Intellectuals and Race Read online

  Jean-Paul Sartre has been credited, if that is the word, with originating the practice of excusing violence by depicting the violence of some as reactions to other things that have been analogized to violence or redefined as violence.14 That verbal tactic has since crossed the Atlantic. After the ghetto riots of the 1960s, whose violence shocked many Americans, Professor Kenneth B. Clark, best known for his work being cited in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, responded by saying:

  The real danger of Harlem is not in the infrequent explosions of random lawlessness. The frightening horror of Harlem is the chronic day-to-day quiet violence to the human spirit which exists and is accepted as normal.15

  A writer in The Nation magazine likewise referred to “the quiet violence in the very operation of the system.” The “institutional form of quiet violence operates when people are deprived of choices in a systematic way by the very manner in which transactions normally take place.”16 A committee of black clergymen took out an ad in the New York Times, deploring “the silent and covert violence which white middle-class America inflicts upon the victims of the inner city.”17

  Although many of those who said such things spoke in the name of the black community, or claimed to be conveying what most blacks believed, a 1967 poll found that 68 percent of blacks said that they had more to lose than to gain from rioting.18 After the Rodney King riots in 1992, 58 percent of blacks condemned those riots, while only 32 percent found the violence even partially justified.19

  This, however, was not the impression created in the media, after either the earlier or the later ghetto riots. In 1967, under the headline, “The Hard-Core Ghetto Mood,” Newsweek quoted those individuals, inside and outside the ghetto, who expressed the militant vision accepted by the intelligentsia. “Rage is common to all of them,” black academician Alvin Poussaint said of ghetto blacks. A white academic in California likewise said that the Watts riots represented “the metamorphosis of the Negroes” from victims to master. “The people of Watts felt that for those four days they represented all Negroes; the historic plight of the Negroes; all the rebellions against all injustice… What must be understood by the rest of America is that, for the lower-class Negro, riots are not criminal, but a legitimate weapon in a morally justified civil war.”20 None of those who made such sweeping pronouncements had to offer hard evidence to have their pronouncements echoed throughout the media.

  Nothing is easier than to find some individuals— in any group— who share a given writer’s opinion, and to quote such individuals as if their views were typical. This approach became common in media coverage of ghetto riots. Newsweek magazine, for example, quoted various black youths, including one described as “a child of Detroit’s ravaged ghetto,”21 even though (1) the poverty rate among Detroit’s black population before the riots was only half of that of blacks nationwide, (2) the homeownership rate among blacks in Detroit was the highest in the nation, and (3) the unemployment rate of blacks in Detroit was 3.4 percent— lower than that among whites nationwide.22

  It was after the riots that Detroit became a ravaged community, and remained so for decades thereafter, as businesses withdrew, taking jobs and taxes with them. But here, as elsewhere, an idea that fit the vision did not have to meet the additional requirement of fitting the facts.

  Racism and Causation

  At the heart of the prevailing liberal vision of race today is the notion of “racism”— a concept with multiple, elusive and sometimes mutually contradictory meanings. Sometimes the term refers simply to any adverse opinion about any racially different group, whether a minority in a given society or a group that may be a majority in some other society. This immediately transforms any adverse judgment of any aspect of a different racial group into an indictment of whoever expressed that adverse judgment, without any need to assess the evidence or analysis behind it. In short, this approach joins the long list of arguments without arguments.

  At other times, the term “racism” refers more specifically to an adverse conclusion based on a belief that the genetic endowment of a particular racial group limits their potential. Other meanings include a preference for advancing the interests of one race over another, with or without any genetic theories or even any adverse assessment of the behavior, performance or potential of the group to be disfavored. For example, an argument has been made in various countries around the world for policies preferring one group over another on the ground that the group to be discriminated against is too formidable for others to compete against on even terms. This argument has been made in Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Malaysia, in India’s states of Assam and Andhra Pradesh, and even in early twentieth century America, where Japanese immigrants were feared on grounds that their high capability and lower standard of living would permit them to undercut the prices charged by white American farmers, workers, or commercial business owners.23

  In other words, racism defined as a preference for one race over another need not depend upon any belief that the group to be discriminated against is inferior in performance or potential, and at various times and places has been based on the opposite belief that the group that is to be discriminated against was too proficient for others to compete with on equal terms, for whatever reason. As a book advocating group preferences for Malays in Malaysia put it, “Whatever the Malays could do, the Chinese could do better and more cheaply.”24 A leader in a campaign for preferential policies in India’s state of Andhra Pradesh said: “Are we not entitled to jobs just because we are not as qualified?”25 In Nigeria, an advocate of group representation policies deplored what he called “the tyranny of skills.”26

