Discrimination and Disparities Page 7

  History shows that there have in fact been discriminatory impositions of residential patterns, at various times and places, not only as regards blacks in the United States, but also many other groups in countries around the world. These include the original ghettos imposed on Jews in much of Europe in centuries past. But that does not, by itself, mean that all residential sorting and social sorting are externally imposed, or need to be externally eradicated.

  Sorting has been as common within black neighborhoods as within other neighborhoods around the world. Back in the 1930s, the research of noted black scholar E. Franklin Frazier showed clear patterns of residential clustering of people with different ways of life within the black community in Chicago.

  After dividing that community into seven zones, Professor Frazier showed empirically that the proportion of adults to children varied greatly from one zone to another, as did the ratio of males to females, and the percentage of mulattoes in the population was several times higher in one zone than in another.10

  Moreover, these were not simply isolated differences. They were differences reflecting different socioeconomic levels and differences in family stability and behavioral standards. Delinquency rates within Chicago’s black community ranged from more than 40 percent in some neighborhoods to under 2 percent in others.11

  In nineteenth-century Detroit, black homeowners lived clustered together and separate from black renters.12 Similar residential differentiation took place in Cleveland’s black community.13 A history of Harlem pointed out occupational differences among people who returned home from work and got off at different subway stops in Harlem.14

  Mid-twentieth-century data showed income distribution among blacks in the country as a whole to be slightly more unequal than among whites.15 So did later data.16 A 1966 study indicated that among the more than 4 million black American families at that time, just 5.2 thousand families produced all the black physicians, dentists, lawyers and academic doctorates in the country.17 Despite how exceptional such occupations and achievements were among blacks at that time, these particular families averaged 2.25 individuals each in those categories.18 That is, every four such families averaged nine individuals at these levels.

  Awareness of such social differences was both widespread and often acute within the black population.19 There is a whole literature on exclusive black elites, including such books as Aristocrats of Color by Willard B. Gatewood, Our Kind of People by Lawrence Otis Graham and Certain People by Stephen Birmingham.

  Particular upscale neighborhoods within mid-twentieth-century Harlem were known as “Strivers’ Row” and “Sugar Hill.” A luxury apartment building at 409 Edgecombe Avenue was so widely known as a residence of the black elite that it was said to be sufficient to get into a taxi in Harlem and say simply “409” for the driver to know where to take you.20

  Similar patterns existed in Chicago. There had long been a small black community in Chicago in the nineteenth century, before the great migrations of blacks from the South in the twentieth century led to severalfold increases in the number of blacks in that city. Those blacks born and bred in nineteenth-century Chicago, and living as small enclaves of blacks in an overwhelmingly white population, had over time assimilated culturally to the norms of the surrounding society, as other groups have in similar circumstances.

  The later massive migrations of Southern blacks to Chicago in the twentieth century created acute polarization within the black community there.21 The Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, was highly critical of the newcomers for behavior that gave blacks in general a bad name. So were other blacks from the pre-existing black community there and in other Northern cities, where both the existing black residents and the local black press denounced the new arrivals from the South as vulgar, rowdy, unwashed and criminal.22

  Like other black newspapers in other Northern communities, the Chicago Defender published many admonitions to Southern blacks arriving in Chicago, including “Don’t use vile language in public places,” “Don’t allow yourself to be drawn into street brawls,” “Don’t take the part of law breakers, be they men, women, or children,” and “Don’t abuse or violate the confidence of those who give you employment.”23

  As with other racial or ethnic groups, in other times and places, blacks in these Northern communities feared that the arrival of less assimilated members of their own race would provoke negative reactions in the larger society that would not only jeopardize the progress of their race, but would even threaten retrogressions, as the larger society turned against blacks in general.24

  These fears as to how the new black arrivals from the South would behave, and how the local white population would react against blacks in general, both turned out to be all too well founded. A study in early twentieth-century Pennsylvania, for example, showed that the rate of violent crimes among black migrants from the South was nearly five times the rate of such crimes by blacks born in Pennsylvania.25 The South had long been the country’s most violent region, among blacks and whites alike.26

  Negative reactions from Northern whites set in, as feared, and affected blacks in many ways. Some Northern communities where black children had for years been going to the same schools as white children, now began to impose racial segregation in the schools.27 In Washington, blacks were no longer allowed in many white theaters, restaurants or hotels, and their opportunities to work in white-collar occupations shrank.28 There were similar trends in Cleveland and Chicago,29 among other places. Oberlin College and Harvard, where black students had lived in dormitories with white students before, now excluded black students from their dormitories.30

  As these retrogressions set in, in Northern cities, black civic organizations, such as the Urban League, sought to assimilate the newcomers to existing norms of behavior, just as civic and religious organizations among the Irish and the Jews did earlier, in order to get Irish and Jewish immigrants assimilated to American cultural standards.

