A tip ‘o the hate to my VDARE editor James Fulford.
This appeared in a conservative magazine called National Review on October 9, 1995. I have no idea what happened to the author or the magazine.
PRUDENT DISCRIMINATION
Myth of the Racist Cabbie
As racism declines as a social force in America,
blacks confront a new problem -- rational discrimination.
What, if anything, should be done about this?
Dinesh D'Souza
Mr. D'Souza, who is John M. Olin Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The End of Racism, just published by the Free Press.
A generation after the civil-rights movement, Americans are once again engaged in a radical rethinking of their attitudes toward race. Racial preferences are now opposed by the vast majority of Americans; even among blacks, there is a new and vibrant diversity of opinion on the subject. Yet so far no one has questioned the very premises of the discussion. The basic assumption of our current racial debate is still that racism is the theory and discrimination is the practice. Racism is said to be based on ``prejudices,'' which constitute judgments made in the absence of evidence, and ``stereotypes,'' which are grossly misleading generalizations about groups. The obvious solutions, promoted by Martin Luther King and other activists, were twofold: statutes intended to outlaw racial discrimination, and social and educational programs to increase interaction between groups. As whites regularly lived and worked with blacks, their attitudes and actions toward them were expected to undergo a transformation, as ignorant prejudices gave way to enlightened acceptance.
As a result of these policies, state-sponsored segregation is dead; overt and arbitrary racial discrimination has greatly abated; white attitudes have undergone a revolutionary transformation in favor of equal rights in employment, housing, voting, and education; and there is a large and thriving black middle class. Yet, at the same time, the prevailing civil-rights model, and the laws and policies based on it, now seem irrelevant to contemporary problems, such as the lurid sufferings of the underclass, which have worsened over the past few decades. Consequently the debate seems to have been polarized and stalled by the crosscurrents of white backlash, black rage, and liberal despair. African American scholar Derrick Bell conveys some of the regnant frustration: ``We have made progress in everything, yet nothing has changed.''
Perhaps one way to gain an enlarged perspective on our current situation is to step back and turn our assumptions into questions. Are there circumstances in which discrimination actually makes sense? Are people who discriminate against people of other races by definition racist? Might prejudices reflect not ignorant predisposition but prudent judgment?
THE problems with the prevailing civil-rights paradigm become evident when we examine the most widely cited contemporary example of racial discrimination -- the refusal of many taxidrivers to pick up young African-American males. In a recent article, Gregory Wright commented in the Washington Post:
As an African American, I am fed up with having to flag down five cabs before finding one that will take me home, fed up with feeling anger, embarrassment, and frustration when cabdrivers swear they are off-duty and then pick up a white customer before I can get around the corner. Taxidrivers, many of whom come from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, say they don't want to pick up African-American passengers because they are afraid of being robbed, assaulted, or murdered. One Nigerian cabdriver told me he only picks up African Americans who are well dressed and look like businessmen. For African Americans, this discrimination can be inconvenient and downright humiliating.
It is easy to sympathize with the indignation expressed at such flagrant acts of racial discrimination. Yet according to Wright's own account, many of the cabdrivers who are reluctant to pick up young African-American males are themselves African, Caribbean, or Middle Eastern. Moreover, the Nigerian cited by Wright says explicitly that he will pick up blacks who are suitably dressed. His discrimination seems to be based not simply on skin color but on other aspects of appearance.
During my travels I took up the issue with a number of taxidrivers in New York, Washington, Chicago, and other cities. Most of them denied that they refuse to pick up every black male, and all ridiculed the notion that cabdrivers pass up black women. But many groused that African-American passengers frequently leave no tip and sometimes beat the fare, and virtually all acknowledged that as a consequence of previous threats, robberies, and assaults they employ a kind of heightened scrutiny before they will stop for a young black man.
``This racism stuff is all bull -- -- ,'' one African student who was driving to put himself through school, told me. ``I'm not going to pass up a fare, which is money in my pocket. But I don't want to get robbed. You know what the black crime rate is in New York? Do you want me to risk a gun to my head, man? What's wrong with you?''
A white driver in Chicago told me, ``No exceptions, pal. I never pick up niggers.''
``You don't like blacks?'' I asked.
``Not blacks. Niggers.''
``That sounds like racism to me.''
``Hey, that's c---- . I pick up older blacks all the time. I have no problem with giving black women a ride. My black buddies won't pick up no niggers. I ain't no more racist than they are.''
