The Bias Narrative versus the Development Narrative: Thinking About Persistent Racial Inequality in the United States

By Glenn Loury. Excerpts:

"“Hands up, don’t shoot.” That narrative was heard frequently after Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, abetting the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. This was a singular event in the history of racial conflict in America. It would appear that, actually, there was no validity to the “hands up, don’t shoot” story. Rather, Brown attacked the police officer who, fearing for his life, then shot him. Independent investigations by local authorities and the US Justice Department concluded as much. Eyewitnesses have testified to this effect. The fact of the matter is that “hands up, don’t shoot” never happened."

"I am not a big fan of this systemic racism narrative. It is imprecise and those invoking it are begging the question. I want to know exactly what structures, what dynamic processes, they mean, and I want to know exactly how race figures into that story. The people employing that narrative do not tell me this. History, I would argue, is complicated. Racial disparities have multiple causes that interact with one another, ranging from culture, politics, and economic incentives to historical accident, environmental factors and, yes, the acts of some individuals who may be racists, as well as systems of law and policy that are disadvantaging to some racial groups without having so been intended.

So, I am left wanting to know just what they are talking about when they say, “systemic racism.” Use of that phrase expresses a disposition. It calls me to solidarity while asking for fealty, for my affirmation of a system of belief. It frames the issue primarily in terms of anti-black bias. It is only one among many possible narratives about racial disparities, and often not the most compelling one."

"Equity versus equality

What about affirmative action and reparations? Surely, if I believe that racial inequality is rooted in social relations, then I must favor these polices, no? Actually I have concerns—grave concerns—about these policies. I want briefly to give some hint of what it is that I am concerned about, which reveals something about my larger outlook on the age-old American dilemma of racial inequality.

I oppose slavery reparations for two reasons—one principled and the other pragmatic. When the Japanese Americans interred by the Roosevelt administration during the Second World War were finally, in an act of Congress signed into law by Ronald Reagan and presided over by George H.W. Bush, acknowledged as having been wrongly victimized and offered a token reparation payment, it was $20,000 a head for 80,000 people. That was $1.6 billion, paid out of the Treasury—and it should have been paid, in my view. By contrast, there are some 40 million African Americans, and if you take the modern equivalent of 40 acres and a mule, and you bring it forward at a normal rate of return, you are reaching astronomical sums. Maybe it is $100,000 a head, with inflation, for 40 million people. That would be $4 trillion, compared with 80,000 people and $1.6 billion. Some scholars estimate even larger sums, purportedly due to black Americans because of slavery.

Enacting reparations for slavery would create a Social Security scale-of-magnitude fiscal/social policy in America, the benefits from which would be based on racial identity. That, quite simply, is a monumental mistake for our country. It is South Africa-esque. Our government would have to classify people, enact statutes, and administer programs on a massive scale based on race. America ought not go down that path even if the courts would allow it.

My practical argument is that remedying racial disparities ought to be left as an open-ended commitment. True enough, this problem—due in no small part to our bitter history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation—must be addressed. But, in my view, it would not be the smartest thing in the world for black Americans to cash out that obligation; to have a transaction wherein, metaphorically speaking, we sit on one side of the table with our moral capital, while America sits on the other side with its checkbook, and a transaction is negotiated by means of which a historical “debt” is discharged. We ought not to be in a hurry to commodify that obligation. For then, when confronted with lingering racial disparities, the country can say “you’ve all been paid.”

Rather, what we should do is to take our moral chips, combine them with other like-minded political initiatives, and aim to create a decent society for everyone, whether that concerns healthcare, housing, food security, employment, education, or old-age security. Were these efforts to be sufficiently robust on behalf of everybody, the most pressing concerns about racial disparity (having to do with extreme deprivation) would be ameliorated and we will have lent our moral capital to the right cause—not a racially defined reparation but rather a humanely defined improvement in the quality of the nation’s social contract. Blacks ought not to negotiate a moral separate settlement with America.

One final word about affirmative action. We are now 50 years down the line with this policy. It has been institutionalized. Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Belonging: in practice what that means is affirmative action. I have a concern, though, which is that equality of representation, when you are in the most rarified venues of selection, is in competition with equality of respect. I’m specifically referring here to selecting at the 95th percentile—the right tail of the distribution of talents, not the population median.

It is impossible that there would not be post-admissions performance differences by race in students selected at this percentile if racially different criteria of selection are used pre-admission, so long as those criteria are correlated with performance. And, if the criteria—SAT test scores, grades, advance placement tests, quality of essay, letters of recommendation, whatever indicia of performance you want to use—are not correlated with post-admissions performance, then they shouldn’t be used. But they are being used because we all know that they are correlated with post-admissions performance to some degree.

I invite you to look at the data produced by discovery in the Harvard case, for example, to see the huge disparity in academic preparation characteristic of applicant populations by race to Harvard University in recent years. There’s going to be different post-selection performance if those criteria are correlated with performance, and that’s what we see. What is the consequence of that? Either we will acknowledge the difference in post-admissions performance; or we won’t; we’ll cover it up by flattening assessment criteria and, in effect, pretending it’s not there. The dishonesty can be stifling in my view. My point: Right-tail selection plus racially preferential selection is inconsistent with true equality. It will get you representation, perhaps, but it won’t get you equality—at least not equality of respect.

