The Anatomy of Racial Inequality

Glenn C. Loury

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780674255401
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Discriminación y relaciones raciales

Speaking wisely and provocatively about the political economy of race, Glenn C. Loury has become one of our most prominent black intellectuals—and, because of his challenges to the orthodoxies of both left and right, one of the most controversial. A major statement of a position developed over the past decade, this book both epitomizes and explains Loury's understanding of the depressed conditions of so much of black society today—and the origins, consequences, and implications for the future of these conditions.Using an economist's approach, Loury describes a vicious cycle of tainted social information that has resulted in a self-replicating pattern of racial stereotypes that rationalize and sustain discrimination. His analysis shows how the restrictions placed on black development by stereotypical and stigmatizing racial thinking deny a whole segment of the population the possibility of self-actualization that American society reveres—something that many contend would be undermined by remedies such as affirmative action. On the contrary, this book persuasively argues that the promise of fairness and individual freedom and dignity will remain unfulfilled without some forms of intervention based on race.Brilliant in its account of how racial classifications are created and perpetuated, and how they resonate through the social, psychological, spiritual, and economic life of the nation, this compelling and passionate book gives us a new way of seeing—and, perhaps, seeing beyond—the damning categorization of race in America.

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INTRODUCTION

THIS BOOK is a meditation on the problem of racial inequality in the United States, focusing specifically on the case of African Americans. The argument to come will be abstract, theoretical, offering causal accounts and normative judgments. In making it I rely on, but am not confined by, my background in economics. I also draw on relevant scholarly literatures in sociology, political science, and history. Though no new evidence is presented, this treatment points to a novel conceptual framework for assimilating the evidence at hand. I will convey that framework with the aid of simple, stylized “models”—that is, thought experiments which illustrate the workings of hypothetical but plausible causal mechanisms. My goal with this exposition is to clarify how the phenomenon called “race”¹ operates so as to perpetuate the inter-group status disparities that are so readily observed in American social life.

One overriding reality motivates this reflection: Nearly a century and a half after the destruction of the institution of slavery, and a half-century past the dawn of the civil rights movement, social life in the United States continues to be characterized by significant racial stratification. Numerous indices of well-being—wages, unemployment rates, income and wealth levels, ability test scores, prison enrollment and crime victimization rates, health and mortality statistics—all reveal substantial racial disparities. Indeed, over the past quarter-century the disadvantage of blacks² along many of these dimensions has remained unchanged, or, in some instances, has even worsened. There has, of course, been noteworthy progress in reversing historical patterns of racial subordination. Still, there is no scientific basis upon which to rest the prediction that a rough parity of socioeconomic status for African Americans will be realized in the foreseeable future.³ So we have a problem; it will be with us for a while; and it behooves us to think hard about what can and should be done.

THREE AXIOMS

As a starting point for the analysis I adopt three postulates, or axioms, about “race” and inequality in the United States. I use the term “axiom” here in the mathematical sense: an assumption embraced for the sake of argument, the implications of which may be of interest. I do not claim that these axioms are self-evident, merely that they are not implausible and are worthy of exploration. My goal in this book is to uncover the conclusions regarding “race” and social justice in the United States that are entailed by these assumptions.

Axiom 1 (Constructivism): “Race” is a socially constructed mode of human categorization. That people use marks on the bodies of others to divide the field of human subjects into the subgroups we call “races” is a social convention for which no deeper justification in biological taxonomy is to be had.

Axiom 2 (Anti-Essentialism): The enduring and pronounced social disadvantage of African Americans is not the result of any purportedly unequal innate human capacities of the “races.” Rather, this disparity is a social artifact—a product of the peculiar history, culture, and political economy of American society.

Axiom 3 (Ingrained Racial Stigma): An awareness of the racial “otherness” of blacks is embedded in the social consciousness of the American nation owing to the historical fact of slavery and its aftermath. This inherited stigma even today exerts an inhibiting effect on the extent to which African Americans can realize their full human potential.

I defend Axiom 1—the claim that “race” is best viewed in social, not biological terms—in the next chapter. The position on anti-essentialism in Axiom 2 has simply been assumed, not reached as a conclusion after a review of empirical evidence. There is, of course, an ongoing debate among social scientists about the sources, extent, and significance of racial differences in intelligence. In my opinion, the evidence emerging from this debate does not support the view that the social and economic disadvantage of blacks in America can be explained in terms of supposed innate differences in the intellectual abilities of the “races.” But this book is not the place to make that case. In any event, I will in due course offer a deeper argument, to the effect that in a democratic polity devoted to civic equality the position on anti-essentialism taken here ultimately must be adopted as an a priori commitment, and not as a conclusion held tentatively or made contingent on the interpretation of evidence.