These concerns seem to be borne out by cabdriver muggings and killings. In August 1994, Keith Moore, a 38-year-old cabdriver and single father, was found with the keys in the ignition and two bullet wounds in his head. His friends told the Washington Post that he never worried about picking up passengers in questionable neighborhoods no matter what the time of day. If Moore had exercised prudence, his colleague Louis Richardson said, he probably would be alive today. The U.S. Labor Department recently reported that driving a cab is the riskiest job in America, with occupational homicide rates higher than those for bartenders, gas-station attendants, and policemen.
These facts suggest how hollow it sounds to accuse cabdrivers of ``prejudice'' and ``stereotypes.'' While we can be sure that racist taxidrivers would discriminate, not all taxidrivers who discriminate are racist.
MICHELLE Joo, an Asian-American shopkeeper in Washington, D.C., acknowledges that she discriminates based on race. When deciding whether to let people into her jewelry and cosmetics store, she tells the Washington Post, ``I look at the face.'' She won't open the door ``if he looks ugly, if he's holding a bottle in a paper bag, if he's dirty. . . . If some guy looks kind, I let him in.'' Young black men are kept out if they seem rowdy, Miss Joo says. Usually they react by banging on her glass windows. One may say that Michelle Joo has no fixed policy of keeping blacks out. Nor does she have a quota about the number she will admit. Rather, she seems to be a prudent statistician. She employs race as one factor, but not the only factor, in her decision-making. As a means to ensure her security and business survival, she is practicing what may be termed rational discrimination.
Thousands of other store owners in major cities make similar decisions every day. So do countless women -- black, white, Hispanic, and Asian -- who come across black males in circumstances they consider not entirely safe. Regardless of their general attitudes about civil rights, they do what they feel is necessary in each particular case. Shopkeepers scurry to the front of the store where they can monitor the exit. Female pedestrians may clutch their purse more tightly or cross the street if approached by one or more young black men. Sometimes people snap the locks on their car doors as African-American youths walk by.
The psychological toll of such reactions is high. If you are black, columnist William Raspberry says, it is unusual to find yourself treated as an individual, and to receive the kind of consideration that whites expect. In The Rage of a Privileged Class, Ellis Cose describes a typical justification for black rage: ``Why am I constantly treated as if I were a drug addict, a thief, or a thug?'' Many who echo these sentiments also question the basis for group judgments about blacks. Legal scholar Charles Ogletree argues that ``99 per cent of black people don't commit crimes.''
Blacks make up approximately 12 per cent of the nation's population. Yet according to Uniform Crime Reports, published annually by the FBI, blacks account for 39 per cent of those arrested for aggravated assault, 42 per cent of those arrested for weapons possession, 43 per cent of those arrested for rape, 55 per cent of those arrested for murder, and 61 per cent of those arrested for robbery. Even discounting for the possibility of some racial bias in criminal arrests, it seems clear that the average black person is between three and six times as likely to be arrested for a crime as the average white person.
Young black males are arrested and convicted of crimes at an astonishingly high rate. According to the Sentencing Project, a liberal advocacy group, about 25 per cent of young black men in America are in prison, on probation, or on parole on any given day. For whites, the figure is 6 per cent. In major cities, the figures for young black men are even higher.
Jesse Jackson acknowledged the cultural pathology of violence among inner-city blacks when he said, ``There is nothing more painful for me than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start to think about robbery, and then see it's somebody white and feel relieved.'' Faced with immediate criticism from other black activists, Jackson hurried to ``clarify'' his views and deny that he meant what he said. But several African-American scholars have made the same point. Johnnetta Cole writes that among black women ``one of the most painful admissions I hear is: I am afraid of my own people.'' Given black crime rates, Howard University education professor Kenneth Tollett says, ``The statements we have called stereotypes in the past have become true.''
Personally I would be angry and upset if, as a law-abiding person, I were routinely treated as a criminal by taxidrivers, storekeepers, or pedestrians. Yet, equally predictably, taxidrivers, storekeepers, and women who clutch their purses or cross the street will attach little significance to such personal and historical sensitivities. Such people are unlikely to be intimidated by accusations of prejudice. For them, the charges are meaningless, because the prejudice is warranted. In this context, a bigot is simply a sociologist without credentials.
IT IS now time to examine with fresh eyes the meaning of familiar terms such as prejudice and stereotype, which underlie the conventional liberal understanding of racism. African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates writes: ``Racism exists when one generalizes about attributes of an individual, and treats him or her accordingly.'' Gates offers some specific examples: ``You people sure can dance,'' and ``Black people play basketball so remarkably well.'' He concludes, ``These are racist statements.'' But are they?
