photographer in the Marines which once excluded blacks' from such occupations. Further benefit was derived from the GI Bill, though such was marked by much discrimination against black veterans. All of these laid the foundation for the CRA which would not have passed without them.
Interestingly enough, the post-Civil Rights years, saw clear gains in not only general Black academic achievement but in IQ as well. Black Americans have gained between 4 to 6 IQ points relative to non-Hispanic whites between 1972 and 2002 on 4 major tests of cognitive ability. Dickens and Flynn (2006) make no claim that their finding covers ALL tests, nor do they claim blacks have caught up with whites, and they clearly note that other instruments do not show as large a gain (2-3 points versus 4 to 6.) Nevertheless, depending on the test taken, gains small and large, relative to whites are real, and the range of years showing improvement covers the years of the "evils" of the welfare state as well as the "evil" affirmative action years. Yet within this period, the gains were registered. Per Dickens and FLynn QUOTE:
"It is often asserted that blacks have made no IQ gains on whites, despite relative environmental gains, and that this adds credibility to the case that the black/white IQ gap has genetic origins. Until recently, there have been no adequate data to measure black IQ trends. We analyze data from nine standardization samples for four major tests of cognitive ability. These suggest that blacks have gained 5 or 6 IQ points on non-Hispanic whites between 1972 and 2002. Gains have been fairly uniform across the entire range of black cognitive ability."
--Dickens WT(1), Flynn JR. 2006. Black Americans Reduce the Racial IQ Gap: Evidence from Standardization Samples. Psychol Sci. 2006 Oct;17(10):913-20
Oh and by the way, aside from employment, housing and credit, white vigilante profiling of people "who don't belong here" is also alive and well, along with sometimes police profiling and abuse by unrighteous people who took an oath to uphold right, and uphold the law. People who take such oaths are supposed to adhere to a higher standard.. At least a righteous judge speaks the truth in one case in the linked video. But that's another tale..
Whoa on there homie. What about all the generous "free money" given to minorotees during the halcyon subprime mortgage days? How could there be any discrimination?
Well pilgrim, you have just been suckered by yet another false propaganda narrative. There was no "free money" to be given. They were subprime loans- meaning crushingly high interest payments and penalties for those steered towards them. There was plenty of money to be made for those who were white primarily- they could bundle the profitable "ghetto loans" into packages resold on secondary markets. Black people did not receive any so-called "free money." And contrary to the false right wing narrative, subprime loans managed under government agency auspices- namely the Community Redevelopment Act, were managed more conservatively than the free-wheeling, lesser controlled subprime market, from which white profiteers did quite nicely, even as more and more lower-end white people were pulled on to the subprime treadmill. Oh and by the way, nice white profits were on tap as blacks, already deliberately segregated and desperate for more housing, were steered towards these worse-off loan instruments, even those black buyers with equal or better credit-worthiness than whites. In fact racial discrimination is one of the key factors in the crisis, alongside others. As one credible study notes- QUOTE:
"The rise in subprime lending and the ensuing wave of foreclosures was partly a result of market forces that have been well-identified in the literature, but it was also a highly racialized process. We argue that residential segregation created a unique niche of minority clients who were differentially marketed risky subprime loans that were in great demand for use in mortgage-backed securities that could be sold on secondary markets. We test this argument by regressing foreclosure actions in the top 100 U.S. metropolitan areas on measures of black, Hispanic, and Asian segregation while controlling for a variety of housing market conditions, including average creditworthiness, the extent of coverage under the Community Reinvestment Act, the degree of zoning regulation, and the overall rate of subprime lending.
We find that black residential dissimilarity and spatial isolation are powerful predictors of foreclosures across U.S. metropolitan areas. To isolate subprime lending as the causal mechanism through which segregation influences foreclosures, we estimate a two-stage least squares model that confirms the causal effect of black segregation on the number and rate of foreclosures across metropolitan areas. We thus conclude that segregation was an important contributing cause of the foreclosure crisis, along with overbuilding, risky lending practices, lax regulation, and the bursting of the housing price bubble."
--Jacob Rugh, Dougls Massey 2010. Racial Segregation and the American Foreclosure Crisis. American Sociological Review. Vol 75. Isu 5
and continued, we see how blacks were targeted and set up for predatory subprime loans..
"A study of subprime borrowers in Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, and San Diego found that African Americans were significantly more likely than whites (40 versus 24 percent) to report lender marketing efforts as the impetus for taking out a home equity loan (California Reinvestment Committee 2001). In the end, subprime lending not only saddled borrowers with onerous terms and unforeseen risks, but it also reinforced existing patterns of racial segregation and deepened the black-white wealth gap (Bond and Williams 2007; Friedman and Squires 2005; Williams et al. 2005). In the new regime of racial inequality, African American and Latino homeowners bore a disproportionate share of costs stemming from the bursting of the housing bubble.
Compared with whites with similar credit profiles, down payment ratios, personal characteristics, and residential locations, African Americans were much more likely to receive subprime loans (Avery, Brevoort, and Canner 2007; Avery, Canner, and Cook 2005; Bocian, Ernst, and Li 2006; Pennington-Cross, Yezer, and Nichols 2000). Moreover, after controlling for background factors, black and Hispanic homeowners were significantly more likely than whites to receive loans with unfavorable terms such as prepayment penalties.. higher cost ratios.. and higher rate spreads.The racial gap in subprime lending holds across all income levels with perhaps an increase at higher income levels (Institute on Race and Poverty 2009; Williams et al. 2005).
