Measuring Human Rights (33): Measuring Racial Discrimination

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 compare the average outcomes in order to detect large discrepancies between them. For example, do blacks in the US earn less, achieve less in school etc. Only then can you assume that there may be racism or discrimination and can you design policies that deal with it.

Now, categorizing people into different racial groups is not straightforward. You need to do violence to reality. Racial classifications and categorizations are not simply a reflection of factual reality, of “real group identities”. Instead they are social constructions or even fantasies influenced by centuries of prejudice, stereotypes and power relations. If we want to use racial classifications to measure discrimination, then we give people labels that may have little or nothing to do with who or what they are and how they identify themselves. Instead, these labels perpetuate the stereotypes and power relations that were the basis of the racial classifications when they were first conceived centuries ago. For example, “black” or “African-American” is not a simple descriptive label of a well-defined and existing group of people; instead it’s an ideological construction that was once used to segregate certain groups of very different people and subordinate them to a lower station in life. (Evidence for the claim that race is a social construct rather than a natural fact can be found in biology and in the fact that racial classifications differ wildly from one country to another).

In other words, the “statistical representation of diversity is a complex process which reveals the foundations of societies and their political choices” (source). In this particular case, the foundation of society was racism and the political choices were segregation and discrimination. If today we use the same racial and ethnic classifications that were once used to justify segregation and discrimination, then we run the risk of perpetuating racist social constructions. As a result, we may also help to perpetuate stereotypes and discrimination, even as we try to go in the opposite direction. It’s a form of path dependence.

Statistics are not just a reflection of social reality, but also affect this reality. Statistical categories are supposed to describe social groups, but at the same time they may influence people’s attitudes towards those groups because they contain memories of older judgments that were once attached to those groups. The dilemma is the following: the use of racial classifications to measure discrimination means giving people labels that have little or nothing to do with who they are or what they are; but they have something to do with how others treat them. It’s this treatment that we want to measure, and we can’t do so without the use of classifications. Using such classifications, however, can help to perpetuate the treatment we want to measure and avoid.

More posts in this series are here.

Most Urgent Human Rights Policies

(source)

If you’re a political leader, a church leader or anyone else with the ability and willingness to change some people’s behavior and promote respect for human rights – to some extent that includes all of us – what should be your policy priorities? On which human rights violations should you focus? Ideally, you would like to be told something more specific than “reduce suffering and violence and enhance liberty and equality”. So here’s my attempt at something specific.

I’ll list a few domains that require urgent action. Not all of these domains are equally amenable to action, because there may be strong resistance in some quarters. Nevertheless, I consider all these domains to be equally important. I’ll list them first (and include links to older posts arguing why action is important) and afterwards distinguish between those domains where immediate progress is realistic and where it’s not. Of course, it’s not because progress isn’t realistic that we should remain passive.

1. Promote free trade. Standard arguments for protectionism sound a lot like the Count complaining that there are beggars at the door. Protectionism may even harm citizens of the protecting country. It certainly harms producers in poorer countries. More here.
2. Abolish capital punishment and reduce incarceration rates. Capital punishment doesn’t deliver on its promises, and even if it did it wouldn’t be acceptable. “Tough on crime” policies go beyond what is required for public safety and the rights of victims.
3. One way to reduce incarceration rates is to end the war on drugs. Ending the war on drugs will also reduce racial discrimination because it leads to strong imbalances in incarceration rates by race, impoverishing and even destroying many black families.
4. Abolish existing laws and practices that lead to discrimination of all types. Some laws, however, may be necessary to combat discrimination.
5. Guarantee social safety nets through a fair and efficient system of benefits and progressive taxation - perhaps including a basic income guarantee - but also encourage private charity. Design the taxation system in such a way that it reduces income inequality.
6. Help the poor by way of Conditional Cash Transfers.
7. Rethink development aid. More here and here.
8. Combat malnourishment and hunger and improve the water supply. More here and here.
9. Reduce immigration restrictions. The supposed negative consequences of increased immigration are largely fictitious, and the benefits for migrants are huge. Also relax asylum rules for refugees.
10. Improve education and healthcare.
11. Enhance the scope of humanitarian intervention in order to avoid Rwanda style atrocities.
12. Promote democracy, the rule of law, the separation of powers, federalism, and the separation of church and state, and improve those institutions where they already exist. Human rights are typically safer in democracies and obviously require the rule of law.
13. Declare victory in the war on terror, but continue the capture terrorist and subject them to fair criminal trials. Abandon torture, targeted killings if alternatives are available, and extrajudicial incarceration, and limit invasions of privacy to those strictly necessary to capture terrorists.
14. Abolish freedom-restricting laws such as those prohibiting assisted suicide and euthanasia. Relax abortion laws where necessary.
15. Guarantee the freedom of the internet.

Now, which of these actions are realistic in the short term, and which are not? The latter part of the list, namely actions 9 to 15, seems to be the most difficult. Substantial progress is already under way for 1, 2, 4 (take the case of same-sex marriage and the repeal of DADT), 6, 7 and 8. Also, 3 may be heading in the right direction. 5 depends to some extent on the general economic climate.

It’s obviously a long list of often very difficult policies, even when we limit ourselves to those areas where progress is relatively easy. Also, in some countries, progress may be easier in some areas than in others. That’s why this list is still too general and different actors may have to choose a subset.

More on progress in the field of human rights here.

Related Articles

• UN chief criticized as soft on human rights (foxnews.com)
• Rights group says democracies ignore abuses (ctv.ca)

The Ethics of Human Rights (66): Human Rights and “Spontaneous Order”

Friedrich von Hayek

Hayek has famously argued that market economies create a spontaneous order, a more efficient allocation of societal resources than any intentional design or planning could achieve. This spontaneous order is superior to any order the human mind can design due to the specifics of the information requirements. Planners will never have enough information to carry out the allocation of resources reliably. Only individual economic actors can create an efficient and productive economy by engaging in free exchanges and by using as their information source the spontaneously developing price system. They can do so because they act on the basis of information with greater detail and accuracy – namely the price system – than the information available to any centralized authority.

Whatever the general merits of such invisible hand theories for the whole of society (I think those merits are real but often vastly overstated), it’s useful to ask if they also apply in the field of human rights. To what extent and in which circumstances can there be an equivalent of “spontaneous order” for human rights? Can it happen that people’s unintended and selfish actions promote respect for human rights? Or do human rights always require intentional and (centrally) planned policy?

First, this question has to be distinguished from a similar one: it’s true that people do have selfish reasons to promote human rights and often act on those reasons, as I’ve argued here. But in that case their human rights efforts are quite intentional. What I’m asking here is whether there are equally selfish but unintentional processes that promote human rights. And I think there are. Before listing some of them, however, let me make clear that those processes, although they are obviously beneficial and to be encouraged, will not make a huge difference, and that they certainly won’t be sufficient to bring about human rights utopia.

After some superficial thinking about this, I came up with three examples:

• Trickle down economics is by now thoroughly discredited, especially when it’s used to justify tax cuts for the wealthy. Not all boats have risen on the rising tide, and the tide itself has recently come crashing down on all of us, the rich included. However, that doesn’t mean that there’s never any trickling down in an economy. When the government’s tax system allows the wealthy to retain a reasonable part of their wealth (let’s assume we know what “reasonable” means here), then some of their wealth does indeed flow down to those with lower incomes. That’s because the rich are more likely to spend the additional income, through either consumption or investment, thereby creating more economic activity, which in turn generates jobs and higher income for the less well-off. If that’s the case, then the right to a certain standard of living is promoted through the selfish and unintentional actions of the wealthy. Of course, this will never be enough to secure that right for everyone all of the time.
• As Becker has argued, free competition between firms reduces discrimination. A racially biased firm will want to hire whites, even if they are more expensive and less qualified than some non-whites. But a firm will only do so if it’s not under pressure from competitors. In a competitive market, other firms can and will produce the same goods at cheaper prices by hiring the cheaper/better black person. The biased firm will then be forced to do the same. It may remain biased – opinions on such matters are notoriously hard to change – but it no longer has the luxury of acting on its bias.
• There’s a strong tendency towards urbanization in developing countries. Large cities offer more economic opportunities, and jobs in factories, shops or trade offer some advantages compared to agriculture (e.g. weather independence, stable income etc.). When women move to cities and work in factories, they usually have less children – they don’t need children to work the land – and they become more independent of traditional patriarchal structures that are more common in the countryside. This does not only improve the wellbeing of women. Having less children means that the remaining children are more likely to attend school, because school is expensive. Female children in particular benefit from this education. Hence, rights such as education and non-discrimination are automatically advanced by urbanization. More here.

More posts in this series are here.

Discrimination (13): Is Disability Just a Case of Bad Luck or Is It Discrimination?

(source)

When people think about disability they usually don’t see it as a moral issue. A disabled person supposedly suffers from bad luck, and the problems she encounters while living her life with a disability don’t result from the decisions or actions of her fellow citizens. They are instead caused by ill health or by biological and anatomical inadequacies, things for which no one is to blame. Brute misfortune, that is all.

Of course, a disability can be caused by someone else’s misconduct, for example industrial pollution or paralyssis following an accident caused by someone else. However, let’s focus on blameless disability, the kind that is not anyone’s fault.

There’s a problem with the view that this kind of disability is no more than misfortune. The threshold level of normal human functioning that determines the difference between disability and non-disability isn’t just determined by biological facts, but also by social practices and the artificial social environment. For example, imagine a society that has developed technologically up to a point where people don’t have to use their hands anymore. No more computer keyboards, steering wheels in cars, remote controls etc. Let’s assume that everything that needs to be done can be done by programming and brain power (not a far-fetched assumption). A person who loses her hands in an accident will not be considered “disabled” in such a society. This accident will not push her below the threshold level of normal human functioning. In fact, most likely it won’t even be viewed as an accident, but rather a small nuisance, depending on the level of pain involved. Much like we in our existing societies react to a bee sting. It’s usually not disabling.

Now, when we take the same example of a person losing her hands, but situate her in a country such as the U.S. today, then we would say that she is disabled and that she has fallen below the threshold level of normal human functioning. But the reason we say this isn’t simply a biological or anatomical one, otherwise she would also have to be disabled in the imaginary society described a moment ago. The reason we say that she is disabled depends on the social circumstances and the social system in which she finds herself after losing her hands. Because U.S. society has been designed in such a way that people need to use their hands a lot of the time, we say that someone without hands is disabled. The decision to count someone as disabled has less to do with biology and anatomy than with the social practices and the artificial social environment we live in. The level of functioning a person can achieve depends less on her biological or anatomical abilities than on the artificial social environment in which she finds herself.

