The Good News They Won’t Tell You About Race in America

By Wilfred Reilly. Excerpts:

"Seven of the wealthiest eight ethnic groups in the U.S. today are populations of color, even as affirmative action broadly defined serves as a counterbalance to much of the residual bigotry within society (though it is the cause of other kinds of social conflicts). In the real world, simply adjusting mathematically for mundane characteristics such as median age and study time closes almost all of the large racial—and gender—performance gaps glibly attributed to bigotry or genetics. Even where there’s some remaining effect of prejudice relating to a belief that racial minorities perform less well than whites, it is very often smaller than the impact of class, sex, region, or a half-dozen other characteristics."

"many of the studies used to demonstrate the prevalence of contemporary bias are limited in scope. Devah Pager and her team looked only at hiring for non-affirmative-action entry-level jobs in the private sector, primarily with white-owned employers, in Milwaukee near the turn of the past century. While Pager, who died in 2018"

"fully 36 percent of U.S. businesses today are minority- or woman-owned. What does “racial hiring bias” look like for applicants to that sector?"

"common sense compels us to admit that there might be reasons other than “hatred” for a bar owner’s reluctance to usher a group of 100 male Hispanic soldiers into an entirely black or white night club packed full of drunks. At a more serious level, several scholars have speculated that reaction to stereotypically black names on resumés is as likely to reflect perceived affirmative-action effects or class bias as it is racism—and, indeed, one significant study finds no negative effect for middle-class black names. It is only a bit glib to say that, while “Sharkeshia Freeman” may well face discrimination in the professional job market, “Marcus Freeman” probably will not."

"The same Gallup polling project that turned up the 8 percent anti-black statistic also found that 7 percent of Americans would never vote for a Catholic candidate, 8 percent would never vote for a woman of any race, 9 percent would never vote for a Hispanic or a Jew, and fully 19 percent would never vote for a practicing Mormon."

"Pro-minority affirmative action has been the law of the land since the Philadelphia Plan in 1967. Such diversity-forward programs recently turned 53 years old—and it is rather remarkable how rarely this empirical fact is used as a rebuttal to claims of widespread “white privilege.”"

"an ambitious young man or woman of color applying to virtually any selective college or university—to say nothing of government or Fortune 500 jobs—enjoys a substantial advantage over an equally qualified white peer. In Mismatch, their 2012 critique of institutional diversity programs, Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor peg this affirmative-action edge as being equivalent to 200–300 SAT points in the academic context, and as a university professor, I concur."

"As of 2019, seven of the top 10 American ethnic groups in income terms—Indian, Taiwanese, Filipino, Indonesian, Persian, and Arab Lebanese Americans—were “people of color” as this term is generally conceptualized, while an eighth group (South Africans) is composed of both black and white individuals. First-place Indian Americans have almost double the median white household income, earning roughly $127,000 vs. $65,902 on average for legacy whites. Chinese and Japanese Americans are not far behind, while Nigerians brought in a tidy salary as well ($68,658) and also ranked as the most educated group in the United States."

"Many black immigrant groups besides Nigerians have also done well, with Ghanaians and the Guyanese coming in well above the white median income. All West Indians combined ($65,258) are just a few dollars behind whites."

"The relevant question for scholars and public intellectuals today is not whether racism remains real (yes), but how large its effect actually is in a 39 percent minority society where 92 percent of white people appear not to be serious bigots. The honest answer appears to be: “not huge.”"

"the core claim of this theory [“systemic racism”]—that minorities are treated worse by “systems” than are similar or equivalent whites—often simply collapses when we look at the impact on group performance of important variables other than race."

"the widely cited income gap between American blacks and whites (the average African-American income is $43,862) largely vanishes given simple adjustments for variables such as aptitude, test scores, median age (the most common age for an African American is 27, vs. 58 for whites), region of residence, and years of education. Similarly, gaps in rates of police shooting and even police encounter by race close almost completely given a single adjustment for the black rate of victim-reported violent crime, which is unfortunately 2.4 higher than the white rate. This same phenomenon occurs almost universally when serious people look at serious questions: Variables such as prior record (and presumably quality of counsel in the courtroom) play a far greater role even during criminal sentencing than does race alone. While some small race and gender gaps in performance or treatment might certainly still exist with everything else adjusted for, claims that blacks or women “earn 59 cents on the dollar” versus whites or men doing the same work almost inevitably collapse."

"simply waiting until marriage to have children is a positive predictor of multiple “success variables,” including income. When Prager wrote in 2016, the poverty rate was nearly 25 percent for white children born into single-mother families, but only 7 percent for black children born into two-parent families. This is a 314 percent advantage in favor of blacks—and there is evidence to suggest that other individual behaviors, such as studying hard and remaining physically fit and attractive, similarly predict success. There turns out to be a great deal of truth to the old and boring adage, beloved of high-school men’s coaches, priests, and rabbis, that one need only do four things in life to avoid poverty: graduate high school, take any job and work, never be convicted of a felony, and avoid having children until married."

"actual interracial crime involving blacks and whites is only about 5 percent of serious crime—and more than 80 percent black-on-white, at that"

"the 70-plus percent majority of police-shooting cases involving whites and Hispanics seems to receive less than 20 percent of the national mass-media coverage of this topic"

"31 percent of individuals who identify politically as very liberal believe that “about 1,000” unarmed black men were killed by police just during 2019, and another 14 percent believe that “about 10,000” such men were killed. Conservatives did a bit better, but, among ordinary mainstream liberals, the equivalent figures were 27 percent and almost 7 percent.

To put these astonishing (if hypothetical) figures in context, the total number of specifically unarmed, specifically black citizens killed by American police during the year in question was 13, as per the Washington Post. Similar extreme confusion surrounded perceptions of the percentage of police-shooting victims who happen to be black: This number was estimated at 60 percent by leftists and extreme liberals, 56 percent by liberals, 46 percent by moderates, and 38 percent even by conservatives. In fact, the actual figure, taking into account the full data set of racially identified and non-identified cases compiled by the Post, seems to be about 25 percent."