There was a time, back in the heady days of the civil rights movement, when people expected to “solve” the racial “problem”—almost as if life were an academic exercise, with answers in the back of the book. Twenty years and many disappointments later, the question is whether we can even discuss the subject rationally.
The poisonous atmosphere surrounding any attempt to debate issues involving race and ethnicity is demonstrated in many ways. In addition to the usual ad hominem attacks and overheated rhetoric, there has also developed a fundamental disregard for the truth, which has become widespread not only among some journalists, but is even beginning to creep into scholarly publications. Not since the days of Senator Joe McCarthy has the drive to discredit so overridden every other consideration. Lies out of whole cloth are not uncommon and straw men dot the landscape.
SAMPLE STRAW MEN
After a decade of research, writing, and lecturing in opposition to the theory of genetic racial inferiority, including several articles and chapters of books devoted solely to that subject,1 I have been depicted as a supporter of genetic racial inferiority theories by Lem Tucker on the nationwide CBS Morning News and by a professor of economics in the “scholarly” Journal of Ethnic Studies.2
It can no longer be taken for granted that a reviewer or critic will even state the very subject of a book accurately. For example, Los Angeles Times syndicated columnist Tom Braden has attacked Walter Williams’ book, The State Against Blacks, as a book about “affirmative action,” which Braden then ringingly defends.3 Yet affirmative action is not even mentioned in passing until page 155 of Williams’ book, and a hasty reader could miss it entirely, even there. The book is about licensed occupations and government control of pay rates.
Similarly, Christopher Jencks in the New York Review of Books has said that my Ethnic America was “in effect” a book about affirmative action.4 Phrases like “in effect” allow anything to be attributed to anybody—regardless of what he actually said. One could equally say that the dictionary is “in effect” a book about mathematics. The average dictionary in fact contains far more discussion of mathematical terms than there is discussion of affirmative action in Ethnic America. The book’s index shows a grand total of two mentions of affirmative action, and both put together would not add up to one full page.
In a passage so phrased that a reader could easily think that it was a direct quote from me, syndicated columnist Carl Rowan expressed what was supposedly my position on my own career:
I did all this on my own, with hard work, so I don’t want government to give any lazy bastard anything.5
What I actually wrote about my career was:
It would be premature at best and presumptuous at worst to attempt to draw sweeping or definitive conclusions from my personal experiences. It would be especially unwarranted to draw Horatio Alger conclusions, that perseverence and/or ability “win out” despite obstacles. The fact is, I was losing in every way until my life was changed by the Korean War, the draft, and the G.I. Bill—none of which I can take credit for. I have no false modesty about having seized the opportunity and worked to make it pay off, but there is no way to avoid the fact that there first had to be an opportunity to seize.6
The Rowan version was echoed by CBS correspondent Lem Tucker, who told millions of viewers of the CBS Morning News that my position was “that he alone, almost without bootstraps, pulled himself out of the ghetto through Harvard and the University of Chicago.”7
It has become remarkably commonplace—and seldom commented on—to attribute positions directly the opposite of those actually taken. For example, my book Knowledge and Decisions argued at length that government is not a co-ordinated unit of action but “a fragmentary aggregation of decision-makers,” and quoted Senator Moynihan’s characterization of “the warring principalities that are sometimes known as the Federal government.” Nevertheless, Lester Thurow in the New Republic said that it claimed that government is “a monolithic conspiracy.” Having established this straw man, he could then say that this was an “angel’s and devil’s” theory and wisely show that the world is otherwise.8
The name of the game is showing that one’s opponent is “simplistic.” How it is done obviously does not matter. Christopher Jencks’ effort in this direction attacked my three-way breakdown of different kinds of discrimination. This was “too simple” according to Jencks.9 His own breakdown? Four ways—apparently one-third more complex, except that his fourth kind of discrimination was one already included under one of my three. No matter. The “simplistic” theme was repeated, and repetition is a major part of such attacks. Life is of course more complex than any statement that anyone can make. What is truly simple-minded is to use this fact selectively to dismiss arguments that cannot be answered with evidence or reasons.
An almost comic example of the genesis of straw men grew out of reactions to a pair of articles of mine in the Washington Post. I argued that some blacks from the old elite, which denigrated and discriminated against other blacks, were now exhibiting the extreme reactions typical of reformed sinners by being blacker-than-thou. Among the examples was Patricia Roberts Harris, once a member of a sorority which refused to admit darker-skinned college girls. The uproar that followed mention of this fact—too widely known to be denied—produced the straw man that I was criticizing Mrs. Harris for being light-skinned! Mrs. Harris herself said that I was using “South African apartheid concepts of racial gradations.”10 Roger Wilkins said in The Nation that I was denouncing black leaders for “having light skins,”11 while St. Clair Drake accused me of “an almost paranoid preoccupation with a nonexistent ‘light skin elite.’”12 Other individuals and publications have echoed the same theme. Not one of them has given any inkling that I had criticized behavior, not complexion.