Hence, disability isn’t just something that happens to people; it’s something that we as a society have decided should happen to people. There’s nothing about our society that necessarily relegates people without hands to the category of the disabled. On the contrary, we have willingly designed our society in such a way that people without hands are disabled. We could just as well design our society in another way. Technology permitting, of course, but technology is also – up to a point – a choice: we just simply decided to develop technologies and the wider social environment in such a way that they don’t really take into account the needs of people without hands.

The fact that we designed our society in the way we did seems to indicate that we don’t care a lot about the disabled, at least not enough to do something for them. And such an absence of care can be viewed as a type of discrimination. After all, until some decades ago, men didn’t much care about the education of women, even though society was quite able to give women the same kind of education as men. The relative lack of education of women wasn’t a necessary fact of life but a choice. And that choice was a symptom of discrimination.

Of course, the analogy is shaky because gender discrimination was and is often a conscious choice, whereas the disabled are only rarely consciously disadvantaged. However, as I’ve stated before, the fact that discrimination is unconscious doesn’t automatically excuse it.

More on luck. More posts in this series.

Related Articles

• Wishful thinking won’t bring equality for disabled people | Zoe Williams (guardian.co.uk)
• More disabled workers file discrimination claims in 2009 (usatoday.com)
• Disability Discrimination – Part I (specialeducationlawblog.blogspot.com)

Limiting Free Speech (51): Speech That Intends to Get Someone Fired

(source)

What if someone tells an embarrassing or potentially harmful truth about someone else to his or her employer, with the intention of convincing the employer to fire this person? Are we allowed to limit the speech rights of the speaker in question (for example, by way of the imposition of a fine, the payment of damages to the person fired or an order to remove internet pages)? And does it matter if the speaker addresses only the employer or the public at large (perhaps in the former case we’re not really dealing with free speech)?

Take this example:

Appellant Derek Schramm is a parent of children enrolled in a Roman Catholic grade school in Minneapolis. Respondent Zachary Faricy is a teacher at the school. In November 2001, Schramm sent a letter to the school principal and the parish pastor informing them of his suspicion that Faricy “might be a homosexual.” (source)

Let’s assume that we’re not dealing here with incitement to commit illegal acts. Discrimination of homosexuals is often illegal, but many religious institutions are exempt from such a rule. (Whether or not that’s a good thing is another matter, briefly discussed here). Hence if silencing this particular speaker is indeed a warranted exception to free speech then it must be one that’s different from the established exception regarding speech that incites illegal activity.

Let’s also assume that we’re not dealing with libel. Perhaps the target in this particular case is indeed a homosexual and has therefore good reason to fear that his Catholic employer will fire him if this fact about him becomes known. Libel is usually defined as a false claim intended to harm someone’s image and reputation, and so that’s not what our example is about. The intended harm is dismissal of the teacher. Like incitement to commit illegal acts, libel is an established exception to free speech rights, and one that I also want to exclude from the current discussion. What I want to do here is see whether speech that intends to get someone fired and that is neither libel nor incitement to commit illegal acts, should always be protected.

Now, speech that incites employers to fire people does impose certain demonstrable harms: the target’s right to privacy is violated, as is his or her right to a decent standard of living (in the case in which the target may not find another job in the short term). So, a priori we could have an argument here in favor of prohibiting speech that incites employers to fire people. Normally, limits to free speech can be acceptable if they are necessary in order to avoid greater harm to other human rights.

However, if we want to allow limits on speech that incites employers to fire people, would we not also be forced to accept the prohibition of public protest aimed at getting a racist or sexist radio host fired? That seems to go very far. Maybe we can limit the free speech exception as follows: in the Catholic school case the speech was directed at a single person – the employer – whereas in the case of public protest the audience is much larger. Still, that’s not a very promising route. The inciter in the Catholic school case may drum up support among other parents or write to the local Catholic newspaper if a private letter to the employer doesn’t do the job.

It’s true that the nature of the audience and the circumstances in which speech occurs can make a difference – hate speech in an obscure periodical should not necessarily be forbidden, but hate speech in front of an excited mob about to attack someone is different. But the same difference doesn’t apply here I think.

In the case of speech that incites employers to fire people – whether it’s private speech or public speech – I would prefer not to impose limits on speech but rather change the law so that it is illegal to fire people for their beliefs, words or lifestyle. And yes, that may include revoking religious exemptions to employment discrimination. After all, how exactly does it harm someone’s religious freedom if his or her children are educated by a homosexual teacher?

More posts in this series are here.

What is Equality? (4): Equality of Opportunity

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 of us who are a bit squeamish about equality. However, I’ll try to show that this is a mistake. Real equality of opportunity is a very ambitious and difficult project. In order to show that, I’ll talk first about some of the causes of inequality of opportunity, and then about the things we can do to reduce this inequality.

Four source of inequality of opportunity

1. Unequal endowments and circumstances

Equality of opportunity means that different people should have an equal chance of success in a certain life project, conditional on the willingness to invest an equal amount of effort. Of course, in reality, people will never have such an equal chance. The lottery of birth means that we are unable to choose to be born in a wealthy family with caring parents who can finance our education and motivate us to achieve our goals. It also means that we can’t choose which talents and genes we are born with. Talents and genetic differences are no more a matter of choice than the character and means of our parents. And genetic differences affect our talents, skills and maybe even our capacity to invest effort. (It’s not impossible that they even determine our choices of projects in which we want to be successful). So two people with the same life projects will only rarely have the same chance of success.

What can we do to equalize their chances? We can’t (yet) redistribute beneficial genes or disable harmful ones, and we don’t want to intervene in people’s families (and force parents to behave in a certain way or possibly even redistribute children). So we can’t remove the impact of genes and parents. But we can correct it, partially. For example, we can compensate people born with a genetic defect that reduces their chances of success in their life projects. We can offer people suffering from a genetic disorder that has left them paralyzed certain instruments to enhance their mobility. We can offer children born in dysfunctional or poor families free education, child benefits and encouragement. Etc.

2. Discrimination

Equality of opportunity also means correcting for lack of opportunity not resulting from the lottery of birth. If African Americans are systematically discriminated in employment, then they don’t enjoy equality of opportunity. They don’t have an equal chance of success in employment. If working for a certain company is part of an African American’s life project, and this company prefers white employees, then this African American doesn’t have an equal chance of success in his life project compared to whites with the same project.

The rule of equality of opportunity is only violated when the African American is rejected for no other reason than his race, and when this rejection diminishes that person’s opportunities (in other words, when this rejection is common and widespread rather than occasional; see here). If his skills, talents, merit and efforts are equal to those of other candidates, he should have an equal chance of employment or advancement. Equality of opportunity means that he should be allowed to compete for positions on equal terms, and that the difference between winners and losers in such competitions can only be a difference based on skills, talents, merit or efforts. However, even when he is rejected for the position because his skills, talents, merit and efforts are below the level of those of other candidates, he may not have been granted equality of opportunity. That is because the lottery of birth (point 1 above) has landed him in a discriminated group and because his lesser skills and willingness to invest effort and strive for merit may be caused by this discrimination.

Even if all are eligible to apply for a … position and applications are judged fairly on their merits, one might hold that genuine or substantive equality of opportunity requires that all have a genuine opportunity to become qualified. (source)

3. Misfortune in life

The natural lottery can reduce your equality of opportunity. Misfortune in the circumstances of your upbringing (bad parents, bad schools etc.) can also do it. And discrimination throughout your life as well. On top of that, other types of misfortune can limit your opportunities: you may get sick or have an accident. So we have to promote equality of opportunity at every step in people’s lives.

4. Neglect of abilities and talents

And there’s yet one additional cause of inequality of opportunity. Until now, I’ve assumed that equality of opportunity means that different people should have an equal chance of success in a certain life project. But maybe people have an equal chance of success in whatever life project they choose (as long as the project is morally acceptable of course). If society recognizes, rewards and encourages only certain talents and abilities, then some people will not be able to be successful in the life projects that they choose and that are compatible with their talents and abilities. For example, it’s fair to say that someone like Elton John would not have enjoyed equality of opportunity in Sparta or Saudi Arabia.

How to promote equality of opportunity?

If we accept all that, then the promotion of equality of opportunity involves different things:

1. Social structures or traditions

At the most basic level, it means getting rid of social structures or traditions that assign people to fixed places in a social hierarchy, to occupations or to life projects on a basis that has nothing to do with skills, abilities, talents, merit and efforts. Patriarchy, in which women are forced to focus on family life and raising children, is incompatible with equality of opportunity. As is a caste society, a society in which racial or other minorities (or majorities) are systematically discriminated against, or a class society in which the class of your parents, your blood line, your religion, your friends and relationships (nepotism) determine your chances of success in life. Getting rid of such social structures and traditions may simply require legislation outlawing them, or may also require affirmative action or positive discrimination and other forms of compensation for past wrongs (if some still benefit in the present from past wrongs, then equality of opportunity will not be respected simply because the wrongs have ended).

2. Equalizing skills, abilities and talents

But the promotion of equality of opportunity also means equalizing skills, abilities and talents, to the extent that this is possible (e.g. offering poor children free education of the same quality as the education and private tutoring offered to children born in wealthy families). And compensating people when this isn’t possible (e.g. give a blind man some help if we can’t cure his blindness).

3. Upgrading ambitions

And the promotion of equality of opportunity means reducing differences in merit and effort that are not the consequences of people’s voluntary choices. E.g. a child raised in a poor and dysfunctional family may have involuntarily adapted her ambitions downwards. Helping her at a young age may allow us to prevent this down-scaling of ambitions. Perhaps this down-scaling of ambitions is the result of the structures and traditions described in 1 above.

4. Other types of misfortune

The promotion of equality of opportunity also means helping people whose skills, abilities, talents, merit and efforts have been limited by misfortune different from the misfortune caused by the lottery of birth. If two people have the same ambition, talents and skill to become a lawyer – perhaps after social corrections to their initial starting positions in life (e.g. free schooling for the poorest one of them) and after legislation providing equal employment access (e.g. for the black lawyer-to-be) – but an accident leaves one of them blind, maybe society should provide that person with law books in Braille and such.

5. Recognizing abilities

And, finally, it means that a broad range of talents and abilities should be recognized and rewarded in society, with the exception of those that involve limitations of other people’s talents and abilities.

Limits of equality of opportunity

So equality of opportunity is a very ambitious and far-reaching project, contrary to what people usually believe about this type of equality. Hence we have to limit it somehow. For example, it shouldn’t extend to people’s private lives. You can’t demand that the girl next door marries you even if that’s your project in life and even if you think you’re the best candidate who didn’t have his equal opportunity. And the girl can decide not to marry you simply because you’re black. A club of racists can decide not to accept your membership request. A racist restaurant owner can decide not to serve you food on his private property. None of this diminishes your equality of opportunity, at least not as long as enough of the same opportunities exist for you elsewhere.

There will be a problem of equality of opportunity if all or many restaurants, clubs etc. turn you away. But if that’s not the case, and enough of the same opportunities remain elsewhere, even businesses can discriminate on the basis of race in their employment decisions, as long as this practice is not widespread and not part of a wider system of discrimination not limited to employment. If, in a perfectly tolerant and egalitarian society, there’s one bakery insisting on being racist and refusing to hire or serve blacks, who cares? (More here).

Equality of opportunity and statistical discrimination

However, discrimination in employment doesn’t have to be taste based, as they say. It can be mere statistical discrimination. Is that a violation of equality of opportunity? I would say yes, because discrimination is discrimination and whatever the motives are – a taste for discrimination or just prudence based of statistical averages – it diminishes the opportunities of those affected by it. People who engage in statistical discrimination make no effort to assess the skills, merit and talents of individuals.

More on equality of opportunity. More on the related topics of social mobility and meritocracy (a meritocracy can only exist when there’s equality of opportunity, otherwise people can’t be said to get what they deserve; and a society without or with low social mobility is unlikely to be one that respects equality of opportunity).

Related Articles

• 25 reviews of Equal Opportunity (rateitall.com)
• What is Equal Opportunity? (brainz.org)
• Knesset Expands Equal Opportunity Law (israelnationalnews.com)

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics (38): The Base-Rate Fallacy

(source)

When judging whether people engage in discrimination it’s important to make the right comparisons. Take the example of an American company X where 98 percent of employees are white and only 2 percent are black. If you compare to (“if your base is”) the entire US population – of which about 13 percent are African American – then you’ll conclude that company X is motivated by racism in its employment decisions.

However, in cases such as these, it’s probably better to use another base rate, namely the number of applicants rather than the total population. If only 0.1 percent of job applications where from blacks, then an employment rate of 2 percent blacks actually shows that company X has favored black applicants.

The accusation of racism betrays a failure to point to the real causes of discrimination. It’s a failure to go back far enough and to think hard enough. The fact that only 0.1 percent of applicants were black – instead of the expected 13 percent – may still be due to racism, but not racism in company X. Blacks may suffer from low quality education, which results in a skill deficit among blacks, which in turn leads to a low application rate for certain jobs.

The opposite error is also quite common: people point to the number of blacks in prison, compare this to the total number of blacks, and conclude that blacks must be more attracted to crime. However, they should probably compare incarceration rates to arrest rates (blacks are arrested at higher rates because of racial profiling). And they should take into account jury behavior as well.

More about racism. More posts in this series.

Human Rights Facts (70): Intolerance and Discrimination in America

(source)

In light of the recent Trayvon Martin case, a few historical examples of how fear of the “other” has led many Americans to acts of intolerance and discrimination:

• In 1654, Peter Stuyvesant, director-general of New Netherland, tried to have Jewish refugees expelled, claiming they would “infect” the colony.
• In 1732, founders of the Georgia colony, which was seen as a religious haven, drew up a charter that explicitly bans Catholicism.
• In 1844, Mormon founder Joseph Smith is murdered in an Illinois prison by a lynch mob. Soon after, many of his followers migrated to Utah.
• In 1854-56, nativists formed the Know Nothing Party (yes, that was their name), which called for strict limits on immigration, especially from Catholic countries.
• In 1865-66, following the end of the Civil War, riots erupted during Reconstruction, and African American churches and schools were burned in Memphis and New Orleans.
• In 1882, strong anti-Chinese sentiment in California led to the federal Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended immigration from the East.
• In 1883, the Department of Interior declared many Native American rituals to be “offenses” punishable by jail sentences of up to 30 years.
• In 1942, FDR signed an executive order establishing “exclusion zones,” which led to the forced internment of some 110,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans. (source)

Needless to say, fear of the other isn’t a exclusively American problem.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (70): “No More Police Brutality”

photo by Matt Herron

(source)

A policeman wrests a US flag from a boy, having already confiscated his “No More Police Brutality” sign, during a 1965 civil rights protest in Jackson, Mississippi.

More iconic images of human rights violations are here.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (69): The Birmingham Protests of 1963

This image of Parker High School student Walter Gadsden being attacked by dogs was published in The New York Times on May 4, 1963. Image credit: Bill Hudson, Associated Press

(source)

(source)

(source)

High school students are hit by a high-pressure water jet from a firehose during a protest in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, as photographed by Charles Moore. Images like this one, printed in Life, inspired international support for the demonstrators

(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 images of human rights violations are here.

Human Rights Maps (169): Legislation Prohibiting Employment Discrimination on the Basis of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

Anti-discrimination legislation tends to become more inclusive over time, in two ways:

• more groups enjoy protection against discrimination (the disabled, transsexuals, older people, short people etc.) and
• discrimination becomes illegal in more social settings (employment, trade etc.).

I’ll focus here on employment discrimination, and more specifically discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Employment Discrimination laws seek to prevent discrimination based on race, sex, religion, national origin, physical disability, and age by employers. A growing body of law also seeks to prevent employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. Discriminatory practices include bias in hiring, promotion, job assignment, termination, compensation, retaliation, and various types of harassment. (source)

In the U.S., many states have laws that protect all public employees against employment discrimination, including discrimination of people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. Many large cities and other localities have similar rules. A minority of states ban this type of discrimination in private employment: 21 states plus DC have laws banning discrimination in private employment that also cover sexual orientation, and 15 plus DC have laws that also cover gender identity.

Here’s a map showing those 21 and 15 states:

Legislation prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and Gender Identity in private employment

(source)

And here’s a map showing legislation covering both private and public employment:

Legislation Prohibiting Employment Discrimination on the Basis of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

(source)

An interesting new development: employers seem to be discriminating against the unemployed. When evaluating candidates for positions, employers prefer to hire someone who already has a job elsewhere. They often even announce in their job postings that they don’t hire applicants who aren’t currently working. Unemployed candidates, even if they have the same qualifications, are refused because their current lack of a job is supposed to signal laziness or other disqualifying characteristics. Some therefore propose to include also discrimination of the unemployed in legislation prohibiting employment discrimination. Others think that would be a bad idea subjecting businesses to frivolous lawsuits every time an unemployed person fails to get a job.

More on discrimination here. More human rights maps here.

Human Rights Video (24): Gender Discrimination

An interesting talk about gendercide, gender differences in child mortality and in literacy and education, human trafficking, maternal mortality etc.

More human rights videos are here.

Discrimination (9): The Beauty Bias

Although someone’s looks and attractiveness aren’t explicitly mentioned in human rights law as prohibited grounds of discrimination, we can safely say that the general prohibition on discrimination does apply to discrimination based on appearance, just like it applies to discrimination of people belonging to a certain race, sex, religion etc. This statement may sound extreme – and some will call it the first step on a slippery slope – but I think it’s a justified statement given the fact that appearance based discrimination can be just as harmful as more traditional types of discrimination.

People generally prefer beautiful individuals and express this preference by giving them certain advantages. One symptom of the beauty bias is the beauty premium: in the U.S., and probably in most other countries, an attractive person earns more: the premium is about $250.000 over the course of a lifetime, compared to the least attractive. Monthly averages point to a difference between 10 and 12%, even in professions where looks wouldn’t seem to matter. Daniel Hamermesh (in “Beauty Pays“) found evidence of differences in promotions, risks of unemployment, credit facilities etc.

A number of role-playing, laboratory studies have demonstrated that more attractive men are more often hired, but the laboratory data for women are less consistent. … more attractive men had higher starting salaries and they continued to earn more over time. For women, there was no effect of attractiveness for starting salaries, but more attractive women earned more later on in their jobs. (source)

There’s no reason to believe that beautiful people deserve this kind of advantage since they generally aren’t more intelligent, productive, etc. (although some disagree about productivity). It’s simply the case that people who decide about employment, pay and career prefer beautiful people. Beauty brings along a degree of self-confidence I guess, which may persuade (possible) employers and makes them believe – correctly or not – that with higher self-confidence comes higher productivity. But that isn’t all that’s happening:

even when the experimenters controlled for self-confidence, they found that employers overestimated the productivity of beautiful people. (source)

Marilyn Monroe

So it looks like the beauty bias is just that, a bias, much like the bias against women and blacks.

The beauty bias can be measured because a

common standard of beauty does exist. Based on an attractiveness scale of one to five, most people surveyed will come to near agreement on a test subject’s looks, a finding that holds true across all cultures. (source)

By the way, the beauty bias operates in other areas as well. Beautiful candidates are more successful in democratic elections. And ugly criminals face rough justice:

Stephen Ceci and Justin Gunnell, two researchers at Cornell University, gave students case studies involving real criminal defendants and asked them to come to a verdict and a punishment for each. The students gave unattractive defendants prison sentences that were, on average, 22 months longer than those they gave to attractive defendants. (source)

Also:

11 percent of surveyed couples say they would abort a fetus predisposed toward obesity. College students tell surveyors they’d rather have a spouse who is an embezzler, drug user, or a shoplifter than one who is obese. (source)

Of course, earning a little less and having a smaller chance of being elected aren’t the world’s gravest human rights violations. It’s not as if we still banish the ugly from the public square:

In the 19th century, many American cities banned public appearances by “unsightly” individuals. A Chicago ordinance was typical: “Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting subject … shall not … expose himself to public view, under the penalty of a fine of $1 for each offense.” (source)

However, the evidence above suggests that beauty does play an important role in many different areas, making the impact of appearance based discrimination potentially large. Hence the obvious question: should ugly people be protected against discrimination? Should there be a law making it illegal to pay people more simply because of their looks? After all, there seems to be no difference between this form of discrimination and more traditional forms. All forms of discrimination impose a disadvantage on a group of people for no other reason than their group membership.

However, legal protections would require a public determination of beauty and ugliness. And they would require the ugly to step forward and claim damages or benefits. That’s stigmatizing, and open to discussion: there is, as stated, a common standard of beauty, but there can still be disagreement on specific cases, especially along the margins. Beauty is to some extent in the eye of the beholder, and if you’re labeled as ugly by some or even by the majority, there may still be others who think the world of you. Including yourself. De gustibus non est disputandum. The same isn’t true for gender, sexual orientation and race (with some caveats for the latter). When governments sanction a universal scale of attractiveness we’re going down a dangerous route because this can ossify opinions about beauty and lead to even more discrimination. And then there’s the issue of self-esteem: would people be willing to apply for official recognition of their ugliness, even if the money is good?

Posts on similar subjects, such as colorism and heightism, are here and here. More of my drawings are here.

Racism (20): Racial Discrimination in Marijuana Arrests

Marijuana use by black residents of Washington DC is only slightly higher than among white residents. Given that blacks are slightly more numerous in DC than whites, we should – if criminal justice were fair – also see only slightly more blacks arrested for marijuana use. Surprise, surprise: that’s not the case. In 2007, 91 percent of those arrested for marijuana were black. Adjusting for population, African-Americans are eight times more likely to be arrested.

