Black America
Nearer to overcoming
May 8th 2008 | ATLANTA AND HARLEMFrom The Economist print edition
Barack Obama's success shows that the ceiling has risen for African-Americans. But many are still too close to the floor
WHEN Roland Fryer was about 15, a friend asked him what he would be
doing when he was 30. He said he would probably be dead. It was a
reasonable prediction. At the time, he was hanging out with a gang and
selling drugs on the side. Young black men in that line of work seldom
live long. But Mr Fryer survived. At 30, he won tenure as an economics
professor at Harvard. That was four months ago.
Mr Fryer's parents split up when he was very young. His father was a
maths teacher who went off the rails: young Roland once had to borrow
money to bail him out of jail. His great-aunt and great-uncle ran a
crack business: young Roland would watch them cook cocaine powder into
rocks of crack in a frying pan in the kitchen. Several of his relatives
went to prison. But Mr Fryer backed away from a life of crime and won a
sports scholarship to the University of Texas. He found he enjoyed
studying, and was rather good at it. By the time he was 25, the
president of Harvard was hectoring him to join the faculty.
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Mr
Fryer now applies his supple mind to the touchy, tangled issue of
racial inequality. Why are African-Americans so much less prosperous
than whites? Why do so many black children flounder in school? Why do
so many young black men languish behind bars? Why are stories like Mr
Fryer's considered so surprising?
Black and white Americans tend to produce different answers to these
questions, and there is also heated disagreement within both groups.
Some blacks think their glass is three-quarters full; others think it
three-quarters empty. Optimists can point to obvious improvements.
Little more than four decades ago, blacks in the South could not vote.
This year, a black man may be elected president. Under segregation,
southern blacks were barred from white schools, neighbourhoods and
opportunities. Now, racial discrimination is both illegal and taboo.
Blacks have pierced nearly every glass ceiling. The secretary of state,
the boss of American Express and the country's most popular entertainer
(Oprah Winfrey) are all black.
Life for the average African-American has also improved remarkably.
The median black household income has risen from $22,300 (in 2006
dollars) in 1967 to $32,100 in 2006. Black life expectancy has soared
from 34 in 1900 to 73 today. Most blacks today are middle class.
Yes, say the pessimists, but the gap between what blacks and whites
earn and what they learn, which narrowed steadily between the 1940s and
the late 1980s, has more or less frozen since then. Blacks' median
household income is still only 63% of whites'. Academically, black
children at 17 perform no better than a white 13-year-old. Blacks die,
on average, five years earlier than whites. And though the black middle
class has grown immensely, many blacks are still stuck in
crime-scorched, nearly jobless ghettos.
What ails black America? Public debate falls between two poles. Some
academics and most civil-rights activists stress the role played by
racial discrimination. It may no longer be overt, they argue, but it is
still widespread and severe. Julian Bond of the National Association
for the Advancement of Coloured People reckons that racism is still
“epidemic” in America.
Black conservatives, while never denying that racism persists, think
it much less severe than before and no longer the main obstacle to
black advancement. Bill Cosby, a veteran comedian, tours the country
urging blacks to concentrate on improving themselves: to study hard, to
work hard and—especially—to shun the culture of despair that grips the
ghetto.
The debate is often bitter. Michael Eric Dyson, a leftish academic,
argues that the black middle class has “lost its mind” if it believes
Mr Cosby's argument downplaying the importance of race. Larry Elder, a
conservative pundit, wrote a book about blacks who blame racism for
nearly everything called: “Stupid Black Men”.
Mr Fryer eschews histrionics in favour of hard data. He is obsessed
with education, which he calls “the civil-rights battleground of the
21st century”. Why do blacks lag behind whites in school? Mr Fryer is
prepared to test even the most taboo proposition. Are blacks
genetically predisposed to be less intelligent than whites? With a
collaborator from the University of Chicago, Mr Fryer debunked this
idea. Granted, blacks score worse than whites on intelligence tests.
But Mr Fryer looked at data from new tests on very young children. At
eight months to a year, he found almost no racial gap, and that gap
disappeared entirely when he added controls for such things as low
birth weight.
If the gap is absent in babies, this suggests it is caused by
environmental factors, which can presumably be fixed. But first they
must be identified. Do black children need better nutrition? More
stimulation in the home? Better schools? Probably all these things
matter, but how much? “I don't know,” says Mr Fryer. It is a phrase
that, to his credit, he uses often.
Cool to be dumb
His most striking contribution to the debate so far has been to show
that black students who study hard are accused of “acting white” and
are ostracised by their peers. Teachers have known this for years, at
least anecdotally. Mr Fryer found a way to measure it. He looked at a
large sample of public-school children who were asked to name their
friends. To correct for kids exaggerating their own popularity, he
counted a friendship as real only if both parties named each other. He
found that for white pupils, the higher their grades, the more popular
they were. But blacks with good grades had fewer black friends than
their mediocre peers. In other words, studiousness is stigmatised among
black schoolchildren. It would be hard to imagine a more crippling
cultural norm.