In his classic work, The Nature of Prejudice, published in 1954, Gordon Allport drew on modern social-science theories to explicate the paradigm of liberal anti-racism. Allport argued that prejudices and stereotypes reveal less about their objects than their subjects. Applying such concepts as displacement and frustration-aggression theory, Allport maintained that when people feel hostility and anger which they have difficulty coping with, they project it onto others, who thus become sacrificial victims or ``scapegoats.'' Allport helped to establish a premise that many social scientists continue to hold today: prejudices and stereotypes endure because of the principle of self-selection. From the distorted perspective of the racist, blacks who do not conform to preconceived notions simply do not exist; they are, in Ralph Ellison's term, invisible men.
For the better part of a generation, this liberal understanding of racism worked fairly well. The reason was that both whites and blacks had indeed developed many erroneous views about each other as a consequence of the social isolation produced by Southern segregation. During slavery the races stayed in regular, even intimate, contact, but after emancipation the forced separation of the races created a divided society in which dubious and even absurd generalizations could endure, unchecked by contrary experience. The civil-rights movement's assault on prejudices and stereotypes, as well as the experience of desegregation, helped to topple many such group generalizations that could not withstand empirical examination.
The problem with the liberal paradigm is its premise that all group perceptions are misperceptions. Paradoxically it is desegregation and integration which have called the liberal view into question. One of the risks of increased exposure to blacks is that it has placed whites in a position to discover which of their preconceived views are true.
In fact ethnic groups which have had little history of oppressing each other now seem to be formulating clear and often critical images of other groups. In one of the more remarkable surveys of recent years, the National Conference of Christians and Jews reports that many minority groups harbor much more hostile attitudes toward other minority groups than whites do. For example, 49 per cent of blacks and 68 per cent of Asians said that Hispanics ``tend to have bigger families than they can support.'' Forty-six per cent of Hispanics and 42 per cent of blacks agreed that Asian Americans are ``unscrupulous, crafty, and devious in business.'' And 53 per cent of Asians and 51 per cent of Hispanics affirmed that blacks ``are more likely to commit crimes and violence.''
It is, of course, possible that these minority perceptions reveal that, by a kind of social osmosis, everyone is learning racism from whites. But if so, why would minority perceptions be stronger than those of whites who are the alleged racists par excellence? More likely, these intergroup minority perceptions are the product of experience. Most people today have fairly regular contact with others of different races, and have many opportunities to verify their collective judgments about other groups.
During my speaking trips to college campuses, I decided, as a journalistic exercise, to test people's perception of group traits by raising the question of whether stereotypes may be true and prejudices based on them therefore legitimate. Inevitably, I encountered strong emotional opposition. Educated people today have been taught to despise group generalizations. In a sense, we have been raised to be prejudiced against prejudice.
Recently on a West Coast campus, I raised the question of whether, as a group, ``blacks have rhythm.'' A professor of Afro-American Studies insisted, ``Absolutely not,'' and a number of white students readily agreed. Instinctively, they raised the familiar defenses, ``I know a black man who can't dance.'' ``How can you generalize about a group that is so diverse?'' ``What about Elvis? He had rhythm, and he wasn't black,'' and so on. I pointed out that these were poor refutations of a proposition that was being offered as true on average, or compared with the experience of other groups. One cannot rebut the statistically irrefutable statement that men on average are taller than women by producing a six-foot woman and a four-foot man. Those individuals would merely constitute exceptions to a general pattern that has persisted across cultures for most of recorded history.
Incidentally, the view that blacks tend to be more rhythmic than whites is no whimsical recent invention but is supported by observation and experience in several cultures over two millennia. In ancient Greece and Rome, which held no negative view of black skin color, Ethiopians and other blacks were celebrated for a perceived natural inclination to music and dance. This is a central theme of that segment of Greek and Roman art which focuses on blacks. Moreover, the same perception of blacks is evident in many Arab descriptions of African blacks written in the late Middle Ages. Ibn Butlan, for example, writes that if a black man was dropped from heaven ``he would beat time as he goes down.'' The Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun attributed the black African proclivity for music to the relaxing influence of the sun's heat.
On one point the liberal paradigm about group generalizations is sound: people's perceptions of others are always filtered through the lens of their own prior experience. But the liberal understanding cannot explain how particular traits come to be identified with particular groups. Only because group traits have an empirical basis in shared experience can we invoke them without fear of serious contradiction. Think how people would react if someone said, ``Koreans are lazy,'' or ``Hispanics are constantly trying to find ways to make money.'' Despite the prevalence of anti-Semitism, Jews are rarely accused of stupidity. Blacks are never accused of being tight with a dollar, or of conspiring to take over the world. By reversing stereotypes we can see how their persistence relies, not simply on the assumptions of the viewer, but also on the characteristics of the group being described.
