(source) South-Carolina is now the only US State where HIV-positive prisoners are segregated in separate housing units with unequal program opportunities, inferior mental health care and fewer work options. There’s absolutely no reason to do that, unless you want to maintain the reign of sexual terror that is still widespread in US prisons. AIDS is […]
(source) The University of Colorado caved to the gun lobby and created gun-friendly dorms. At the present, there are floors that are gun-friendly. A dorm for the armed is opening in 2014. But the school is disturbed that not a single person has actually expressed any interest in living in the gun zone. Is it […]
(source) (source) At 15 years of age, on September 1957, Dorothy Counts was one of the first black students admitted to the Harry Harding High School, in Charlotte, North Carolina. After four days of harassment that threatened her safety, her parents forced her to withdraw from the school. … The harassment started when the wife […]
(source) Residential segregation can be the outcome of racial animus or racial prejudice, for example when whites decide that they don’t want to live near blacks for no other reason than race. In that case, segregation is a symptom of racism and is evidently wrong. What to do about it is less clear: forcing people […]
You are here: Home > Human Rights Statistics > Statistics on Discrimination > Statistics on Segregation Content 1. Types of segregation 2. What is wrong with segregation? 3. Measuring segregation using the dissimilarity index 4. Residential segregation in the US 5. Employment segregation in the US 6. Apartheid 7. India’s caste system 1. Types of segregation Segregation comes in many forms: there […]
A nice illustration complementing this previous post: (source, click image to enlarge) More on segregation here.
It’s common knowledge that women tend to earn less that men, even in countries that pride themselves on their respect for gender equality. Here are the data on the gender pay gap in the U.S.: (source) One of the causes of this gap is occupational sex segregation, meaning that women and men tend to work […]
Segregation comes in many forms: there can be segregation in schools, at work, in the places people live, in restaurants etc. In U.S. history, it has often been racial segregation, but there is also something like gender segregation, wealth segregation etc., and often these types overlap. Segregation can be the forced and legal separation of […]
If people tend to live, work, eat or go to school together with other members of their group – race, gender etc. – then we shouldn’t automatically assume that this is caused by discrimination, forced separation, restrictions on movement or choice of residence, or other kinds of human rights violations. It can be their free choice. However, […]
More on segregation here. Something on the Little Rock Nine, on Rosa Parks, and on Jim Crow. Other collections of human rights images are here. (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) And here’s one making fun of it all: (source unknown)
(source, picture by Warren K. Leffler) The picture, taken in 1963, shows Governor George Wallace attempting to block integration and desegregation at the University of Alabama by the enrollment of black students. He is standing defiantly at the door (while being confronted by Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach). Wallace is best known for the line: In […]
Picture by Elliot Erwitt depicting one instance of racial segregation in the U.S. Read more on segregation here, and something about the related topic of Jim Crow here.
(source) Daimler-Benz … avidly supported Nazism and in return received arms contracts and tax breaks that enabled it to become one of the world’s leading industrial concerns. (Between 1932 and 1940 production grew by 830 percent.) During the war the company used thousands of slaves and forced laborers including Jews, foreigners, and POWs. (source) Can […]
The measurement of racial discrimination may seem like a purely technical topic, but in reality it comes with a huge moral dilemma. In order to measure racial discrimination, you have to categorize people into different racial groups (usually in your national census). On the basis of this you can then collect social information about those groups, and […]
It’s a useful custom among bloggers to end the year with an overview of some of the year’s highlights. So here goes. There have been about 2,100,000 pageviews in 2012, slightly higher than the previous year and the one before. Spectacular progress is not my thing it seems. These are the posts/pages that got the most […]
We have before us two people: one is blind, the other one has perfect eyesight. Let’s assume that eye transplants are simple and safe. If we were to take one eye from the latter – who, we assume, is an unwilling participant – and give it to the former, overall wellbeing would be greatly enhanced. […]
(source) Ubi jus ibi remedium: where there is a right, there must be a remedy in case of violation of the right. It’s an old but somewhat misguided principle. If you focus too much on it, you’ll miss the essence of human rights. It has some superficial appeal: when nothing can be done about a rights violation, […]
One way to solve the traditional conflict between freedom and equality is offered by Elizabeth Anderson. If you want to live a free life, you have to stand in relations of equality with others. Oppressive or exploitative relationships are both unequal and unfree. Historically, unequal relationships such as “natural” hierarchies between social groups (sexes, races, […]