During the 1990s, the United States was increasingly characterized by a dual, racially segmented mortgage market, one that was structured by the race of borrowers and the racial composition of neighborhoods (Apgar and Calder 2005; Stuart 2003; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development 2000). Controlling for neighborhood characteristics, the incidence of subprime lending was significantly greater among black and Hispanic borrowers (Calem, Hershaff, and Wachter 2004) and among people who had not gone to college (Manti, Raca, and Zorn 2004). As a result, from 1993 to 2000, the share of subprime mortgages going to households in minority neighborhoods rose from 2 to 18 percent (Williams et al. 2005). The rise of racially targeted subprime lending destabilized minority neighborhoods by increasing turnover (Gerardi and Willen 2008), and the destabilizing effects on homeownership did not remain confined to minority neighborhoods, but spilled over into adjacent white and mixed neighborhoods (Schuetz et al. 2008).
National evidence from a longitudinal study of homeowners from 1999 to 2005 shows that the racial gap in homeownership exit rates widened in a way that cannot be explained by social, economic, or financial factors that historically accounted for black-white differentials (Turner and Smith 2009). The coincidence of the peak in subprime lending with the inexplicable decline in the stability of black home ownership and exit rates offers compelling evidence that segregation and the new face of unequal lending combined to undermine black residential stability and erode any accumulated wealth (Shapiro et al. 2010)"
--Jacob Rugh, Dougls Massey 2010. Racial Segregation and the American Foreclosure Crisis. American Sociological Review. 75(5) 629–651
Summary and bottom line
America is no longer the open apartheid state it was in the past, and in many ways has changed for the better. But contrary to numerous popular narratives, this post shows that serious, credible scholars document the clear existence of racial discrimination in housing, employment, credit and consumer markets, a pattern dishonestly denied, dismissed or downplayed by right-wing and libertarian pundits and intellectuals. This state of things is important to remember in an era of fake news, where a vast propaganda effort is underway to distort and lie about what is actually happening on the ground now, and what actually happened in the past. Part of the propaganda barrage is that whites somehow are "victims" that are so good and virtuous - lacking racial consciousness or bias, while the evil minorities take advantage of them. This is the bogus propaganda spiel of white nationalists like Jared Taylor for example, and other sympathizers. Why just look at the "giveways" of "affirmative action" to the culluds - oh and never mind that the primary beneficiaries of "affirmative action" are white women, or that the main beneficiaries of preferential treatment in college admissions are white legacy/alumni types.
Authors like Taylor elsewhere contradict their own arguments. He commends whites for separating themselves from blacks, commends discrimination in favor of whites in housing, jobs etc, then turns around and laments that whites lack "racial consciousness" or "identity" per his book "White Identity." But this is nonsense. If white people are still so racially sensitive as to segregate off themselves, and favor their own people in housing, jobs and social contact, then how can they have no racial "consciousness?" This is the cynical, deceptive, dismal reasoning out there embraced by tens of millions, fed by around-the-clock propaganda mills online, and offline. This state of affairs is a warning to black folk, particularly black youth, that they have much work ahead of them, and that little time can afford to be wasted on the frivolous and unproductive. To black young people especially- things are better than in the past, but harsh realities still await in employment, housing and other spheres. Stop being naive, stop wasting time, and get down to bidniss.
LINKS TO OTHER POSTS:
Rulers of Rubble- The real Gaza ground invasion - Part 1
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-rulers-of-rubble-why-idf-is-not.html
Critical Race Theory debunked! Part 3
Critical Race Theory debunked- Part 1- the classes of doom
Teflon Don map see fulsome benefit from Floyd fallout
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2020/06/teflon-don-may-see-fulsome-benefits.html
Tchalla's "Wakanda First" philosophy looks a bit like Donald Trump's "America First" approach
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2019/01/tchallas-wakanda-first-philosophy-looks.html
'AsiaRate' Lawsuit against Harvard shows dirty little secret- white quotas used at elite universities
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2018/06/asiarate-lawsuit-against-harvard-shows.html
Some gays find welcome home in the 'alt-right' as nationalist organizations step up recruitment
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2018/05/some-gays-find-welcome-home-in-alt.html
Racial discrimination is alive and kicking in employment, housing and credit markets
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/racial-discrimination-is-alive-and.html
Sowell 3- new data shows backward tropical evolution? Wealth and Poverty- An International Perspective in Trump era
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/sowell-3-new-data-shows-backward.html
Sowell 2- Wealth, Poverty and Politics- International Perspective - Trump era to bring these issues into sharper focus?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/sowell-2-wealth-poverty-and-politics.html
Sowell- Liberal intellectuals and hard questions about race differences- Trump era may force them to focus?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/sowell-liberal-intellectuals-and-hard.html
Trump properties discriminated against black tenants lawsuit finds
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/07/trump-properties-discriminated-against.html
Stealing credibility- Dinesh D'souza has prison epiphany- after hanging with the homies- Hallelujah Hilary!
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/05/straining-credibility-dinesh-dsouza-has.html
Shame on you, and your guilt too- A review of Shelby Steele's 'Shame'
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/05/a-review-wealth-poverty-and-politics.html
Go with the flow 3- more DNA and cranial studies show ancient African migration to, or African presence in ancient Europe
other links
It is difficult to say whether Affirmative Action head count QUOTA plans in the 1970s (such as in higher Education for example) had as much impact as the opening up of equal opportunities under the Civil Rights Act. AA head count Quotas and Civil Rights Equal Opportunities, while related (such as in courts requiring discriminating employers to finally start promoting women or blacks after rights legislation or cases), are not the same thing. Claiming body-count quotas to be "essential" for black advance some 3 decades after the 1970s is a shaky exercise, especially given rising black educational attainment, and economic changes. But whatever the complex mix of factors, hard data debunks some of Sowell's persistent attempts, and more directly, attempts by such right-wing public intellectuals as Dinesh Dsouza or Charles Murray, to poo-poo or dismiss civil rights legislation and policies as a significant factor in black gains in the 1960s.