(source, source, the drawing makes it look like blacks are more than 11 times more likely to get arrested – 8*11=91 – but that doesn’t take into account the fact that blacks are slightly more numerous in DC – hence the correct number is 8 times)

A similar pattern for Chicago (where whites are more numerous than blacks):

marijuana arrest rates by race, Chicago

(source, click image to enlarge)

And this is the case for many if not all types of crimes. The racial distribution of inmates in U.S. prisons is highly negative for black Americans. Whereas they only make up 12% of the total U.S. population, they represent more than 40% of all inmates. It’s obvious from the case of cannabis that this difference isn’t due to a higher level of involvement in crime. I wonder, could racial profiling perhaps explain something? Actually, I don’t wonder…

Racism (20): Evidence of Colorism

(source)

Colorism is prejudice of or discrimination against other people based on skin color. The concept is different from racism because it’s usually used to describe discrimination within a certain race or ethnic group, based on the tone of skin color, rather than discrimination of an entire race or ethnic group. In general, this means that lighter skin tones are preferred and darker skin is considered less desirable. Lighter-skinned members of a certain race or ethnic group can discriminate against members with darker tones within the same group, but colorism more often means a general social preference for lighter skins.

Separation of light and darkness, from the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo

One cause of colorism may be a traditional and historical preference for light and an abhorrence of darkness, light being good and godly, dark being evil and scary. However, I won’t explore the causes and just limit myself to some examples. There’s the one I mentioned some time ago, and then there’s this one:

Villanova researchers studied more than 12,000 cases of African-American women imprisoned in North Carolina and found that women with lighter skin tones received more-lenient sentences and served less time than women with darker skin tones. The researchers found that light-skinned women were sentenced to approximately 12 percent less time behind bars than their darker-skinned counterparts. Women with light skin also served 11 percent less time than darker women.

The study took into account the type of crimes the women committed and each woman’s criminal history to generate apples-to-apples comparisons. The work builds on previous studies by Stanford University, the University of Colorado at Boulder and other institutions, which have examined how “black-looking” features and skin tone can impact black men in the criminal-justice arena. …

Part of the reason may simply come down to how pretty jurors consider a defendant to be, and that being light-skinned and thin (also a factor studied in the research) are seen as more attractive. (source)

More on discrimination in incarceration is here.

What is Democracy? (54): Kallocracy?

Ronald Reagan looking handsome

Beautiful people have a number of advantages in social life. They earn more, even in occupations where appearance does not seem relevant to job performance. And, somewhat surprisingly, the beauty premium – and the corresponding ugliness penalty – are higher for men than for women. (I say surprisingly because we usually think that women are more often judged on the basis of their looks). A related effect is heightism: tall people, who are often considered to be more beautiful, also earn more.

And it’s not just in salaries that beauty makes a difference. Beautiful people are also more successful in democratic politics. They are more likely to be elected and, again, the marginal effect of beauty is larger for male candidates than for female candidates. So democracy is in fact kallocracy, rule of the beautiful (from the Greek “kallos“).

But why is there a political benefit of good looks? Probably because there’s a general benefit of being beautiful and because people generally – and hence also in politics – value good looking people more than the rest of us. Psychological experiments have shown that a snap judgment of whether we like someone’s face determines what we believe about that person’s character. And character is important in politics. There’s also the fact that the visual media give more attention to beautiful politicians, something which probably translates into a higher voter share.

Makes you doubt the value of democracy, doesn’t it? And makes you wonder whether we wouldn’t be better off handing over politics to some kind of elite. More positively, perhaps we should start seriously considering a type of democracy that isn’t focused on the selection of candidates through the means of a media circus.

More posts in this series are here.

The Causes of Poverty (45): Bad Luck

(source)

Some of the poor are victims of bad luck. That’s not something which is sufficiently understood. Agreed, others dig their own grave or get their graves dug by crooked capitalists, unfair international rules, overly optimistic financial institutions causing a global economic crisis, heartless politicians etc. However, there are cases in which the link between someone’s actions or intentions – self-regarding or other-regarding – and someone’s poverty is very weak indeed and in which it’s better to say that it’s a good dose of bad luck that drives people over the brink. And I’m not just thinking about the guy losing his job because of illness or accident.

The data are very clear. In essence, if you have the bad luck of being

• a small person
• a black person
• a woman (especially a single mother)
• an adoptee
• a less than beautiful person
• an obese person
• or a combination of any or all of these largely unchosen and uninflicted characteristics

then you’ll earn less, sometimes a lot less than average, and you’ll run a higher risk of becoming poor.

Maybe you would reply that people with some of these characteristics don’t earn less because they had the bad luck of being born like that – e.g. black, female, short etc. – but because employers are racist or prejudiced against women or short people. True, but not always. Poverty rates among blacks in the U.S. are a lot higher than average, but only part of this gap can be explained by racist employers. Other parts of the explanation, such as education levels, statistical discrimination etc., can’t be linked immediately or exclusively to racial bias.

Or maybe you would reply that some people have themselves to blame for some of their harmful characteristics, e.g. being obese or a single mother. That, in other words, these characteristics are chosen and self-inflicted and not a matter of bad luck. That is also only partly true. Obesity can be genetically determined, and single parenthood can be the result of misguided policies such as the war on drugs.

More posts in this series are here.

(image source)

Racism (18): Human Rights and Affirmative Action

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 test scores, affirmative action will add other selection criteria such as race, gender, ethnicity, language, religion etc. Maybe in certain cases the initial selection criteria (e.g. test scores) are dumped altogether because it’s assumed that they reflect racial bias or because past discrimination makes it difficult for discriminated groups to achieve good test scores.

As you can see from this description, affirmative action policies are usually internal policies implemented by organizations or institutions (schools, businesses, representative bodies etc.) wishing to become more diverse and more representative of society at large, although they can also be imposed by the government. It’s common – but not necessary – for affirmative action policies to work with quotas, i.e. fixed percentages of selectees from historically disadvantaged groups.

(source)

Now, how should we evaluate affirmative action from the perspective of human rights? Some see affirmative action as a means to compensate for past human rights violations and past exclusion. A minority which has been discriminated in the past may still find it difficult today to achieve equality of opportunity today. Affirmative action is then intended to break a self-continuing pattern of exclusion. Combined with other policies such as reparations, welfare, anti-discrimination laws etc., affirmative action will hopefully achieve more equality. According to this view, affirmative action is necessary from a human rights perspective.

However, it’s equally possible to argue that affirmative action doesn’t help or even undermines human rights. An example of the way in which it may not help is given by its application in education. Those African-Americans who are most likely to profit from affirmative action in access to higher education institutions aren’t the most disadvantaged of their group. On the contrary, they are probably among those who already have sufficiently good educational credentials (a requirement to be eligible to higher education in the first place), and they are by definition not the least advantaged. Affirmative action doesn’t seem to serve equality.

The same setting provides another example of the way in which affirmative action fails to help or even harms the cause of human rights. White people who enter education are by definition relatively young and hence least likely to have contributed to past discrimination. Their exclusion from a university resulting from the preferential selection of African-Americans harms their right to equal treatment for no good reason. It looks like discrimination as a means to fight discrimination, racism as a means to fight racism. Affirmative action is then supposed to harm the rights of whites. It’s even possible that a poor white boy, who would profit a lot from acceptance by a highly ranked university, is excluded in order to benefit a rich black boy who will have a decent life even without any education. That seems perverse to many opponents of affirmative action who argue that all racial classifications should be abandoned and all selection policies should be color-blind.

There are a few possible counter-arguments against this position. It’s true that those who are excluded or not selected because of affirmative action programs probably aren’t individually responsible for the historical disadvantages imposed on the beneficiaries of those programs, and therefore shouldn’t “pay” for correcting those disadvantages. However, it may still be true that they benefit from continuing inequality. For example, if women are systematically excluded from some professions, men in general benefit from this exclusion, even if they haven’t excluded women themselves. (That’s an argument made by Mary Anne Warren among others). Also, if African-Americans have traditionally been excluded from higher quality educational institutions, it’s likely that the better test scores presented by whites and required to enter university do not simply represent higher ability. Discrimination has benefited and continues to benefit whites in terms of test scores, even those whites who are not in the least responsible for the substandard basic education received by blacks. Demanding that only test scores be used as a criterion for selection in universities is not the way to avoid discrimination (of whites) but the way to cement discrimination (of blacks).

Moreover, even if it’s true that some whites are unjustly discriminated against by affirmative action programs, one might argue that this is a small price to pay for correcting a much higher number of cases of anti-black discrimination. Although personally I’m weary of sacrificing the rights of some for the benefit of others.

Also, to the extent that it’s true that affirmative action means fighting discrimination with discrimination, we should realize that the two kinds of “discrimination” are not at all the same. The type of discrimination that affirmative action is supposed to correct is a discrimination motivated by racial animus and intended to stigmatize some people as “inferior”. If affirmative action is a kind of discrimination, it’s one that has other motives. Whites who are excluded from a university because of affirmative action programs aren’t excluded because we believe that whites are inferior or because we don’t like them. However, it’s probably cold comfort for whites to know that their discrimination is not motivated by hatred.

And finally, affirmative action can be defended on a number of other consequentialist grounds that have nothing to do with the possible compensation or correction of injustices. For instance, allowing more blacks in law school can bring about a justice system that is seen as more legitimate by black citizens. More blacks in the police force may result in police departments that are more legitimate, more acceptable and more authoritative to black people. More female CEOs or professors may inspire more young women to follow their lead or to be more successful generally. More blacks in medical school may result in better healthcare for communities that are currently not well served. Diversity in school may have some educational advantages: proximity to people from other races may reduce racism and may better prepare students for their future lives in a diverse society. In general, a society that is representative in all fields is much more legitimate in the eyes of all citizens. And, last but not least, diversity improves the functioning of the marketplace of ideas. So, if all of this or some of this is true, affirmative action can yield more overall respect for human rights.

Discrimination (8): What’s Wrong With Discrimination?

White wife to white husband: "I wish you were not allowed in here"; so we're doing blacks a favor by not allowing them in saloons...

