Intellectuals and Race Read online

  Since the geography of the planet is not something “socially constructed,” the misfortunes of lagging groups are not automatically a social injustice, even if they can be conceived of as injustices from some cosmic perspective, in the sense that many peoples have suffered serious deprivations through no fault of their own. Putting the onus on society by calling these deprivations a violation of “social justice” may be a verbal sop to those who are lagging, but it points them away from the paths by which other lagging groups have advanced themselves in the past, by pointing them toward blaming other people.

  Cultural attitudes, which in some societies create a rigid division between “women’s work” and “men’s work,” or which make manual labor repugnant to people with education, or caste-ridden societies which drastically limit the sources from which particular talents can be drawn for accomplishing particular tasks, all affect the economic potential of a given society. A society which throws away the talents and potentialities of half its population by making many economic roles and endeavors off-limits to women can hardly be expected to match the economic performances of societies which do not restrict their own prospects like this. In a society with rigid class or caste divisions, the highly varied talents and potentialities which arise among individuals may not arise solely, or even predominantly, among those individuals who happen to be born within the rigid class or caste stratifications in which their talents and potentialities are considered appropriate, or in which those talents and potentialities have opportunities to reach fruition.

  These are among the many reasons why societies, races and civilizations are extremely unlikely to have identical achievements, even in the complete absence of genetic deficiencies or social injustices.

  What does all this boil down to?

  1. Grossly uneven distributions of racial, ethnic and other groups in numerous fields of endeavor have been common in countries around the world and for centuries of recorded history.

  2. The even, proportional or statistically random distribution of these groups, which has been taken as a norm, deviations from which have been regarded as evidence of either genetic differences in ability (in the early 20th century) or as evidence of maltreatment by others (in the late 20th century) has seldom, if ever, been demonstrated empirically, or even been asked to be demonstrated.

  The disparity in burdens of proof for different beliefs about the causes of inequality of outcomes rivals the disparities in these outcomes themselves. Not only in the American media and popular discourse, but in academic institutions and in courts of law— all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States— no burden of proof whatever is required for the presumption that disparate outcomes at a given institution constitute prima facie evidence of discrimination at that institution, which legally shifts the burden of proof of innocence to the accused, contrary to legal traditions in other contexts, where it is the accuser who has the burden of proof, whether in criminal or civil cases.

  BEHAVIOR AND BELIEFS

  Not only do different racial, ethnic, and other groups differ in their occupational skills and experience, they tend also to differ in their beliefs and behavior toward other groups and internally among themselves.

  Reluctance to associate with any group, whether at work or in neighborhood or other settings, is almost automatically attributed by the intelligentsia to ignorance, prejudice or malice— in utter disregard of not only the first-hand experience of those who are reluctant, but also of objective data on vast differences in rates of crime, alcoholism, and substandard school performances between groups, even though such differences have been common in countries around the world for centuries.

  Cholera, for example, was unknown in America until large numbers of Irish immigrants arrived in the nineteenth century, and cholera outbreaks in New York and Philadelphia went largely through Irish neighborhoods.55 People who did not want to live near Irish immigrants, as a result of diseases, violence and other social pathology rampant in the Irish communities of that era, cannot be automatically dismissed as blinded by prejudice or deceived by stereotypes.* Strenuous efforts, especially by the Catholic Church, to change the behavior patterns within Irish American communities,56 suggest that it was not all a matter of other people’s “perceptions” or “stereotypes.” Moreover, these efforts within Irish American communities ultimately paid off, as barriers against the Irish, epitomized by employers’ signs that said “No Irish Need Apply,” faded away over the generations.

  Such barriers were not simply a matter of mistaken or malign ideas in other people’s heads, nor were the Irish simply abstract people in an abstract world, however much that vision may flatter intellectuals’ desires to be on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. There is no need to go to the opposite extreme and claim that all negative views of all groups are based on valid reasons. The point here is that this is an empirical question to be investigated in terms of the particular facts of the particular group at a particular time and place— a process circumvented by reasoning as if discussing abstract people in an abstract world.

  People sort themselves out in innumerable ways, both between races and within races, as well as in situations where race is not a salient factor. For example, studies have shown the correlation between the IQs of husbands and their wives to be similar to— and sometimes greater than— the correlation between the IQs of brothers and sisters,57 even though there is no genetic or biological reason for spouses to be similar in IQ. Only the fact that people behave differently toward people whom they perceive as similar to themselves seems likely to explain IQ correlations between people who get married, even though they do not give IQ tests to one another before deciding to wed.

  It is easy to tell when different racial and ethnic groups live separately when these groups have physical differences that are visible to the naked eye— blacks and whites being an obvious example. However, such residential differences are common in countries around the world, even when there are no physical differences to catch the eye of observers.