  The conclusion that the widespread retrogressions in racial opportunities open to blacks in Northern cities in the early twentieth century were a result of the massive migration of less acculturated Southern blacks to those communities is reinforced by the history of the mass migration of Southern blacks to the Pacific coast, decades later.

  In the 1940s, during World War II, industries producing military equipment and supplies on the Pacific coast attracted vast numbers of blacks and whites from the South. Henry Kaiser’s huge shipyard in Richmond, California, alone employed more than 90,000 people,31 and there were similar war industries in other west coast communities.

  As among Northern cities in the nineteenth century, blacks were a very small percentage of the population on the Pacific coast before these mass migrations from the South, and were correspondingly more acculturated to the behavioral norms of the surrounding society than were Southern blacks arriving there. Prior to the 1940s, racial discrimination was not on the same scale on the Pacific coast as in the South, or as in Northeastern cities after the great migrations there from the South. In San Francisco, black children went to schools that were not racially segregated and the small black population lived in neighborhoods with whites, Chinese and other races.32

  The great migrations of blacks out of the South that reached the Northeastern and Midwestern cities around the time of the First World War reached the Pacific coast, decades later, during the Second World War. During the 1940s, more than four-fifths of the blacks who arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area shipyards came from the South, usually the less educated Deep South.33

  The new black arrivals were overwhelmingly more numerous than the existing black population. In Richmond, California, for example, there were only 270 black residents in 1940 but the Kaiser industries brought in more than 10,000.34 The black population of Berkeley in the 1950 census was nearly four times what it had been in the 1940 census, before the United States was at war. Over that same span of time, the black population of Oakland rose to more than five times what it had b
een before, and that of San Francisco rose to approximately nine times its 1940 level.35

  As in the Northern cities earlier in the twentieth century, the new black arrivals on the west coast were seen by the existing black population there as vulgar and ill-behaved.36 And, as in Northern cities decades earlier, the arrival of the newcomers was followed by retrogressions in black-white relations.37

  The Prevalence of Sorting

  In countries around the world, innumerable groups have sorted themselves in many ways, both residentially and socially. This sorting extends right down to the individual level. The correlation between the IQs of husbands and wives is at least as high as the correlation between the IQs of brothers and sisters38—even though there is no biological reason for the IQs of husbands and wives to be similar, as there is with brothers and sisters. Clearly, people sort themselves out when choosing whom to marry, even though they are highly unlikely to actually know the IQ of the person they marry before the wedding, nor necessarily even afterwards. Yet the net result of their spontaneous and informal sorting produces this statistical correlation nevertheless.

  There are many kinds of sorting, including sorting by lifestyle in Bohemian neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, which represents an unsorting by such other criteria as race or social class origins. Yet what is far harder to find is the even or random distribution of different kinds of people—in places or endeavors—that is widely treated as a norm, deviations from which are regarded as evidence of discrimination, in the sense of Discrimination II.

  From the standpoint of particular individuals, there is no question that large, and sometimes devastating, costs can be imposed because of the actions of other members of the group to which they belong, even when the particular individual has played no part in those actions to which members of other groups object.

  Such individuals are clearly victims, but of whom? The hooligans and criminals who have caused other groups to seek to protect their own safety and the security of their homes and families? From a moral perspective, there is no obvious “solution,” unless the interests of one set of people automatically trump the interests of another, which hardly seems moral, even if it may be politically expedient or in keeping with whatever the social vogues of the time might be.

  An episode involving sociologist William Julius Wilson presents a much milder version of the dilemmas faced earlier during the great migrations:

  I am an internationally known Harvard professor, yet a number of unforgettable experiences remind me that, as a black male in America looking considerably younger than my age, I am also feared. For example, several times over the years I have stepped into the elevator of my condominium dressed in casual clothes and could immediately tell from the body language of the other residents in the elevator that I made them feel uncomfortable. Were they thinking, “What is this black man doing in this expensive condominium? Are we in any danger?” I once sarcastically said to a nervous elderly couple who hesitated to exit the elevator because we were all getting off on the same floor, “Not to worry, I am a Harvard professor and I have lived in this building for nine years.” When I am dressed casually, I am always a little relieved to step into an empty elevator, but I am not apprehensive if I am wearing a tie.

  I get angry each time I have an experience like the encounter in the elevator.39

  Professor Wilson’s sarcasm and anger were directed at people whose reactions reflected a greater concern for their own personal safety than for his sensitivities. His account suggests that they were not racists, for merely by wearing a tie he avoided tensions on both sides, even though wearing a tie did not change his race.