  Racism not only has varying definitions, its role in arguments by intellectuals can vary greatly from its use simply as a descriptive term to its role as a causal explanation. How one chooses to characterize adverse decisions against a particular racial group may be a matter of personal semantic preferences. But to assert a causal role is to enter the realm of evidence and verification, even if the assertion contains neither. For example, a New York Times editorial presented a classic example of the liberal vision of racism:

  Every index of misery continues to show that the devastating effects of racism linger on in America. Blacks make up a disproportionate number of the citizens dependent on public assistance. The unemployment rates among black males and teen-agers remain at least twice as high as among whites. The proportion of blacks dropping out of the labor force altogether has doubled over the last two decades.27

  The bare facts cited are undoubtedly true. But two of the three facts— higher unemployment and lower labor force participation among blacks than among whites— are worse today than in earlier times. By the logic of this editorial, that would imply that there was less racism in the past, which no one believes.

  Black labor force participation rates were higher than that of whites generations ago.28 Black unemployment rates were lower than that of whites in 1890 and, for the last time, in 1930.29 Black 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds had a slightly lower unemployment rate than white youngsters of the same age in 1948 and only slightly higher unemployment rates than their white peers in 1949.30 Moreover, these unemployment rates for black teen-agers were a fraction of what they would become in later times. These low unemployment rates existed just before the minimum wage law was amended in 1950 to catch up with the inflation of the 1940s which had, for all practical purposes, repealed the minimum wage law, since inflated wages for even unskilled labor were usually well above the minimum wage level specified when the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938.

  The key role of federal minimum wage laws can be seen in the fact that black teenage unemployment, even in the recession year of 1949, was a fraction of what it would become in even prosperous later years, after the series of minimum wage escalations that began in 1950.31

  The last year in which black unemployment was lower than white unemployment— 1930— was also the last year in which there was no federal minimum wage law. The Davis-Bacon Act
of 1931 was openly advocated by some members of Congress on grounds that it would stop black construction workers from taking jobs from white construction workers by working for less than the union wages of white workers.32 Nor was the use of minimum wage laws to deliberately price competing workers out of the labor market unique to the Davis-Bacon Act or to the United States. Similar arguments were made in Canada in the 1920s, where the object was to price Japanese immigrants out of the labor market, and in South Africa in the era of apartheid, to price non-whites out of the labor market.33

  Any group whose labor is less in demand, whether for lack of skills or for other reasons, is disproportionately priced out of labor markets when there are minimum wage laws, which are usually established in disregard of differences in skills or experience. It has not been uncommon in Western Europe, for example, for young people to have unemployment rates above 20 percent.34

  The point here is not to claim that pricing competitors out of the market was the motivation of all or most of the supporters of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The point is that this was its effect, regardless of the intentions. In short, the empirical evidence is far more consistent with the changing patterns of black labor force participation rates and unemployment rates over time being results of minimum wage laws than with changes in the degree of racism in American society. Indeed, these patterns over time are completely inconsistent with the fact that racism was worse in the earlier period. Only the fact that the intelligentsia tend to make racism the default setting for explaining adverse conditions among blacks enables such statements as those in the New York Times editorial to pass muster without the slightest demand for either evidence or analysis.

  It is much the same story when racism is used as an explanation for the existence of black ghettoes. If racism is simply a characterization, there may be others who prefer different characterizations, but these are matters of subjective preferences. However, if a causal proposition is being advanced, then it is subject to empirical verification like other causal propositions.

  When racism is offered as a causal explanation, as distinguished from a characterization, that makes the predispositions of whites the reason for the residential segregation of blacks, among other forms of racially disparate treatment. But seeing that as a hypothesis to be tested brings us face to face with inconvenient but inescapable facts of history. For example, most blacks were not residentially segregated in such cities as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Washington by the end of the nineteenth century35— even though they had been before and would be again in the twentieth century. Do the racial predispositions of white people just come and go unpredictably? That would be an especially strange thing for predispositions to do, even if reasoned opinions change with changing circumstances.

  It is a matter of historical record that there were in fact changing circumstances preceding changing racial policies in the United States, both when these were changes for the better and when they were changes for the worse. Moreover, where the circumstances changed at different times from one place to another, racial attitudes and policies also changed correspondingly at different times.