  As late as the second half of the twentieth century, if one wished to have Americans of northern European ancestry and Americans of southern European ancestry living randomly distributed with one another in the New York metropolitan area, it would be necessary to move just over half of all Americans of southern European ancestry.58 At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Jewish immigrants and their children were concentrated on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, they were not randomly distributed; Hungarian Jews were clustered together, as were Polish, Rumanian and other Jews.59 Meanwhile, German Jews lived uptown. In Chicago, when Eastern European Jews began moving into German Jewish neighborhoods, German Jews began moving out.60

  It was much the same story among blacks in Chicago. Sociological studies by E. Franklin Frazier in the 1930s found different classes of blacks living in different parts of Chicago’s black community. Some black neighborhoods in Chicago had delinquency rates over 40 percent and others had delinquency rates under 2 percent.61 Meanwhile, in Harlem during the same era, “Observant subway riders could see the porters and domestics get off at West 125th Street, the clerks and secretaries depart at West 135th Street, and the doctors and lawyers leave at West 145th Street.”62

  In Italian East Harlem, people from Genoa lived clustered together and separate from the clusters of Italians from Naples or Sicily.63 Similar regional clusters of Italians existed on New York’s Lower East side, as well as in San Francisco, Cleveland, New Haven and other American cities.64 None of this was peculiar to the United States. Similar clusters of Italians from particular places in Italy were also common in Buenos Aires and Toronto during the immigrant era.65

  Considering an opposite approach may make the difference between reasoning in the abstract and reasoning in the concrete stand out more sharply. When a scholarly study of economic development in Latin America concluded, “Costa Rica is different from Nicaragua because Costa Ricans are different from Nicaraguans,”66 its con
clusion— whatever its merits or demerits— was one almost unthinkable within the confines of the vision prevailing among intellectuals today, even as a hypothesis to be tested. The opposite approach— treating Costa Ricans and Nicaraguans as if they were abstract people in an abstract world, whose differences in outcomes could only be a result of external circumstances— has been far more common among the intelligentsia.

  __________

  * The problems with genetics as an all-purpose explanation will be dealt with in the next chapter.

  * For example, a study of military forces in countries around the world found that “militaries fall far short of mirroring, even roughly, the multi-ethnic societies” from which they come. Cynthia H. Enloe, Police, Military and Ethnicity: Foundations of State Power (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1980), p. 143. Another massive scholarly study of ethnic groups in countries around the world concluded that, when discussing “proportional representation” of ethnic groups, “few, if any, societies have ever approximated this description.” Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 677. Yet another such international study of ethnic groups referred to “the universality of ethnic inequality” and pointed out that these inequalities are multi-dimensional: “All multi-ethnic societies exhibit a tendency for ethnic groups to engage in different occupations, have different levels (and, often, types) of education, receive different incomes, and occupy a different place in the social hierarchy.” Myron Weiner, “The Pursuit of Ethnic Equality through Preferential Policies: A Comparative Public Policy Perspective,” From Independence to Statehood, edited by Robert B. Goldmann and A. Jeyaratnam Wilson (London: Frances Pinter, 1984), p. 64.

  * “The Germans in St. Louis were principally concentrated in the northern and southern sections of the city. The Irish also had their own special area, and it was never safe to venture from one section into the other… Rioting occurred also when Irish rowdies interfered with German picnics, frequently for no apparent reason except to add excitement to an otherwise dull Sunday.” Carl Wittke, The Irish in America (New York: Russell & Russell, 1970), p. 183.

  Chapter 3

  Changing Racial Beliefs

  For centuries, there have been beliefs that some races are superior to others. Various developments in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in the early twentieth century, turned such general beliefs into organized ideologies with the aura of “science,” often creating the very dogmatism among intellectuals that science is meant to counter. By the end of the twentieth century, opposite ideologies about race would prevail among intellectuals, sometimes also invoking the name of science, with no more justification and with the same dismissive attitude toward those who dared to disagree with the currently prevailing vision.

  The term “race,” as it was used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was not confined to broad divisions of the human species, such as black, white and yellow races. Differences among Slavs, Jews and Anglo-Saxons were often referred to as “racial” differences as well. Madison Grant’s influential 1916 best-seller, The Passing of the Great Race, was one of those writings which divided Europeans into Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean “races,” among others.1

  Rather than become bogged down in semantic issues, we can refer to racial and ethnic groups loosely under the rubric of race, in part because more precise definitions could easily lose touch with social realities, in a world of growing racial intermixtures over the generations. These biological intermixtures have accelerated in our own times, even as the stridency of separate racial identity rhetoric has increased. These include people bitterly complaining about how half their ancestors mistreated the other half, as a current grievance of their own, whether among the Maoris of New Zealand or among various American racial or ethnic groups.

