Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Does Structural Racism Exist?
One of the many reasons why no rational conversation about racism is possible is the complete lack of verbal precision in the public discussion of the subject. Simply deploying the word “racist” and assuming that people will know what you are talking about is a recipe for acrimony. Yet almost no attempt is ever made to distinguish between Bull Connor and a soccer mom who avoids taking a short cut through the dangerous part of town. Both are seen as instances of the same phenomenon.
Since the mere accusation of racism can be enough to ruin a career, it behooves us to take some care in the use of that word. Unfortunately, in its current promiscuous usage (especially by public figures), the word “racist” is little more than a meaningless epithet. In academia, where it is axiomatic that all whites are racist by definition, the situation is even worse. It is no use pointing out the moral frivolousness of erasing distinctions and stripping the r-word of its meaning, as we know that in fact malevolent racism has existed and does exist.
It would be nice to have some rigorous definition of the word “racism” connected to some objective test that could be used to determine whether a given person is or is not a racist. Such a test would need to meet the following criteria: 1) it should not depend on mind-reading; 2) It should not depend on assumptions based on the subject’s own race, ethnicity, demographic profile, position in the social matrix, etc.; 3) it should not assume a priori that the subject is or is not racist; and 4) the definition of the word “racist” must be clearly distinguishable from “politically conservative white person.”
It would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath. Getting morally and intellectually serious about racism would break a lot of rice bowls and derail a lot of political careers, so it’s never going to happen.
But if we did want to do it, we might start with the term “structural racism”. Here, as elsewhere, verbal precision is nonexistent. For example, here is a representative comment from an online discussion:
I’d be interested to know what any who are following this discussion see in the following scenario: In a department, a white worker is hired at a salary significantly higher than the black worker she works alongside who has 10 years seniority/experience in the position. Similar work histories, similar degrees, same job title, same duties. In this department, the black worker has remained the only black employee, and the lowest paid employee, despite good-to-excellent evaluations each year, and being a finalist for, and subsequent winner of the company’s “employee of the year” (non-monetary) award. Written requests for an increase in salary by the black worker receive no written response from supervisors. I see racism in this situation; not an imagined slight, nor matter of differing perspectives. Does anyone else see this as an example of structural racism?
Personally, I don’t see this as an example of structural racism. It could be an instance of individual racism, and even of individual illegal employment discrimination. But I don’t see what’s “structural” about it. Structural means there is something about the fundamental structure of society that systematically skews outcomes in favor or against a particular group. You would need to look at aggregate data to find evidence of it. You would also need to have a pretty good model of causality that could explain the data. Like anything else in social science, it’s hard to tease out the causal mechanisms because there are so many variables in play and it’s difficult to do experiments like you would in real science.
For suggesting this in the above-referenced online discussion I got my head handed to me. I hope that Ricochet is different.
So is “structural racism” real?
There may be one objective way to test whether or not there is anything to this structural racism notion. For simplicity, let’s agree that “structural” racism means that blacks face systematically higher barriers to professional advancement than non-blacks. If structural racism exists, then we would expect blacks who succeed in advancing in various fields despite these institutional barriers to be systematically more highly qualified and more successful, on average, than their similarly situated non-black peers.
Is there any evidence that this happens in real life? Corporate management, finance, law, software development, firefighting, law enforcement, academic science, and engineering are all routinely accused of systematic discrimination against blacks. Is there evidence that blacks who advance in these fields systematically outperform their non-black peers? There must be some objective way to measure this, since performance data is widely available in all these areas.
Do black presidents outperform white ones?
OK, that last question was rhetorical. But the others aren’t. There are examples of overt, institutional discrimination against ethnic minorities in other societies that clearly show a pattern of the kind of systematic over-performance I am talking about. There may also be data-rich examples closer to home. Take, for example, the Tuskegee airmen. Two all-black Army Air Force units saw combat during World War II: the 99th Pursuit Squadron and the 332nd Fighter Group. Despite obvious discrimination, these units performed well above average by all accounts and exceptionally well by many. There are almost certainly other such examples from America’s own unquestionably segregated past. Somebody should take a quantitative look at this.
I am only an armchair social scientist, so I don’t know if this approach would generate any light. It’s not unproblematic. Professional sports may present a problem. There is clear over-performance by blacks relative to whites in the NBA and NFL. But I doubt that this is evidence of invidious discrimination against blacks in professional sports. What does this say about my proposed project?
Has anyone ever studied this? Would it be useful to do it?
Published in General
Argument to structural racism is pure racism on the part of the earnest arguer.
Its an assumption about an entire race with a heavy moral assignment on that ethnicity, on no evidence.
Its perfectly analogous to arguing you cant hire a black guy because they all steal. Its use is probably EO complaint worthy.
I want to walk back the last comment. It IS EO worthy, but then most people who say that kind of dumb stuff only really believe it in the abstract, and only ever rise to the level of ignorantly annoying, when pressured they will have no ability to link it to their day to day life with the people they work and live with. It will always be anonymous forces. Its the true believers who do make the abstraction to reality leap that are the problem.