(source unknown)

Let me try out a few possible answers to the question in the title of this post:

1. 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 lot of friends or none at all, etc. None of those types of differential treatment seem to pose a moral problem per se.
2. Is discrimination wrong because it’s differential treatment of persons based on the mere fact of their membership of a group? That can’t be true either. We don’t allow the blind to drive a car, we don’t allow the mentally ill to run for political office, and we don’t allow inmates to move freely across the country. Again, usually this is done without violating our moral intuitions. Differential treatment based on group membership may be wrong in some cases but it’s not discrimination per se.
3. Is discrimination wrong because it’s disadvantageous treatment of some relative to others? Again, the answer is no. We certainly impose a disadvantage on inmates when we confine them to a prison building.
4. Is discrimination wrong because it’s disadvantageous treatment that is morally objectionable? If I, as the sole racist member of a tolerant society, refuse to eat at a restaurant owned by an African American or serve African Americans in my own restaurant, I act in a morally objectionable way, and impose a small disadvantage on some people. And yet these people are not discriminated against in any meaningful sense of the word.
5. Is discrimination wrong because it’s differential treatment of persons based on some of their immutable characteristics, for example their gender or skin color? Again, the answer has to be no. Sometimes it’s justified to treat persons differently based on their immutable characteristics or on characteristics that are beyond their control. We don’t allow one legged basketball players to compete in the NBA. And, conversely, sometimes it’s not justified to treat persons differently based on their self-chosen lifestyle. Forcing vegetarians to eat meat, for example, is wrong.
6. Is discrimination wrong because it’s differential treatment of persons based on characteristics that are superficial or irrelevant, for example when we refuse to eat somewhere simply because the restaurant owner is black? That can’t be the case either. If I prefer to marry a blond because I believe blond women are better wives, I’m not discriminating against non-blonds. And if I’m the only one refusing to eat in a black man’s restaurant, it’s hard for him to claim that he’s discriminated against.
7. Is discrimination wrong because it fails to treat people as individuals and relies on inaccurate stereotypes? For example, because I believe African Americans can’t cook properly and I therefore don’t bother to check out the food of an individual African American restaurant owner? Again, discrimination must be something else, for two reasons. First, there are laws against discrimination based on correct stereotypes, so-called statistical discrimination. Employers can’t just refuse to hire young women simply because young women are more likely to have children and hence be absent from work. Second, I may rely on inaccurate stereotypes and not engage in discrimination. For example, if I organize a successful boycott of German classical music based on the erroneous belief that this music is inferior to French classical music, I don’t discriminate orchestras or record labels that produce German classical music.

racist protester at Little Rock Central High School

So then, why is discrimination wrong? Discrimination is wrong because it is a denial of rights. Not all denials of rights are discrimination – for example I imagine that Kim Jong Il denies the rights of all North Koreans consistently without discrimination. But discrimination is a denial of rights, and a denial of a particular type, namely the unequal denial of rights.

But not every case of unequal denial of rights is a case of discrimination. For instance, if some people in police custody are beaten up and others aren’t that’s not necessarily discrimination. Discrimination is the unequal denial of the rights of members of a socially salient group, and for no other reason than their membership of that group. It must be a socially salient group, i.e. a group that is an important and stable distinction in society, not a fleeting and inconsequential identity such as the group of people with blue eyes or people of the age of 40. Those groups aren’t salient and hence won’t be discriminated.

So, discrimination occurs when rights are granted to some and taken away from others, for no other reason than their membership of a socially salient group.

Drinking fountain on the Halifax County Courthouse (North Carolina) in April 1938

What exactly is a denial of rights? It’s an action (or a law, a custom etc.) that makes it impossible or very difficult to exercise one’s rights. That means that there won’t be discrimination if for example one lonely racist shop owner refuses to service blacks. Those blacks can easily exercise their rights by avoiding the racist shop. Only if the number of such cases is high and those cases occur systematically will there be denial of rights and hence discrimination. The policy of an army to reject homosexuals is discrimination because homosexuals can’t simply go to another army to serve their country. Racial discrimination at the time of Jim Crow and segregation was real discrimination because it substantially reduced the options of blacks who could not exercise their rights elsewhere.

If we revisit some of the examples given above we can see that they are not necessarily cases of discrimination as it is defined here. Giving people low grades or low salaries can be justified if it’s done for good reasons, i.e. not simply because of people’s membership of groups. But even if it’s done because of membership, it’s not discrimination if it’s isolated and if people can easily go elsewhere for their proper grades or salaries. Discrimination isn’t just about unequal treatment but also about options. Not all unequal treatment is discrimination. It’s discrimination when it also takes away the rights of those treated unequally. And their rights are taken away, not when there’s a single instance of unequal treatment based on group membership, but when there are many such instances and people can’t easily exercise their rights elsewhere. Their rights in these examples are the right to education and the right to fair wages. The same is true in the case of the sole racist member of a tolerant society refusing to eat at a restaurant owned by an African American. The restaurant owner isn’t denied his right to sell his food because one guy refuses to eat there.

More on discrimination here and here.

Human Rights Maps (121): Residential Segregation in the U.S.

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 “different kinds of humans” into different groups and the illegality of interaction or contact. Jim Crow laws, laws regarding interracial marriage etc. have in the past enforced segregation. But even when it’s illegal it can be maintained by way of prejudice, discrimination, selective rental behavior or employment decisions, vigilante violence (e.g. lynching), intimidation, ghettoization etc. Below I focus on non-legally enforced residential segregation in present-day U.S.

Over the 20th century, the residential patterns of US households became increasingly divided by race. From 1940 to 2000, the share of the metropolitan white population who lived in the suburban ring increased from 38% to 74%, whereas, even by 2000, over 60% of the black metropolitan population remained in central cities. (source)

In the hundred largest metropolitan areas, where most whites and blacks live,

the exposure of the average white person to black people has risen by two percentage points, from 5.5 percent in 1980 to 7.6 percent today. 

The decline of isolation among African-Americans since 1980 has been overwhelmingly due to the growth of Latino populations in black neighborhoods. The presence of Latinos in black neighborhoods has doubled since 1980, from 8.2 to 16.4 percent. Similarly, the declining homogeneity of white neighborhoods does not reflect the long-sought residential integration of whites and blacks, but instead the influx of Latinos into white neighborhoods. In 1980 Latinos were 5.5 percent of residents in majority-white neighborhoods. Today they are 11.2 percent. (source)

These two maps show current residential segregation in New York and Chicago respectively:

residential segregation in New York

(source/source/source/source, one dot equals 25 people and is color-coded based on race: White is pink; Black is blue; Hispanic is orange, and Asian is green)

residential segregation in Chicago

(source/source/source/source, one dot equals 25 people and is color-coded based on race: White is pink; Black is blue; Hispanic is orange, and Asian is green)

Another approach to residential segregation is in the map below:

(source, read the source for the methodology)

Where people decide to live is obviously their free choice and I don’t think anybody seriously defends forced relocation as a solution to residential segregation. However, if residential segregation is the result, not of free choice but of racial poverty, conscious or unconscious discrimination by landlords or employers or any other type of racial bias, then it is a problem. However, rather than trying to solve this problem directly, one should look at the underlying causes of residential segregation and do something about those.

More on segregation. More on how segregation is measured. More maps on discrimination. More human rights maps.

Related Articles

• Check Out The Extreme Racial Segregation In America’s Biggest Cities (businessinsider.com)
• How White Is Your Neighborhood? [Urban Anthropology] (gawker.com)
• Segregation and Exploitation in the Old South (blogs.forbes.com)
• “Mapping Race and Ethnicity” and related posts (rustwire.com)

Measuring Human Rights (15): Measuring Segregation Using the Dissimilarity Index

"At the bus station in Durham, North Carolina." May 1940, Jack Delano

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, if it’s not, then we usually call it segregation and we believe it’s a moral wrong that should be corrected. People have a right to live where they want, go to school where they want, and move freely about (with some restrictions necessary to protect the property rights and the freedom of association of others). If they are prohibited from doing so, either by law (e.g. Jim Crow) or by social pressure (e.g. discrimination by landlords or employers), then government policy and legislation should step in in order to better protect people’s rights. Forced desegregation is then an option, and this can take various forms, such as anti-discrimination legislation in employment and rent, forced integration of schools, busing, zoning laws, subsidized housing etc.

There’s also some room for intervention when segregation is not the result of conscious, unconscious, legal or social discrimination. For example, poor people tend to be segregated in poor districts, not because other people make it impossible for them to live elsewhere but because their poverty condemns them to certain residential areas. The same is true for schooling. In order to avoid poverty traps or membership poverty, it’s better to do something about that as well.

In all such cases, the solution should not necessarily be found in physical desegregation, i.e. forcibly moving people about. Perhaps the underlying causes of segregation, rather than segregation itself, should be tackled. For example, rather than moving poor children to better schools or poor families to better, subsidized housing, perhaps we should focus on their poverty directly.

However, before deciding what to do about segregation, we have to know its extent. Is it a big problem, or a minor one? How does it evolve? Is it getting better? How segregated are residential areas, schools, workplaces etc.? And to what extent is this segregation involuntary? The latter question is a hard one, but the others can be answered. There are several methods for measuring different kinds of segregation. The most popular measure of residential segregation is undoubtedly the so-called index of dissimilarity. If you have a city, for example, that is divide into N districts (or sections, census tracts or whatever), the dissimilarity index measures the percentage of a group’s population that would have to change districts for each district to have the same percentage of that group as the whole city. Formally:

Where bi is the number of blacks in district i, B is the number of blacks in the city as a whole, wi is the number of whites in district i, and W is the number of whites in the city as a whole. This formula gives you a number between 0 and 1, 0 for no segregation and 1 for complete segregation (similar to the Gini coefficient).

The dissimilarity index is not perfect, mainly because it depends on the sometimes arbitrary way in which cities are divided into districts or sections. Which means that modifying city partitions can influence levels of “segregation”, which is not something we want. Take this extreme example:

(source)

The image shows the same city twice, with two different partitions, A and B situation. No one has moved residency between situations A and B, but the district boundaries have been altered radically. In situation A with the districts drawn vertically, there is no segregation (dissimilarity index of 0). But in situation B, with the districts drawn horizontally, there is complete segregation (index = 1), although no one has physically moved. That’s why other, complementary measures are probably necessary for correct information about levels of segregation. Some of those measures are proposed here and here.

More on segregation is here. More posts in this series are here.

The Causes of Wealth Inequality (15): Slavery

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 geographic differentiation allows us to identify the link between past slavery and current outcomes. We start by reviewing, over a cross section of counties, the effect of the intensity of slavery in 1870 on the current level of income per capita. For the year 2000, we find no evidence that those counties that employed slave labour more heavily are poorer than those that did so to a lesser extent or not at all (even though a negative relationship between slavery and income was still present until 1970).

Next we turn to the impact of slavery on current income disparities and we find that it is indeed associated with a higher degree of income inequality. In other words, former slave counties are more unequal in the present day. They also show a higher poverty rate and a higher degree of racial inequality. Moreover, the data say that the impact of slavery on economic inequality and poverty runs through its impact on racial inequality, and not vice versa. (source)

How exactly does slavery lead to long turn income inequality? If slavery is seen as a symptom of feelings of racial superiority, then it’s not far-fetched to assume that those feelings didn’t die with slavery and continued to affect blacks by way of discriminatory policies and practices, including in wage determination and other areas that influence economic inequality, such as the provision of education.