This is no case for group traits having a biological foundation. Probably the vast majority of group traits are entirely cultural, the distilled product of many years of shared experience. Yet prejudices and stereotypes are not intended to explain the origins of group traits, only to take into account their existence. Nor is this an argument to emphasize negative traits. Stereotypes can be negative or positive. Indeed the same stereotype can be interpreted favorably or unfavorably. One can deplore Roman machismo or admire Roman manliness; deride Spanish superstition or exalt Spanish piety; ridicule English severity or cherish English self-control. In each of these interpretations, we see a single set of facts, a different set of values.
William Helmreich, in The Things They Say Behind Your Back, takes up the issue of whether there is a rational basis for group stereotypes. Helmreich finds some stereotypes that are clearly false. During the Middle Ages, for example, apparently many Christians took religious polemic literally and came to believe that Jews have horns. Clearly this was not a perception destined to last: one has only to encounter a few Jews to discover that they do not, in fact, possess horns.
Helmreich takes up other stereotypes, however, such as the view that many Nobel laureates are Jewish, or that the Mafia is largely made up of Italians, or that the Japanese tend to be xenophobic and nationalistic, or that many Irishmen and American Indians drink enormous quantities of alcohol. Basically Helmreich finds that these perceptions are confirmed by the data. Of all the stereotypes he considers, Helmreich concludes that ``almost half the stereotypes have a strong factual basis.''
Thus the liberal assumptions that groups do not differ and that group generalizations are irrational turn out to be wrong. Indeed they generate a civil-rights paradigm which is at variance with most people's direct observation of the world. We would do better to acknowledge the reality of group traits and ask how we should act on it.
RATIONAL discrimination is not limited to the exasperating but relatively inconsequential actions of taxidrivers and storekeepers; it is also quite pervasive in other areas, notably hiring.
In one of the most famous demonstrations of the persistence of hiring discrimination, in 1991 the Urban Institute sent ten black and ten white testers to apply for a range of private-sector jobs in Chicago and Washington, D.C. The testers were matched in pairs with very similar appearances, deportments, and credentials. The Institute found that in 67 per cent of cases neither candidate received a job offer; in 13 per cent, both did; in 15 per cent, only the white tester received an offer; and in 5 per cent, only the black tester did.
Although these results hardly prove, as the Institute concluded, that racial discrimination against blacks is ``widespread and entrenched,'' they do suggest that it continues to exist. Curiously, however, the Institute study found that white and black employers were equally likely to discriminate. This suggests the possibility that discrimination persists because in some cases it is efficient; it makes economic sense.
Conventional economic theory holds that arbitrary racial discrimination is economically costly. The reason was explained years ago by economist Gary Becker: employers who refuse to hire the best person for the job are likely to suffer relative to their competition. Even discrimination based on arbitrary features such as race can be profitable, however, when the cost of discrimination is lower than the transaction cost of evaluating candidates individually.
Consider the case of a chain of stores seeking to hire entry-level workers recruited mainly from the local high-school. Let us assume, further, that African Americans as a group have substantially higher crime rates than whites, Hispanics, or Asians. Employers could disregard this fact and carefully scrutinize the individual history and character of each applicant. This would certainly be the ideal course of action. But employers, who are in business to make a profit, may reason that entry-level jobs do not warrant the expenditure of time and effort to investigate every applicant's personal history. The employer may save transaction costs by simply keeping the number of blacks hired to a minimum.
That the discrimination unearthed by the Urban Institute study was probably rational is suggested by its finding that the race of the interviewer showed no correlation with the likelihood of engaging in discrimination. Discrimination practiced equally by white and black employers is likely to be discrimination that does not depend on racist intentions, but rather applies the logic of predictive evaluation, discriminating against people in high-risk categories. Race is not being singled out here: employers may have similar rational reasons for their reluctance to hire women, who may get pregnant and leave, or the elderly, who are more likely to fall ill, or young people, who may prove less reliable as employees.
In Chicago, one of the sites of the Urban Institute study, Joleen Kirschenman and Kathryn Neckerman interviewed employers about their motives for hiring and found support for the rational-discrimination hypothesis.
-- In general, one construction-company owner said, for urban blacks ``the quality of education is not as great as white folk from the suburbs, and it shows.''
