Why We Shouldn't Assume Unequal Outcomes Are Due To Racist And Sexist Discrimination
Ibram X. Kendi is a history prof and the director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University, but he is a lazy thinker on "How to Fix Inequality," writing at Politico:
To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals. The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with "racist ideas" and "public official" clearly defined). It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won't yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.
You get to argue against behaviors you don't like; you don't get to start editing the Constitution to make up for impatience to reach your political goals or an inability to argue well enough persuade persuade people.
Let's take on one bit of his lazy thinking: "Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy."
Wayne State law prof Kingsley Browne has a terrif paper in a law journal, no paywall, that simply destroys this contention. The abstract:
Evidence that an employer's work force contains fewer minorities or women than would be expected if selection were random with respect to race and sex has been taken as powerful-and often sufficient-evidence of systematic intentional discrimination. In relying on this kind of statistical evidence, courts have made two fundamental errors. The first error is assuming that statistical analysis can reveal the probability that observed work-force disparities were produced by chance. This error leads courts to exclude chance as a cause when such a conclusion is unwarranted. The second error is assuming that, except for random deviations, the work force of a non-discriminating employer would mirror the racial and sexual composition of the relevant labor force. This assumption has led courts inappropriately to shift the burden of proof to employers in pattern-or-practice cases once a statistical disparity is shown. Recognition of these two errors suggests that the role of statistical evidence in discrimination cases should be greatly reduced.
A few bits from the paper:
In the discrimination context, the probability that an employer's work-force disparities are a consequence of chance is completely dependent upon a statistic which the courts never have: the likelihood of discrimination prior to making the employment decision. Although one might attempt some estimate of the percentage of employers who engage in systematic discrimination, the estimate could be no more than the crudest approximation. Moreover, even if that statistic existed, its use would be improper, since the consequence would be to hold an employer liable simply on the ground that a certain percentage of employers are believed to discriminate on a systematic basis.' Presumably no one would employ such logic to argue that a simple showing by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that 51 percent of taxpayers cheat on their income taxes would justify the imposi- tion of civil penalties against a taxpayer....Once it is understood that chance disparities are common and that statistical analysis does not reveal the probability that a disparity was a consequence of chance, the justification for treating disparities as prima facie proof of discrimination disappears.
...The assumption that qualifications are randomly distributed by race and sex within the qualified labor force has no more empirical basis than the same assumption with respect to the general population.
...There is reason to think that there may also be racial and ethnic differences in interest in various jobs; at least there is no basis to erect a legal presumption that such differences do not exist.
...Just as with race, productivity-related differences exist between the sexes. There are differences in education; for example, men earn the great majority of Ph.D.'s in engineering, physics and mathematics, and in the absence of affirmative action in graduate admissions the sex imbalance would be even greater. There are also differences in employment experience; for example, the disproportionate responsibil- ity of women for household work and child care causes many women to devote less effort to market work than men and to evaluate certain job characteristics differently, which, in turn, has an impact on their occupational distributions and their earnings.
...The assumption of equal interest in all jobs between men and women also has no basis in fact and is counter to everyday experience.
...In sum, evidence of actual instances of discrimination should be required in all cases because statistical evidence by itself proves little. Moreover, evidence of a substantial number of victims is necessary in order to ensure that the individual discriminatory actions are repre- sentative of the employer's regular practices and not merely isolated instances. Rather than anecdotal evidence being viewed as an adjunct to statistical evidence, anecdotal evidence should be the core of the case, demonstrating large numbers of individual instances of discrimination. The function of statistical evidence should be simply to support the inference that those many instances are indeed part of a larger pattern or to attempt some estimate of the total magnitude of the discrimination.
In other countries, women are pushed more in STEM fields and as a result there are more women with STEM Phds. According to my mathematician husband, Italy produces a lot of great female mathematicians.
I would argue that there is sexism, but not at the hiring level... way earlier on in the way we raise our kids. My husband has often noted that he finds gender roles in the US extreme and arbitrary. I think the whole trans madness highlights this, we're telling kids who deviate from their gender roles that they are really the opposite sex. Of course that is new.
What is strange though is some countries with even stricter gender rules (such as India) are producing a lot of female STEM graduates. So my theory isn't perfect.
But I think the decisions are happening way earlier than hiring time, something about our eductation system is veering girls away from STEM. Is it the "just find your true passion" thing? Are parents in other cultures more Tiger mom-ish about getting all their kids to study STEM? I know there's a tendency to let girls weasel out of harder classes when things get tough.
NicoleK at September 26, 2019 10:10 PM
As for racial minorities, we know the differences in education begin early and have a lot to do with home life and how much parents speak to children. Obvioulsy a parent working three jobs is going to have less time to devote to kids' vocabulary. This is a harder fix.