Others whose work has raised inconvenient questions about race and ethnicity have encountered similar treatment. William Julius Wilson, Derrick Bell, Walter Williams and Anne Wortham come immediately to mind, but they are by no means the only targets. More important, the issue is not these particular individuals, for if distortions and character assassination were going to stop them, they would have stopped long ago. The real issue is whether the new McCarthyism creates an atmosphere in which only a handful of people dare to question publicly the prevailing vision. If it succeeds in discrediting ideas and facts it cannot answer, in intimidating others into silence, then the whole attempt to resolve urgent social issues will have to be abandoned to those with fashionable clichés and political cant—what has been aptly called “White-speak.”
Straw men need to be examined not only in themselves, but also as indicators of what positions are too weak to defend in any other way. Many of these positions involve discrimination and policies for dealing with it.
“REPRESENTATION” AND DISCRIMINATION
For at least twenty years, the media, politicians, the courts and intellectuals have been using numerical “representation” data to infer racial, sex, and other discrimination. The issue here is not whether any discrimination exists. The issue is whether what is used as evidence is in fact evidence. In a legal sense, the question is whether it distinguishes between the innocent and the guilty. In a larger social sense, the question is whether it clarifies or obscures the causes of very real and sometimes very large economic differences between groups.
One of many reasons why various racial and ethnic groups are not equally represented in all occupations and institutions is that they differ greatly in their average age, as noted in Chapter 2. Those who put together straw men try to turn this into an argument that age differences alone explain virtually all racial and ethnic differences, to the complete exclusion of discrimination.
Christopher Jencks, for example, accuses me of “leaving the reader with the impression that if the median black, Indian, or Hispanic were as old as the median European, he would be almost as affluent.”13 It would be fascinating to see the actual number (and I.Q. scores) of any readers who drew that conclusion from books that repeatedly emphasized the wide range of demographic, historical, geographical, cultural, and other factors at work. In a similar vein, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in a November 1982 report, depicted me as claiming that group differences result from differences in age and education and are “not a result of anything else.”14 But it is the Civil Rights Commission that has had a single, all-purpose explanation of intergroup differences—discrimination. It is precisely in opposition to this automatic inference of discrimination that such factors as age—and numerous other variables—are mentioned.
In comparing people with the “same” education, to show what income differences remain as the effects of discrmination, the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights resolutely ignores vast qualitative differences in education that exist at every level. Black and Hispanic youngsters do not take as much mathematics in school, nor score nearly as high on standardized mathematics tests as white or Asian youngsters.15 Similarly, black and Hispanic Ph.D.’s specialize in a vastly different mix of subjects from those in which white or Asian Ph.D.’s specialize, the former concentrating in subjects that do not require mathematics and do not pay as much. To call group differences in income between people with the “same” education, in a purely quantitative sense, “discrimination” is to play games with words.
One of the fallacies in discussions of the importance of age applies far more broadly than to age alone, and has created devastating disasters in higher education. Some ethnic groups differ little in age or income, and their small income and occupational differences may have little or nothing to do with age. From this Christopher Jencks concludes that age differences “have almost no impact on family incomes.”16
By reasoning as Jencks does, one could also “prove” that height has no significant effect on playing basketball. Players who are six foot nine are usually about as good as players who are six foot ten. This approach would, however, leave the most blatant fact unexplained-why basketball players usually tower over the rest of us.
The same kind of reasoning has been used to “prove” that test scores have no real validity as predictors of performance in college, medical schools, etc. At a college where virtually all students score in the top ten percent on national tests, just where in that select group a particular student is located probably means much less than his motivation, emotional state, and other such personal factors, Statistical correlations between scores and results may not be very impressive within that narrow range. But to use this as a reason to admit students from the bottom half of the test scores to compete with those at the top is to set the stage for disaster.
The 1960s saw this kind of reasoning, and these kinds of disasters, on college campuses across the country. There are many today still pushing such thinking. It would be analogous to hiring midgets to play in the National Basketball Association, after having “proven” that height doesn’t really matter.