Concerning the assumption of “ingrained racial stigma,” I provide a more extended justification in Chapter 3. For now, I wish merely to note that astute external observers of race relations in the United States have often stressed just this point. Thus in the early nineteenth century one finds Alexis de Tocqueville remarking that “the prejudice rejecting the Negroes seems to increase in proportion to their emancipation, and inequality cuts deep into mores as it is effaced from the laws” (Tocqueville 1848, 316). And at mid-twentieth century one finds Gunnar Myrdal pointing out the power of “vicious circles” of cumulative causation—self-sustaining processes in which the failure of blacks to make progress justified for whites the very prejudicial attitudes that, when reflected in social and political action, served to ensure that blacks would not advance (Myrdal 1944). I will suggest that subtle processes of this kind are at work among us, even today, and that a proper study of contemporary racial inequality requires one to identify such tragic, self-perpetuating processes, and in so doing, to lay bare the deeper, structural causes of African-American disadvantage.

Thus, the descriptive and the normative analyses to be offered here are closely connected. I endeavor to fathom the deeper causes of racial inequality so that, ultimately, I can assess the public morality of American social policy on this issue. So I will be addressing the question of “racial justice.” Again, my approach is theoretical and conceptual. I make an effort to specify the criteria that ought to be consulted in such reflections. This leads me naturally into the fields of social and political philosophy, where such considerations have long been at the forefront. I end up questioning whether liberal political theory, the ruling orthodoxy on such matters, is adequate to this task of assessment. My concern is that liberal theory, as it has come to be practiced, gives insufficient weight to history—especially to the enduring and deeply rooted racial disparity in life chances characteristic of American society. One implication of liberal individualism especially important in current policy debate is the notion that public agents should be “colorblind”—that is, they should pay no heed to racial identities when formulating and executing policy. This view, I am convinced, is quite wrong, and I argue strenuously against it.

AN OVERVIEW

With these ambitions in view, the next three chapters successively address the topics Racial Stereotypes, Racial Stigma, and Racial Justice. Here is a brief overview of the argument.

The “stereotype” theme to which I will turn next deals with issues of information, incentives, and group reputation. Of the three topics, this is the one based most strictly in economics. My treatment takes as a point of departure collaborative research I published in the early 1990s with the economist Stephen Coate of Cornell University (Coate and Loury 1993a, 1993b). The key ideas can be conveyed without the burden of any technical apparatus and provide a valuable foundation for the subsequent analysis.

The main goal in Chapter 2 is to illustrate the sense in which it can be “rational” for an observer to use racial information to assess a subject’s functionally relevant but nonracial traits, assuming that those traits are not directly observable. For instance, an employer concerned about a worker’s productivity, a lender worried about a borrower’s risk of default, or a policeman wanting to arrest a criminal may find that, on the average, their objectives are better served when they deal on different terms with the persons whom they perceive as belonging to different “races,” and this despite the fact that “race” has no objective association with the underlying productivity, creditworthiness, or law-abidingness of individuals in society. Yet, this appearance of rationality notwithstanding, I go on to show how such racially stereotypic reasoning can in fact reflect modes of social cognition subtly biased against blacks, and I suggest that this kind of bias can serve to perpetuate and legitimate profound racial inequities.

These observations point in a natural way toward the topic of Chapter 3—“racial stigma,” a sociological notion at some remove from my discipline of economics. Nevertheless, as will soon become clear, the concept of racial stigma is central to my thinking. My approach is loosely modeled on the work of the sociologist Erving Goffman.⁴ Goffman’s key concept is the notion of “virtual social identity” (Goffman 1963). This is the identity unreflectively imputed to someone by observers who, not being privy to extensive idiosyncratic information, draw conclusions about a person’s deeper qualities on the basis of the easily observable indicators that may lie at hand. This imputed identity is “virtual” because it can diverge from the subject’s actual identity; and it is “social” because the imputation occurs within the context of the social encounter and is structured by the nature of the social relationship that obtains between the subject and the observer.

One can immediately see a connection between this “stigma” notion and the concept of “stereotype” just mentioned. Both entail management by human agents of social situations where information about the people being encountered is limited. Yet the discussion in Chapter 3 makes clear that subtle and important distinctions can be drawn between these two notions. In particular, I will suggest that while “stigma” involves stereotyping it is, for the study of the problem of racial inequality, the more profound idea. Indeed, I will argue that “racial stigma” should now be given pride of place over “racial discrimination” as the concept which best reflects the causes of African-American disadvantage.

