The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same PDF

# The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same ## Some (Incomplete and Unsatisfying) Explanations for Persistent Inequality In the mid-1990s, scholars Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray published _The Bell Curve_, a provocative best-selling book about human intelligence. At the center...

# The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same ## Some (Incomplete and Unsatisfying) Explanations for Persistent Inequality In the mid-1990s, scholars Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray published _The Bell Curve_, a provocative best-selling book about human intelligence. At the center of the book, the authors argued that the divide between highly intelligent people ("the cognitive elite") and the unintelligent was widening dramatically, because opportunities and resources were increasingly distributed on the basis of merit rather than class or social status. Noting that unintelligent people were reproducing at a faster rate than intelligent people, the authors went on to recommend that government intervene to reverse that trend for the sake of general welfare. Most controversially, the authors argued that racial differences in IQ were traceable at least in part to genetic differences. More precisely, the authors deemed it "highly likely" that genes at least had something to do with racial differences in IQ scores, particularly with regard to differences between blacks and whites. To be sure, Herrnstein and Murray said they remained "resolutely agnostic" on the question of how much influence genetic deficits might play relative to the environment. At the same time, the book pushed pretty hard on the claim that black-white gaps could be traced to IQ differences, and that IQ differences in turn were genetic in part. Reaction to the book was both swift and critical. Readers didn't bother to parse the subtleties of the book's language, nor did they take much note of the authors' resolute agnosticism. Most famously, anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould forcefully denounced the book as less a scientific treatise than a manifesto of ideology, and he listed multiple ways in which the science behind the argument was quite weak or failed altogether. One critic pointed out research indicating that scores for students of color appear to depend on what the test takers were told about how the test results would be used. Other critics pointed out that the analysis ignored or underestimated the effect on IQ of education, class, and inheritance. Herrnstein and Murray were certainly not the first scholars to use genes to explain persistent racial gaps. At various stages in our intellectual history, biologists and anthropologists have argued, amazingly enough, that the shape of the skull and brain size, and the genes for those traits, explained racial disparities. But many academics had thought that those kinds of genetic explanations were now off the table, so thoroughly had the early theories been discredited. In the end, much of the scientific community agreed that the book was riddled with mathematical errors, bad reasoning, and mis-citation of sources. And of course, more than a few scholars accused the authors of racism. Over the last half-century, scholars have come up with a very wide range of explanations for persistent racial gaps. In this chapter, we will investigate the most commonly offered theories. As we will discover, each field has its own take on the subject, and the diversity of explanations is quite remarkable. Economists suggest that market imperfections cause whites to statistically discriminate. Biologists have proposed that genes play a role, though culture is the more likely culprit for some these days. And a growing number of scholars argue that the way we structure our social arrangements is responsible. As we will see, many of these explanations have seemed quite promising-but none of them has proved wholly satisfying, for reasons that will be become clearer as we go along. ## Economic Explanations First, consider the economists' explanations. According to the most popular explanation offered by economic theory, racial gaps persist because people for whatever reason have a taste or preference for discrimination, and imperfect market competition cannot drive those preferences out. Say for example that employers harbor an irrational prejudice against Latinos. Employers might well refuse to hire Latino workers because they don't want to associate with them, and might even be willing to pay some price to accommodate that preference. Likewise, employers might discriminate not because of their own tastes but because other workers and customers might have such tastes. Economists like Gary Becker have suggested that market forces will drum out this racism. In a perfectly competitive market, those employers, workers, and customers who have a taste for discrimination and are willing to pay to accommodate that taste will be outcompeted by those who don't have such tastes. This is because those tastes are expensive, competitively speaking-discriminating employers, workers, and customers will have to pay a cost to accommodate their tastes for exclusion. For example, employers who don't want to hire Latino or black workers likely will have to pay higher wages to white workers because they will be hiring from a smaller pool. In perfect market competition, market players are perfectly rational and all transactions go off without a hitch. Under those conditions, discriminating employers will eventually be replaced by nondiscriminating employers, who won't have to pay higher wages because they are willing to draw from the wider pool. Because nondiscriminating firms can operate more cheaply than discriminating firms, the market will favor nondiscriminators. But as economists point out, perfect competition does not always exist outside theoretical models. For example, those markets in which people of color are not a big enough percentage of the population to let nondiscriminating employers easily fill slots with minorities could allow employers to indulge their taste for exclusion. Whether the market will drive out discriminating firms depends on a range of empirical factors: the degree of competition in the market, the demographics of the labor market, and other factors such as those described above. The takeaway point from this theory, then, is that racial gaps might persist because people still have a taste for exclusion, and competitive forces can't drive out people's taste for discrimination for a number of reasons. Another group of theories involve so-called rational discrimination. The taste-based explanations described above are agnostic about the source of people's tastes or preferences. In contrast, statistical discrimination models explain preferences to exclude as based on so-called rational generalizations about race. These models start with the presumption that employers frequently don't have perfect information about whether a worker is productive. Sometimes, for example, because white employers are more well-connected to other white workers through social networks, they have better information about white workers and less perfect information about workers of color. As a result, employers engage in stereotype. They may try to infer a worker's productivity by generalizing on the basis of easily observed traits like race or gender. Sometimes employers generalize on the basis of actually observed, real differences in productivity-for example, they generalize that black workers have less education (which is true owing to historic discrimination). Sometimes employers just imagine differences where they don't exist. But in either case, those generalizations can become self-fulfilling. In particular, they may trigger minority decisions about whether to invest in becoming productive, which in turn fulfill the stereotype. If employers hire fewer workers of color because they generalize about their education levels, for example, those workers in turn will rationally invest less in the education, skills, and training. Why bother investing if you don't get a full return? As a result, even imagined differences can become real. Whether on the basis of stereotype or some observed correlation between race and education, if employers think that workers are less productive, they will in fact become less productive. ## Biology and Social Science Explanations We shall now say a word or two more about biologists and their genes-based explanations. Genetic explanations have long been a favorite of biologists at the turn of the century and conservative theorists in more modern times. Scholars like anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould have explored the darker days of our intellectual history, in which scholars argued that blacks and "Mongoloids" were inferior because of their physiological or genetic characteristics. Some so-called experts in "craniometry," for example, suggested that people of color possessed lower IQs because their brains were smaller. But as time passed, most if not all of these ideas were thoroughly discredited as scientifically unsupported, although the ideas did reappear in modified and more sophisticated form from time to time, as was true in _The Bell Curve_. For scholars in social science, in contrast, continuing intentional discrimination seems like the most intuitively appealing explanation for persistent racial gaps. But the research is pretty clear that American citizens don't harbor bias at nearly the levels they did during Jim Crow. Study after study documents that racial bias (at least the conscious kind) has gone down over the last forty years. In light of that research, could continuing discrimination really explain the kinds of persistent racial gaps that we still see? Possibly. Consider recent evidence in the context of jobs and housing. In several studies, researchers sent resumes with equivalent credentials to employers using names that identified the senders as black (for example, Jamal and Lakisha) or as white (Brad and Emily). Employers invited back for interviews those "job candidates" with white names 50 percent more often than they called back equally qualified black applicants. Were they generalizing on the basis of race? Maybe they assumed that black-named applicants had a poorer skill set, even though the resume listed equivalent credentials. But the design of the study made that unlikely. Putting better credentials on the candidates' resumes improved the callback rate for white-named applicants, but not for black-named applicants. More likely, employers were stereotyping on the basis of names. They may have assumed that applicants with black-sounding names were apt to identify strongly with their racial identity or embrace a distinctively black culture. And of course they made no such assumptions about white-named applicants. Although researchers could not pinpoint the reason for different callback rates between black and white candidates, the study suggests that continuing discrimination might well be partly to blame for persistent racial gaps in jobs. We see the strongest evidence of continuing discrimination in housing markets. As with the job candidates, researchers in housing discrimination often send in undercover "testers" to see whether real estate brokers and housing lenders will treat clients differently because of their race. Testers of different races are given identical credentials and housing interests, and are trained to follow the same script in their opening interactions with brokers and lenders. The research shows consistently that blacks and Latinos have very different experiences when looking for a house than do whites. Black and brown testers are typically offered less information about housing, given fewer opportunities to see units, and get less help with financing. In addition, real estate agents steer black testers to property in neighborhoods that they don't show to whites. Likewise, Latino testers get less help with mortgage financing than do white testers. Some scholars theorize that continuing intentional discrimination might be cyclical. We might see it more when economic times are tough, and general inequality rises in all races. In these circumstances, competition for higher income jobs increases, and intentional discrimination increases because race is an easy difference to use in discriminating anti-competitively. Likewise, psychologists have argued that whites might perceive certain events-affirmative action or the election of a black president, for example-as a threat to the material and status interests of whites as a group, and such perceived threats might motivate continuing intentional discrimination. One recent and quite compelling theory is subconscious bias. Some psychologists argue that racial gaps persist because people subconsciously hold stereotypical beliefs about others based on race, or subconscious associations between someone's racial category and their propensity for violence, for example. At Harvard, Mazharin Banaji and her colleagues have designed a research instrument called the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which measures the strength of people's implicit racial biases. In the laboratory, computers measure the speed with which research subjects respond when they are asked to perform categorizing tasks. Initially, subjects are asked to categorize names-Lakisha, Jamal, Juan, Marta, Emily, Scott- or photographs of faces as belonging to particular racial categories. Experimenters then ask subjects to engage in two categorizing tasks that associate race with pleasant or unpleasant emotion. First, they are asked to use one hand to respond to things that are unpleasant (say, that are violent) and also to black names or photos. They are asked to use the other hand to respond both to things that are pleasant and to white names or pictures. The categorizing task then is reversed, pairing violence with white names or photos and nonviolence with black names or photos. A significant percentage of subjects tend to respond more quickly on the task that associates race with stereotypically pleasant or unpleasant associations-white with nonviolence, black with violence, for example. Researchers read the difference in response times as indicating implicit bias in favor of one group or the other, depending on the direction of the differences, or as neutral. The results are quite astonishing. Over 75 percent of self-identified whites and Asians demonstrate a bias in favor of whites against blacks. Even black test takers typically demonstrate an unconscious bias in favor of whites. Some scholars have questioned whether the implicit bias test measures anything other than people's familiarity or cultural knowledge of stereotypes. Alternatively, the test might just measure the greater salience of one racial identity-say black-in the category of race. Raising more serious questions, critics also point out that IAT scores appear to vary when the same person takes the test under different circumstances. Others question whether implicit bias affects decision making that is less split-second and more deliberative. Police officers may have to make split-second decisions based on race, for example, if they have to decide whether the object a black suspect is pulling out of his pocket is his ID or a gun. But how relevant is implicit bias in longer, more deliberative decisions like those in which employers engage when deciding whom to hire? On this question, evidence is accumulating that IAT scores correlate to more deliberative behavior. IAT scores predict, for example, the way in which a prospective employer will assess a person's resume quality. In 2008, researchers in Sweden sent employers matched resumes with Muslim-sounding names. This time, researchers followed up with the employers and administered an IAT. Perhaps not surprisingly, those employers who were less likely to call back a candidate with Muslim-sounding names scored higher on an IAT designed to measure preferences for or against Muslims. In conclusion, even if researchers are not clear on what the IAT measures or how it relates to deliberative decision making, most scientists agree that the IAT measures something important that relates to continuing discrimination. ## Culture and Its Connection to Structure Let's now look at culture, one of the more popular explanations for persistent inequality. The argument that culture explains persistent racial gaps in well-being has a long intellectual history, worth reviewing at some length. Anthropologist Oscar Lewis first made the now-infamous argument that a "culture of poverty" explained persistent gaps. Explaining the status of the "slum dwellers of Mexico City," Lewis argued that they shared a subculture of poverty-practices like high divorce rates, early initiation into sex, abandonment of wives and children-with American blacks, who suffered the added disadvantage of racial discrimination. In Lewis's view, a culture of poverty was, like other cultural practices, "a way of life" that could be "passed down from generation to generation along family lines." In the mid-1960s, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested that poverty persisted among American blacks because of a shift in the social fabric in the ghetto, Moynihan traced poverty to the fact that "the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling," and the "fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated." Moynihan issued a highly controversial report outlining the basic features of the culture of the "underclass To be sure, the report stressed unemployment and underemployment as key causes, but those ideas