Much empirical evidence suggests that human beings do not interact randomly—nor as frequently or as intensely—with all other human beings as with selected sub-sets of people like themselves. In short, people sort themselves out, both in where they choose to live and with whom they choose to interact most often and most closely.
It is worth examining some of that empirical evidence as to self-sorting, before going on to consider the consequences of third-party sorting or unsorting of other people. The crucial point here is that, when people spontaneously sort themselves, the results are seldom even or random, and are often quite skewed.
Where people live has, at various times and places, been decided either by the people themselves or by others who imposed various restrictions through a variety of institutional devices, ranging from government laws and policies to many private formal and informal means, ranging from restrictive covenants to homeowners’ associations to outright violence against individuals or groups who have sought to live in neighborhoods where they were not welcome.
Immigrants have seldom emigrated evenly or randomly from their country of origin. Nor have they settled evenly or randomly in the country they reached. For example, two provinces in mid-nineteenth-century Spain, containing 6 percent of the Spanish population, supplied 67 percent of the Spanish immigrants to Argentina. Moreover, these immigrants tended to live clustered together in particular neighborhoods in Buenos Aires.1
Similarly skewed patterns of settlement have been common around the world, among other immigrants moving from their country of origin to their country of settlement.2 During the era of mass emigration from Italy, for example, Italian immigrants in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Argentina and the United States not only tended to cluster together in predominantly Italian neighborhoods but, more specifically, within those neighborhoods people from Genoa, Naples or Sicily clustered together with other people from those same respective places in Italy.3
During that same era, the massive immigration of Eastern European Jews to America was concentrated in New York’s Lower East Side. But within those Jewish neighborhoods, Hungarian Jews were largely clustered in their own enclaves, as were Jews from Romania, Russia and other places in Eastern Europe.4
German Jews, who had lived in their own enclave on the Lower East Side, decades before the mass arrival of Eastern European Jews, were already leaving that neighborhood as they rose socioeconomically, and were increasingly locating in other parts of New York as the Eastern European Jews arrived. Such spatial and social separation between German Jews and Eastern European Jews was common in New York,5 Chicago,6 San Francisco7 and Boston.8 In Australia, as well, there have been both institutional and social separation between the earlier arriving Jewish immigrants from Western Europe and the later Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, with the latter establishing their own synagogues and pursuing different religious and secular views and agendas.9
Lebanese immigrants to Sierra Leone in Africa or Colombia in South America likewise settled in enclaves of other Lebanese from the same parts of Lebanon and of the same religion, with Catholic Lebanese from particular places in Lebanon settling together and separate from enclaves of Orthodox Christians from Lebanon or Lebanese Shiite Muslims.10
German immigrants who settled in nineteenth-century New York not only settled in an area of Manhattan called Kleindeutschland (little Germany), Hessians clustered in one part of Kleindeutschland, while Prussians clustered in another.11
People tend to sort themselves out, not only in their residential patterns but also in their social interactions. Twentieth-century Japanese immigrants to Brazil not only settled in Japanese enclaves, most Okinawan immigrants in Brazil married other Okinawans, rather than marrying fellow Japanese from other parts of Japan, much less marrying members of the Brazilian population at large.12
It was much the same story among German immigrants in nineteenth-century New York, where most Bavarians married other Bavarians, and most Prussians married other Prussians. Among the Irish immigrants as well, most nineteenth-century marriages that took place in New York’s Irish enclaves were marriages between people from the same county in Ireland.13
In the Australian city of Griffith, in the years from 1920 to 1933, 90 percent of Italian men who had emigrated from Venice and gotten married in Australia married Italian women who had also emigrated from Venice. Another five percent married Italian women from other parts of Italy, the same percentage as married “British-Australian” women.14
However striking these patterns may be statistically, they are not patterns that most people are made aware of by seeing them with the naked eye, as is the case with differences between black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods in the United States. As a result, black-white residential separations have been seen and treated as if they were unique, as well as being inconsistent with prevailing background assumptions of equal or random outcomes in the absence of discriminatory impositions.
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 ratio 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.15
Moreover, these were not simply isolated differences. They were differences reflecting different socioeconomic levels and differences in family stability and individual behavioral standards. Delinquency rates within Chicago’s black community ranged from more than 40 percent in some neighborhoods to under 2 percent in others.16
In nineteenth-century Detroit, black homeowners lived clustered together and separate from black renters.17 Similar residential differentiation took place in Cleveland’s black community.18 A history of Harlem pointed out occupational differences among people who returned home from work and got off at different subway stops in Harlem.19 Mid-twentieth-century data showed income distribution among blacks in the country as a whole to be slightly more unequal than among whites.20 Later data in 2016 showed that, while the top ten percent of white income earners had incomes nearly eight times that of the bottom ten percent of white income earners, the top ten percent of black income earners had incomes nearly ten times the income of the bottom ten percent of black income earners.21
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.22 Despite how exceptional such occupations and achievements were among blacks at that time, these particular families averaged 2.25 individuals each in those categories.23 That is, every four such families averaged nine individuals at these levels.
Awareness of such social and economic differences was both widespread and often acute within the black population.24 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.25
Those blacks born and bred in nineteenth-century Chicago, and living as small enclaves of blacks in an overwhelmingly white population, 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.26
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.27
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.”28
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 group 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.29
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.30 The South had long been the country’s most violent region, among blacks and whites alike.31
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.32
In Washington, blacks were no longer allowed in many white theaters, restaurants or hotels, and their opportunities to work in white-collar occupations shrank.33 There were similar restrictive trends in Cleveland, Chicago, and St. Louis,34 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.35
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.36
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,38 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.39
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. In 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.40
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 10,000.41 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 been before, and that of San Francisco rose to approximately nine times its 1940 level.42
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.43 And, as in Northern cities decades earlier, the arrival of the newcomers was followed by retrogressions in black-white relations.44
A timeless explanation of discrimination against blacks, such as racism, cannot account for either the progress or the retrogressions that took place on a large scale at differing times. This is not to deny that there has been racism, but the evidence suggests that the discrimination that took place was not simply Discrimination II, for that would leave unexplained the large swings in the magnitude of discrimination against blacks.
These striking changes in the progress and retrogressions in black-white relations over time have been too large and too numerous in different settings to be simply Discrimination II—based on a false perception by whites—and more closely fit the consequences of Discrimination IB, a correct perception of behavioral changes in local black communities outside the South, as those communities began to consist increasingly of people steeped in a culture that originated in the South, and was unwelcome in the North by both black and white Northern communities.
As late as 1944, when a landmark study of American race relations—An American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal—was published, that study pointed out that most blacks living in the North had been born in the South.45 Moreover, the sheer size of the greatly enlarged black communities living in places outside the South meant that neither the pace nor the thoroughness of cultural assimilation of these black communities to the behavioral norms of the larger society was likely to be what it had been in the tiny black communities in the North, surrounded by overwhelmingly white communities, during the nineteenth century.
In short, Discrimination IB had staying power, despite how much some might prefer depicting it as Discrimination II. To the extent that the cause was misdiagnosed, proposed cures for Discrimination II, such as re-educating the white population to their misperceptions, offered only limited prospects of success.
Many individual blacks were in fact misperceived, given the very high costs of gaining the knowledge required for Discrimination IA, judging each individual as an individual.
But to argue that the black population as a whole was misperceived, and that this explains the retrogressions, is to argue that the preexisting black population and the pre-existing white population were both mistaken when they reached very similar conclusions about the behavior of the incoming migrant population. At the very least, such a conclusion should require at least some empirical evidence.
In countries around the world, innumerable groups have sorted themselves in many ways, socially as well as residentially. 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 sisters46—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.
People who shop at stores in the Whole Foods chain have college degrees more than twice as often as people who shop at stores in the Family Dollar chain. The stores in the Whole Foods chain are located in communities with average population sizes more than five times the average population size in communities where stores in the Dollar General chain are located.47
There are many other 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, because of pervasive social sorting and Discrimination IB, there can be large, and sometimes devastating, costs imposed on individuals 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. According to Professor Wilson:
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.48
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.49
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. They understood what is called here Discrimination IB.50
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. In the United States, similar governmental restrictions on where black Americans could live were long common in various forms, supplemented by private racial restrictions.51
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 harder to answer.
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 existed, even though slavery existed virtually everywhere else in the world at that time. And it 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.52
The relative handful of blacks at that time were treated the same legally, in that regard53—but not socially. As the numbers of Africans brought to the colonies increased greatly, their fate became that of perpetual slavery for themselves 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 Discrimination 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, free blacks began to acculturate to the behavioral norms of the much larger white population around them. In Illinois, for example, legal restrictions on access to public accommodations for blacks were removed from the law.54 There were not enough black voters at that time to have brought this about by themselves, so this represented changes in white public opinion.
In nineteenth-century Detroit, blacks were not allowed to vote in 1850, but they were voting in the 1880s, and in the 1890s blacks were being elected to statewide offices in Michigan by a predominantly white electorate. The 1880 census showed that, in Detroit, it was not uncommon for blacks and whites to live next door to each other.55 The black upper class had regular social interactions with upper-class whites, and their children attended high schools and colleges with the children of their white counterparts.56
Writing in 1899, W.E.B. Du Bois noted “a growing liberal spirit toward the Negro in Philadelphia,” in which the larger community had begun to “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.57 Both contemporary and later writers commented on similar developments in other Northern communities.58
While black children in most Northern communities had long been educated in racially segregated schools during the first half of the nineteenth century, if they were allowed to attend public schools at all, this changed during the second half of that century:
By 1870, those northern states that had excluded blacks from public schools had reversed course. Moreover, during the quarter century following the end of the Civil War, most northern states enacted legislation that prohibited racial segregation in public education. Most northern courts, when called upon to enforce this newly enacted antisegregation legislation, did so, ordering the admission of black children into white schools.59
These were not just coincidental mood swings among whites across the North. The behavior of blacks themselves had changed.
As Jacob Riis put it in 1890, “There is no more clean and orderly community in New York than the new settlement of colored people that is growing up on the East Side from Yorkville to Harlem.”60 By the late nineteenth century, most blacks in New York state had been born in New York state, and grew up with values and behavior patterns similar to those of the vastly larger white population around them.
However, in this as in other things, a major retrogression set in later, in Northern cities, with the arrival of large masses of black migrants from the South in the early twentieth century, concentrated within a relatively few years and arriving in numbers sufficient to prevent their becoming as acculturated to the norms of the larger society, either as quickly or as much as the small nineteenth-century black populations had in the North. The same retrogressions in race relations seen in other aspects of life likewise occurred in Northern schools:
… with the migration of hundreds of thousands of southern blacks into northern communities during the first half of the twentieth century, northern school segregation dramatically increased. Indeed, by 1940, northern school segregation was more extensive than it had been at any time since Reconstruction.61
In most cases, this was de facto racial segregation in the North, as distinguished from the explicit racial segregation by law in Southern schools. But similar end results were achieved in the North by gerrymandering school districts and by other means. Among the reasons cited for this resurgence of racial segregation in the Northern schools were both educational and behavioral problems of black children.62 However, as regards educational problems, surveys in both Chicago and Detroit indicated that these were primarily problems with black children whose families had migrated from the South,63 where educational standards were lower.
Neither eras of progress in race relations nor eras of retrogression were simply inexplicable mood swings among whites. Both represented responses to demonstrable changes in local black populations. These responses were complicated by the inherent problems of white third parties trying to sort out differences among black children, even though sorting out black children in general from white children in general required nothing more than eyesight. It was very low-cost Discrimination IB.
Moreover, in the early twentieth century, the rise to dominance of genetic determinism as a supposedly “scientific” doctrine strengthened the hand of those white officials who were prepared to write off the potential of black and other minority children, as the Progressives of that era did.64
The residential and other outcomes produced by the sorting of people became, in the second half of the twentieth century, widely condemned as wrong in itself, and as creating other social wrongs against the less fortunate groups. This might be considered a special case of the more general assumption that outcomes would tend to be even, or random, in the absence of malign interventions.
But, whatever it was based on, the view became axiomatic among many Americans in the second half of the twentieth century that unsorting people was a high priority, especially in schools, but also in residential neighborhoods.
Perhaps the most famous, and most consequential, Supreme Court decision of the twentieth century was that in the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education, declaring that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional. This ended more than half a century of hypocrisy, following the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that government-imposed racial segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment requirement of “equal protection of the laws” for all, so long as the racially segregated facilities provided for blacks were “separate but equal.”
For generations, it was widely known that the separate facilities provided for blacks in the racially segregated South were grossly unequal. As courts belatedly began to demand that either equal state institutions be provided for blacks or else blacks must be admitted to the institutions provided for whites, various efforts were made by Southern states to reduce the inequality and, in some cases, blacks were reluctantly granted access to some white institutions, such as a law school in Texas, though with restrictions that did not apply to white students.65 But even this represented a slow, uphill advance against determined resistance by Southern officials.
Now, in the Brown v. Board of Education case, a unanimous Supreme Court decreed that racially segregated schools were, according to Chief Justice Earl Warren, inherently unequal,66 so that the slow and circuitous route to equalizing government facilities was to be replaced by simply outlawing the official sorting of school children by race.
It was now no longer a question of unequal physical facilities or unequal financial support, for the very act of racial segregation was said to reduce the educational prospects of black children: “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”67
In the heady atmosphere of the times, when the Brown v. Board of Education decision was widely hailed by blacks and most whites, except among white Southerners, as a long overdue end to government-imposed racial segregation and discrimination, the ringing assertions made by Chief Justice Warren were widely accepted. Nevertheless, only about a mile from where those pronouncements were made in the Supreme Court, there was an all-black public high school whose history, going all the way back into the nineteenth century, belied the Chief Justice’s key assertions about empirical facts.
As of 1954, when Chief Justice Warren declared that separate schools were inherently unequal, all-black Dunbar High School sent a higher percentage of its graduates on to college than any white public high school in Washington.68 As far back as 1899, when the same test was given in Washington’s four academic high schools at that time, this same all-black public high school scored higher than two of the three white public high schools.69
Although most of its graduates went to local colleges, some were already beginning to go to some of the leading colleges in the country at the end of the nineteenth century—and graduating Phi Beta Kappa. Over the period from 1892 to 1954, 34 of these graduates were admitted to Amherst College. Of these, 74 percent graduated from Amherst, and 28 percent of these black graduates were Phi Beta Kappas.70 Among other elite colleges from which students from this high school graduated Phi Beta Kappa during that era were Harvard, Yale, Williams, Cornell, and Dartmouth.71
Among the graduates of this high school—known by various names over the years since its founding in 1870, including Dunbar High School since 1916—were “the first black who” had a range of career achievements. These included the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. at an American university, the first black federal judge, the first black general, the first black Cabinet member, the first black tenured professor at a major national university, and Dr. Charles Drew, who won international recognition as a pioneer in developing the use of blood plasma.72
Clearly, racially segregated schools were not inherently inferior. There is no question that most black schools in the South at that time, and many in the North, had inferior educational outcomes. And no doubt inferior resources supplied to black schools had a role in these outcomes, though not necessarily the sole role or the most important role.
In any event, the crusade to racially integrate public schools, during the decades following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, generated much social turmoil, racial polarization and bitter backlashes, but no general educational improvement from seating black school children next to white school children.
One of the painful ironies of the racial integration crusade was that Dunbar High School’s 85 years of academic achievement came to an abrupt end, in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. To comply with that decision, Washington schools were all made neighborhood schools, so that Dunbar could no longer admit black students from all parts of the city, as it had before, but only students from the particular ghetto neighborhood where it was located. Dunbar quickly became a typical failing ghetto school, with serious academic and behavioral problems.
By 1993, a smaller percentage of Dunbar students went on to college than had done so 60 years earlier73—even though 1933 was in the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s and 1993 was in the midst of the prosperous decade of the 1990s.
Neither racial integration nor general prosperity, nor even a newer, more modern and more expensive school building was a substitute for what was lost. Yet, toward the end of the twentieth century, some new and highly successful schools brought educational excellence to many ghetto communities, not only in Washington but also in New York and other communities across the country. Many of these educational successes were in particular chains of charter schools, such as the Success Academy and KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) chains.
Not all charter schools were successful, but those that were successful often produced a level of educational achievement far above those of either most ghetto schools or many of the white schools to which black children were bused in the name of racial integration.
In 2017, for example, the 14,000 students in the Success Academy charter schools in New York passed the statewide examinations in English and mathematics at a higher rate than the students in any regular public school district in the entire state.
What made this especially striking is that an overwhelming majority of the students in the Success Academy schools were either black or Hispanic, and from low-income families, while an overwhelming majority of the students in the regular public school district with the highest proportion of its students passing the same examinations were either white or Asian, and their average family income was four times that of families with children in the Success Academy schools.74
What is truly extraordinary about such educational achievements is that the children admitted to the Success Academy charter schools were selected by lottery—by sheer chance—rather than by either tests or by their previous records in school. They differ from a random sample of low-income black and Hispanic youngsters only in that they are the children of parents who cared enough about their education to enter them in the lottery. They were self-sorted, contrary to beliefs by many others that low-income minority parents are not qualified to make educational decisions supposedly best made by educational or other “experts.”
Here, as with Dunbar High School during its past era of academic achievement, self-sorting was crucial. Black students were not simply assigned to go to Dunbar High School during its era of academic achievements. Students had to apply, and those with neither the interest nor the inclination to subject themselves to rigorous educational norms had no reason to apply.
The educational track record of such self-sorting has been far more successful than third-party sorting, whether the third parties sorted by race or by residential location, or by a belief that racial diversity would lead to higher educational achievements.
The usual explanations or excuses for grossly inferior educational results in minority neighborhood public schools do not stand up under scrutiny. Whatever the effects of “a legacy of slavery” or of generations of racial discrimination, these black children who succeeded in Success Academy charter schools were no more exempt from these and other negative social influences than other black children from the same communities who have failed abysmally in the regular public schools.
Internal differences have been at least as common among blacks as among other racial or ethnic groups, making self-sorting a way of reducing counterproductive frictions that impede education. Successful charter schools give a glimpse of what can be accomplished by black children in low-income ghettos when self-sorting frees them from the disruptions and violence of unruly classmates, just a small number of whom can prevent a whole class from getting a decent education.
Along with the unsorting of American school children by decades of mandatory busing to racially “integrate” public schools in racially different neighborhoods, there have been parallel efforts to racially “integrate” the neighborhoods themselves.
Among the various government programs to unsort people who have sorted themselves have been programs to build the kind of housing in middle-class neighborhoods that would be affordable to people with lower incomes. Other strategies have included providing subsidies to enable low-income and minority families to be able to rent existing housing in higher income neighborhoods.
The assumption behind such programs has been that social isolation was behind many social pathologies in the ghettos, so that ending that isolation would lead to improvements in the behavior and performances of minority adults and children.
This was essentially the same assumption behind the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, that separate facilities were inherently unequal. Although that decision did not explicitly state that racial mixing was essential for black children to get an equal education, that was the logical corollary of what the decision did say.
The idea of racial “integration” or demographic “diversity” spread from education issues to questions of residential unsorting of different racial, ethnic or income groups. Government promotion or imposition of such policies was said to benefit both the newcomers inserted into middle-class neighborhoods and the existing residents who had sorted themselves away from them.
Whatever the plausibility of those assumptions and theories, the crucial question of the empirical validity of such assumptions depends on hard evidence. Contrary to those who attribute social pathologies in the ghettos to external causes in general, and white racism in particular, some of the strongest opposition to government programs that insert people from ghettos into middle-class neighborhoods came from black residents in those middle-class neighborhoods.75 As the Chicago Tribune put it:
The harshest criticism of dispersing public housing’s tenants comes not from whites but from blacks. In Harvey, a struggling, working-class African-American suburb south of the city, nearly one of every 10 housing units is already occupied by renters with subsidies.76
Among the behaviors of the newcomers commonly complained of by the original residents of working-class and middle-class neighborhoods around the country are that the newcomers’ teenaged children “are allowed to hang out on corners, play basketball late into the night, and sit in parked cars blasting profane music,”77 as in Chicago. Pre-existing residents complain that they “hear frequent gunfire.”78
In a San Francisco Bay Area community, the charge is that the children of the newcomers are “burglarizing nearby residences, hosting wild parties during the week and weekends, threatening neighbors, and engaging in various forms of criminal activity… robbing and assaulting our kids to and from school.”79 In Louisville, homicides have remained concentrated over the years in areas where housing project people have been concentrated.80
Black residents in working-class or middle-class communities have been particularly uninhibited in their denunciations of people from public housing projects and people on welfare that the government inserts into their communities, perhaps because black middle-class residents are not afraid of being called “racists.”
According to the Chicago Tribune, the resistance of working-class and middle-class blacks “in some cases has been fierce.” Black homeowners have “protested, loudly” at public meetings that they “didn’t want ‘those people’ moving back into their rejuvenated neighborhood.” Often homeowners at public gatherings “would shout at officials that they’d worked hard to get where they were and that they didn’t want to live next door to people who would just tear up their homes. They called them ‘project people,’ ‘lowlifers’ and ‘freeloaders.’”81
“Some blacks feel that ‘those people’ make it tough on those of us trying to make something of ourselves,” says Shirley Newsome, a homeowner in Kenwood-Oakland and a longtime voice of moderation. “That’s why white America doesn’t want me living next to them, because they look at me and figure I’m from a place like public housing.”82
Like so many social patterns that are usually discussed in terms of race, this pattern of inserting underclass newcomers into neighborhoods where they are resented by the pre-existing residents also exists when the underclass newcomers are white, and are resented by white preexisting residents. In the best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, the author—a white man from a hillbilly background—reported that his grandmother saw the government’s placing underclass people in their midst “as a betrayal, ensuring that ‘bad’ people would move into the neighborhood,” even though they “looked a lot like us,” but they were the kind of hillbillies who “gave our people a bad name.”83
Among other things, she resented “the drugs and the late-night fighting” among the new neighbors that the government had placed in their neighborhood, and said of the woman who lived next door: “She’s a lazy whore, but she wouldn’t be if she was forced to get a job.” More pointedly: “I can’t understand why people who’ve worked all their lives scrape by while these deadbeats buy liquor and cell phone coverage with our tax money.”84
Advocates of unsorting neighborhoods, whether by race or by class, argue that living in a better neighborhood will produce benefits for both the adults and the children who are moved in, and benefits of “diversity” for society at large. But these expected benefits to the newcomers from housing projects and high-crime neighborhoods have repeatedly failed to show up in extensive empirical studies by a wide variety of researchers on the federal government’s “Moving to Opportunity” program.
A study of that program published in the Journal of Human Resources concluded: “We did not find evidence of improvements in reading scores, math scores, behavior or school problems, or school engagement, overall or for any age group.”85 Another study of the same program published in the American Journal of Sociology concluded that “there is no evidence that extra time spent in low-poverty integrated neighborhoods improves economic outcomes.”86
Yet another study of the “Moving to Opportunity” program, published in the economic journal Econometrica likewise concluded, “we found no significant evidence of treatment effects on earnings, welfare participation, or amount of government assistance after an average of 5 years since random assignment.”87 The American Economic Review, the official journal of the American Economic Association, reached similar conclusions about the same federal program—“no consistent detectable impacts on adult economic self-sufficiency or children’s educational achievement outcomes” from the movement of thousands of people into higher income neighborhoods than the ones they came from.88
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, the oldest American journal in economics, likewise concluded that “the changes in neighborhoods induced by MTO (“Moving to Opportunity” program) have not affected the employment rates, earnings, or welfare usage by a statistically detectable amount for household heads.”89
In addition to these scholarly journals, a study published by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was based on research on that same program which “followed more than 4,600 very low-income families in five U.S. cities over a 10- to 15-year period to examine the short- and long-term effects of moving to low-poverty neighborhoods.” Its conclusion was: “No discernible benefit to economic self-sufficiency, employment outcomes, and risky and criminal behavior for adults and children was observed as a result of moving. Similarly, moving had few positive effects on educational achievement for youth.”90
Nevertheless, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan in 2013 “vowed to help urban blacks relocate to suburban neighborhoods, where they can have access to ‘good schools, safe streets, jobs, grocery stores,’ among other things.” Secretary Donovan claimed that realtors and landlords still discriminate against blacks. “African-Americans,” Donovan said, “are being denied their freedom of choice.”91 According to Investor’s Business Daily:
Earlier this year, HUD broadened the authority of two anti-discrimination laws—the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act—making illegal any housing or credit policy that results in disproportionately fewer blacks or Latinos receiving housing or home loans than whites, even if those policies are race-neutral and evenly applied across all groups.92
Here, yet again, we see the implicit assumption that there would be no disparate outcomes unless there were disparate treatment. Moreover, that assumption seems almost impervious to evidence.
One major difference between people sorting or unsorting themselves, on the one hand, and government officials sorting or unsorting them, on the other hand, is that people who sort or unsort themselves receive both the benefits and the costs of doing so. But government officials receive neither the benefits nor the costs of unsorting other people—and so may persist in the process, in utter disregard of benefits or costs that fall on others. Indeed, the political costs of admitting to having inflicted socially counterproductive policies are a powerful incentive to keep on inflicting those policies and ignoring or denying their consequences.93
It would be wrong to say that there have been literally no benefits at all to anyone from government-subsidized or government-enforced unsorting of people. While some studies have found some benefits to some segments of the low-income groups placed into middle-class neighborhoods by the government,94 these have seldom, if ever, been of the scope or magnitude envisioned when these programs were instituted.
More fundamentally, negative consequences to the pre-existing residents of the communities into which they have been placed are seldom, if ever, mentioned—much less measured—in these studies. It is as if any benefit, however small, to the new residents automatically outweighs any costs, however large, to the pre-existing residents.
If a given prerequisite for employment or promotion—a high school diploma, for example—has a “disparate impact” on some group, such as ethnic minorities, then the burden of proof falls on the accused employer to provide a justification of the requirement or else be judged guilty of discrimination.
This process represents a major departure from American legal principles in both criminal and civil cases, where the burden of proof is usually put on those making an accusation, rather than expecting the accused to prove their innocence. There are serious practical consequences of this very different legal standard in civil rights cases. There are costs to both employers and workers seeking employment, when the assortment and proportions of employees differ from the assortment and proportions of groups in the surrounding area.
For the employer, the fact that a charge of discrimination can be made, based solely on statistics about his employees, without even a single flesh-and-blood human being actually claiming to be discriminated against, means that employers can be put through a costly and time-consuming legal process that can drag on for years, consuming millions of dollars in legal costs alone, quite aside from costs imposed if this uncertain process leads to an unfavorable verdict.
For example, a case charging the Sears department store chain with sex discrimination cost the company $20 million in legal fees95 and took 15 years to resolve through the federal courts—without the government having to produce even one woman, from any of Sears’ hundreds of department stores around the country, claiming to have been discriminated against. Statistical disparities alone were sufficient to keep this costly process going for more than a decade.
In the end, Sears prevailed in the appellate courts. But few employers are in any position to sustain such financial costs for so many years, all the while operating under the public stigma of discrimination accusations that can affect public opinion and the sale of the company’s products.
Most employers, including large corporations, find it expedient to settle such cases out of court, even when they have not violated anti-discrimination laws—and the number of such settlements is then used by critics to claim that employment discrimination is widespread. In 2012, for example, PepsiCo paid more than $3 million to settle a charge by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that the big soda and snacks company’s use of criminal background checks was discrimination against blacks.96
This was a bargain compared to the cost to Sears of fighting a charge of discrimination against women, even though Sears eventually won the case. Moreover, having a charge of racial discrimination hanging over PepsiCo for years, while the case dragged on through the federal courts, could have cost more millions, as individuals and institutions decided to buy their sodas and snacks from some other company.
In short, the outcome of “disparate impact” cases does not necessarily depend on either the quantity or the quality of the evidence. By the time of the PepsiCo settlement, an empirical study had already shown that companies using criminal background checks tended to hire more blacks than companies which did not use such checks.97 The crucial factor in such cases is not the trial, but the costliness of going to trial, both in legal fees and in the loss of business due to bad publicity. The only way for the accused to win, in any economically meaningful sense, is for the case to be thrown out of court instead of going to trial.
Rarely does a judge refuse even to let a case go to trial, though that did happen in 2013 when the evidence presented by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was called by District Court judge Roger Titus “laughable” because of its “mind-boggling-number of errors” and because of the inconsistency of EEOC’s lawsuit against a company for using criminal background checks on job applicants, when the EEOC itself used such checks.98
The implications of the use of a “disparate impact” basis for costly lawsuits in civil rights cases does not end with employers. Workers can also be adversely affected, and not just with reduced employment opportunities for black workers who have no criminal record.
When a federal agency can so easily make charges of discrimination on behalf of workers from racial or ethnic minorities—charges that can be costly and time-consuming to defend against in the courts, or charges that can force costly settlements out of court—that reduces the value of hiring black or other minority workers, even when their job qualifications are equal to the job qualifications of other workers who present no such legal risk.
Employers therefore have incentives to locate their businesses away from concentrations of minority populations, so that they will not be as legally vulnerable to costly charges of discrimination if their work force does not end up with the same demographic makeup as that of the surrounding population.
Some Japanese firms seeking to find locations for their first businesses in the United States have specified that they do not want to locate near concentrations of blacks in the local population.99 American firms that do the same thing, being more familiar with both the legal and the social atmosphere in the United States, may be less likely to leave a paper trail. Nevertheless, this raises the question whether anti-discrimination laws, as applied in the courts, provide incentives to discriminate against racial minorities as well as incentives not to discriminate, with their net effect being uncertain.
Many observers who see racism as both widespread and widely effective in the job market fail to account for the fact that employers in competitive markets have actively sought out black workers, even in places and times where racism was rampant and undisguised, such as in South Africa during the era of apartheid, under a white minority government openly proclaiming white supremacy.
Similarly, black American workers were sufficiently in demand more than a century ago, in the Jim Crow South, that the organized attempts of white employers and landowners to suppress black earnings often collapsed under the pressure of that demand for black workers and sharecroppers.
Northern white employers sent recruiters into the South during the Jim Crow era to recruit black workers, on such a scale as to cause many laws to be passed in the South, restricting the activities of these recruiters by charging them licensing fees and imposing other restrictions, and with serious penalties for violating those restrictions.100 This clearly indicated a strong demand for black workers in both regions of the country.
Within Northern communities, the demand for black workers was sufficient in the 1920s to cause Henry Ford and his executives to establish connections with clergy in Detroit’s black community, in order to get their help in sorting black job applicants. Similar arrangements existed in Chicago and Pittsburgh.101 The Ford Motor Company was, in effect, seeking low-cost access to knowledge of individuals’ qualities, in order to judge each individual individually, instead of having to rely on information about group characteristics. Contacting black clergy was one way of getting the benefits of Discrimination IA without paying the usual very high costs.
In short, racism has not been sufficient to prevent a demand for black workers in a competitive market. It would be painfully ironic if anti-discrimination laws have been among the factors which reduced that demand in later times. Intentions, whether good or bad, do not predestine outcomes.