It should also be noted that the1964 Act was the culmination of decades long struggle with numerous small and large battles continuously fought, on multiple fronts, in the north and south. The 1940s for example saw court decisions equalizing the pay for white and black teachers. Constant agitation and threatened march disruptions, combined with labor shortages during WW2, forced open much needed employment for blacks. The 1954 Brown Decision, while it did not cause much integration over 10 years, did force the white south to begin UPGRADING and BUILDING NEW black schools, and pumping money into black education, not out of the goodness of white hearts, but so whites could AVOID the tsunami of litigation and court decisions for school integration coming down the pipeline after WW2. (Klarman 2004- From Slavery to Civil Rights). These investments did aid blacks in positioning themselves to seize better opportunities opened up by the CRA. Likewise the desegregation of the armed forces, after decades of civil rights "agitation", a courageous decision by President Harry Truman, was a boon for blacks. Even Thomas "poo-poo" Sowell who to be a photographer in the Marines which once excluded blacks' from such occupations. Further benefit was derived from the GI Bill, though such was marked by much discrimination against black veterans. All of these laid the foundation for the CRA which would not have passed without them.
Interestingly enough, the post-Civil Rights years, saw clear gains in not only general Black academic achievement but in IQ as well. Black Americans have gained between 4 to 6 IQ points relative to non-Hispanic whites between 1972 and 2002 on 4 major tests of cognitive ability. Dickens and Flynn (2006) make no claim that their finding covers ALL tests, nor do they claim blacks have caught up with whites, and they clearly note that other instruments do not show as large a gain (2-3 points versus 4 to 6.) Nevertheless, depending on the test taken, gains small and large, relative to whites are real, and the range of years showing improvement covers the years of the "evils" of the welfare state as well as the "evil" affirmative action years. Yet within this period, the gains were registered. Per Dickens and FLynn QUOTE:
"It is often asserted that blacks have made no IQ gains on whites, despite relative environmental gains, and that this adds credibility to the case that the black/white IQ gap has genetic origins. Until recently, there have been no adequate data to measure black IQ trends. We analyze data from nine standardization samples for four major tests of cognitive ability. These suggest that blacks have gained 5 or 6 IQ points on non-Hispanic whites between 1972 and 2002. Gains have been fairly uniform across the entire range of black cognitive ability."
--Dickens WT(1), Flynn JR. 2006. Black Americans Reduce the Racial IQ Gap: Evidence from Standardization Samples. Psychol Sci. 2006 Oct;17(10):913-20
Contrary to dishonest narratives about "massive losses" for whites "due to affirmative action", hard data tells a different tale. Black college students are only as likely to get hired as whites who have dropped out of high school. As one Forbes article notes:
"African-Americans college students are about as likely to get hired as whites who have dropped out of high school. So says a new report from a non-profit called Young Invincibles, which analyzed data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census and examined the effect race and education levels have on unemployment. “We were startled to see just how much more education young African-Americans must get in order to have the same chance at landing a job as their white peers,” said Rory O’Sullivan, deputy director of Young Invincibles, in a statement."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/06/27/white-high-school-drop-outs-are-as-likely-to-land-jobs-as-black-college-students/#7d95680a7b8f
Another article echoes Forbes, offering more detail:
"The researchers looked at data mainly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census, isolating the effects of race and education on unemployment. They found that an African-American male with an associates degree has around the same chance of getting a job as a white male with just a high school diploma. “At every level of education, race impacts a person’s chance of getting a job,” [says] Tom Allison, a research manager and one of the study’s authors..
The gap in employment chances between whites and African Americans leads to a huge gap in unemployment rates, even long after the recession. In May of this year, African-American millennials faced a 16.6 percent unemployment rate, compared to a 7.1 percent rate for whites of the same age range (18 to 34 years old). The study attributes the employment gap mainly to hiring discrimination, high incarceration rates for black people, and African Americans’ lack of inherited wealth from past generations due to a long history of discrimination. Less inherited wealth results in low homeownership rates and high deficits among African Americans: While a college-educated white American has an average net worth of $75,000, a college-educated black American has a net worth of less than $17,500."
https://thinkprogress.org/a-black-college-student-has-the-same-chances-of-getting-a-job-as-a-white-high-school-dropout-b7639607fdf1/
The full report, led by college professors -economist D. Hamilton of the Milano School and W. Darity of Stanford University, challenges the false narrative that all it takes is "gumption," noting that whites have accrued massive advantages- having forcibly and deliberately locked blacks out of substantial economic gains for multiple decades. Black wealth is thus a fraction of whites, and impacts their ability to pursue education and handle the emergencies of life. Title: “Umbrellas Don’t Make it Rain: Why Studying and Working Hard Isn’t Enough for Black Americans.”
http://www.insightcced.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Umbrellas_Dont_Make_It_Rain_Final.pdf
-------------------------------------Oh and by the way, aside from employment, housing and credit, white vigilante profiling of people "who don't belong here" is also alive and well, along with sometimes police profiling and abuse by unrighteous people who took an oath to uphold right, and uphold the law. People who take such oaths are supposed to adhere to a higher standard.. At least a righteous judge speaks the truth in one case in the linked video. But that's another tale..