THE CASE OF THE VANISHING ASIANS
Two of the recurring themes in the literature on race and ethnicity are (1) the enormous impact of past discrimination on current incomes, and (2) the great difference between white ethnic groups, who can eventually blend into the American society, and groups marked by indelible color differences, who cannot. I have been repeatedly accused of ignoring this latter difference. But I have in fact discussed this difference in every book I have written on ethnicity—and have repeatedly found empirically that there is less there than meets the eye.
Asians disappear mysteriously from the discussions of those who make the white-nonwhite difference economically crucial. So do West Indian blacks.
A massive study by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission was typical of this approach—and of the vanishing Asians. Their 1982 report inundated the public and the media with statistical differences (“disparities” and “inequities”) in the employment and income patterns of blacks, Hispanics, and women. Against this backdrop, they unfurled the usual explanations of racism and sexism. But not one speck of data on Asians appeared in this voluminous compilation—even though the explanations being offered would apply to Asians, as well as to other physically distinct minorities.
Near the end of the report, Asians were mentioned in passing, but still without any economic data. The Civil Rights Commission acknowledged that there were “discriminatory immigration laws” against Asians in the past, but was strangely reticent about acknowledging any of the other massive discriminations—not to mention violence and deaths—that they suffered. The final word of the Commission’s brief discussion of Asians:
In the relatively small number of occupations in which Asians were allowed to participate they were able to attain a moderate level of economic success.17
In short, Asians are confined to such occupations as mathematicians, scientists, and engineers! By a rare coincidence, they seem to be confined to precisely the same kinds of occupations in other countries. This form of racism seems particularly odd, since the net result is that Asians, including Pacific islanders, now average ten percent higher incomes than whites, according to the 1980 Census. If this is only “moderate” success, whites must be failures.
BOOTSTRAPS AND BLAME
One of the recurring themes in attempts to discredit critics of the welfare state is that they would leave the disadvantaged to lift themselves by their own bootstraps. “Bootstraps” is one of the classic straw man words of our time—a word used only to describe someone else’s philosophy. No one has advocated it but everyone is sure that someone else has. It is symptomatic of a broader misconception that automatically translates statements of causation into statements of advice to the disadvantaged or moral statements of “blame” for the “victim.”
Various publications have referred to the advice supposedly offered to the disadvantaged in Ethnic America—but none could ever quote any of it. There is a reason: There is no such advice there. Partly that is because so many decisions have been taken out of people’s hands by the government.
Nevertheless, I am depicted as saying that blacks should be following the path of the Jews—or the Irish, the Chinese, or others, according to taste. Yet this would be strange advice indeed after my pointing out repeatedly how many of the options of former times have been destroyed by government policy. Walter Williams’ book, The State Against Blacks, is built precisely around that theme. Yet he too is often accused of offering the same advice.
The confusion between analysis and advice has become enshrined in media thinking. One of many clever journalistic devices is to ask: “But what would you say to the welfare mother, the unemployed black teenager, the disadvantaged Hispanic?” One may as well ask a medical researcher: “But what would you say to the mother whose child is dying of leukemia?” The purpose of cause-and-effect analysis is not to offer advice or consolation to people in impossible situations, but to attempt to reduce the occurrence of such situations.
Whatever advice I have offered on public policy has almost invariably been directed toward policy makers. This advice has ranged from deregulation to education vouchers to repeal of minimum wage laws to tougher crime control. Little of this real advice has ever been quoted, certainly not nearly as much as the fictitious advice.
“Blaming the victim” is another of the mindless clichés of our time. Blame is as irrelevant as bootstraps. No one can be blamed if he did not bring the same skills from Mexico as someone else brought from Germany, or if his school or home did not teach him what people need to know in order to function in a modern technological society. But neither can employers be blamed if people who have more of the required skills are more in demand and others “under-represented.” In scientific and technical occupations, for example, Hispanics are under-represented relative to Germans in Hispanic countries. Nor is this peculiar. Most of the members of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences under the czars were of German ancestry. Chinese students are heavily concentrated in technical fields, from Malaysia to Australia to the United States. People are not magically homogenized by crossing a national border. If anyone should be blamed, it is those who argue as if they are.
THE IRRELEVANCE OF EVIDENCE
Many who argue most vehemently about race and ethnicity make no distinction whatever between (1) conclusions that follow logically as corollaries from their general vision of society and (2) conclusions for which there is empirical evidence. Indeed, concrete evidence against their conclusions may be countered by ad hoc explanations, whose only support is their consonance with the prevailing vision.
Those who support affirmative action, for example, are faced with the embarrassing fact that the economic rise of minorities has slowed noticeably as the “equal opportunity” policies of the 1960s metamorphosed into affirmative action quotas in the early 1970s. An ad hoc explanation offered by Christopher Jencks is that “the gains during the 1960s were in ‘easy’ areas, where resistance was minimal.” He adds: “Achieving comparable gains during the 1970s was bound to require stronger pressures on employers.”18 Not a speck of evidence was offered for any aspect of this explanation.
In reality, the historical data show that (1) the economic rise of minorities preceded passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by many years, (2) the existing upward trend was not accelerated, either by that Act or by quotas that became generally mandatory in 1971, and (3) during the era of affirmative action, such disadvantaged blacks as young males with little experience or education, and members of female-headed households, actually retrogressed relative to whites of the same description, while more advantaged blacks rose both absolutely and relative to their white counterparts.19 In short, although affirmative action invokes the name of the disadvantaged, these are precisely the people who have fallen further behind under its auspices.
Attempts to blame general conditions in the economy or racism among employers run into the hard fact that both advantaged and disadvantaged progress are measured during the same years in the same economy, and one is just as black as the other, especially to racist employers.
These are not mere curious facts. They illustrate effects which elementary economic principles would predict. As the government makes it more dangerous to fire, demote, or even fail to promote, members of minority groups, this tends to increase the demand for the more demonstrably able among them and reduce the demand for the average or below average, or those with too little experience to provide a reassuring track record. But for the true believers in affirmative action, both analysis and evidence are irrelevant.
As in so many other areas of social policy, what matters most politically is not the logic or the facts but the vision—in this case a vision of an incorrigibly corrupt society, whose only saving grace is the presence of a few wise and noble souls, like themselves. Hamlet warned: “Lay not that flattering unction to your soul.” But the laying of flattering unction to one’s soul has become a major industry, extending far beyond race.
Nor is this a recent development. Back in the late 1960s, Professor Charles L. Black wrote in the Harvard Law Review that allowing housing decisions to be made by the marketplace meant “abandoning the Negro to the slum-ghetto that ‘private enterprise’ has made ready for him.”20 Despite the apparent certitude and air of moral condescension characteristic of those with the civil rights vision, Professor Black advanced no evidence whatever for this conclusion.
In reality, most northern big cities had far less residential segregation of blacks in the late nineteenth century than today, even though (1) there were no “fair housing” laws or policies then, (2) racially restrictive covenants were perfectly legal, (3) blacks had no political power, (4) the federal government took little or no interest in blacks after the Compromise of 1877, and (5) the courts were at best indifferent to blacks during the era from the Dred Scott decision of 1857 through Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.
In short, all the supposed “prerequisites” for ending rigid ghettoization did not exist—but neither did rigid ghettoization. What changed—dramatically and suddenly—in the early twentieth century were not “perceptions” but realities. The great migrations from the South flooded the northern cities with blacks far less acculturated than those already there—a point made bitterly in the black newspapers of the times and still expressed years later by the “old settlers” in the black community.21 Rigid segregation in housing developed in this era, in response to this reality. Where the influx from the South occurred earlier—as in Washington, D.C.22—the change in racial residential patterns occurred earlier. Where the influx from the South occurred much later—as in San Francisco23—the change in racial residential patterns also occurred much later.
“Private enterprise,” the supposed villain of the piece, existed both in the early era of wide dispersion of blacks among whites and in the later era of rigid segregation. The striking down of racially restrictive covenants by the Supreme Court in 1948 made no dramatic difference in residential housing patterns. Nor has the rise of government housing projects, free of the taint of private enterprise. As in so many other areas, those with the civil rights vision have made that vision a substitute for evidence.
Nowhere is evidence more irrelevant than when making assertions about the motives of opponents. For example, Professor William Julius Wilson’s book, The Declining Significance of Race, was explained away in this fashion:
By writing a book of this nature, Wilson seems bent on being accepted or begging to get into the white academic world because this is what you have to do when you’re not in. You’re on the periphery…
The facts? Wilson is chairman of the department of sociology at the University of Chicago—the top ranked sociology department in the nation. How he could get any more “in” is hard to imagine. A distinguished economist named Joseph A. Schumpeter once pointed out that the only person’s motivation we really know is our own—and that what we project onto others provides, at best, clues to our own motives. The man who made this charge against Wilson is a professor of education in an undistinguished university. The charge has, however, been repeated in the media.
A common charge against me is that my own career is due to the very affirmative action I criticize. In all the places where this charge has been repeated, not one bit of evidence has yet been offered. It so happens that I have not achieved anything in my career that was not achieved by other blacks before me—and therefore long before affirmative action.