NicoleK at September 26, 2019 10:12 PM
I read a study about cultural differences that could explain a lot. It said that book ownership is vastly different in the Anglo communities and African American communities. The lowest quartile of book ownership in the Anglo community was equal to the highest quartile of book ownership in the African American community.
I remember being surrounded by books. I watched my family read and felt like I was missing out. I might not have had blocks or a Barbie doll house but I had plenty of books that I could use to construct my own play house.
One time we were being scolded for racism because of disparate outcomes at our middle school, I brought up this survey. My assistant principal randomly surveyed kids about books at home and found many of our students had barren bookshelves. The had only books that had been given to them at school.
Jen at September 27, 2019 3:48 AM
Ben Carson's mother figured that out when she was "cleaning rich white people's houses" that they had books and she and her neighbors did not. She went home and forced Carson and his brother to read two books a week from the library and write a book report on them for her. Carson said it wasn't until he was in high school that he figured out she couldn't read the reports, being herself mostly illiterate; she would mark up the reports and discuss them with her children as if she could read. He became a surgeon and his brother became a mechanical engineer. She eventually took her own medicine and learned to read.
He credited books with saving him. Carson grew up poor in a violent neighborhood of Detroit. His mother worked three jobs. Books, he said, made his world bigger and taught him that he had agency in his own life.
My mother used to take us to the city library every week as kids. We grew up reading. When i was in the sixth grade, the library of my small school literally ran out of books, fiction and non-, on the Second World War that I hadn't already read. When I asked if they had more, the librarian suggested The Caine Mutiny, but warned it was a little advanced for me. She was taken aback when I told her I'd read it.
Conan the Grammarian at September 27, 2019 4:20 AM
Books feel like a pretty easy fix. I mean think of all the books one gives away as kids get older, for example. People with bigger kids are forever dumping boxes of books on me... lots of towns have areas in their dumps and recycling centers where you can take or leave books.
More of this.
NicoleK at September 27, 2019 4:49 AM
Books are an easy fix. Getting people to actually open and read them is the hard part. These are deeply embedded cultural norms. It doesn't matter how many books are in the house if the people living there don't want to read them.
Ben at September 27, 2019 6:07 AM
"But I think the decisions are happening way earlier than hiring time, something about our eductation system is veering girls away from STEM."
This is the same mistake that the article is criticizing: assuming that discrimination exists merely because the percentage of female engineers is less than the general population. Can the same be said about the humanities and social sciences, where women predominate? Or nursing? Or real estate? The PM feminists dismiss calls for affirmative action in favor of males in these fields by claiming that if it wasn't for systemic sexism, the percentage of women in these fields would be even higher. It's yet another feminist have-it-both-ways argument.
In the 1970s, men had to sue to be admitted to nursing school. A key case, Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, was decided by the SCOTUS in 1982 in favor of a man who had been denied admission to the university's nursing program specifically because he was male. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the majority opinion. Note that the percentage of men in the field of nursing remains at about 15% today, but few people claim that this is because of discrimination, and I'm not aware of any recent successful court challenges.
Here's an article about some men who overcame sex-based discrimination in the nursing field. (I had to use Bing to find this; Google refuses to reference it.)
https://www.workingnurse.com/articles/Men-in-Nursing-8-Who-Paved-the-Way
Cousin Dave at September 27, 2019 6:24 AM
No, no, he's right. Let's start straight away with the NBA, NFL, MLB and the WNBA.
Ok, so we're going to have to force a bunch of black kids to move to Canada and take up hockey, but so be it.
I have to take this call..."that's not what I meant, you racist". Oh. My mistake.
I R A Darth Aggie at September 27, 2019 6:24 AM
Nichole: Obvioulsy a parent working three jobs is going to have less time to devote to kids' vocabulary.
Conan: She eventually took her own medicine and learned to read.
Sometimes the parent's vocabulary isn't much better than the child's. Mrs. Carson faked it until her kids made it.
Ben: These are deeply embedded cultural norms.
Ding! Ding! There are fewer Ben Carson's in the current cultural environment in the ghettos. Speaking proper english and being educated is a white thing. You don't try to be white.
I R A Darth Aggie at September 27, 2019 7:08 AM
Can’t wait for the inspiring Lifetime movie or the Congressional commendation for breaking down gender barriers.
Conan the Grammarian at September 27, 2019 8:42 AM
I have a theory that Kendi originally wrote his piece for The Onion, but decided to try it out first somewhere else to see if it would pass as serious.
Rex Little at September 27, 2019 8:48 AM
The automatic absolution of individual complicity in outcome and implication of group guilt or innocence is incompatible with the respect for individualism at the heart of our Constitution.
Not to mention the law of unintended consequences when you open an industry to lawsuits based on racial make-up. Anybody want to watch a mostly white NBA?
Besides, what constitutes legal evidence is a matter for the body of laws not the Constitution.