Whoa on there homie. What about all the generous "free money" given to minorotees during the halcyon subprime mortgage days? How could there be any discrimination?
Well pilgrim, you have just been suckered by yet another false propaganda narrative. There was no "free money" to be given. They were subprime loans- meaning crushingly high interest payments and penalties for those steered towards them. There was plenty of money to be made for those who were white primarily- they could bundle the profitable "ghetto loans" into packages resold on secondary markets. Black people did not receive any so-called "free money." And contrary to the false right wing narrative, subprime loans managed under government agency auspices- namely the Community Redevelopment Act, were managed more conservatively than the free-wheeling, lesser controlled subprime market, from which white profiteers did quite nicely, even as more and more lower-end white people were pulled on to the subprime treadmill. Oh and by the way, nice white profits were on tap as blacks, already deliberately segregated and desperate for more housing, were steered towards these worse-off loan instruments, even those black buyers with equal or better credit-worthiness than whites. In fact racial discrimination is one of the key factors in the crisis, alongside others. As one credible study notes- QUOTE:
"The rise in subprime lending and the ensuing wave of foreclosures was partly a result of market forces that have been well-identified in the literature, but it was also a highly racialized process. We argue that residential segregation created a unique niche of minority clients who were differentially marketed risky subprime loans that were in great demand for use in mortgage-backed securities that could be sold on secondary markets. We test this argument by regressing foreclosure actions in the top 100 U.S. metropolitan areas on measures of black, Hispanic, and Asian segregation while controlling for a variety of housing market conditions, including average creditworthiness, the extent of coverage under the Community Reinvestment Act, the degree of zoning regulation, and the overall rate of subprime lending.
We find that black residential dissimilarity and spatial isolation are powerful predictors of foreclosures across U.S. metropolitan areas. To isolate subprime lending as the causal mechanism through which segregation influences foreclosures, we estimate a two-stage least squares model that confirms the causal effect of black segregation on the number and rate of foreclosures across metropolitan areas. We thus conclude that segregation was an important contributing cause of the foreclosure crisis, along with overbuilding, risky lending practices, lax regulation, and the bursting of the housing price bubble."
--Jacob Rugh, Dougls Massey 2010. Racial Segregation and the American Foreclosure Crisis. American Sociological Review. Vol 75. Isu 5
and continued, we see how blacks were targeted and set up for predatory subprime loans..
"A study of subprime borrowers in Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, and San Diego found that African Americans were significantly more likely than whites (40 versus 24 percent) to report lender marketing efforts as the impetus for taking out a home equity loan (California Reinvestment Committee 2001). In the end, subprime lending not only saddled borrowers with onerous terms and unforeseen risks, but it also reinforced existing patterns of racial segregation and deepened the black-white wealth gap (Bond and Williams 2007; Friedman and Squires 2005; Williams et al. 2005). In the new regime of racial inequality, African American and Latino homeowners bore a disproportionate share of costs stemming from the bursting of the housing bubble.
Compared with whites with similar credit profiles, down payment ratios, personal characteristics, and residential locations, African Americans were much more likely to receive subprime loans (Avery, Brevoort, and Canner 2007; Avery, Canner, and Cook 2005; Bocian, Ernst, and Li 2006; Pennington-Cross, Yezer, and Nichols 2000). Moreover, after controlling for background factors, black and Hispanic homeowners were significantly more likely than whites to receive loans with unfavorable terms such as prepayment penalties.. higher cost ratios.. and higher rate spreads.The racial gap in subprime lending holds across all income levels with perhaps an increase at higher income levels (Institute on Race and Poverty 2009; Williams et al. 2005).
During the 1990s, the United States was increasingly characterized by a dual, racially segmented mortgage market, one that was structured by the race of borrowers and the racial composition of neighborhoods (Apgar and Calder 2005; Stuart 2003; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development 2000). Controlling for neighborhood characteristics, the incidence of subprime lending was significantly greater among black and Hispanic borrowers (Calem, Hershaff, and Wachter 2004) and among people who had not gone to college (Manti, Raca, and Zorn 2004). As a result, from 1993 to 2000, the share of subprime mortgages going to households in minority neighborhoods rose from 2 to 18 percent (Williams et al. 2005). The rise of racially targeted subprime lending destabilized minority neighborhoods by increasing turnover (Gerardi and Willen 2008), and the destabilizing effects on homeownership did not remain confined to minority neighborhoods, but spilled over into adjacent white and mixed neighborhoods (Schuetz et al. 2008).
National evidence from a longitudinal study of homeowners from 1999 to 2005 shows that the racial gap in homeownership exit rates widened in a way that cannot be explained by social, economic, or financial factors that historically accounted for black-white differentials (Turner and Smith 2009). The coincidence of the peak in subprime lending with the inexplicable decline in the stability of black home ownership and exit rates offers compelling evidence that segregation and the new face of unequal lending combined to undermine black residential stability and erode any accumulated wealth (Shapiro et al. 2010)"
--Jacob Rugh, Dougls Massey 2010. Racial Segregation and the American Foreclosure Crisis. American Sociological Review. 75(5) 629–651
Summary and bottom line
America is no longer the open apartheid state it was in the past, and in many ways has changed for the better. But contrary to numerous popular narratives, this post shows that serious, credible scholars document the clear existence of racial discrimination in housing, employment, credit and consumer markets, a pattern dishonestly denied, dismissed or downplayed by right-wing and libertarian pundits and intellectuals. This state of things is important to remember in an era of fake news, where a vast propaganda effort is underway to distort and lie about what is actually happening on the ground now, and what actually happened in the past. Part of the propaganda barrage is that whites somehow are "victims" that are so good and virtuous - lacking racial consciousness or bias, while the evil minorities take advantage of them. This is the bogus propaganda spiel of white nationalists like Jared Taylor for example, and other sympathizers. Why just look at the "giveways" of "affirmative action" to the culluds - oh and never mind that the primary beneficiaries of "affirmative action" are white women, or that the main beneficiaries of preferential treatment in college admissions are white legacy/alumni types.