were pretty much ignored in the heated discussion that followed the report's publication. Critics of Moynihan's culture of poverty argument raised several points. First, they noted that culture is very hard to define, and a so-called subculture of poverty even more difficult to define with any precision. In the same vein, some of the literature defined the so-called culture of poverty in ways that seemed strange-evidence of the culture of poverty included purely factual indicators of poverty such as being unemployed, for example. Second, critics noted that researchers had a difficult time proving that such cultural practices are passed down from parent to child, when children also grow up in many of the same situational circumstances-unemployment, substandard schooling-as do their parents. Third, critics argued that many of the so-called pathological practices described by experts were in fact rational responses to poverty. Take for example the common choice by families of color to insulate themselves and their family members from outside networks and institutions. Sociologist William Julius Wilson has pointed out that for people who live in violent neighborhoods, being isolated makes a great deal of sense. Far from being pathological, the practice is quite rational, even as it also deprives the family of potentially positive network connections. Though the culture explanation fell out of fashion in the 1970s, it never entirely disappeared from the discourse around race. As the culture wars of the 1980s heated up, social scientists like Thomas Sowell and Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom argued that the racial gap in performance between whites and Latinos might be explained at least in part by cultural factors-for example, Latinos' limited education and their "propensity to work in unskilled jobs that don't require a knowledge of English". Other scholars have pointed to the fact that West Indian blacks have succeeded economically to a greater degree than "native" black Americans, even though they are phenotypically indistinct. So what should we make of the culture argument? Is culture really the reason that people of color remain persistently poor when it comes to wealth, housing, health, political participation, and the rest? One way of answering this question is to say, as sociologist Wilson does, that the so-called cultural deficits can be more usefully understood as rational, adaptive responses to bad structural conditions. First, let's define some key terms. When we refer to "structural conditions," we mean to include processes or environmental conditions that slot people into particular social positions, roles and networks. So structure includes things like residential segregation, unemployment, and the mismatch in geographic location between jobs and people's residences (which slots people into the position of unemployed). "Cultural practices," by contrast, might include a set of community-shared values, goals, and practices-things like collectively shared attitudes toward law enforcement, or in another example, the practice in some communities of female-headed kinship networks in which single-mother households band together in groups to share child care and other resources. In Wilson's framework, structure shapes culture, and culture in turn shapes and contributes to structure. So for example, in neighborhoods that have many black and brown men in prison, combining female-headed households in resource networks makes a lot of sense. Of course, these "cultural practices" might also contribute to continued joblessness and poverty, if women become cut off from the relatively greater wealth (again owing to discrimination) resources that men (or at least white men) typically can access. At worst, then, the culture story is just plain wrong. At best, a story about culture that does not also discuss structure is radically incomplete. As this book will argue, the best explanations assert that culture and structure reflect and reproduce each other in a positive feedback loop that moves from culture to structure and back again. We will end our review of other explanations by looking at the scholarship that first suggested that persistent racial gaps might be traced to feedback loops, though they weren't called that yet. In very early theoretical work back in the late 1970s, economist Glenn Loury offered a simple but powerful model to explain the persistence of racial poverty. In his model, group membership (in groups defined by race and class) affected a person's ability to acquire skills to earn an income, and, in turn, a person's race and wealth contributed to and shaped the race and class background of the group. Analogizing his theoretical model to the real world, Loury pointed out that residentially segregated neighborhoods produce underfunded schools, and parents with poorly connected social networks decreased a child's chances of getting a job. In particular, children from those neighborhoods or those parental networks are less likely to get (or have to pay more to get) the training to do skilled work. Accordingly, each generation suffered the deprivations of the prior generation and reproduced them for the next generation. The argument in this book for lock-in draws heavily on Loury's early theoretical work on self-reinforcing phenomena, and similar work by complex systems theorists. The following chapters discuss four separate kinds of feedback loops-family networks, in which parents affect the wealth of their children; social networks, in which friends and coworkers affect each other's jobs chances; neighborhood networks, in which neighbors' collective wealth affect a neighbor child's education; and institutional networks, in which selection processes early on affect the job chances of future generations. We will explore the argument that, when considered all together, these feedback loops have locked racial inequality into place.