  Unlike blacks from an earlier era, who clearly blamed those blacks whose behavior had brought on a retrogression that hurt all blacks, Professor Wilson’s account gives no indication of any sense that he was paying the social price for dangers created by black hooligans and criminals.

  A very different view of such situations was taken by another black scholar, Professor Walter E. Williams, an economist at George Mason University:

  Information is not costless… People therefore seek to economize on information cost. In doing so, they tend to substitute less expensive forms of information for more expensive forms. Physical attributes are “cheap” to observe. If a particular physical attribute is perceived as correlated with a more costly-to-observe one, the observer might use that attribute as an estimator or proxy for the costly-to-observe attribute.40

  In a sense, Professor Wilson’s reactions were similar to those of people who blame store owners for the high prices charged in low-income, high-crime neighborhoods, rather than blame those whose behavior raised the costs that the stores’ prices have to cover. There was a time when ordinary blacks, with far less education than Professor Wilson, saw clearly that the misbehavior of a black underclass would cause other blacks to be burdened with a backlash.

  Imposed Residential and Social Sorting

  In addition to spontaneous self-sorting, there is no question that there has also been residential Discrimination II in the plain sense that governmental regulations have explicitly prescribed where people of a particular race, religion, or other social identity can and cannot live.

  These would include the original ghettos to which Jews were consigned in particular European cities in centuries past, or whole geographic regions of the Russian Empire where Jews were permitted or not permitted to settle. The areas where Jews were permitted to live were called “the Pale of Settlement”—a phrase surviving in the English language today in statements about certain things being “beyond the Pale.”

  Similar residential restrictions were placed on the overseas Chinese minorities in various Southeast Asian communities, as well as other groups in other societies around the world. Similar governmental restrictions on where black Americans could live have been common in various forms, supplemented by private racial restrictions.

  The question is not whether such residential restrictions can exist, or have existed, but whether the presence of such restrictions can be automatically inferred from statistics showing non-random clusterings of particular people living in particular places or concentrated in particular kinds or levels of particular occupations. Such issues involve not only causal questions but also moral questions—the latter being the hardest to answer.

  Causation

  Even seeking a causal explanation is by no means simple. We may characterize the behavior of whites who did not want blacks living in their neighborhoods as “racist.” But, if we wish to go beyond characterizations to cause and effect, we have entered the world of facts, with its testing of beliefs against evidence. Once again, we confront the difference between Discrimination I and Discrimination II.

  Going back to the earliest days of slavery in colonial America, there is no question that slaves simply lived wherever others told them to live. But even in those early times, there were also “free persons of color.” In fact, these “free persons of color” existed in the American colonies before slavery, which existed virtually everywhere else in the world, developed as a legal institution in seventeenth-century America.

  Before that, the relatively few Africans in the colonies were treated like the far larger numbers of indentured servants from Europe, who were held in bondage for a given number of years, usually to pay off the cost of their passage across the ocean, and then released as free people. In early colonial America, more than half the white population in colonies south of New England arrived as indentured servants.41

  The relative handful of blacks at that time were treated the same legally, in that regard42—but not socially. As the numbers of Africans brought to the colonies increased greatly, their fate became that of perpetual slavery for them and their descendants.

  Thus began a cycle of retrogressions followed by progress, followed by new retrogressions followed by new progress, in the treatment of the black population. The reasons for these oscillations tell us something about Discrimination I and Disc
rimination II.

  Even if racist ideas, assumptions and aversions might fully explain discrimination against blacks, that would still leave unexplained these oscillations—which represented major changes, back and forth, lasting for generations, in both the nineteenth century and the twentieth century.

  Major restrictions, both legal and social, against “free persons of color” existed in both the North and the South, during the era of slavery. But, while those restrictions tightened over time in the South during the nineteenth century, they eroded in the North during that same century.

  In the South, where plantation slavery was the norm, “free persons of color” were seen as dangers to that whole system, both because their very presence demonstrated to slaves that slavery was not an inevitable fate for black people, and because the fraternization of “free persons of color” with slaves not only spread the idea of freedom, but also provided a source of help for slaves who escaped.

  In the North, whose climate was not conducive to plantation slavery, and where blacks were a marginal part of the total population, both legal and social restrictions against blacks were not as severe and—more important—began to erode significantly in the second half of the nineteenth century, after successive generations of Northern-born blacks began to acculturate to the behavioral norms of the much larger white population around them. One indicator of this acculturation to the norms of the larger society was that the black-white difference in homicide rates in various Northern communities during the first half of the nineteenth century was much smaller than it would become a century later. In a monumental treatise on violence in countries around the world, The Better Angels of Our Nature, author Steven Pinker noted: