Blacks have a history in the United States that is quite different from that of other American ethnic groups. The massive fact of slavery looms over more than half of that history. The Jim Crow laws and policies, which not only segregated but discriminated, were still going strong in that part of the country where most blacks lived, in the middle of the twentieth century. “Lynching” meant—almost invariably—the lynching of blacks by whites. Blacks were widely believed to be genetically inferior in intelligence, both in the North and the South, long before Arthur Jensen’s writings on the subject appeared. James B. Conant’s 1961 book, Slums and Suburbs, reported a common assumption among school officials around the country that black children were not capable of learning as much as white children.1
Blacks are also black for life. They do not have the option simply to change their names and life-styles and blend into the general population—or to reserve their ethnicity for special occasions like St. Patrick’s Day or Columbus Day.
Thus far we have questioned the validity and appropriateness of shaping a general civil rights vision, as the law of the land for all groups, from the highly unusual experience of blacks. Now the question can be confronted as to how well that vision serves the group in whose name it was first invoked.
Given the unique—and uniquely oppressive—history of blacks, it would follow almost inevitably from the civil rights vision that blacks would today suffer far more than other groups from low income, broken homes, and the whole litany of social pathology. But like so many things that follow from the civil rights vision, it happens not to be true in fact. Blacks do not have the lowest income,2 the lowest educational level,3 or the most broken homes4 among American ethnic groups. The habit of comparing blacks with “the national average” conceals the fact that there are other groups with very similar—and sometimes worse—social pathology. The national average is just one point on a wide-ranging spectrum. It is not a norm showing where most individuals or most groups are. The difference in income between Japanese Americans and Puerto Ricans is even greater than the difference between blacks and whites, though most of the factors assumed to cause black-white differences are not present in differences between Japanese Americans and Puerto Ricans.
Internationally, blacks in Latin America have not been subjected to as rigid and severe segregation, oppression, or violence as blacks in the United States. Yet blacks in Brazil, for example, are economically farther behind whites than are blacks in the United States,5 even though Brazil is widely recognized as having better race relations than the U.S. Both the domestic and the international examples suggest that what is most dramatic, most historic, or most morally revolting need not coincide with what is most economically determining.
In short, the historical uniqueness of blacks has not translated into a contemporary uniqueness in incomes, occupations, I.Q., unemployment, female-headed households, alcoholism, or welfare dependency, however much blacks may differ from the mythical national average in these respects. All of these represent serious difficulties (sometimes calamities) for blacks, and indirectly for the larger society, but the question here is the cause. If that cause is either a unique history or a unique genetics, blacks would differ not only from the national average but also from other groups that share neither that history nor the same genetic background.
To take one of the most blatant and most controversial examples, the average I.Q. score of blacks in the United States has been about 85 over the years,6 compared to a national norm of 100. Groups with average I.Q.’s of 85 have been common in American history and in many other countries as well. These include Catholics in northern Ireland,7 inhabitants of the Hebrides islands off Scotland,8 white mountaineers in the United States,9 and people in canal boat communities in Britain.10 Back around World War I, such groups included such immigrant groups as the Italians, Poles, and Greeks, most of whom today score at or above 100 on I.Q. tests.11
Nowhere has the “legacy of slavery” argument been used more sweepingly than in explaining the high incidence of broken homes, female-headed households, and teenage pregnancy among contemporary blacks. As in so many other areas, the power of a vision is shown not by the evidence marshaled to support it but precisely by the absence of any perceived need to supply evidence. The first serious factual study of black family patterns from slavery through the twentieth century was published in 1976. Its masses of data devastated the prevailing beliefs that had been repeated uncritically for generations. Most black children, even under slavery, grew up in two-parent households.12 A teenage girl raising a child with no man present was a rarity among blacks, both during the era of slavery and as late as the 1920s.13 Even today, when this phenomenon has become widespread and catastrophic among blacks, it is even more prevalent among Puerto Ricans.14
Blacks are indeed a special case. But to say that blacks literally cannot be compared to other groups is to say that we must remain ignorant of how much that special history has to do with contemporary social phenomena. Or else we must accept foregone conclusions based on a vision rather than on facts.
If comparisons were being made for the trivial purpose of some kind of invidious game, then it would of course make no sense, for example, to compare blacks with Jews, who were freed from slavery thousands of years ago. Nor would it make much sense to urge blacks to blind imitation of what someone else did in the nineteenth century under entirely different circumstances. The media seem particularly prone to translate causal analysis as this kind of advice—and to attribute such advice to anyone who has made such analysis.15 Even writers who have specifically emphasized the changes in the economy since the nineteenth century16 are depicted as urging twentieth-century blacks to follow nineteenth-century paths—paths that no longer exist.
Blacks can no more become Irish than the Irish can become Chinese. What we can all do, however, is become better informed as to what factors play what role in social phenomena—using the experience of the Irish, the Chinese, or anyone else, insofar as that helps us understand causation. Moreover, much factual information from within the black community is also very revealing as to what factors do and do not promote advancement. This may well provide very little advice to those operating within the constraints set by contemporary social policy. But the real point is to have social policy better informed as to what works and what doesn’t.
CULTURE VERSUS COLOR
Once the question of the causes of the current situation of blacks can be seen as in fact a question, and not a foregone conclusion, it is possible to test alternative beliefs in a number of ways.
Blacks may “all look alike” to racists, but there are profound internal cultural differences among blacks.17 Insofar as racism and discrimination are directed at blacks in general, the incomes and occupations of those blacks who differ culturally provide some indication of the effect of other factors—especially when and if the economic level of these subsets of blacks are comparable to those of their counterparts in the white population. In short, we can compare people of the same color and different culture, as well as people of similar culture and different color. Both comparisons provide clues to the relative weights of color and culture.
West Indians
Black West Indians living in the United States are a group physically indistinguishable from black Americans, but with a cultural background that is quite different.18 If current employer racial discrimination is the primary determinant of below-average black income, West Indians’ incomes would be similarly affected. Yet West Indian family incomes are 94 percent of the U.S. national average, while the family incomes of blacks as a group are only 62 percent of the national average. West Indian “representation” in professional occupations is double that of blacks, and slightly higher than that of the U.S. population as a whole.19
The argument has sometimes been made that white employers distinguish West Indians from other blacks by accent, birthplace, or place of schooling and that this differentiation in their treatment explains the substantial intergroup economic differences between these two sets of blacks in the same economy. Again, the test is not plausibility but evidence. If accent, birthplace or place of schooling are responsible for West Indians’ advantages in the marketplace, then those West Indians lacking such obvious clues for American employers would not be expected to have comparable advantages over other blacks. Second-generation West Indians—born in the United States of West Indian parents—are less likely to have an accent and would have no distinguishing place of birth or schooling.
If employer discrimination explains the economic condition of blacks as well as the different conditions of West Indians, then second-generation West Indians should not be expected to have as large an advantage over other blacks. If, on the other hand, West Indian advantages are cultural, then second-generation West Indians might be expected to have even more advantages over other blacks, since they continue to benefit from the values and behavior patterns of their parents, plus whatever additional benefits derive from their parents’ socioeconomic success and their own greater familiarity with American society. In short, diametrically opposite predictions regarding second-generation West Indians derive from the theory of cultural differences and the theory of employer discrimination as explanations of black incomes below the national average.
The facts about the economic conditions of second-generation West Indians are rather dramatic in themselves, and decisive in their implications. Second-generation West Indians have even higher incomes than the first-generation West Indians, and higher incomes than the national average—or the incomes of Anglo-Saxons. Second-generation West Indians also have higher proportions in the professions than other blacks, first-generation West Indians, the national average, or Anglo-Saxons.20 These data are from the 1970 census, which is to say, they are 1969 incomes—two years before the 1971 federal guidelines mandating quota hiring, and so cannot be explained as effects of affirmative action.
Nor is this simply a matter of one group’s starting out ahead of another. Census data also show that it takes the average West Indian immigrant eleven years to overtake native-born blacks in income.21 This fact also undermines the notion that employer favoritism explains West Indian advantages over native blacks. It is, incidentally, a common pattern among immigrants to eventually overtake native-born people of the same ancestry.22 There are various possible reasons for this, the most likely being selective migration.23 But the point here is not to praise, blame, grade or morally rank groups of human beings. The purpose is to try to understand what factors do and do not prove decisive in economic advancement, regardless of what is commonly believed.
Home and Family
Blacks and whites are not just people with different skin colors. Nor is a history of slavery the only difference between them. Like many other groups in contemporary America—and around the world and down through history—blacks and whites have different cultures that affect how they live individually and collectively. At the same time, there is sufficient overlap that some sets of blacks have a home life and family pattern very similar to those of most whites. Insofar as color is the over-riding factor in economic position, this will make relatively little difference in the incomes of such sets of blacks. Insofar as such cultural factors reflect traits that prove valuable and decisive in the marketplace, such sets of blacks should have incomes comparable to those of whites. Once more, opposite effects would be expected, according to which premise is correct.
A comparison of black and white male youths in 1969—again, before affirmative action—throws light on the role of color and culture. Harvard economist Richard Freeman compared blacks and whites whose homes included newspapers, magazines, and library cards, and who had also gone on to obtain the same number of years of schooling. There was no difference in the average income of these whites compared to these blacks.24 This had not always been true. In earlier periods, such cultural factors had little weight.25 But by 1969 it was true—during “equal opportunity” policies and before “affirmative action.”
Home and family life differ in other ways between blacks and whites. Husband-wife families are more prevalent among whites than among blacks, though declining over time among both groups. About half of all black families with children are one-parent families, while more than four-fifths of all white families with children are two-parent families.26 But what of those black families that are two-parent families—more like the white families in this respect and perhaps in other respects as well? To the extent that racial discrimination is the crucial factor in depressing black income, there should be little difference between the incomes of these black families relative to their white counterparts than there is between the incomes of blacks and whites as a whole. But insofar as family structure reflects cultural values in general, those blacks whose family structure reflects more general norms of behavior should be more fortunate in the job market as well.
For more than a decade, young black husband-wife families outside the South have had incomes virtually identical to those of young white husband-wife families outside the South.27 In some years black families of this description have had incomes a few percentage points higher than their white counterparts. Today, where husbands and wives are both college-educated, and both working, black families of this description earn slightly more than white families of this description—nationwide and without regard to age.28
The implication of all this is not, of course, that blacks as a group are doing as well as whites as a group—or are even close to doing as well. On the contrary. The average income of blacks as a group remains far behind the average income of whites as a group. What we are trying to find out is the extent to which this is due to cultural differences rather than color differences that call forth racism and discrimination.
A racist employer is hardly going to squelch his racism when he learns that a given black worker is under 35, married, and living outside the South. Nor is he likely to put aside his racism because he knows that both husband and wife are college educated. All that such demographic characteristics indicate is that these particular sets of blacks are culturally atypical of blacks in general. The question is whether that makes any real difference in the marketplace, given that they are still black and are competing with whites with similar cultural advantages, as well as advantages of color. According to the civil rights vision, it doesn’t make any great difference but according to the empirical evidence, it makes an enormous difference. It even produces parity of income.
It would be comic, if it were not tragic, how much effort has gone into trying to discredit such data. It has been argued, for example, that black wives are more likely to work, or to work full-time, compared to white wives. This is quite true, and if all one is interested in is dismissing uncomfortable evidence, this may be as good a way as any. But if one is serious, then the next logical question is: What happens when both black and white couples work full-time, year around? The answer is that the young black couples outside the South still make as much as the white couples of the same description.29
STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF BLACKS
The social pathology of blacks is too well known to require elaboration—high rates of crime and family desertion, and low rates of school completion, head a list that is all too familiar. What has received relatively little attention are the factors producing economic advancement among blacks. Indeed, as the discussion of husband-wife families indicated, there is a positive hostility to analyses of black success, when these cut across the grain of the civil rights vision. Nevertheless, it is useful to consider those things that have, over the years, raised black income, both absolutely and relative to white income.
Prior to World War II, black family income averaged less than half that of whites.30 From 1940 to 1960 the principal factor that raised black income, both absolutely and relative to white income, was migration—from low-income areas to higher-income areas.31 The great migrations of blacks out of the South—comparable in magnitude to the historic international migrations of emigrants from Europe—were among the key factors in black economic advancement. It should be noted that when these migrations began back before the First World War, the black leaders of that time generally opposed them. Neither W.E.B. DuBois nor Booker T. Washington, nor most of their colleagues or disciples, was in favor of these mass migrations. But blacks made their own individual decisions. They neither cast down their buckets where they were nor spent much energy trying to change southern whites. History suggests that they were right and their leaders wrong.
Blacks’ improvements in education have been almost an untold story. It must be remembered that blacks were almost totally destitute of the most elementary literacy when slavery ended, a little over a hundred years ago. Most could neither read nor write their own names. To go from this point to where most blacks were at least literate, and to do it in half a century after emancipation was indeed “an accomplishment seldom witnessed in human history,”32 as a distinguished economic historian has noted. The painful effort that this took in virtually impossible circumstances remains largely ignored to this day, though research has been published and is gathering dust on the shelves. More recent studies of successful black schools,33 or of the successful education of blacks in white Catholic schools,34 for example, have seldom aroused much interest or support from civil rights groups. More usually, such success has aroused resentment and anger from believers in the civil rights vision, for most of these successes were produced in ways that had little to do with the civil rights vision—and often in ways that contradicted its premises.
When the U.S. Supreme Court declared in 1954 that separate schools were inherently inferior, within walking distance of that Court was an all-black public school whose performance had equaled or surpassed that of white schools in the District of Columbia for more than 80 years.35 NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall had come from a similar school in Baltimore.36 Most of the things that social reformers promote as “prerequisites” for good education today seldom existed in these or other outstanding black schools—nor outstanding schools for Jews, Chinese, or Japanese youngsters.37
Anyone who has been privileged to live through the past generation of changes among blacks knows that there have been many changes that cannot be quantified. One need only listen to an interview with a Bill Russell or an O. J. Simpson, or many other articulate black athletes today, and compare that with interviews with black athletes of a generation ago, to appreciate just one symptom of a profound transformation that has affected a wide segment of the black population.
It may be understandable that black politicians and civil rights organizations would want to claim the lion’s share of the credit for the economic improvements that black people have experienced. But despite their constant attempts to emphasize the role of the demand side of the equation, and particularly discrimination and anti-discrimination laws, the fact is that enormous changes were taking place on the supply side. Blacks were becoming a different people. More were acquiring not only literacy but higher levels of education, skills, and broader cultural exposure. The advancement of blacks was not simply a matter of whites letting down barriers.
Much has been made of the fact that the numbers of blacks in high-level occupations increased in the years following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the number of blacks in professional, technical, and other high-level occupations more than doubled in the decade preceding the Civil Rights Act of 1964.38 In other occupations, gains by blacks were greater during the 1940s—when there was practically no civil rights legislation—than during the 1950s.39 In various skilled trades, the income of blacks relative to whites more than doubled between 1936 and 1959.40 The trend was already under way. It may well be that both the economic and the legal advances were products of powerful social transformations taking place in the black population and beginning to make themselves felt in the consciousness of whites, as well as in the competition of the marketplace.
Knowledge of the strengths of blacks has been ignored or repressed in a different way as well. Few people today are aware that the ghettos in many cities were far safer places two generations ago than they are today, both for blacks and for whites. Incredulity often greets stories by older blacks as to their habit of sleeping out on fire escapes or on rooftops or in public parks on hot summer nights. Many of those same people would not dare to walk through those same parks today in broad daylight. In the 1930s whites went regularly to Harlem at night, stayed until the wee hours of the morning, and then stood on the streets to hail cabs to take them home.41 Today, not only would very few whites dare to do this, very few cabs would dare to be cruising ghetto streets in the wee hours of the morning.