Chapter 4 is devoted to a discussion of racial justice. I wish to dispel at the outset any misconception that, because I am willing to use the words “race” and “justice” in the same sentence, I must of necessity be engaged in a rear-guard defense of affirmative action (though such a defense can be mounted and I am not at all reluctant to do so). That is not my primary purpose here. I am after bigger fish.

Nothing, in my opinion, reveals the intellectual shallowness of the discourse on racial inequality in contemporary American society more clearly than does this tendency, found among academics and journalists alike, to equate a critical analysis of “race” and social equity with the advocacy of racial preferences. One need only visit a courthouse, public hospital emergency room, or welfare office in any large American city to find compelling evidence that now, some seven score years after the end of slavery, American society is still marred by the social disadvantage of African Americans. When this fact is decried, increasingly one encounters this retort: “Why should a concern about social deprivation take any notice of ‘race,’ if no person is being victimized by racial discrimination?”

Of course, that “if” is a big one! But let us for the sake of argument set that point to one side for the moment. The commonplace claim that discrimination must be proven as the cause of inequality for questions of racial justice to arise is, from the perspective that I am developing here, both wrong and dangerous. My argument in Chapter 4 is aimed directly at refuting this claim.

WHY FOCUS ON BLACKS?

Some readers will object to a discussion of “racial inequality” that focuses on blacks, in light of the presence in American society of other nonwhites whose condition is aptly described as “disadvantaged.” My view is that the case of African Americans is sufficiently distinctive—politically, historically, and sociologically—to warrant the focused analysis offered here. It is undeniable that articulations of and reactions to the claims of blacks are now driving forces in American politics, and this has been the case for many decades. While it is certainly true that Americans of varied backgrounds have over the course of the nation’s history encountered, and in some cases continue to suffer, mistreatment because of their “race,” the duration and severity of discrimination against the African slaves and their descendants have been unprecedented in American history. Only Native Americans have had an experience that could plausibly be seen as comparable, and that is a subject obviously requiring its own treatment.

Also, while status attainment of Americans from many backgrounds has been impeded by customs, practices, attitudes, beliefs, prejudices, and stereotypes, some reflecting perception and treatment by outsiders but some internal to the groups, African Americans are virtually unique in that any such attitudes, prejudices, and customs—particularly those inhibiting achievement that are internal to the group—have evolved almost entirely under the influence of, and often in reaction to, racially oppressive economic and political institutions indigenous to U.S. society. This is less true of the other nonwhite American ethnic groups whose numbers have swelled in recent decades owing to a large influx of immigrants from Asia and Latin America.

This is not a trivial point. Some conservative writers attribute black American disadvantage entirely or in part to purported patterns of “social pathology” said to be characteristic of “black culture.”⁵ Yet even were that to be so—and the point is eminently arguable—such “pathology” could not be rightly understood as an alien cultural blemish imposed on an otherwise pristine Euro-American canvas. Rather, it could only be seen as a domestic product, made over the generations wholly in the good old USA, for which the entire nation bears a responsibility. Clearly, this would not be the case—at least, not to the same degree—were there to be found any comparable, adverse cultural patterns among (say) Dominican or Korean immigrants.

In light of such political, historical, and sociological considerations, I conclude that the severe and protracted disadvantage of blacks, whatever its causes, is a profoundly troubling problem for American society, one that is distinct from and ethically more disturbing than would be the challenge posed by a comparable disparity in the social position of other nonwhite ethnic groups.⁶ In reaching this conclusion, I do not imply that social disadvantage among nonblack racial minorities is of little scholarly or political interest. To the contrary, though it is motivated by the African-American experience, I believe this analysis offers insights that will prove useful for the broader study of racial inequality in the United States. Indeed, while I advance these reflections in the specific context of American society, and while I focus on the economic, political, social, and historical experience of blacks, I nevertheless hope to contribute with the theoretical development that follows to a deeper understanding of the problem of “race” and social marginality as it manifests itself in a great many societies around the globe. And now, on to the argument!

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RACIAL STEREOTYPES

I RELY HEAVILY in this book on the elementary observation that, in the first instance, “race” is a mode of perceptual categorization people use to navigate their way through a murky, uncertain social world. I want us to think about people as being hungry for information, constantly seeking to better underst...