  With race, as with war, twentieth century intellectuals were concentrated on one end of the spectrum in the early years and then on the opposite end of the spectrum in later years. The prevailing over-arching vision among intellectuals— that is, a preference for a society guided from the top down by ideas inspired by intellectual elites— was the same at the beginning and end of that century. But this general preference need not require a commitment to a particular view of a particular issue such as race, even though whatever view happened to prevail among the intelligentsia at a given time was often deemed to be almost axiomatically superior to conflicting views held by others— these other views often being treated as unworthy of serious intellectual engagement. In the early twentieth century, Madison Grant referred to those who disagreed with his genetic determinism as sentimentalists2 and, in the late twentieth century, those who disagreed with the prevailing racial orthodoxy of that era were often dismissed as racists.

  Intellectuals on opposite ends of the spectrum in different eras have been similar in another way: Both have tended to ignore the long-standing warning from statisticians that correlation is not causation. One race may be more successful than another at a particular endeavor, or a whole range of endeavors, for reasons that are neither genetic nor a result of the way the society in which they live treats them. As noted in Chapter 2, there are many historic, geographic and demographic reasons for groups to differ from one another in their skills, experiences, cultures and values— whether these are different social, national or racial groups.

  GENETIC DETERMINISM

  The mid-nineteenth century sensation created by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution had ramifications far beyond the field of biology. The idea of “survival of the fittest” among competing species was extended by others into competition among human beings, whether among different classes or different races. The research of Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911) culminated in a book titled Hereditary Genius, which established that high achievers were concentrated in particular families. Correlation was treated as causation, with genetics being proclaimed to be the reason for the achievement differential.

  Similar reasoning was applied to races. As a later scholar said of Galton: “He believed that in his own day the Anglo-Saxons far outranked the Negroes of Africa, who in turn outranked the Australian aborigines, who outranked nobody.” Again, correlation was treated as causation, leading to eugenics— a term Galton coined— to promote the differential survival of races. He said, “there exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an inferior race.”3

  Whatever the validity of Galton’s assessments of the relative achievements of different races in his own time, profound changes in the relative achievements of different races over the centuries undermine the theory of genetic determinism. China was, for centuries, technologically, economically, and in other ways more advanced than any country in Europe. The later reversals of the relative positions of the Chinese and Europeans in the modern era, without any demonstrable changes in their genes, undermine Galton’s genetic arguments, as other major reversals of the positions of other racial groups or subgroups would undermine the later genetic determinism of other intellectuals.

  This is not to say that there were no great differences in achievements among different races, either within societies or between societies, as of a given time, nor that all such differences reversed over time, though many did. But once the automatic link between genetics and achievement is broken, it ceases to be a weighty presumption, even in the case of groups that have never been leaders in achievement. Whatever non-genetic factors have been able to produce profound differences in other situations cannot be ruled out a priori for any group, and therefore it remains a question to be examined empirically in each particular case— that is, if science is to be something more than an incantation invoked to buttress an ideology and silence its critics.

  Much empirical evidence of large and consequential differences among racial or ethnic groups, as well as social classes, accumulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Studies of the histories of families, as well as the
spread of mental testing, and sociological studies of differences in crime rates and educational achievements among children from different backgrounds, even when attending the same schools, added weight to the case made by those promoting genetic determinism. Contrary to later verbal fashions, these were not simply “perceptions” or “stereotypes.” These were painstakingly established facts, despite the serious problems with the inferences drawn from those facts— such as Madison Grant’s sweeping pronouncement, “race is everything.”4

  THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

  The Progressive era in early twentieth century America was perhaps the high-water mark of “scientific” theories of racial differences. The increasing immigration from Europe, and especially the shift in its origins from Northern and Western Europe to Eastern and Southern Europe, raised questions about the racial quality of the new people flooding into the country. The beginning of the mass migrations of American blacks from the South to the Northern cities, and their concentration in ghettos there, raised similar questions during the same era. Empirical data on group differences in crime rates, disease rates, mental test scores, and school performances fed all these concerns.

  Two huge compilations of empirical data in early twentieth century America stand out particularly. One was the huge, multi-volume report of the federal immigration commission headed by Senator William P. Dillingham and published in 1911. This report showed, among other things, that with children who attended elementary school three-quarters of the school days or more, 30 percent of native-born white children had been denied promotion to the next grade, compared to 61 percent of native-born black children and 67 percent of the children of immigrant Polish Jews.5 The other huge source of data about differences among racial or ethnic groups during this period was the mental testing of more than 100,000 soldiers by the U.S. Army during the First World War.6 The proportions of soldiers with different ancestries who exceeded the American national norms on mental tests were as follows:7