Why should discussion of positive achievements by blacks ever be a source of embarrassment, much less resentment, on the part of black leaders? Because many of these positive achievements occurred in ways that completely undermine the civil rights vision. If crime is a product of poverty and discrimination as they say endlessly, why was there so much less of it when poverty and discrimination were much worse than today? If massive programs are the only hope to reduce violence in the ghetto, why was there so much less violence long before anyone ever thought of these programs? Perhaps more to the point, have the philosophies and policies so much supported by black leaders contributed to the decline in community and personal standards, and in family responsibility, so painfully visible today? For many, it may be easier to ignore past achievements than to face their implications for current issues.
The negative features of black life may be far more politically usable, as in the “long hot summer” of violence that is routinely predicted each spring if various political demands are not met. However, the long-run implications of constantly talking as if welfare mothers, drug addicts, and street hoodlums were typical of the black population is that it may be forgotten by the larger society that most black adults are people who work and pay taxes like everyone else. Together with such chronic irritants as affirmative action and busing, this raises serious questions about the long-run prognosis for race relations in the United States.
EARMARKED BENEFITS AND CONCEALED LOSSES
Particular laws and social policies may benefit or harm blacks directly as blacks or indirectly as members of the general society. The magnitude of the benefit or harm is not determined by whether blacks or minorities are specified, or even thought of, when the laws or policies are instituted. Politically, however, it makes an enormous difference whether benefits are earmarked. Black politicians and civil rights leaders obviously gain when they can deliver benefits earmarked for their constituency. Resentment in the white community—and sometimes other minority communities—is likewise heightened when particular laws, programs or policies are publicly labeled as benefits for blacks.
Benefits that blacks receive as members of the general society produce neither the same political gain for black leaders nor build up the same resentments in the white population. No doubt the G.I. Bill after World War II had an almost revolutionary effect on the ability of blacks to attend college, but it produced neither racial strife nor political breast-beating by black leaders.
Similar principles apply to harm that is done to blacks. Even the most trivial, explicitly racial, restriction will provoke resentments that can easily lead to fervent crusades. But substantial, pervasive, and enduring harm may be done to blacks as part of the general society without arousing even passing interest. For example, numerous empirical studies by economists over the past few decades have repeatedly concluded that minimum wage laws have their most devastating impact on black teenagers,42 whose unemployment rates have soared, but black political and civil rights leaders have remained unconcerned and have continued to support such laws, which are vital to the labor unions who are the political allies of the black leadership.
Because blacks are a minority, black leaders can accomplish little or nothing without political allies—and the quid pro quo is the essence of politics. To get support for earmarked benefits for blacks, it is necessary to support other benefits for the allies’ constituents. These benefits for other constituencies may be harmful to blacks, but such harm may not even be noticed politically, much less measured.
Subsidies to farmers raise food prices (as well as taxes and inflationary deficits) but the effect of this on blacks is not a racial issue in the political arena. Food stamps are. Yet the question whether blacks have lost more through the agricultural subsidy program than they have gained through food stamps does not even arise politically. Black politicians are therefore free to vote for agricultural subsidies in exchange for farm state Congressmen’s votes for food stamps. The benefits are earmarked and the losses concealed. Whether blacks are better off or worse off on net balance is another question entirely. Most blacks—72 percent43—receive no food stamps, so for them this whole logrolling operation has produced a complete loss.
A recent book entitled The State Against Blacks, by Professor Walter E. Williams, details the catastrophic racial impact of various occupational licensing laws, which have had the net effect of forcing blacks out of many well-paying occupations where they were once well represented. Yet this factual study, well buttressed with official statistics, has aroused no response from black political and civil rights leaders, to whom Williams is anathema.
