Reproducing Racism

How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage

Daria Roithmayr

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780814777121
• eBook ISBN: 9780814777138
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Law

Argues that racial inequality reproduces itself automatically over time because early unfair advantage for whites has paved the way for continuing advantage

This book is designed to change the way we think about racial inequality. Long after the passage of civil rights laws, blacks and Latinos possess barely a nickel of wealth for every dollar that whites have. Why have we made so little progress?

Legal scholar Daria Roithmayr provocatively argues that racial inequality lives on because white advantage functions as a powerful self-reinforcing monopoly, reproducing itself automatically from generation to generation even in the absence of intentional discrimination. Drawing on work in antitrust law and a range of other disciplines, Roithmayr brilliantly compares the dynamics of white advantage to the unfair tactics of giants like AT&T and Microsoft.

With penetrating insight, Roithmayr locates the engine of white monopoly in positive feedback loops that connect the dramatic disparity of Jim Crow to modern racial gaps in jobs, housing and education. Wealthy white neighborhoods fund public schools that then turn out wealthy white neighbors. Whites with lucrative jobs informally refer their friends, who refer their friends, and so on. Roithmayr concludes that racial inequality might now be locked in place, unless policymakers immediately take drastic steps to dismantle this oppressive system.

1

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.¹

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.² 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.³ Other critics pointed out that the analysis ignored or underestimated the effect on IQ of education, class, and inheritance.

Herrnstein and Murray certainly were 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.⁴ And of course, more than a few scholars accused the authors of racism.⁵

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.⁶ 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.⁷ 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.⁸

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.⁹

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.¹⁰

What other explanations do economists offer for persistent racial gaps? Some theorists suggest that monopoly might be responsible for racial inequality (an idea on which this book builds). If an employer had a monopoly over the product market, then the firm would be able to determine wages without having to worry about being undercut by competitors. Likewise, in a “monopsonist” market (where one buyer dominates the market), if a firm (or group of colluding firms) were the only employer in the labor market, it could control wages and discriminate without threat of competition.

But in both these cases, the employers would have to be willing to surrender profits in the short run to maintain the monopoly in the long run. In the case of monopoly, for example, cooperating members could make much more by breaking the monopoly agreement. Economists find the notion that employers would surrender profits to be implausible. Moreover, most economists agree that modern markets are not characterized by monopoly or monopsony, and that the empirical support for such models is missing.¹¹ As we will see later, monopoly may well be part of the explanation for persistent inequality, but not in the way these models describe.

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.¹² 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.¹³

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.¹⁴ 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.¹⁵

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.¹⁶

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.¹⁷ 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.¹⁸

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.¹⁹

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.²⁰ 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...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same
• 2. Cheating at the Starting Line
• 3. Racial Cartels in Action
• 4. Oh Dad, Poor Dad
• 5. It’s How You Play the Game
• 6. Not What You Know, but Who You Know
• 7. Please Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
• 8. Locked In
• 9. Reframing Race
• 10. Unlocking Lock-In
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author