Authors like Taylor elsewhere contradict their own arguments. He commends whites for separating themselves from blacks, commends discrimination in favor of whites in housing, jobs etc, then turns around and laments that whites lack "racial consciousness" or "identity" per his book "White Identity." But this is nonsense. If white people are still so racially sensitive as to segregate off themselves, and favor their own people in housing, jobs and social contact, then how can they have no racial "consciousness?" This is the cynical, deceptive, dismal reasoning out there embraced by tens of millions, fed by around-the-clock propaganda mills online, and offline. This state of affairs is a warning to black folk, particularly black youth, that they have much work ahead of them, and that little time can afford to be wasted on the frivolous and unproductive. To black young people especially- things are better than in the past, but harsh realities still await in employment, housing and other spheres. Stop being naive, stop wasting time, and get down to bidniss.
Rulers of Rubble- The real Gaza ground invasion - Part 1
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-rulers-of-rubble-why-idf-is-not.html
Critical Race Theory debunked! Part 3
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2022/06/james-patterson-was-right-about-racism.html
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2022/06/critical-race-theory-debunked-part-2.html
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2022/05/critical-race-theory-debunked-white.html
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2020/06/teflon-don-may-see-fulsome-benefits.html
The Teflon Don- Covid-era approval rating may signal November success
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-teflon-don-covid-era-approval.html
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-teflon-don-covid-era-approval.html
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2020/04/would-biden-win-be-any-big-loss-for.html
Tchalla's "Wakanda First" philosophy looks a bit like Donald Trump's "America First" approach
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2019/01/tchallas-wakanda-first-philosophy-looks.html
'AsiaRate' Lawsuit against Harvard shows dirty little secret- white quotas used at elite universities
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2018/06/asiarate-lawsuit-against-harvard-shows.html
Some gays find welcome home in the 'alt-right' as nationalist organizations step up recruitment
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2018/05/some-gays-find-welcome-home-in-alt.html
Racial discrimination is alive and kicking in employment, housing and credit markets
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/racial-discrimination-is-alive-and.html
Sowell 3- new data shows backward tropical evolution? Wealth and Poverty- An International Perspective in Trump era
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/sowell-3-new-data-shows-backward.html
Sowell 2- Wealth, Poverty and Politics- International Perspective - Trump era to bring these issues into sharper focus?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/sowell-2-wealth-poverty-and-politics.html
Sowell- Liberal intellectuals and hard questions about race differences- Trump era may force them to focus?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/sowell-liberal-intellectuals-and-hard.html
Trump properties discriminated against black tenants lawsuit finds
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/07/trump-properties-discriminated-against.html
Stealing credibility- Dinesh D'souza has prison epiphany- after hanging with the homies- Hallelujah Hilary!
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/05/straining-credibility-dinesh-dsouza-has.html
Shame on you, and your guilt too- A review of Shelby Steele's 'Shame'
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/05/a-review-wealth-poverty-and-politics.html
Go with the flow 3- more DNA and cranial studies show ancient African migration to, or African presence in ancient Europe
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/04/go-with-flow-3-more-dna-and-cranial.html
Go with the flow 2- African gene flow into Europe in various eras
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/11/go-with-flow-2-african-gene-flow-into.html
DNA studies show African movement to Europe from very ancient times
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/dna-studies-show-african-movement-to.html
Guilt3- Why the "white privilege industry" is not all there
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/guilt3-why-white-privilege-industry-is.html
Guilt2- Media collaborates with guilt mongers - or how to play the white victim card
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/guilt2-media-collaborates-with-guilt.html
How Obama plays on white guilt
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/08/how-obama-plays-upon-white-guilt-hilary.html
Blacks oppose free speech- more ramshackle "research" from "the East"..
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/08/blacks-oppose-free-speech-ramshackle.html
Hands off the Confederate flag
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/06/hands-off-confederate-flag.html
Despite much more wealth than blacks, whites collect about the same rate of welfare and are treated more generously
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/06/despite-much-more-wealth-than-blacks.html
African "boat people" ushering in European demographic decline
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/05/african-boat-people-ushering-in.html
The forgotten Holocaust- King Leopold's "Congo Free State" - 10 million victims
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-forgotten-holocaust-10-million-in.html
Are violent minorities taking over California and the West?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/04/are-violent-minorities-taking-over.html
Presidential hopeful Ben Carson meets and Greeks
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/03/presidential-hopeful-ben-carson-meet.html
Contra "ISIS" partisans, there have been some beneficial effects of Christianity
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/03/contra-isis-partisans-there-are-some.html
The social construction of race, compared to biology- Graves
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-social-construction-of-race_8.html
Why HBD or hereditarianism lacks credibility
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/10/why-hbd-or-hereditarianism-lacks.html
Leading Scientists criticize hereditarian claims
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/leading-scientists-criticize.html
Thai me down - Thais fall behind genetically related southern Chinese, Tibetans below genetically related East Asians like Koreans and other Chinese
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/thai-me-up-thai-me-down.html
Time for liberals to respect "the south" ... in a way of speaking.. the south of Egypt that is..