Mr Fryer has some novel ideas about fixing this state of affairs.
New York's school system is letting him test a couple of them on its
children. One is to give pupils cash incentives. If a nine-year-old
completes an exam, he gets $5. For getting the answers right, he gets
more money, up to about $250 a year. The notion of bribing children to
study makes many parents queasy. Mr Fryer's response is: let's see if
it works and drop it if it doesn't.
Another idea, being tested on a different group of children, is to
hand out free mobile telephones. The phones do not work during school
hours, and children can recharge them with call-minutes only by
studying. (The phone companies were happy to help with this.) The
phones give the children an incentive to study, and Mr Fryer a means to
communicate with them. He talks of “re-branding” academic achievement
to make it cool. He knows it will not be easy. He recalls hearing
drug-pushers in the 1980s joking “Just say no!” as they handed over the
goods, mocking Nancy Reagan's anti-drug slogan.
Blacks who do well in school are hungrily recruited by universities,
which often admit them with lower test scores than are required of
whites or Asians. The bar was first lowered for blacks out of a sense
that America owes them a debt for past discrimination. Now universities
are more likely to argue that racial diversity is valuable for its own
sake.
But racial preferences are unpopular among whites, and the most
blatant ones are, increasingly, illegal. The University of Michigan
used to give applicants more points for being black than for getting a
perfect score on the entrance exam. The Supreme Court deemed this
unconstitutional in 2003, but ruled that less explicit preferences
might be allowable.
When voters are asked if they want to ban racial preferences in the
public sphere, they generally say yes. Since the 1990s, three states
have passed referendums barring racial preferences, and four more may
do so in November. Opponents of racial preferences argue that they are
bad for blacks, too.
A study by Richard Sander of the University of California, Los
Angeles, found that when the bar is lowered for black applicants to law
school, they are admitted to institutions where they cannot cope. Many
who drop out of top-tier colleges might have thrived at slightly less
competitive ones. Mr Sander calculated that the net effect of pro-black
preferences was actually to reduce the number of blacks who passed the
bar exam. That is, racial preferences for black law students result in
fewer black lawyers. John McWhorter, the author of “Winning the Race:
Beyond the Crisis in Black America”, argues that lowering the bar for
blacks also reduces their incentive to excel at school. “As long as
black students have to do only so well, they will do only so well,” he
says.
For every dollar that a white man earns, a black man makes only 70
cents. Such figures are sometimes bandied around to imply that nearly
all of this gap is caused by discrimination. That is bunk. If a firm
could really get the same work done 30% more cheaply simply by hiring
blacks, someone would have noticed and made a fortune doing just that.
That said, blacks certainly face barriers in the job market. Two
economists, Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, sent out 5,000
replies to job advertisements in Boston and Chicago. Each fictitious
applicant was randomly assigned either a black-sounding name, such as
Jamal or Lakisha, or a white one, such as Emily or Greg. For every ten
jobs the “whites” applied for, they were offered one interview. The
“blacks” had to post 15 letters to elicit the same response. Clearly,
some managers are racist. But many are not. And many firms are
desperate to hire and promote blacks, if only to avoid lawsuits.
The short straw
Looked at more closely, the statistics are murky. White men are more
likely to work than black men. The proportion of black men
participating in the labour force fell from 74% in 1972 to 67% last
year. Whites start more businesses, too. Only 5% of firms are
black-owned, though blacks account for 13% of America's population.
A black woman with a degree earns as much as a white woman with a
degree. But with a professional degree, the black woman earns 30% more
(see chart 2). That does not prove that law firms discriminate in
favour of black women—though they may. Another explanation is that a
skilled white woman is more likely to have a rich husband (or indeed
any husband), and so may have less incentive to maximise her earnings.
Even when blacks earn as much as whites, the whites are typically
far wealthier. In 2000 the average white household in the bottom fifth
of income-earners had net assets of $24,000. The figure for blacks was
a piffling $57. Whites in the middle fifth were five times wealthier
than their black counterparts.
Partly this is because whites inherit more. But it is also because
of different approaches to investment. Blacks are more likely to put
their money in the bank, notes Mr Fryer. Whites are more likely to
invest in shares, which generate higher returns. Compound this over a
couple of generations and the effect is colossal.
Another crucial factor is the collapse of the black family. The
proportion of black babies born out of wedlock has nearly doubled since
1970, to 69%. And 70% of these births are to mothers who are truly
alone, not cohabiting. Stable two-parent families accumulate wealth
more easily than single-parent homes. Two salaries stretch further, two
pairs of hands mean less need for paid child care. Two-parent families
also find it easier to raise well-adjusted, studious children, who go
on to start stable families of their own. Broken families, if middle
class, find it harder to stay that way. And if they start in the
ghetto, they find it harder to break out.
“Black life is not valued!” booms Michael Walrond, a popular pastor
in Harlem. He is referring to the news that three police officers were
acquitted of all charges after shooting dead an unarmed black man, Sean
Bell, a few hours before his wedding. The cops fired 50 bullets, but
the pastor says he is outraged by the figure of 31. Members of his
mostly black flock know immediately what he means. Two of the officers
were black and all of them thought Mr Bell had a gun. But it was the
white officer who reloaded and fired 31 rounds. Mr Walrond's angry
sermon draws cheers.