My graduation from Harvard came more than 80 years after the first black student graduated from Harvard. When I received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, it was from an institution that had already produced a disproportionate share of all the black Ph.D.’s in the history of the United States. E. Franklin Frazier was working on his doctorate at Chicago before I was born.
St. Clair Drake asserts that my appointment at Cornell University was “due to black militant pressure”24—but without evidence or any apparent sense of need for evidence. When I was offered an appointment at Cornell in December 1964, there weren’t enough black students there to pressure anybody to do anything. Blacks were so rare at Cornell that when my wife and I encountered another black couple at a campus restaurant, we all four stopped dead in our tracks, and then burst out laughing.
But even at Cornell, I was not the first black professor of economics. Nor was I the first black economist in the Labor Department or at AT&T, among other places. In all these places I was doing what other blacks had already done—before affirmative action.
The unsupported assertion that my career is due to affirmative action is sometimes accompanied by the unsupported assertion that writing about race has made my career. But in reality I had tenure at U.C.L.A. more than a year before numerical “goals and timetables” were mandated—and before ever publishing a single article or book on race. I had published books on economics and articles in economics journals—as had Abram L. Harris, a black economist a generation before me, who was a full professor at the University of Chicago when I was a graduate student there.
There is no reason why critics should have known such personal trivia. But there is also no reason why they should make sweeping assertions without knowing what they are talking about.
THE CURRENT CLIMATE
The strong feelings and contending visions that surround issues of race and ethnicity are not enough to explain the current intellectual intolerance and reckless disregard for truth. There have always been strong feelings and contending visions. Yet when W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a highly critical review of a book by his arch rival, Booker T. Washington, he nevertheless referred to Washington’s “very evident sincerity of purpose” and acknowledged that he “commands not simply the applause of those who believe in his theories, but the respect of those who do not.”25 We have come a long way since then, but not all of it has been progress.
In the early years of the civil rights movement, there was not only an optimism about the future but a confidence that the facts and rational thinking were on the side of civil rights advocates. Evidence was an ally. Chief Justice Earl Warren’s portentous reference to “modern authority” in Brown v. Board of Education symbolized the role of “social science.”
One of the many painful contrasts between that era and today is that evidence is increasingly evaded by those who speak in the name of civil rights. Whether it is low test scores or high crime rates, the first order of business is to dismiss the evidence and discredit those who bring it. Even good news—successful minority schools or the rise of a black middle class—is denounced when it does not fit the preconceived vision. Unvarnished facts are today more likely to arouse suspicion and hostility than any joyous anticipation of more ammunition for the good fight.
There are reasons for this. Despite much racial progress, there have also been some very fundamental disappointments. Ghettoes persist, and in many ways are becoming worse for those trapped in them. School integration has largely been thwarted by the demographic facts of “white flight.” But even where it has occurred, it has produced neither the educational nor the social miracles once expected. Job barriers have come down but black teenage unemployment has soared to several times what it was 30 years ago. Many white allies in the early struggles for civil rights have become critics of the later phases, such as affirmative action and busing. A small but growing number of black critics has also appeared.
How and why this all happened is a long and complicated story. In essence, however, two things have happened: (1) the battle for civil rights was won, decisively, two decades ago, and (2) the succeeding years have painfully revealed that blatant denials of civil rights were not the universal explanation of social or racial problems. Intellectual and institutional inertia persists in calling racial and ethnic political issues “civil rights” issues and often designing strategy, policies and rhetoric as if they were. Andrew Young perhaps best epitomized this tendency when he said:
We struggled in the 50s to integrate the schools and the buses. We struggled in the 60s to integrate the lunch counters and the ballot boxes. And we’ve got to struggle in the 80s to integrate the money.26
But the mindset and agenda of the past are no longer working. Like the blind men who each felt only one part of the elephant, many minority leaders mistake that for the whole elephant. Those who point out that other parts are quite different, and that the whole elephant is quite different, are seen as contradicting a tangible reality which has been seized upon and held fast for years. For many, “discrimination” and “racism” are not partial truths but whole truths, not just things to oppose but explanations to cling to, like a security blanket. Evidence that undermines the status of these old enemies also undermines the comforting vision that has grown up around them.
People do not change their vision of the world the way they change clothes or replace old light bulbs. But change they must if they mean to survive. No individual (or group) is going to capture all of reality in his vision. If the only reaction to other visions—or uncomfortable evidence—is blind mudslinging, then the limitations that are common to all human beings become, for them, ideological prisons.