  As of the early nineteenth century, residential segregation was just one of a number of restrictions placed on free blacks in both the North and the South. However, by the last decade of the nineteenth century, such residential restrictions had eroded in Northern cities to the point where W.E.B. Du Bois could write in the 1890s of “a growing liberal spirit toward the Negro in Philadelphia,” in which “the community was disposed to throw off the trammels, brush away petty hindrances and to soften the harshness of race prejudice”— leading, among other things, to blacks being able to live in white neighborhoods.36 Nor was Philadelphia unique. There were similar developments in New York, Detroit, Washington and other Northern cities.37 Census data show a lower rate of urban residential segregation of blacks nationwide in 1890–1910 than in later decades of the twentieth century and even as late as the 2010 census.38

  Other restrictions had eroded as well. In Detroit, blacks who had been denied the vote in 1850 were voting in the 1880s, and in the 1890s blacks were being elected to public office by a predominantly white electorate in Michigan. The black upper class in Detroit at that time had regular social interactions with whites, and their children attended high schools and colleges with whites. In Illinois during this same era, legal restrictions on access to public accommodations for blacks were removed from the law, even though there were not enough black voters at the time to influence public policy, so that this represented changes in white public opinion.39

  In New York City, by the 1890s most blacks did not work as unskilled laborers but held modest but respectable jobs as barbers, waiters, caterers, and skilled craftsmen. Distinguished historian Oscar Handlin characterized blacks in New York at that time as being “better off than the mass of recent white immigrants.”40 The visible improvement in the living standards of blacks was noted in Jacob Riis’ 1890 classic, How the Other Half Lives.41

  In Philadelphia, blacks were among the leading caterers in the city, serving a predominantly white clientele.42 In Chicago, there were also successful black businesses serving a predominantly white clientele43 and, as late as 1910, more than two-thirds of the city’s black residents lived in neighborhoods that were predominantly white.44

  To maintain that residential and other racial restrictions on blacks were simply a matter of the predispositions of the white population— racism— immediately raises the question of why such predispositions should have changed so much during the course of the nineteenth century— and then changed back again, drastically, and within a very few years— during the early twentieth century. But this pattern of progress in race relations in Northern urban communities during the nineteenth century, followed by retrogression in the early twentieth century, followed again by progress in the latter part of the twentieth century, is more readily understood in terms of causes other than pure subjective mood swings in the white population. In short, whether or not attitudes within the white population deserve the characterization of racism, a causal analysis of the major changes that occurred in residential and other restrictions on blacks cannot explain such changes by simply saying “racism.”

  Turning from the white population to the black population, we find developments that make the changing residential patterns explicable without resorting to inexplicable changes inside the heads of white people. Beginning at the beginning, African slaves were brought into American society at the bottom, and concentrated in the South— a region with its own cultural handicaps that produced marked differences between the white populations of the North and South that many observers noted during the antebellum era.45 This meant that those blacks who came out of the South to live in Northern cities would be very different in many ways from the white populations of those cities. The visible racial differences made blacks easy to identify and restrict.

  During the course of the nineteenth century, however, over a period of generations Northern blacks tended to acquire more of the culture of the surrounding white urban population of the North, just as other groups often have when living surrounded by a vastly larger population with a different culture and a higher socioeconomic level. By the end of the nineteenth century, this cultural assimilation had reached the point where racial barriers eased considerably in the Northern cities, where the black populations of these cities were now predominantly native-born residents, rather than migrants from the South.46

  This situation changed drastically, however, and within a relatively few years, with the mass migrations of millions of blacks out of the South, beginning in the early twentieth century. This not only greatly multiplied the black populations living in many Northern cities, the newcomers were seen by both the pre-existing black populations and the white populations of these cities as creating greatly increased social problems such as crime, violence and offensive behavior in general.47

  If these were mere “prejudices,” �
��perceptions” or “stereotypes” in the minds of white people, as so many adverse judgments have been automatically characterized, why did the very same views appear among Northern-born blacks at the same time?

  Where hard data are available, these data substantiate the pattern of behavioral differences between the pre-existing Northern black populations and the newcomers from the South. In early twentieth-century Pennsylvania, for example, the rate of violent crimes among blacks from the South was nearly five times that among blacks born in Pennsylvania.48 In Washington, D.C., where the influx from the South occurred decades earlier, the effect of the Southerners’ arrival could be seen decades earlier. For example, out of wedlock births were just under 10 percent of all births among blacks in Washington in 1878, but this more than doubled by 1881, following a large influx of Southern blacks, and remained high for years thereafter.49

  The new majorities of Southern blacks in the Northern black urban communities were sufficiently large, and their culture sufficiently reinforced by continuing new arrivals from the South, that their rate of assimilation to the cultural norms of the surrounding white society was neither as rapid nor as complete as that of the much smaller numbers of blacks who had preceded them in these cities in the nineteenth century. Moreover, as late as 1944, Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma pointed out that a majority of blacks living in the North at that time had been born in the South.50