Yes , It is called Affirmative Action.
One of the problems in your analysis is that you are not looking at the margins.
You are looking at something like average performance of people who got in (to the NFL, etc.); or you are looking at something like the top X% of each group who made the cut. Those do not demonstrate discrimination either way. To find discrimination you must look at the marginal players who did not get in.
How does a white player who just missed the cut compare to a black player who just missed the cut? If the white is better, that evidences discrimination against whites; if the black is better, that evidences discrimination against blacks regardless of the average or other performance of each group who made the cut.
You mentioned confounding factors, which is important. There certainly are confounding factors when it comes to comparing performance between racial groups (income, academic, professional advancement, etc.). We know that blacks are plagued with social problems that contribute to higher, and persistent, poverty. If you don’t control for these factors then you can’t attribute the gap to racism of any kind.
My hypothesis is that when you compare blacks and whites, apples to apples, you’ll see the gap vanish, in the same way that we see the pay gap diminish between men and women. Another interesting factor is the performance of African immigrants. They often test higher in English than black Americans. How in the world do we weave structural racism into that?
Just to underline your comment on the lack of verbal ability in our society to discuss this. In the picture definition of discrimination above there is a definition that equates discrimination with bigotry (racism, sexism, etc.).
Discrimination is a necessary component of successful existence. I discriminate when I pick a fresh head of lettuce over a wilted one or a non-smelly, clear eyed fish over a smelly, cloudy eyed one. I discriminate when I chose my spouse over others I might have asked to marry (the argument about who was harmed, the other women or my spouse is still open). And yes I discriminate when I plan my trip to avoid run down parts of town.
None of these, contrary to the popular notion are anything but healthy and right. We are also right to be against undue discrimination, but even then the burden of proof should be heavily on the accuser rather than what it is in our society now.
Structural racism does exist in college admissions. The recent story about Asians being discriminated against in admissions to Harvard may or may not be true, but it sounds true.
I am not against Harvard discriminating by race on admissions BTW. I don’t like it, it does not strike me as fair, but that is fine with me if they do. Harvard has their reasons of course, people always have reasons for doing what they want to do.
My daughter, a freshman at UC Boulder (affectionately referred to as the Peoples Republic of Boulder by the rest of Colorado) told me of her discovery of “Structural Racism” at school.
When asked to define it, she replied that it means that people hire people who they feel comfortable working with and are reasonably certain of the hire’s qualifications. To her, that means white people will hire white people or highly educated minorities that “act white”; passing over people who don’t dress or act like the employer.
I asked, what’s wrong with that? Should I hire people who dress badly and don’t communicate well to interact with my customers, possibly affecting my business?
Yes, she replied, because to do otherwise is discrimination.
That is what they are teaching at this university, any kind of qualifying of applicants based on ability or presentation is wrong because it discriminates against fools.
If all people are equal, then why shouldn’t everyone get paid just for existing? Anything else is “racist”.
Just, wow. Hopefully she’ll have an experience that teaches her the folly of such thinking. We learn more from those practical experiences than we do in college, it seems.
I think there is “structural” racism in that there is biologically in-built racism in humans — we reject those who aren’t like how we see ourselves as a matter of automatic behavior. For thousands of years those who weren’t ‘us’ stole our cattle, enslaved our children, raped the women, and killed the men. Everyone associates this with skin color, but it extends to all sorts of things like people we find attractive versus those we don’t, symmetrical features, similar socio-economic cueing, level of literacy, and even fraternal relationships. The “near the margin” comment seems to capture the problem – how can you tell whether your in-built preference for “more like me” is better than a preference for a more diverse group?
For myself, when acting as a hiring manager I rejected “more like me” in favor of a diverse group. My experience both as an manager and employee was that groups were everyone is very similar tend towards poor judgement and insular behavior (caused largely by us vs. them thinking). As a manager I found that I haven’t ever had a case where I needed everyone to be a either at a senior level or an ‘A’ player — there are lots of maintenance jobs that must be done and you become a senior player by learning them and an ‘A’ player even if junior frequently acts as if that work is beneath them. The trade-off is that in my experience diverse group tends to have a lot more internal behavior problems but I found that was easier to control with peer reviews come raise season.
In answer to your basic question, truthful information is always useful. But I think any study bucking the trend will be pilloried or worse so it will not be done. One only need to look at the furor over the one chapter of The Bell Curve on race and intelligence to know you cannot talk about it without tying yourself in knots. The entire book has been publicly derided even by conservative intellectuals.
I am not one who has the knowledge to judge the work, but I think even careful arguments get nowhere.
no.
I called myself merely an armchair social scientist, but I just realized that that’s the only kind there is! I should have been more verbally precise and said that I am NOT a social scientist.
Of course structural racism exists, otherwise we would not need Affirmative Action, since we have Affirmative Action then structural racism must exist.