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/time-for-liberals-to-respect-south-in.html
Irony 2: touted High IQ "G-men" cannot reproduce themselves
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/07/irony-2-higher-iqs-correlated-with_25.html
Unz and Sowell: Unz debunking Lynn's IQ and Wealth of Nations. Sowell debunking the Bell Curve
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/07/unz-and-sowell-unz-debunking-lynns-iq.html
Irony 1: touted High IQ types are more homosexual, more atheist, and more liberal (HAL)
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/06/irony-high-iqs-produce-more-atheists.html
Elite white universities discriminate against Asians using reverse "affirmative action"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/06/elite-white-universities-discriminate.html
Deteriorating state of white America
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/05/deteriorating-state-of-white-america.html
Racial Cartels (The Affirmative Action Propaganda machine- part 2
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-affirmative-action-propaganda.html
Hereditarian's/HBD's "Great Black Hope"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/04/blog-post.html
Exploding nonsense: the 10,000 Year Explosion
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/03/exploding-nonsense-review-of-cochran_8.html
We need "rational racism"- Convicted felon Dinesh Dsouza becomes his own test case
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/we-need-rational-racism-proponent.html
The Affirmative Action Propaganda Machine- part 1
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-affirmatve-action-propaganda.html
Two rules for being "really" black- no white wimmen, no Republican
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/to-be-really-black-you-cant-have-white.html
The Axial age reconsidered
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-axial-age-reconsidered.html
Cannibal seasonings: dark meat on white
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/12/i.html
"Affirmative Action" in the form of court remedies has been around a long time- since the 1930s- benefiting white union workers against discrimination by employers
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/09/affirmative-action-as-term-appears-in.html
Mugged by reality 1: White quotas, special preferences and government jobs
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/mugged-by-reality-1-white-quotas.html
Lightweight enforcement of EEO laws contradicts claims of "flood" of minorities "taking jobs"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/blog-post.html
Railroaded 3: white violence and intimidation imposed quotas
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-3-white-violence-and.html
Railroaded 2: how white quotas and special preferences blockade black progress...
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-2-thow-white-quotas-and.html
Railroaded 1: How white affirmative action and white special preferences destroyed black railroad employment...
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-how-white-affirmative-action.html
Affirmative action: primary beneficiaries are white women
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2011/04/affirmative-action-primary.html
7 reasons certain libertarians and right-wingers are wrong about the Civil Right Act
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/05/7-reasons-libertarians-may-be-wrong.html
Assorted "Role models" debunked- hypocritical heriditarianism
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/hbd-debunked-debunking-hypocritical.htmll
Social philosophy of Thomas Sowell
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2011/07/social-philosophy-of-thomas-sowell.html
Additional gene flow data... :)
Go with the flow 2- African gene flow into Europe in various eras
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/11/go-with-flow-2-african-gene-flow-into.html
DNA studies show African movement to Europe from very ancient times
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/dna-studies-show-african-movement-to.html
Guilt3- Why the "white privilege industry" is not all there
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/guilt3-why-white-privilege-industry-is.html
Guilt2- Media collaborates with guilt mongers - or how to play the white victim card
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/guilt2-media-collaborates-with-guilt.html
How Obama plays on white guilt
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/08/how-obama-plays-upon-white-guilt-hilary.html
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2019/01/blog-post.html
Blacks oppose free speech- more ramshackle "research" from "the East"..
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/08/blacks-oppose-free-speech-ramshackle.html
Hands off the Confederate flag
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/06/hands-off-confederate-flag.html
Despite much more wealth than blacks, whites collect about the same rate of welfare and are treated more generously
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/06/despite-much-more-wealth-than-blacks.html
African "boat people" ushering in European demographic decline
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/05/african-boat-people-ushering-in.html
The forgotten Holocaust- King Leopold's "Congo Free State" - 10 million victims
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-forgotten-holocaust-10-million-in.html
Are violent minorities taking over California and the West?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/04/are-violent-minorities-taking-over.html
Presidential hopeful Ben Carson meets and Greeks
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/03/presidential-hopeful-ben-carson-meet.html
Contra "ISIS" partisans, there have been some beneficial effects of Christianity
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/03/contra-isis-partisans-there-are-some.html
The social construction of race, compared to biology- Graves
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-social-construction-of-race_8.html
Why HBD or hereditarianism lacks credibility
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/10/why-hbd-or-hereditarianism-lacks.html
Leading Scientists criticize hereditarian claims
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/leading-scientists-criticize.html
Thai me down - Thais fall behind genetically related southern Chinese, Tibetans below genetically related East Asians like Koreans and other Chinese
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/thai-me-up-thai-me-down.html
Time for liberals to respect "the south" ... in a way of speaking.. the south of Egypt that is..