This, by the way, also makes the case for reparations a bit stronger. More posts in this series are here.

Related Articles

• The historical roots of inequality (voxeu.org)

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (70): Discrimination of Homosexuals in the Turkish Army

Scene from Fassbinder's movie "Querelle"

[I]t’s practically impossible for Turkish men to avoid exposure to military life, and the burden is on them to prove they are unfit for service. Every man between 20 and 41 years old is required to serve at least six months. Exemptions are granted only under two conditions: a mental or physical disability, and homosexuality. Turkey does not recognize the right to conscientious objection. …

Astoundingly, some gays … report that they were asked to produce photographs showing them as participants in anal intercourse. Even then, Turkish authorities are said to apply special criteria. According to the military, and Turkish society at large, penetrating another man does not necessarily qualify as a homosexual act; only being penetrated is undisputedly homosexual. Hence the unwritten rule when it comes to such photos: “The man should be in the passive position, receiving from behind,” L. explains, “and looking at the camera. Preferably while smiling.” (source, source)

More posts in this series are here. More on discrimination of homosexuals is here. More on the related topic of DADT is here.

Racism (15): Does the Stigma of “Acting White” Explain the Racial Achievement Gap in Education in the U.S.?

In many areas of life, different racial groups in the U.S. achieve unequal results. African-Americans earn less, are more likely to be in prison, are more often ill etc. So it’s no surprise that there’s an achievement gap in education as well.

At nine months old, there are no detectable cognitive differences between black and white babies. Differences emerge as early as age two, and by the time black children enter kindergarten they are lagging whites by 0.64 standard deviations in math and 0.40 in reading. On every subject at every grade level, there are large and important achievement differences between blacks and whites that continue to grow as children progress through school. Even accounting for a host of background factors, the achievement gap remains large and statistically significant. (source)

Take a look at these two graphs:

(source)

While the education gap seems to be closing, it remains wide. It’s likely that other multicultural societies face the same kind of problem. Racists have an obvious explanation: racial inferiority! Anti-racists have an equally obvious but more convincing explanation: racists! But apart from the effects of lingering racist discrimination there’s also a more interesting cause of the education gap: the stigma of “acting white“, causing minority students to suffer from the negative prejudices of their ethnic peers. Roland G. Fryer has looked at this, and found that it can explain a lot.

“Acting white” is a kind of negative peer pressure. Black peer communities impose costs on those members who are perceived to be “acting white” (or are trying to “act white”). The criticism of “acting white” and the costs imposed on those who are believed to “act white” lead to the avoidance of behavior that is seen as the traditional prerogative of whites. The avoided behavior can be quite harmless, for instance wearing clothes of a particular brand that is believed to be typical of whites, or giving your children certain “white” names. But the avoided behavior can also undermine people’s education, for example when people are discouraged to use standard English, to read books or to achieve high grades. (And even the seemingly harmless habit of giving your kids “black” names can result in harm. It’s known, for instance, the employers regularly discriminate people with “black” names while processing job applications).

The individuals exposed to all these kinds of negative peer pressure have a disincentive to invest in their education. They deliberately underachieve in order to avoid social sanctions. Naturally, the degree of the disincentive depends on the nature and the level of the costs imposed: those costs can be the threat of rejection, ridicule etc. Different people will suffer different costs and will perceive the gravity of the costs differently, but as long as there is a perceived trade-off between acceptance and authenticity on the one hand and achievement on the other, there will also be an achievement gap.

Fryer measures the impact of the stigma using social popularity, number of friends and friendship patterns plotted against school grades. His results clearly show an inverse relationship between grades and popularity for non-whites:

(source)

Not surprisingly, the effect of “acting white” is more severe in integrated schools than in predominantly black schools. The reason is the higher level of competition between communities and the perceived threats between groups:

In an achievement-based society where two groups, for historical reasons, achieve at noticeably different levels, the group with lower achievement levels is at risk of losing its most successful members, especially in situations where successful individuals have opportunities to establish contacts with outsiders. Over the long run, the group faces the danger that its most successful members will no longer identify with its interests, and group identity will itself erode. To forestall such erosion, groups may try to reinforce their identity by penalizing members for differentiating themselves from the group. The penalties are likely to increase whenever the threats to group cohesion intensify. (source)

This explanation of the causes of the “acting white” stigma, based on the desire of groups to preserve their identity in the face of external threats to their internal coherence, is more convincing that the two major alternative explanations:

• Blacks have developed a culture of investing themselves in alternative pursuits rather than in education because historically academic achievement was the prerogative of whites. This explanation reeks of historical determinism.
• Blacks have developed a culture of “victimology” and deliberately engage in cultural sabotage. This explanation can be perceived as racist.

“Acting white” explains a lot but surely not everything. It’s likely that the racial poverty and income gaps also contribute to the education gap, as do patterns in family structure, incarceration rates of black fathers, school quality etc. Stereotype threat can also play a part. As well as some good ol’ racism, of course.

Related Articles

• Closing the Racial Achievement Gap: It’s Time to Look Beyond the Classroom (psychologytoday.com)
• An Antidote to the ‘Acting White’ Phenomenon: Segregated Schools? (theroot.com)
• NYT: Black education gap looks even bleaker (msnbc.msn.com)

Racist Stereotypes, A Collection of Images

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 hung or with fat buttocks. Such representations serve to signal, confirm and spread the conviction that blacks are inferior. This conviction in turn justifies all sorts of discrimination.

Very common is the caricature of funny looking big-lipped black folk:

The big lip stereotype is of course closely connected to the monkey stereotype:

And a monkey isn’t really that much different from a savage:

The text reads: “Just leave that cigar with me! Leave, go of it, you chimpanzee”. Most racial prejudices are present in this one: the big yellow eyes, big lips, funny hair, savage customs (cannibalism), leopard skin dress, beads etc. Surprisingly, the savages did manage to produce a professional looking banner announcing the banquet.

And just to show you that we’re not talking about ancient history:

(I think the original non-photoshopped image is actually of a South American Amazonian Indian, by the way)

The savage nature of blacks wasn’t believed to be limited to their jungle life and cannibalism. Often they were also depicted as being fond of bestiality:

It’s not just male blacks who are deemed to be sexually deviant. There’s also the stereotype of the oversexualized black female. Typical is the so-called Jezebel stereotype. The Jezebel, named after the Bible figure, is a loose woman who wants sex all of the time. Of course, the usual racist stereotypes are also included: big lips, funny hair…:

Apart from the Jezebel stereotype, there’s also the Sapphire and the Mammy stereotype, both quite common. A Sapphire is an overbearing woman who, often holding her hands on her hips and talking all the time, bullies her man:

The Mammy figure (also called the “Aunt Jemima stereotype”) is a domestic servant, good-natured, overweight, loud and a good cook, invariably wearing a headscarf:

Male blacks as well were often depicted as servants:

“Rastus,” the Cream of Wheat Cook, created in 1893 as a likable image to help sell packages of “breakfast porridge.” Rastus is marketed as a symbol of wholeness and stability. The toothy, well-dressed Black chef happily serves breakfast to a nation. The language that he uses is typically “simple”.

And then there’s the strange watermelon stereotype. The origin of the link between blacks and watermelons is unclear. Maybe it has something to do with slaves stealing food from the field:

 

Whatever the origin, the stereotype does serve to make them look stupid and childlike. And, of course, there’s the black athlete, again highly animalized:

(source)

Other collections of racist images are here, here, here, here, here and here. The whole series of human rights images is here.

Related Articles

• ‘Training away stereotypes’: People trained to think in opposition to stereotypes are more receptive to advertising starring minority actors (sciencedaily.com)
• Modern Minstrelsy: Exploring Racist Stereotypes in Literature and Life (learning.blogs.nytimes.com)

Gender Discrimination (23): Reverse Gender Discrimination in Criminal Justice

Using data obtained from the United States Sentencing Commission’s records, we examine whether there exists any gender-based bias in criminal sentencing decisions. … Our results indicate that women receive more lenient sentences even after controlling for circumstances such as the severity of the offense and past criminal history. …

Studies of federal prison sentences consistently find unexplained racial and gender disparities in the length of sentence and in the probability of receiving jail time and departures from the Sentencing Guidelines. These disparities disfavor blacks, Hispanics, and men. A problem with interpreting these studies is that the source of the disparities remains unidentified. The gravest concern is that sentencing disparities are the result of prejudice, but other explanations have not been ruled out. For example, wealth and quality of legal counsel are poorly controlled for and are undoubtedly correlated with race. …

The findings regarding gender in the case of serious offenses are quite striking: the greater the proportion of female judges in a district, the lower the gender disparity for that district. I interpret this as evidence of a paternalistic bias among male judges that favors women. (source)

More on unconscious discrimination and incarceration rates.

Related Articles

• Defendant’s gender affects length of sentence (sciencedaily.com)

Racism (14): Race and Consumer Behavior

The iPod family

Some time ago, I’ve cited a study showing evidence of racist sorting by people looking for a job (white job seekers often avoid working for black managers, and white workers quit their jobs more rapidly when a white manager is replaced with a black manager). A similar phenomenon is race discrimination by buyers.

Do buyers discriminate based on race? This column describes an experiment in the US that advertised iPods online from black and white sellers. Black sellers received fewer offers at lower prices, doing better in markets with competition amongst buyers and worse in high-crime markets. The authors find evidence of both statistical and taste-based discrimination. … [I]t appears that discrimination may not “survive” in the presence of significant competition among buyers. Furthermore, black sellers do worst in the most racially isolated markets and markets with high property crime rates, suggesting a role for statistical discrimination in explaining the disparity. (source)

The important question is indeed to what extent this “sorting” on the part of buyers is motivated by statistical discrimination or by taste-based discrimination:

• Statistical discrimination means that race is used as a proxy for unobservable negative characteristics, maybe in this case a judgment about the probability that black sellers will be happy with a marginally lower sales price, given their statistically higher rates of poverty. Or perhaps there’s distrust based on unclear statistical judgments about the risk of buying fake or stolen goods, meeting sellers in an inconvenient or dangerous neighborhoods, or dealing with unreliable sellers who might not complete the transaction.
• Taste-based discrimination occurs when people just don’t like dealing with black people for no particular reason apart from the difference in race.

The study cited above uses a number of clever ways to disentangle these two effects. For instance, the inclusion of white tattooed sellers, who also received fewer and lower purchase offers, suggesting that part of the differences are due to statistical discrimination. Another part, however, is just plain racism. Black sellers are at a significant disadvantage on average, and that’s due to both statistical and taste-based discrimination.