You need a closely approximating parity of performance to get equality of respect. But you’ve applied different levels of selectivity into a highly competitive and elite activity, where the selection criteria are correlated with post-admissions performance, so you’re getting disparities in performance post-admission that you’re not owning up to, or that you’re covering up.

So, many have observed that there are not enough black economists on the faculty of leading universities. We can do better. We should be more diverse and inclusive at the top departments in the country. There should be at least two blacks at each one, let’s say. Maybe I can agree with all of that. But suppose there are just not enough top-flight black economists to go around. (Dare we face this reality?) If “doing better” means making the criteria of selection into this rarified enterprise of academic economics, at the top, depend upon the racial identity of job applicants, then you’re not going to get equality. Instead, you’re going to get some degree of black mediocrity. This fact is currently unsayable.

Here’s what we ought to do instead: devote our efforts to enhancing the development of African American prospects, such that when you apply roughly equal criteria of selection at the right tail, the numbers of blacks selected still goes up based on achievement. You should not increase the number of successful applicants by changing standards to achieve racial parity—that is a huge mistake.

Further, we need not strive for population parity in every pursuit. How can you expect population parity in an enterprise when there are some groups (Asians? Jews?) who are significantly overrepresented? You cannot get population parity in every activity while maintaining equal criteria of selection when all the groups are not feeding into the pool of qualified applicants at the same rate. The permanent embrace of preferential selection in extremely selective, competitive venues by race is a mistake. I can understand its transitional use, historically speaking, but institutionalizing this practice is inconsistent with true equality.

This is why I signed on to the amicus brief some economists put together to support the Asians in their lawsuit against Harvard. Addiction to the use of racial preferences in the most elite of America’s academic venues breaks my heart, to be honest with you, because it is an invitation to mediocrity. It is a kind of bluff and a shell game. At the most exclusive venues of intellectual labor—at a Princeton University, or a Brown University, or MIT, or Caltech—the stuff is hard, and not everybody can do it well. It is hard reading Plato and figuring out what he was talking about. It is hard doing physics, advanced mathematics, chemistry, and other STEM disciplines. That work is difficult. Medical school is hard. Law school is hard. It requires real intellectual mastery to be done effectively. Unfortunately, a proportionate number of African Americans have not achieved that mastery. We can go into the reasons why. History has not been entirely kind to black people. There is blame enough to go around. But the fact remains that, relative to population, fewer blacks have developed this mastery, so we are fewer in the venues where the intellectual work is difficult.

Now, there are two things you can do in the face of that. One is to lower standards so as to increase the representation of African Americans and call that “inclusion.” The other is to face these developmental deficiencies and address them, and I mean address them from infancy. So, this is not laissez-faire. I’m not saying there could be no public initiatives; no educational enrichments, and so on. No summer programs, whatever. We can talk about what things need to be done, but can we first understand what the problem is? If our kids are testing poorly, it is because they do not know the material. If a poor Asian kid living in a three-room apartment with four siblings can ace the test, our kids can do it too. Anybody who does not think so is a racist. They have the “racism of low expectations” about blacks. They write us off. They think we are defeated by history. They patronize us, presuming that we can’t actually perform? “Yes, we can’t” becomes their motto.

But black Americans can perform. We just need to do the work. Give us an opportunity to confront the deficits and redress them, maintaining a level playing field. Do not lower the bar for us and we will measure up in the fullness of time. It may not happen tomorrow, and it may not happen the next day, but it will happen in the fullness of time. I say this as a matter of faith.

Now, I can understand in 1970, with all the rabble-rousing and whatnot, that the universities had to meet the protest halfway and so they did what they did. But we’re now in the year 2021. We’re a half-century past that and we’re laying down a predicate for how it is that we go forward. This “No, it’s not equality; it’s equity” bunk is a surrender in the face of the problem that we face. The problem is to develop black people so that proportionately more of us exhibit the mastery requisite to being successful in these competitive venues.

Consider the brouhaha at the Georgetown Law Center a few months ago. An instructor, unaware that she was being recorded, stated that the poor performers clustering at the bottom of her class were disproportionately black students. She said it upset her. She didn’t know what to do about it, but the black kids were not doing well. Do you know what happened when it was revealed that she had said this? Students and faculty of all races proceeded to declare Georgetown Law to be a racist institution. It was demanded—and the Dean acceded to the demand!—that this lecturer be fired. White faculty were called upon to issue a joint statement acknowledging their white privilege and taking responsibility for the poor performance of the black students in the law school.

Now, here’s what I know: contracts, constitutional law, torts, civil procedure, this is what you study in law school, and that is intellectually demanding work. Writing an effective legal argument is a real skill. What the lecturer was reporting is that the black kids at Georgetown—one of the most elite law schools in the country, disproportionately lack that skill—a predictable consequence of using less rigorous standards when admitting those students.

One might hope that the administration, being so informed, would slap its collective forehead and say, “Oh my God, let’s do something to make sure that our youngsters of color have the requisite skills.” Instead, they retreat behind an “institutional racism” smokescreen. It is patronizing and condescending to blacks to do this, because what they’re saying, in effect, is: “We don’t think you’re going to be able to cut it. But it’s okay. We’ll cover for you.” Such a posture may assuage the guilt of certain parties, but it is profoundly inconsistent with racial equality in its truest and highest sense."