I wasn’t very pleased with my previous attempts, so here’s one more. Equality of opportunity is a type of equality that’s usually seen as a very moderate one, one that’s not too demanding – especially compared to other types of equality that focus on equal outcomes – and hence it’s supposed to be acceptable to those […]
(source) I’ve argued many times before against the popular view that increased immigration is detrimental to native employment and income. The simple argument about an increase in supply of cheap labor driving down wages and forcing expensive native workers out of the job market is just that: simple, too simple. There’s even evidence that the […]
(source) Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States in 1961 and following years to test the United States Supreme Court decisions Boynton v. Virginia (1960) and Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1946). … Boynton outlawed racial segregation in the restaurants and waiting rooms in terminals […]
Since not everyone is interested in the personal comments and reflections that are part and parcel of blog posts, I’ve decided to create a few static pages – more website-like pages rather than blog posts – where I copy the statistics and the data on trends and distributions of human rights violations that I blog about. This way, those statistics […]
(source) I did hear about some similar cases before - for example, North Korea lecturing Japan on human rights, and the late Gaddafi lecturing Switzerland (!) on human rights - but this is the best: A state-run Chinese website has launched a bitter attack on the Dalai Lama, accusing the exiled Buddhist leader of Nazi racial policies and inciting Tibetans to […]
(source) (source) (source) (source) (source) The Birmingham protests in 1963 attempted to bring attention to the unequal treatment that black Americans endured in Birmingham, Alabama. There were numerous confrontations between black youth and white civic authorities. Eventually, the municipal government was pressured into changing the city’s discrimination laws. Read the whole story here. More iconic […]
(source, more about the watermelon stereotype here) Measuring racism is a problem, as I’ve argued before. Asking people if they’re racist won’t work because they don’t answer this question correctly, and understandably so. This is due to the social desirability bias. Surveys may minimize this bias if they approach the subject indirectly. For example, rather than […]
Title Views Statistics on Capital Punishment 38,124 The Causes of Poverty (3): Overview 28,673 Segregation, A Collection of Images 27,091 Statistics on Discrimination of Homosexuals 26,137 Statistics on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Correlations 25,242 Human Rights Quote (48): Aids Disaster 22,808 Statistics on Child Labor 20,832 Statistics on Discrimination of Women 17,862 Statistics on Prison […]
(source) Poverty kills, it seems. As if it’s not bad enough in itself. Although death is often multicausal, a study has tried to estimate in how many cases poverty is a contributing factor: For 2000, the study attributed 176,000 deaths to racial segregation and 133,000 to individual poverty. The numbers are substantial. For example, looking […]
(source) The concept of equality of opportunity is incomprehensible as such. It needs some additional words: equality of opportunity is always equality of the opportunity to do something, to be something or to get something out of life. I’ll argue that, if equality of opportunity is to be a justifiable ideal, this “something” can’t be […]
Affirmative action is a set of policies aimed at improving the representation of women and minorities in education, business, employment and other sectors of society where these groups have traditionally been underrepresented or even completely excluded. Representation is improved by way of preferential selection. For example, if students are normally selected on the basis of […]
I wasn’t very pleased with an older post on the distinctions between different types of equality, so I’ll give it another try. Indeed, if you want to explain the nature of equality the best thing to do is to distinguish between different types of equality. In fact, we’ll need a whole set of different distinctions, […]
This blog contains numerous statements similar to this one: There are large and important differences between blacks and whites in nearly every facet of life – earnings, unemployment, incarceration, health, and so on. (source) We can assume that racism and discrimination are at least partially to blame for such discrepancies in life prospects between races, […]
Apartheid in South Africa was a system of legal racial segregation enforced by the National Party government in South Africa between 1948 and 1994, under which the rights of the majority non-white inhabitants of South Africa were curtailed and minority rule by white people was maintained. Racial segregation in South Africa began in colonial times, […]
(source unknown) Let me try out a few possible answers to the question in the title of this post: Is discrimination wrong because it’s differential treatment of persons? That can’t be the case, because we treat people differently all of the time: some people earn more than others, have better grades in school, have a […]
You’ve probably already heard about Google’s Ngram tool, a tool that allows you to calculate the frequency of keywords in the millions of books available in Google’s collection. Such frequencies can be thought of as approximations of the general use of a word at a certain time. (I’ve mentioned Ngrams before on this blog, namely […]