More on statistical discrimination here.

Related Articles

• Rev. Gregory Seal Livingston: Is There Discrimination at the World Bank? (huffingtonpost.com)
• Unconscious bias is real challenge (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• The Visible Hand (freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com)

Discrimination (7): Statistical Discrimination v. Background Checks?

Employers often use background checks before deciding to hire someone. For example, they may check the criminal record of job candidates, their credit scores, health history etc. It’s somewhat understandable although not always acceptable that they are reluctant to hire someone who has been in jail, has been sick for a long time, or has proven to be undisciplined by not paying her bills.

Let’s focus on ex-convicts for the moment. These people have a hard time as it is, sometimes even for no good reason because they shouldn’t have been incarcerated in the first place (I argued here that many countries, and especially the U.S., put too many people in jail). So, allowing employers to use criminal background checks can force ex-convicts into a vicious circle: unable to find a job, they may be forced to go back to crime.

Furthermore, there’s a racial aspect to all of this: in the U.S., African Americans are more likely to be ex-convicts. According to some, this racial discrepancy is precisely the reason to allow criminal background checks. If employers aren’t allowed to check individual candidates, they will resort to statistical discrimination: they know that blacks are more likely to have a criminal record and so they won’t hire any blacks at all, just to be safe.

However, if you espouse this argument in favor of background checks, you essentially want to make things better for one disadvantaged group – blacks, who are generally disadvantaged in employment, see here – by making things worse for an even more disadvantaged group, namely ex-convicts. And that’s assuming that employers will hire more black people if they can use criminal background checks; but assuming that means assuming there’s no racism. Helping a disadvantaged group by harming an even more disadvantaged group is plainly absurd, and you can only fail to see that it’s absurd if you have an overriding fear of government regulation. Regulation should be kept in check but not at any price. I think in this case regulating businesses and outlawing background checks is the appropriate thing to do.

Let’s turn briefly to another type of background check: credit scores.

[M]illions of Americans, as a direct consequence of looking for work, have lower credit scores. … The use of credit checks in employment decisions should be banned. It is a form of discrimination against the poor — the codification and enforcement of class barriers. It is therefore a form of discrimination against those groups more likely to be poor. (source)

It seems there’s a

growing tendency of HR departments to check the credit scores of potential employees apparently deeming this data to be an important predictor of employee behavior. This creates a Catch-22 scenario for the unemployed where you can’t improve your credit score unless you get a job and you can’t get a job until you improve your credit score. (source)

Apart from the obvious fact that credit scores seem to be a type of knowledge that is much less useful for an employer compared to a criminal record – if your house burned down and your credit score is low as a result, does that make you a bad employee? – there’s a real issue for the poor here. They shouldn’t be discriminated against just for being poor. It’s not just a lack of conscientiousness or discipline that can lower your credit score. Back luck and poverty won’t help either. Some say the free market and competition will take care of this: employers stupid enough not to hire good poor people simply because they have a credit problem will lose out. Their competitors who don’t engage in credit checks will hire them, and those businesses will acquire a commercial advantage. I don’t know. Seems awfully optimistic to me.

By the way, all this is another reason to make unemployment insurance more generous:

I’d rather see our energy focused on longer-term, more generous unemployment benefits that might keep some people from trashing their credit while they look for a job. (source)

Related Articles

• Are Businesses That Use Background Checks in Hiring Guilty of Discrimination? (race.change.org)
• Background Checks in Hiring: Discrimination or Due Diligence? (blogs.wsj.com)
• EEOC: Employers can’t refuse to hire convicts (hotair.com)
• How Job Screening Can Become Discrimination (abcnews.go.com)

Discrimination (6): Should People Be Liable For Unconscious Discrimination?

First of all, it’s evident that people often have unconscious motives for their actions. For example, parents “wishing the best” for their children can act out of frustration about their own past failures. So it’s likely that some acts of discrimination are based on similar “deep” motives. Some of us who genuinely believe that we are colorblind may still avoid black neighborhoods at night, cross a lonely street when a tall black male comes our way, or favor a CV sent in by someone with a “‘Caucasian” name. Tests have shown that people are more biased than they admit to themselves. (You can test your own racism here).

So we may be violating anti-discrimination laws without “really” and consciously wanting to. You could say that in such cases we shouldn’t be prosecuted for breaking the law, because there is no intent on our part. Discrimination takes place but no one really wants it to take place. True, normally there’s an intent requirement when deciding liability: if you drive your car and you hit someone who crosses the road where he or she shouldn’t do so, you’re not criminally liable. You killed a person but didn’t intend to. In some cases, the lack of intent diminishes rather than removes liability: if you’re in a fight with someone and the other person dies because of your actions, you won’t be charged with homicide but with the lesser crime of manslaughter if you didn’t intend to murder.

As the example of manslaughter already makes clear, intent isn’t always necessary for liability (another example would be Eichmann). Hence, lack of intent can’t be the reason not to make unconscious discrimination a crime.

Anyway, intent or the absence of it is often very difficult to prove. In the case of homicide/manslaughter, you can use witness accounts or physical evidence, you can reconstruct the crime and try to figure out if the killing was planned or intended, or you can interrogate the perpetrator, and even then it’s rarely easy. Things seem to be much more difficult still in cases of unconscious discrimination. Looking for intent is basically trying to look inside people’s minds, which isn’t obvious, and when people fool their own minds it’s becomes even harder.

If we accept that unconscious discrimination should be a crime in certain cases, and perhaps equivalent to conscious discrimination, then the problem is how to prove that it took place. In the case of conscious discrimination, you can often rely on the utterances of the person(s) who discriminate. That’s evidently impossible in the case of unconscious discrimination. Perhaps you can’t prove it in individual cases – if one black person’s CV is rejected, it’s probably impossible to say it’s because of implicit or unconscious racism. However, if a company rejects a large number of such CVs, and correcting for other factors such as education or skill level doesn’t remove bias in the distribution, then you may perhaps have evidence of discrimination (that’s a technique that’s useful in cases of conscious discrimination as well, by the way). So you would need to rely on statistical analysis, something that usually isn’t done in the determination of criminal liability. It’s not because x % of all killings are manslaughter that everyone charged with a killing has x % change of “getting away” with manslaughter. The decision to sentence someone for the crime of murder or manslaughter is always made on an individual basis and not a statistical one, although past conduct of the suspect can sometimes come into play.

An additional difficulty: if we accept that laws aren’t only meant to punish but also to prevent and deter, it seems that the latter goal is futile in the case of unconscious discrimination. People who are not aware that they engage in discriminatory activities will hardly be persuaded by laws telling them to stop doing so.

I’m personally not yet ready to take a firm position on these issues. For more information on this topic, take a look at this interesting paper.

Related Articles

• Unconscious bias is real challenge (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

LGBT Rights (10): Increasing Numbers of People Live in Jurisdictions Where Same-Sex Marriage is Legal

(source, source, these numbers do not include domestic partnerships and other arrangements that are somewhat equivalent to, but clearly distinguished from, marriage)

It’s only a small percentage – about 3.7 – of the total global population, but the increase is encouraging. A map of the legal status of same-sex marriage in the countries around the world is here.

The large increase in 2008 in the numbers for the US (the green area, pushing up the yellow area for South Africa, where the numbers did not actually rise in 2008), followed by a similarly large decrease was due to the recognition by California courts of same-sex marriages, and the following reversal resulting from “Prop 8“, a popular vote that abolished the right. (The most recent turn of events is that Prop 8 has been judged unconstitutional by a Californian Court).

More on same sex marriage rights here and here. Some data on public opinion regarding this matter are here. A discussion of the conflict between same-sex marriage and religious liberty is here and here.

Related Articles

• Shifting Attitudes Take Gay Rights Fight Across Globe, Experts Say (socialpsychology.org)

Human Rights Poem (79): I am a Negro

Langston Hughes

(source)

I am a Negro, by Langston Hughes

I am a Negro:
Black as the night is black,
Black like the depths of my Africa.

I’ve been a slave:
Caesar told me to keep his door-steps clean.
I brushed the boots of Washington.

I’ve been a worker:
Under my hand the pyramids arose.
I made mortar for the Woolworth Building.

I’ve been a singer:
All the way from Africa to Georgia
I carried my sorrow songs.
I made ragtime.

I’ve been a victim:
The Belgians cut off my hands in the Congo.
They lynch me still in Mississippi.

I am a Negro:
Black as the night is black,
Black like the depths of my Africa.

More Langston Hughes. More about racism, slavery, lynching and Congo.

Discrimination (4): Private Discrimination, Freedom of Association and Property Rights

(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 implies that a restaurant owner for example should be able to segregate his restaurant or even refuse black customers for example. (This view is based on the libertarian opposition to government regulation of the private sector).
• Then there was the case of the Christian student’s union refusing gay members.
• A teacher in a Christian school got herself fired because of premarital sex.
• There’s the famous case of the Boy Scouts’ refusal to allow gay members (Boy Scouts of America v. Dale).
• The D.C. police department recently decided to no longer intervene in an ongoing protest by Muslim women over their place in area mosques. These women have provoked confrontations in mosques by claiming the right to worship next to men, a right refused by conservative Muslim men. The police initially escorted the women out of the mosques, as requested by the men, but won’t do that anymore. The men claim that the mosques are private institutions, and private property rights should prevail. The women, they say, are trespassers.
• And some time ago the British BNP, a racist political party, was forced to accept black members.

A similar but different case – because not based on prejudice or discrimination (except if you count PC as discriminating between views) – was the firing/quitting of journalist Helen Thomas following a politically incorrect and possibly antisemitic comment on Israel.

We can, of course, imagine an infinite number of similar cases:

• Can a gym be held liable for dismissing a fat fitness trainer?
• Should a business be able to offer a gays-only retirement home?
• Can a landlord invoke religious objections to renting to an unmarried or gay couple?
• Etc.

What all such real and imaginary cases have in common (even the Thomas case, which I’ll exclude from the current discussion because it’s slightly different and doesn’t – necessarily – involve discrimination) is that different values clash. Equality, equal treatment and the absence of discrimination on the one hand clashes with the freedom of association, the right to property and the freedom of contract on the other hand. (In the Thomas case, free speech clashes with freedom of employment contract).

If you’re a value pluralist – as I am – then these are hard cases. Property rights, freedom of association, freedom of contract (including in employment), equality and non-discrimination are all important values. It’s a right to hire or fire employees, accept or reject members of associations and serve or fail to serve customers on whatever basis you wish, even if this means discriminating certain employees, members or customers. But it’s also a right not to suffer discrimination. None of these values is by definition or a priori more important than the others. (If you think only freedom and property count, then you can wrap this up in a minute. Likewise if you think equality does count but is the automatic result of freedom. Don’t laugh, some actually think like that. Remember trickle down and the invisible hand).

