On racial discrimination

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The following is an excerpt from Economic Facts and Fallacies, pp 172-174 by Thomas Sowell.

Thomas Sowell is a black man who is a Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305. He has written over forty books. See the Wikipedia article Thomas Sowell . I have a very high regard for him as a very honest and articulate person of great perception and intellect.

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Just as people with a racial bias or prejudice may fail to discriminate when the cost of doing so is too high, someone with no racial antipathy at all may still discriminate by race if rates of crime, disease, or other undesirable characteristics differ from one racial group to another and alternative ways of sorting out individuals are more costly or less accurate. Indeed, members of the same group may discriminate against other people like themselves for the same reason, as when black taxi drivers avoid picking up black male passengers after dark.

In short, race is used as a sorting device for decision-making, even by people who are not racists. The employers may be reluctant to hire young black males because these employers are aware of what a high proportion of them have been arrested or imprisoned, even if these employers have no antipathy to black people, as such, and readily hire older blacks or black females. A study of those employers who routinely check for prison records among all people who apply for employment found that these particular employers hired black males more often than other employers did. That is these particular employers no longer had to rely on race as a sorting device, when they already had in place a more accurate (and more costly) sorting device that was in use for screening their job applicants in general. Distinguishing racism, as such, from the use of race as a sorting device complicates the problem of trying to determine how much racial discrimination exists.

It is also worth noting that one of the things that makes race such a widely used sorting device is that it is far less costly than other sorting devices, since race is immediately visible to the naked eye at no cost, unlike religion, education or other sorting devices that require more time or expense. Many people have said that each person should be judged as an individual but virtually no one actually does that because the cost of acquiring sufficient knowledge about an individual is often far more than it is worth. Such costs can include not only financial costs but also physical dangers, including death. When you see a shadowy figure in an alley at night, that might be a kindly neighbor out walking his dog or a sadistic serial killer waiting to ambush another victim. It is not worth the cost of finding out. In general, how finely it pays to sort depends on the costs and the benefits of doing so. At one time, employment advertisements said “No Irish Need apply.” Such ads did not begin to disappear until the acculturation of Irish immigrants to the norms of American society reached the point where the benefits of sorting the Irish individually exceeded the costs of doing so.

With racial or ethnic minorities, as with women, the question of discrimination is not simply whether there is any, or how much, but also where it takes place. In both cases, the discrimination can begin in childhood,, especially when it comes to schooling, so that there may be real differences in qualifications by the time individuals begin entering the job as adults. For many years — indeed, generations — black children in the South attended schools where the expenditures per pupil were substantially lower than in white schools. In some parts of the South, per pupil expenditure was several times as high for white students as for black students. In some places, the number of days in a school year differed, so that black and white students with the same number of years of schooling had very different quantities and qualities of education.

When, in adulthood, blacks and whites with the “same” education were paid different amounts during the Jim Crow era, it was by no means certain whether the difference represented employer discrimination or discrimination that occurred before the worker reached the employer, or some combination. In a later era, after such disparities in per pupil expenditures and in days of school attendance were either less or non-existent, the academic performances of the students themselves differed so much that, as already noted, an average black seventeen year-old scored at a level achieved by white students who were years younger. Here again, though for different reasons, comparisons of the incomes of blacks and whites with the “same” education were comparisons of apples and oranges, so that inferences of employer discrimination were still questionable.

On pages 186-187 Dr. Sowell writes:

Both history and statistics reveal the fallacy of the “legacy of slavery” explanation for current social pathology in America’s black ghettoes. Senator Edward Brooke, who grew up in Washington’s black community in the 1920s and 1930s summarized in a few words what many statistics confirm:

For younger people growing up in America today, stories of my youth will seem almost incomprehensible. It will require the suspension of their sense of reality to picture a time when large areas of Washington, D.C., were truly safe, when families stayed together, neighbors helped one another, students were encouraged to study, and there were no drugs or drive-by shootings.

The world that Senator Brooke described was generations closer to the era of slavery than the generations pervaded by the ghetto social pathology all too familiar in our times. Moreover, many remarkably similar pathologies have been found in a study of a white lower-class community in Britain, where none of the familiar explanations of slavery, racism or discrimination apply. What lower-class white communities in Britain and the black ghettoes in the United States have in common is a pattern of social pathologies that have become pronounced in the latter half of the twentieth century, when similar ideas and policies became dominant in both countries. Britain was once one of the most law-abiding nations on earth but, by the early twenty-first century, its crime rate in most categories was higher than that in the United States. In both countries, politicians, activists, and ideologues who claimed to have solutions instead made many problems worse than before.

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Slavery, racism, and discrimination are not the causes of the problems of the Blacks today. The causes lie in black culture and in the changes in our society stemming from the replacement of old Christian moral attitudes and values for the modern atheistic moral outlooks of Humanism / Liberalism — and in the social legislation enacted by the Johnson administration in the mid 1960s in the form of a welfare program that offered single women free food and shelter for life if they would just have children outside marriage, new progressive ideas on reforming criminals instead of imprisoning them, and sex education programs in schools.

See

How the US Lost the 'War on Poverty' | Thomas Sowell

How Woke Legal Policies Failed | Thomas Sowell

How 'Reproductive Health' Education Policies in Schools Failed | Thomas Sowell