Conan the Grammarian at September 27, 2019 9:11 AM
No, cousin Dave, it's pretty well known that people tend to "go easy" on girls while they tell boys to tough it out. Schools tend to be more likely to let girls drop out of harder classes while pushing boys.
NicoleK at September 27, 2019 10:09 AM
In the 60s America talked about going to the moon & Mars.
Today it is who is most racist.
China laughs.
Lucifer at September 27, 2019 12:45 PM
That isn't accurate in the US at least. Or at least not any more NicoleK. Boys and girls in the US get the same median scores on purely objective tests (math, science, etc). Boys have lower grades over all, mainly due to soft measures. Namely participation and behavior grades.
Then you have the college level where women are over 56% of college students and about 60% of graduates. If the girls were being permitted to drop out of hard courses they wouldn't be able to get higher education degrees later.
If you were talking about 1950s USA I could agree. But over 50 years have passed since then. It isn't the same nation.
Ben at September 27, 2019 12:46 PM
Actually, I do buy NicoleK's statement, but at one level removed. Girls now out-number boys in AP math and science classes, and on average receive the highest grades. However... boys continue to out-score girls on the math portion of the SAT. The gap is about 30 points, and it has hardly budged since 1980. The Left claims that this is because the SAT is, somehow, in a way that no one can identify, discriminatory against girls. How pure math formulas are sexist is left unsaid, except by the wackos who claim that math itself is sexist.
So there's really only one explanation remaining, and it sort of touches on what NicoleK said. Clearly, girls aren't being encourage to drop out of AP classes, since they out-number boys. However... they are being allowed to skate on inferior work, while boys who do better work receive lower grades because more is expected of them. I saw this happen many times in my own educational experience. It's the soft bigotry of low expectations.
(It is not a given that correcting this will cause the SAT gap to close. The difference might be attributed to inherent gender differences both in topic preference and specific types of cognitive abilities. Yes, there will always be exceptions, but the mere existence of outliers does not invalidate the mean.)
Cousin Dave at September 27, 2019 1:32 PM
"In other countries, women are pushed more in STEM fields and as a result there are more women with STEM Phds."
Well yes if you force people into things more do it. But that just shows the bias they have in Italy. It's not a question of ability but desire. This is why in free countries when women have choices many more choose not to go into STEM.
Joe J at September 27, 2019 5:06 PM
Dave, I was unpopular in Ed school because I was in favor of standardized testing. Now perhaps some of the word problems or literature parts could be biased, if they all contain references to polo or something that only some groups are likely to understand, but the straight up math problems? No.
NicoleK at September 28, 2019 1:48 AM
Books are an easy fix. Getting people to actually open and read them is the hard part. These are deeply embedded cultural norms. It doesn't matter how many books are in the house if the people living there don't want to read them.
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According to an unsigned editorial, years ago, the REAL heavy lifting lies in convincing PARENTS that reading can be fun - if you pick the right books. Plenty of adults don't read for fun at all, so why would they enjoy reading to kids? Not to mention that many are too dumb to realize that there's no need to read aloud those kids' books that bore adults to tears; parents can always get a dozen from the library that they remember and love and tell the kids: "Here. Pick one of these tonight."
(I've always wanted to ask Professor Harold Bloom: "You DO know that adults who don't like reading existed long before TV, right? What would you have done if, in your 20s, you had had to teach in some poor public school, and your students had parents who didn't like reading?" Fat chance - he's been a member of the Yale English Department since age 25. He's now 89. But while it's true that many upper-class parents are wimps when it comes to keeping their kids away from screen time, Bloom doesn't seem to care that, regarding poorer kids, it isn't the kids' fault when they need extra help from their teachers to appreciate books without pictures in them, since their parents don't read to them.)
lenona at September 28, 2019 10:59 AM
Not to mention that kids who don't have much help from parents OR teachers need books at the school library that are super-popular, so that there's a chance they'll read THOSE, if only so they won't feel left out by their classmates. If they're pulp fiction, too bad. Learning to read THICK books all the way through takes a lot of practice, and for many kids, only then can they be expected to start to enjoy books that are only 100 pages long but are a lot harder for some young people to appreciate. Like "Macbeth."
lenona at September 28, 2019 11:06 AM
Jews and asians get better grades and make more than whites. Jews have gotten 30% of US Nobel Prizes. Immigrant Persians,Indians, chinese, and even Nigerians make more $ than the national average. Whites make up a minority of football and basketball players. If this is white supremacy, whites are the worst supremacists in history.
also: blacks are not excluded from hockey--they just aren't into it.
cc at September 28, 2019 4:13 PM
My mother constantly corrected our grammar as kids. We had a full encyclopedia set which she would pull out. We talked about Napoleon or the amer revol at dinner. After dinner my parents sat and read books so we did too. The environment does have a big effect.
cc at September 28, 2019 6:09 PM
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