Afterwards, in his office, he agrees that it is not only whites who
devalue black lives: black criminals do too. Mr Walrond, like many
inner-city clerics, works hard to reform those who stray. But like
Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, he tends to assume the
worst about his country. He finds Mr Wright's theory that the
government concocted the AIDS virus to kill blacks “credible”.
He refers to the Tuskegee experiment between 1932 and 1972 when some
doctors in Alabama deliberately neglected to treat black syphilis
patients in order to study the disease's progression. That was an
abomination. But it is hardly evidence that the government is bent on
genocide.
From alienation to despair
Is the state racist? Those who think so often point to the
criminal-justice system. A startling 11% of black males aged 20-34 are
behind bars. Overall, black men are seven times more likely to be
incarcerated than white men. Until recently, sentences for crack
offenders (who are mostly black) were much harsher than those for
powder-cocaine offenders (mostly white). Ex-convicts in several states
are barred from voting, a penalty that deters no crime but signals to
wrongdoers that they can never be full citizens again. “We are becoming
a nation of jailers, and racist jailers at that,” reckons Glenn Loury,
an economist.
Not so, says Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, a
conservative think-tank. Blacks are more likely to be jailed because
they commit more crimes, she argues. In 2005 the black murder rate was
seven times higher than that for whites and Latinos combined. Harsh
crack laws account only for a smidgeon of the disparity in
incarceration rates. In 2006 blacks were 37.5% of state prisoners;
exclude drug offenders and that figure drops to 37%. And since black
criminals' victims are mostly black, some argue that locking more of
them up has saved many black lives.
In other ways, it is far from clear that the government is trying to
keep blacks down. Affirmative-action policies mean that it provides
jobs for a disproportionate number of them. It also allows blacks who
own small businesses to charge 10% more than whites and still win
federal contracts. “Small” is generously defined. A firm with 1,500
employees can qualify. Its black owner can be worth $750,000—excluding
his home and business—and still be deemed “economically disadvantaged”.
Yet many blacks feel alienated in a way that is “vastly
disproportionate to real-life stimulus,” frets Mr McWhorter. When New
Orleans flooded, some speculated that the government had blown up the
levees. Even cooler heads believed that the botched response stemmed
from George Bush's indifference to black suffering.
Alienation has consequences. Amid the revolutionary fervour of the
1960s, says Mr McWhorter, many blacks learned that “America's racism
rendered it unworthy of any self-regarding black person's embrace and
that therefore blacks were exempt from mainstream standards of
conduct.” The conventional wisdom about ghettos—best expressed in
William Julius Wilson's book “When Work Disappears”—is that inner
cities decayed because factories moved away. But the jobs often moved
only a couple of bus rides away. Noting that millions of blacks moved
halfway across the country to find work during the “great migration” in
the early 20th century, Mr McWhorter wonders why so many of their
descendants failed to follow suit.
He offers two explanations. First, a huge expansion of open-ended
welfare in the 1960s enabled mothers to subsist without work. Until the
mid-1990s, welfare often paid better than an entry-level job. Second,
the counter-culture taught young blacks that working for “chump change”
was beneath their dignity.
Bill Clinton fixed welfare and pushed millions of jobless women
into work. Violent crime has also fallen sharply since the 1990s,
despite the best efforts of gangster rappers to glorify it. Previously
dysfunctional cities, such as New York and Washington, DC, are now soberly governed and better places to live in.
Yet many African-Americans are intensely gloomy. In a poll last
year, only 44% said they expected life for blacks to get better, down
from 57% in 1986. The subprime mortgage crisis, which will cost many
black families their homes this year, will surely deepen the gloom.
Some blacks contend that racism has simply gone underground. Ellis
Cose, a journalist, once wrote that even middle-class blacks suffer
constant subtle racial slights, and that these are so distressing that
they “are in the end most of what life is”. Other blacks think he
exaggerates. Sometimes, says Mr McWhorter, the assistant trailing you
in a store is just trying to sell you something.
If Barack Obama can only...
Taking the longer view, there is much to cheer. In every way that
can be measured (a big caveat), racism has diminished in the past two
generations. Inter-racial marriages are up sevenfold since 1970. Young
Americans are far less likely to express racial animosity than their
elders, suggesting that as old bigots die, they will not be replaced.
And if Mr Obama becomes president, it would “raise the ceiling for
everyone,” says Robert Franklin, the president of Morehouse, a black
college in Atlanta.
“For me, racism is not going to be an obstacle,” says DeWayne
Powell, a student at Morehouse. He recalls an incident when, en route
to drop off his college application, he stopped to ask for directions.
A white receptionist asked sneeringly whether he could read. “I
laughed,” he says. “I thought: I'm on my way to fulfil my destiny, and
you're stuck behind that glass.”
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher (1788-1860)