But it’s not true. In that Harvard example we had…conservatives…using the same logic and arguments as the Left to make the case for “racism”, when it is no such thing.
Lack of logic isn’t something that afflicts the Left only.
And there’s the issue. People aren’t equal.
Some, like me, might disagree.
Anyway, to get back to the original point here, the problem isn’t so much in doing studies on this issue. The problem is that the particular disciplines in social science which concern themselves with this nonsense…don’t have people who are capable of doing such studies.
I.e., most sociologists simply don’t possess the tools to carry out such empirical studies.
You have to go into psychology or economics to find people with the needed tools, but those disciplines don’t focus on this nonsense.
Sociologists like to do “audit” type studies, where they send white and black applicants to apply to the same job, and see who gets called.
The problem, of course, is that they attribute the results to “racism”.
Interestingly, they never mention the race of the person interviewing them ;)
The evidence for Asian quotas in elite college admissions is pretty rock-solid. Ron Unz explains in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/12/19/fears-of-an-asian-quota-in-the-ivy-league/statistics-indicate-an-ivy-league-asian-quota
And here is Unz at greater length on the subject: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
Incidentally, this is another case where we would expect to see over-performance, and I’ll bet that part of the reason why Asians are as academically successful as they are in the U.S. has to do with the fact that the Ivies and others blatantly discriminate against them.
And you’re paying tuition for that?!? Its seems to me that you need to un-enroll your daughter from CU. Otherwise you’re just aiding and abetting the anti-education of your own children. From my point of view, upon hearing that line of argument, I’d have said, “Pack your bags and get the hell out of that place. ‘Tis time to get a job.”
I’ll never understand why parents will beggar themselves to pay for the indoctrination of their children into positions they themselves deplore! Madness!
The evidence is the opposite of rock solid. It’s nonsense.
We’ve already discussed this at length in another thread, and I have no desire to revisit that topic (with the associated insults hurled at higher ed by “conservatives”, as usual).
The arguments here by “conservatives” are identical to the ones the Left makes about “blacks”. They are nonsense, for the same reasons. They look at 1 indicator and pretend that the world revolves around that 1 indicator. And when outcomes are observed that don’t fit their already-pre-determined way the world should revolve around 1 indicator…like magic…racism is discovered!
To understand why the “evidence” conservatives point to about Asians and Harvard is equal nonsense to what the Left says, you have to read this:
This is precisely what is the problem here.
Of course, for many “conservatives” when the Left makes these same poor arguments, then these arguments are rejected. When the “right” makes these same poor arguments, than it’s “solid evidence”.
Both of these arguments are, of course, poor arguments. And in both cases, it’s an appeal to emotions, aimed at gaining votes.
Science, social or otherwise…it ain’t.
For me, one of the most eye opening discussions on racism took it back to biology. Strangers show up and your children die. The issue isn’t race or culture but different immune systems. Thus “distrust of the other” began.
Back in high school, there were cliques. Socies, Jocks, Nerds, Queen Bees and unasssociated looser loners. Like me. Ok: so was this “Structural” anything or just the way groups form and align? Could the PTA or the Principal have legislated or decreed and end to cliques?
I rank “structural racism” right in there with “disproportionate impact”.
I’m with Thomas Sowell here: discrimination is tolerated only by those who do not bear the cost.
So why is it that we who have neither rice bowl, political career, or other dog in the fight act as if the current “national conversation” is worth even one more word on the subject?
Does structural racism exist? I don’t see it. I’m flabbergasted by what has happened in the last few years. I thought we elected a black president because racism had ended. As far as I’m concerned Obama has failed at even being a black president.
That reminds me of a study I read about. After controlling for other factors including skin color, “Michael” is more likely to be hired than “Jaquevious,” but there’s no significant difference between “Michael’s” prospects and those of “Ngazi” (an actual Nigerian name.)
I agree that the example in the OP does not demonstrate structural racism, and that it might demonstrate individual racism.
I don’t think this is an example of structural racism, but it appears that something structural is going on, and it’s impacting the races differently:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/21/abortion-rates-black-teens_n_2925427.html
Is something “structural” causing black teens to have four abortions for every one abortion white teens have? The article continues:
Some think it’s a conspiracy. Other say that nobody is home with the kids, because, presumably, the adults (single moms?) are working. Without commenting on the accuracy of these claims, both are structural, are they not?
I see a problem, in this discussion on what structural racism is.
I agree that there is inherent racism in human beings, as some have suggested in this thread, though it’s manifesting itself more in minorities than it is with the dwindling majority.
But staying on point, when I hear the term structural racism, I’m thinking of the artificial (?) social structures put in place to mostly do business.
One of the tenants of conservatives, especially the religious, is that we all have a bit of evil in us that needs to be held in check. There’s nothing to be done about that, except continuing to hold in check. So inherent racism is here to stay.
To be honest, I see little to no structural racism against minorities in this country. It’s all against whites, and it’s mostly administered by whites even with set asides and affirmative action tipping the scales.