Taxi licensing laws, for example, have enormous racial impact. In almost all major American cities, the number of taxi licenses is restricted,44 regardless of how many qualified people want to drive cabs. These artificial limitations drive up the market price of the license—to $20,000 in Philadelphia and $60,000 in New York45—and thereby puts it beyond the reach of most blacks or other lower-income groups. Philadelphia has a grand total of 14 licensed black cab drivers46 in a city of nearly 1,500 licensed taxis. By contrast, about 70 percent of the 10,000 taxis in Washington, D.C., are driven by blacks. Washington is one of the exceptional cities without restrictive licensing. The net result is that (1) the racial composition of taxi drivers is radically different, and (2) the total number of jobs as taxi drivers is several times as large as in Philadelphia, even though Philadelphia has a larger population than Washington.
Politically, however, it makes far more sense for a black leader to fight tooth and nail for a hundred more CETA jobs in the Philadelphia ghetto than to fight for an end to taxi licensing restrictions, even though the latter would probably mean thousands more jobs for blacks—jobs with far higher pay than CETA jobs and of permanent duration. Ghetto jobs are an earmarked benefit, however few, tenuous and low paid. Benefits to blacks as members of the general public are no feather in a black leader’s cap, even if blacks are benefited more than others by gaining access that was nearly impossible for them before.
Not only licensing laws but federal regulation and unionization have forced blacks out of many well-paying fields. In the federally regulated interstate trucking business, for example, less than one percent of the required Interstate Commerce Commission (I.C.C.) authorization certificates are held by blacks.47 Here, as in the case of restrictive taxi licensing, there is no real question as to whether there are any “qualified” blacks available. But a nationwide I.C.C. authorization certificate, which would cost in the millions to purchase in the marketplace from an existing carrier, is held by only one black trucker.48
In the railroad industry, the combination of regulation and unionization has proven catastrophic for blacks. In 1910, one-fourth of all locomotive firemen in the South were black. By 1960 that was down to 7 percent. This also sheds further light on the role of racism. In the South, where racism has been strongest, blacks remained better represented in the railroad industry (as well as the construction industry and other well-paid occupations) longer than in the North, because the South was more resistant to unionization. Blacks in the midwest, northeast or far west were never even 2 percent of the locomotive firemen in those regions.49
Unionization drove out blacks in two ways: (1) directly through discriminatory rules and policies, and (2) indirectly, by artificially raising the wage rates and making them uniform. Artificially high wage rates create a chronic surplus of job applicants, making discrimination less costly. Uniform rates eliminate any incentive an employer might have to hire a black worker who might be available for less than a white worker, especially if the black worker had less experience, skill or other qualifications. Unionization, like minimum wage laws, protect those who are already established on the inside, at the expense of those on the outside. In the construction industry, unionized contractors are aided by the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires that “prevailing wages”—in practice, union wages—be paid by contractors who do work for the government. This makes it virtually impossible for non-union contractors to get the vast amount of business coming from the government. Most minority contractors are non-union.50
There are virtually endless examples of concealed losses to blacks that evoke no political response from black leaders. Earmarked benefits are what pay off for these leaders politically, however small or even counterproductive these earmarked programs may be for blacks. Affirmative action, as noted in Chapter 2, benefits primarily those blacks already more advantaged, making more disadvantaged blacks worse off. It is, however, an earmarked benefit, and therefore politically sacred. It is also a continuing source of resentment against blacks.
The civil rights vision and the civil rights leadership continue pushing an approach which has proved counterproductive for the mass of disadvantaged blacks, beneficial primarily to those already advantaged, and which accumulates resentments against all blacks. These resentments are increasingly expressed in hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis, which are gaining members not only among ignorant southern rednecks but also in more middle class and educated classes across the nation—in short, in places where they never had a foothold before. Earmarked benefits for blacks provide some of these hate groups’ strongest appeals to whites, however little these earmarked policies actually help blacks, either absolutely or compared to more general social benefits that would not have the same potential for racial polarization.