Income inequality doesn’t have the same causes everywhere, as is evident from this study which points to the fact that slavery in the U.S., which was abolished almost 150 years ago, still has nefarious effects today. Within the US, the institution of slavery has historically been associated more heavily with specific areas – primarily the South. This […]
(A older collection of images on inequality is here. Similar collections: sexism, segregation, antisemitism, discrimination, caste, and racism). (source, more on income inequality) (source, more on the Muslim veil here, more on gender equality here) (source, more on segregation, Jim Crow and Rand Paul’s objections to the Civil Rights Act) (source, more on same-sex marriage […]
It was and still is quite common to see non-whites depicted as dumb, evil, lazy, poor, cannibalistic, uncivilized and un-Christian savages with stuff sticking through their noses. Or as odd-looking servants, comical figures, dimwitted people scared of ghosts (and turning white out of fear). As overly joyous fools or overly sexual deviants, bare breasted, heavily […]
(source, source, click image to enlarge, more about these maps here, here and here) What’s interesting about these maps is not that it tells us a lot about poverty (except perhaps that there is less wealth segregation than is normally expected), but that at the time, poverty was explicitly linked to crime (the lowest classes […]
(source) To what extent should anti-discrimination laws apply to private associations, to voluntary employment contracts and in private property? Let’s have a look at a number of recent news stories: There was the controversy over Rand Paul’s opposition (shared by many other libertarians) to the application of the Civil Rights Act to private enterprises, which […]
In a recent court case in the US, a Christian student group objected to a university decision to withdraw recognition of the group. This withdrawal was justified by the university on the basis of the group’s discrimination of gays. Gays can only join the group when they “repent”. This policy by the group was deemed discriminatory by […]
Prominent libertarian politician Rand Paul recently caused a stir by claiming that he didn’t support parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, specifically the parts applying non-discrimination legislation to private businesses. Like most libertarians, he believes that if private restaurant owners, for example, want to prevent blacks from eating there, then that’s their right. […]
When you read about the causes of poverty you’ve probably convinced yourself that there are causes, and that the poor don’t have only themselves to blame. What you’re most likely to find are the following causes: culture (for example the religious hypothesis of Max Weber) geography, climate, resources (most notably in the work of Jeffrey […]
More descriptive information on antisemitism is here. More on the related topics of the holocaust, holocaust denial and segregation. (source, jewish world domination) (source, I like the “caution” ribbon; more about Israel and Palestine) (source, more about antisemitism in Arab countries) (source) (source) (source, nazi caricature of jewish banker sitting on a bag of money; […]
(source) Here’s another version: More on gay rights, and some statistics. And here is the famous picture of racial segregation that inspired this ad. More on segregation. More human rights ads.
(source) I, Too, Sing America, by Langston Hughes I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes. But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow I’ll sit at the table When company comes Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen” […]
Another case in which the language of human rights is shockingly abused: Markus [is] America’s first legal male prostitute. [He] is the newest hire at the Shady Lady Ranch brothel in Tonopah Nevada, a business that recently got the go-ahead to hire a few good men. He likened his decision to rise up and become a gigolo to […]
You are here: Home > Human Rights Statistics > Measurement Issues > Measurement of Human Rights This blog focuses on human rights, including economic human rights and political human rights, and therefore also devotes a lot of space to issues related to poverty and democracy (democracy being the practical translation of political human rights). One particular characteristic of this blog is the quantitative […]
Rosa Parks’ refusal to obey bus driver James Blake’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger, and her subsequent arrest, is one of the most famous events in the history of the American civil rights movement. Read the whole story here. (source) (source) More on segregation and Jim Crow. […]
(source, click to enlarge) Libertarians traditionally adopt a negative kind of freedom, and, more precisely, limited negative freedom: they believe that individuals should be free from interference by the government. They seldom accept that individuals can be coerced by private and social constructs, such as tradition, the family, gender roles, cultural racism etc. Here’s a rather long but exceptionally […]
A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog makes the connection between the rhetoric of the tea-party protests and of the segregationists some 50 years ago. Both movements systematically use(d) the labels “antichrist” and “communist/socialist” to describe their opponents (respectively the civil rights movement and its contemporary product, Obama). So perhaps we’re not talking about two different […]