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/time-for-liberals-to-respect-south-in.html
Irony 2: touted High IQ "G-men" cannot reproduce themselves
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/07/irony-2-higher-iqs-correlated-with_25.html
Unz and Sowell: Unz debunking Lynn's IQ and Wealth of Nations. Sowell debunking the Bell Curve
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/07/unz-and-sowell-unz-debunking-lynns-iq.html
Irony 1: touted High IQ types are more homosexual, more atheist, and more liberal (HAL)
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/06/irony-high-iqs-produce-more-atheists.html
Elite white universities discriminate against Asians using reverse "affirmative action"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/06/elite-white-universities-discriminate.html
Deteriorating state of white America
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/05/deteriorating-state-of-white-america.html
Racial Cartels (The Affirmative Action Propaganda machine- part 2
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-affirmative-action-propaganda.html
Hereditarian's/HBD's "Great Black Hope"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/04/blog-post.html
Exploding nonsense: the 10,000 Year Explosion
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/03/exploding-nonsense-review-of-cochran_8.html
We need "rational racism"- Convicted felon Dinesh Dsouza becomes his own test case
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/we-need-rational-racism-proponent.html
The Affirmative Action Propaganda Machine- part 1
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-affirmatve-action-propaganda.html
Two rules for being "really" black- no white wimmen, no Republican
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/to-be-really-black-you-cant-have-white.html
The Axial age reconsidered
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-axial-age-reconsidered.html
Cannibal seasonings: dark meat on white
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/12/i.html
"Affirmative Action" in the form of court remedies has been around a long time- since the 1930s- benefiting white union workers against discrimination by employers
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/09/affirmative-action-as-term-appears-in.html
Mugged by reality 1: White quotas, special preferences and government jobs
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/mugged-by-reality-1-white-quotas.html
Lightweight enforcement of EEO laws contradicts claims of "flood" of minorities "taking jobs"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/blog-post.html
Railroaded 3: white violence and intimidation imposed quotas
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-3-white-violence-and.html
Railroaded 2: how white quotas and special preferences blockade black progress...
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-2-thow-white-quotas-and.html
Railroaded 1: How white affirmative action and white special preferences destroyed black railroad employment...
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-how-white-affirmative-action.html
Affirmative action: primary beneficiaries are white women
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2011/04/affirmative-action-primary.html
7 reasons certain libertarians and right-wingers are wrong about the Civil Right Act
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/05/7-reasons-libertarians-may-be-wrong.html
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/12/better-nutrition-led-to-increases-in.html
Assorted "Role models" debunked- hypocritical heriditarianism
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/hbd-debunked-debunking-hypocritical.htmll
Social philosophy of Thomas Sowell
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2011/07/social-philosophy-of-thomas-sowell.html
Additional gene flow data... :)
Bogus "biodiversity" theories of Kanazawa, Ruston, Lynn debunked
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/09/blog-post.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/09/blog-post.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-post_1818.html
In the Blood- debunking "HBD" and Neo-Nazi appropriation of ancient Egypt
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-post_29.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-post_29.html
early
Europeans and middle Easterners looked like Africans. Peoples returning
or "backflowing" to Africa would already be looking like Africans
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/05/blog-post_1754.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/05/blog-post_1754.html
Ancient Egypt: one of the world's most advanced civilizations- created by tropical peoples
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/09/blog-post_06.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/09/blog-post_06.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/03/playing-greek-defence-review-of-thornton.html
Quotations from mainstream academic research on the Nile Valley peoples
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-post_9251.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-post_9251.html
http://egyptsearchreloaded.proboards.com/thread/15/basic-database-nile-valley-studies
OTHER LINKS
Race, IQ, and Wealth: What the facts tell us about a taboo subject By Ron Unz
HBD EVOLUTION, BRAIN SIZE AND NATIONAL IQ CLAIMS DEBUNKED
IQ claims and miscellaneous data
Race, IQ, and Wealth: What the facts tell us about a taboo subject By Ron Unz
HBD EVOLUTION, BRAIN SIZE AND NATIONAL IQ CLAIMS DEBUNKED
Evolution, brain size, and the national IQ of peoples ... -
Jelte Wicherts 2010
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsPAIDrejoinder.pdf
------------------------------------
Why national IQs do not support evolutionary theories of
intelligence - WIcherts, Borsboom and Dolan 2010
Personality and Individual Differences 48 (2010) 91-96
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010.pdf
----------------------------- -------------
Are intelligence tests measurement invariant over time? by
JM Wicherts - ?2004
--Dolan, Wicherts et
al 2004. Investigating the nature of the Flynn effect. Intelligence 32 (2004)
509-537
http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2004.pdf
-------------------------------------------
LYNN AND VANHAVEN'S IQ AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS DEBUNKED
---------------- -------
www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/mcbrearty/Pdf/McB%20&%20Brooks%202000%20TRTW.pdf
------------------------
Race and other misadventures: essays in honor of Ashley
Montagu... By Larry T. Reynolds, Leonard Lieberman
http://books.google.com/books?id=5DLrgG_MflgC&pg=PA190&dq=r-+k-+selection+races&cd=1#v=onepage&q=r-%20k-%20selection%20races&f=false
--------------------------------
Race and intelligence: separating science from myth. By Jefferson
M. Fish. Routledge 2002. See Templeton's detailed article referenced above also
inside the book
http://books.google.com/books?id=t9OdPPLIgMAC&pg=PA64&dq=r-+k-+selection+races&cd=7#v=onepage&q=r-%20k-%20selection%20races&f=false
------------------------
http://www.ogiek.org/indepth/what-they-mean.htm
---------------- -------
Oubre, A (2011) Race Genes and Ability: Rethinking Ethnic
Differences, vol 1 and 2. BTI Press
For summary see: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/05-02-18/
---------------- -------
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/curveball.html
 |
-----------------------------------------------------------
--S OY Keita, R A Kittles, et al. "Conceptualizing human
variation," Nature Genetics 36, S17 - S20 (2004)
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/pdf/ng1455.pdf
--S.O.Y. Keita and Rick Kittles. (1997) *The Persistence ofRacial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence. AJPA, 99:3
http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/pageDocuments/WAURRSZQOE.pdf
---------------- -------
HBD RACE EVOLUTION CLAIMS DEBUNKED BY GENETICISTS
Alan Templeton. "The Genetic and Evolutionary
significnce oF Human Races." pp 31-56. IN: J. FiSh (2002) Race and
Intelligence: Separating scinnce from myth.