-- Another employer remarked, ``The Polish immigrants that I know are more highly motivated than the Hispanics.''
-- One manufacturer said, ``We are not shutting out any black specifically, but I will say that our experience has been bad.''
The authors conclude that employers are using race as a proxy for ``aspects of productivity that are relatively expensive or impossible to measure.'' Many employers do seem to recognize diversity among blacks, often describing a particular individual as a good prospect, ``the exception to the rule.'' Nevertheless, employers do use group generalizations, so that in Kirschenman and Neckerman's view, ``black job applicants, unlike their white counterparts, must indicate to employers that the stereotypes do not apply to them.''
Rational discrimination may be difficult to understand in hiring, yet its economic justification is obvious in other areas. Insurance companies, for example, have no special dislike for teenage boys, but they charge them higher rates than female and older drivers. This is very unfair to an individual teenage boy who is a skilled and cautious driver, because he is penalized on account of the statistical habits of a group he did not voluntarily join. Yet even with reasonably thorough personal information, companies are not in a good position to predict individual behavior.
IS discrimination based on race necessarily racist? Not if you define racism as a doctrine of intrinsic superiority and inferiority, which leads to judgments against a group on grounds of biology rather than conduct. Indeed, the existence of rational discrimination compels us to revise the liberal paradigm which holds that racism is the theory and discrimination is the practice. The two may be unconnected. It is possible to be a racist and not discriminate: this would be true of many poor and marginalized whites who might hate blacks and consider them inferior, but who are not in a position to enforce their convictions. So too it is possible to discriminate and not be a racist: this would constitute rational discrimination.
Just because discrimination can be rational, however, does not mean that it is always moral. When individuals and companies make decisions not to go to great lengths to ensure that they are not misjudging any particular person, they are sacrificing the just treatment of individuals at the altar of security, convenience, or profits. Even though such judgments may be prudent and realistic, they are not, strictly speaking, fair. Rational discrimination based on unalterable traits is problematic in a way that discrimination against high-school dropouts and convicted felons is not.
Thus the question of whether rational discrimination should be legal is a real one. The new public-policy dilemma is based on the recognition that discrimination sometimes makes practical sense, and that such discrimination forces a choice in which the claims of morality are on one side, and the claims of rationality and productivity are on the other.
We have, in fact, three models of how to deal with the persistence of discrimination. The first is affirmative action. Some advocates, such as legal scholar David Strauss, argue that racial preferences are an essential remedy for rational discrimination. Yet this argument is specious. After all, rational discrimination is objectionable because it treats competent individuals as incompetent on account of their involuntary membership in a disfavored group. This is hardly remedied by racial preferences which treat comparatively incompetent individuals as competent on account of their membership in a favored group.
The second approach is to make all discrimination, including rational discrimination, illegal in the public and private sector. This was Martin Luther King's solution, and it remains attractive to most Americans. Yet such a solution, although a vast improvement over the current system of racial preferences, would require massive state intervention in the private sector to unmask and punish discriminators, including minority firms which prefer to hire members of their own group, and other employers whose only sin amounts to engaging in rational behavior.
Then there is a third, and venerable option which was once considered liberal, but which has been virtually forgotten. In a free society, which maintains a distinction between the private and public sphere, rational discrimination is far more problematic when perpetrated by institutions of government than by private individuals and institutions. The reason is that in a democracy the government is responsible to all its citizens, who have a right to demand that they be treated as individuals equally under the law. Thus a new option emerges: the government should be strictly race-neutral, but private actors would be free to discriminate. In this scenario, rational discrimination would be legal, and so would private-sector affirmative action.
I can already hear the gasps of civil-rights activists, who are so wedded to the paradigm of old struggles that they cannot see what is obvious to the generation born after the civil-rights movement: Bull Connor is dead, and the ancien ré is finished. True, there will be employers who will refuse to hire blacks, and some may even post signs that say ``No African Americans Need Apply.'' So what? Irrational discrimination of this sort is harmful only when it is comprehensive in scope -- when everyone discriminates. On the other hand, if only some employers discriminate, then competitive markets impose the main financial cost of discrimination on the discriminator, where it belongs.
Thus we arrive at a supreme irony: perhaps the best way to save affirmative action is to abolish the civil-rights laws, or rather, to limit their employment provisions to government conduct. This would be not a repudiation of the civil-rights movement but its natural fulfillment. Only such a bold strategy establishes a framework of state-neutrality and personal freedom that permits citizens of all backgrounds to pursue their competing utopias, and offers a realistic way out of our current thicket.
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