IQ claims and miscellaneous data
HBD RACE AND INTELLIGENCE CLAIMS DEBUNKED
J. FiSh (2002) Race
and Intelligence: Separating science from myth.
------------------------------------------
MORE HBD DEBUNKING
-------------------------------- ---------------------
Oubre, A (2011) Race Genes and Ability: Rethinking Ethnic
Differences, vol 1 and 2. BTI Press
----------------------------------------------
Krimsky, S, Sloan.K (2011) Race and the Genetic Revolution:
Science, Myth, and Culture
-------------------------------
Wicherts and Johnson, 2009. Group differences in the
heritability of items and test scores
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/04/24/rspb.2009.0238.full
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/coming-apart-can-murrays-down-with.html
"SELECTION FOR"- "SELECT FOR" HDB
CLAIMS DEBUNKED- "SELECTION" IS NOT THE ONLY KEY FORCE DRIVING CHANGE
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/12/demic-diffusion-notes-and-tropical.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/05/7-reasons-libertarians-may-be-wrong.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/08/cro-magnons-are-us-debunking-claims.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/03/exploding-nonsense-review-of-cochran_8.html
--Joseph Graves, 2006. What We Know and What We Don’t Know:
Human Genetic Variation and the Social Construction of Race
http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Graves/
J. Kahn (2013) How a Drug Becomes "Ethnic" - Yale
Journal of Health Policy, Law and Ethics, v4:1
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&context=yjhple
------------------------------------ -----------------
http://evolution.binghamton.edu/evos/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/PageProofs-Graves_race.pdf
-------------------------------------------- ----------------------------
other links
Evolution, brain size, and the national IQ of peoples ... -
Jelte Wicherts 2010
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsPAIDrejoinder.pdf
------------------------------------
Why national IQs do not support evolutionary theories of
intelligence - WIcherts, Borsboom and Dolan 2010
Personality and Individual Differences 48 (2010) 91-96
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010.pdf
----------------------------- -------------
Are intelligence tests measurement invariant over time? by
JM Wicherts - ?2004
--Dolan, Wicherts et
al 2004. Investigating the nature of the Flynn effect. Intelligence 32 (2004)
509-537
http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2004.pdf
-------------------------------------------
LYNN AND VANHAVEN'S IQ AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS DEBUNKED
---------------- -------
www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/mcbrearty/Pdf/McB%20&%20Brooks%202000%20TRTW.pdf
------------------------
Race and other misadventures: essays in honor of Ashley
Montagu... By Larry T. Reynolds, Leonard Lieberman
http://books.google.com/books?id=5DLrgG_MflgC&pg=PA190&dq=r-+k-+selection+races&cd=1#v=onepage&q=r-%20k-%20selection%20races&f=false
--------------------------------
Race and intelligence: separating science from myth. By Jefferson
M. Fish. Routledge 2002. See Templeton's detailed article referenced above also
inside the book
http://books.google.com/books?id=t9OdPPLIgMAC&pg=PA64&dq=r-+k-+selection+races&cd=7#v=onepage&q=r-%20k-%20selection%20races&f=false
------------------------
http://www.ogiek.org/indepth/what-they-mean.htm
---------------- -------
Oubre, A (2011) Race Genes and Ability: Rethinking Ethnic
Differences, vol 1 and 2. BTI Press
For summary see: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/05-02-18/
---------------- -------
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/curveball.html
-----------------------------------------------------------
--S OY Keita, R A Kittles, et al. "Conceptualizing human
variation," Nature Genetics 36, S17 - S20 (2004)
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/pdf/ng1455.pdf
--S.O.Y. Keita and Rick Kittles. (1997) *The Persistence ofRacial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence. AJPA, 99:3
http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/pageDocuments/WAURRSZQOE.pdf
---------------- -------
HBD RACE EVOLUTION CLAIMS DEBUNKED BY GENETICISTS
Alan Templeton. "The Genetic and Evolutionary
significnce oF Human Races." pp 31-56. IN: J. FiSh (2002) Race and
Intelligence: Separating scinnce from myth.
HBD RACE AND INTELLIGENCE CLAIMS DEBUNKED
J. FiSh (2002) Race
and Intelligence: Separating science from myth.
------------------------------------------
MORE HBD DEBUNKING
-------------------------------- ---------------------
Oubre, A (2011) Race Genes and Ability: Rethinking Ethnic
Differences, vol 1 and 2. BTI Press
----------------------------------------------
Krimsky, S, Sloan.K (2011) Race and the Genetic Revolution:
Science, Myth, and Culture
-------------------------------
Wicherts and Johnson, 2009. Group differences in the
heritability of items and test scores
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/04/24/rspb.2009.0238.full
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/coming-apart-can-murrays-down-with.html
"SELECTION FOR"- "SELECT FOR" HDB
CLAIMS DEBUNKED- "SELECTION" IS NOT THE ONLY KEY FORCE DRIVING CHANGE
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/12/demic-diffusion-notes-and-tropical.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/05/7-reasons-libertarians-may-be-wrong.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/08/cro-magnons-are-us-debunking-claims.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/03/exploding-nonsense-review-of-cochran_8.html
--Joseph Graves, 2006. What We Know and What We Don’t Know:
Human Genetic Variation and the Social Construction of Race
http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Graves/
J. Kahn (2013) How a Drug Becomes "Ethnic" - Yale
Journal of Health Policy, Law and Ethics, v4:1
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&context=yjhple
------------------------------------ -----------------
http://evolution.binghamton.edu/evos/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/PageProofs-Graves_race.pdf