All those rights are important, and when they clash, as in our examples, we’ll have to make a hard choice: which right in which case will receive priority? That will be, by definition, a case by case trade-off. You can’t use a general rule, since all these rights are – in the abstract – equally important. You can’t use a rule that says, for example, “property rights are equally important as equal treatment, except for bigots”. It’s not because you’re a bigot that you lose your property rights, your freedom of association or your freedom of contract. Those rights are human rights and intrinsically valuable.

So let’s assume that we will find many cases in which equal treatment is more important than property, contract or association rights. Pre-Civil-Rights-Act-America would be such a case. We will then engage in some justified anti-discrimination efforts that limit these other rights. And we will acknowledge that there is a limitation of rights going on. That there is a trade-off between rights and that the limitations of certain rights don’t mean that those rights are no longer important. It’s a necessary evil and an unfortunate consequence of clashing rights.

We’ll also find numerous cases in which property, contract or association rights will outweigh discrimination concerns. The example of the fitness teacher given above (who doesn’t have a right to employment in the business of his choice), or the gay retirement home (non-gay pensioners have ample opportunities elsewhere) would be cases like this. The same goes for the case of the guy protesting ladies’ night. Not all consequences of discrimination are equally harmful.

Consequently, anti-discrimination efforts can’t be an absolute concern and can’t become the only preoccupation. Otherwise, other rights would suffer needlessly. A balance has to be found. We have to decide how far our anti-discrimination measures can go without weighing too heavily on other rights, and how far bigots can be allowed to use their rights without harming the targets of their bigotry. (Or how far non-bigots can discriminate for non-bigoted reasons).

And when attempting to make this balance, we have to look at the specific circumstances and the relative harm that we can do on both sides. Small scale bigotry against a single individual who has numerous outside options – another employer, another restaurant, another organization etc. – won’t initiate anti-discrimination action, certainly not by the government. Jim Crow, on the other hand, inflicted enormous harm on large groups of people during many decades. And it would not have been abolished by a few activists, boycotts or sit-ins. Nor, for that matter, by the government ending its own discrimination. Active government action against private – and public – discrimination was required. And did happen in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and later decisions which banned private actors from withholding services or denying employment on the basis of race (or of religion, sex, or national origin). Those anti-discrimination efforts did harm property and other rights but it’s clear that a failure to intervene would have meant perpetuating the greater harm of Jim Crow. I’ll come back to the topic of government vs private intervention against discrimination in a moment.

A parenthesis: some cases fall outside the current discussion. Government mandated discrimination in public places – trains, buses, public schools etc. – is completely and utterly unacceptable in all cases since the government can never be allowed to discriminate. Government discrimination also doesn’t cause a conflict of rights. The topic here is strictly private discrimination.

Take a look at this quote:

Wasn’t racial discrimination basically a private affair? Did we really have to enact federal laws and regulations to end it? Many of these laws dictate how people run their businesses and associations, and these restrictions are problematic to say the least. Even if we do find discrimination wrong, isn’t it a private wrong? (source)

In fairness to the author, he doesn’t seem to answer completely in the affirmative. And yet, why would you even ask those questions? Well, you should if you’re a libertarian and if liberty – including the liberty to do with your private property as you like and to freely engage in contracts and associations as you please without limitations – is the supreme value in life. However, if we accept the logic of this quote, then domestic violence and a whole bunch of other crimes are “private affairs” that shouldn’t be governed by “problematic” laws. And yet they are governed by laws, and hence we have laws “dictating how people run their associations”, and that’s a “problematic restriction”. We may think domestic violence or marital rape is wrong, but it’s a “private wrong” and hence none of our business. Domestic violence or marital rape take place within “private property” and can be seen, with a stretch of the imagination, as part of the freedom of contract (if a wife doesn’t want to be beaten or raped she should cancel the marriage contract, just like a pre-1964 African American who didn’t want to be discriminated by a restaurant owner should have gone elsewhere).

Of course, no one in his right mind would view domestic violence or marital rape like this, and no libertarian does. But the fact that libertarians – as well as many conservatives for that matter – never spill a drop of ink defending these crimes and yet fill libraries with defenses of private discrimination (and have even run a presidential campaign on the basis of this defense) just goes to show that equality and non-discrimination aren’t very important concerns for them, or at least not as important as violence and rape.

Do we really need government intervention to harmonize the two legitimate concerns? The concern for private freedom to discriminate within your property or associations, and the fight against discrimination? Some say that the fight against discrimination shouldn’t necessarily entail government coercion against private discrimination and should focus on private activism. That’s possible of course. Boycotts may help, just as minority organization, lobbying, education etc. (Another proof that free association is an important right. Minorities often depend on freedom of association and on strong property rights for their activism, and free commerce and freedom of contract tend to lower prejudice). There are also market mechanisms that counteract discrimination and fostering those mechanism might reduce discrimination without government coercion.

But that effort is certainly naive in many settings, especially when discrimination is widespread and group conformity counteracts market incentives (for example when customers are willing to pay a premium to visit segregated businesses, in which case the business owners will not be pressured by the profit motive to accept all customers; or when businesses are threatened into respect for segregation). Likewise when discrimination is government mandated. Hence the need, in many cases, for government coercion to break widespread patterns of discrimination that seriously reduce the options and opportunities of those who are discriminated against.

Why specifically state intervention? Racist business restaurant owners or bigoted employers or organizations can perhaps, sometimes, be persuaded to accept non-whites customers, employees or members through boycotts, social ostracism or the pressures of the market, but state intervention is often necessary in order to force them to do so. And they should be forced when the targets of their discrimination are seriously harmed by this discrimination, don’t have options elsewhere and can’t wait for the slow process of the market and of mentality changes. For example, a black person failing to get hired because of his or her race, after many attempts, suffers more harm than a black person failing to get served in a restaurant but having many more restaurant options close by.

It can be, in some settings, immoral to say that government shouldn’t intervene and that only social activists should struggle against racism and discrimination. In many cases, such as the southern parts of the US under Jim Crow, a struggle that isn’t backed by government often means risking life and limb. Discrimination in the US was underpinned by private terrorism (KKK) and actively supported or condoned by government law enforcement officers. Insisting that discrimination should be combated solely by private actors means exposing them to serious risks.

A final consideration: what if property is the direct result of discrimination? Can the descendants of slave owners really claim that their property rights should be a justification of their discriminatory actions? Or is their property illegitimate given the fact that it wouldn’t have existed without slavery? That would be an additional reason to favor equal treatment over property rights, when these two values clash.

Human Rights Nonsense (19): Ladies’ Night Discrimination

(source)

For nearly two decades, Minnesota native Steve Horner has crusaded against what he considers a monumental injustice: Ladies’ night.

The complaints he filed with Human Rights Departments in several states have earned him at least $6,000 in damages for being denied ladies’ special prices at bars…

[T]he white, balding, bespectacled Horner compared his quest to Rosa Parks’ refusal to go to the back of the bus…

“I believe that to be vigilantly in defense of the constitution, one needs to speak up about these issues,” Horner said in an interview. (source)

More on gender discrimination (the real stuff) and Rosa Parks (the real one, and another fake one). More human rights nonsense.

Why Do We Need Human Rights? (15): Is Human Rights Talk Mere Signaling?

There’s certainly a lot of signaling going on in human rights talk. People who engage in human rights talk don’t necessarily have as a first priority the goal of improving respect for human rights, but rather want to convey some meaningful information about themselves and use human rights talk to do that.

For example, it’s possible that some of the people who are very expressive about perceived discrimination of a particular minority group may be primarily motivated by a possible leadership position within that minority group. Their human rights talk signals leadership aspirations. Some allegations by torture victims may not be intended to stop a torture regime, but to signal extremist credentials to like-minded people. Also regarding torture, I’ve written not so long ago about a study suggesting that some governments sign torture conventions, not to rid the world of torture, but to signal ruthlessness: they sign the convention and just continue their torture methods, thereby telling their victims and their population in general that they are so powerful that they can voluntarily submit to laws and then deliberately and openly break them in the face of impotent international opprobrium.

Another example is the ritualistic condemnation of China’s human rights record. Western leaders, when visiting China or playing host to Chinese leaders, are expected to repeat some standard phrases about human rights in China. That’s what their national constituencies expect from them, and they grudgingly comply. It has become part of protocol, like kissing the Pope’s ring. It’s utterly meaningless because real action to pressure China is completely lacking. China knows this, but goes along and issues its equally ritualistic counter-claims of national sovereignty blah blah. The West signals that it cares about human rights; the Chinese leaders that they don’t.

Something similar is happening with universal jurisdiction. Countries engaging in universal jurisdiction often start court cases against foreign dictators, without the slightest hope of actually punishing and imprisoning those dictators, but at least they signal that the “world community” doesn’t silently accept atrocity. And perhaps they also signal their own country’s moral superiority. A lot of human rights talk seems to be about moral superiority.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx already identified signaling as a important function of human rights, although he pushed his point a bit too far. Human rights, according to him, are an ideology. An ideology pretends to be a description of the world but in reality it masks certain key aspects of it in order to maintain the economic status quo. It is an instrument in the continuation of the existing social order. Those who may threaten the status quo in a revolutionary way can be convinced by the ideology of human rights to work within the system and struggle for equal rights. However, these equal rights, according to Marx, can only deliver formal equality, not real equality. Only a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism can achieve the latter. Human rights signal equality but in reality serve to maintain class rule.

Those who benefit from the existing order and who are therefore part of the ruling class, will tend to produce and propagate ideologies. Religion is another example of an ideology, and one that works in much the same way as the ideology of human rights. Desires that can harm the existing order and the status quo - such as desires for equality – must be neutralized. The idea of the Christian paradise expresses certain desires for a better world but makes it impossible to realize them and to threaten the existing order. By convincing people that these desires can only be realized in the afterlife, the idea or better ideology of paradise pacifies relationships in this life. Why revolt if you know that equality and happiness are there for the taking in a future life? Especially when you will only get paradise if you respect morality in this life and when morality is often and conveniently incompatible with the consequences of revolt.

Religious ideology neutralizes desires by situating them in the afterlife. Religion is opium for the people, a drug that makes them forget the pain of this world, or at least convinces them to accept this pain, because pain can lead to revolt and those in power never like revolt. Something similar is inherent in the ideology of human rights. The use of force or coercion by the state in the defense of the right to capitalist property, for example, is not necessary when the poor can be convinced that property is a human right which is in their interest, rather than a right of the wealthy. The economic relationships and structures are maintained with political and legal force but also with legal ideology.

All ideologies are similar. Christianity can convince people to accept their situation by promising salvation in a future life, and the ideology of human rights does the same by convincing people, all people, that they have the same rights and that they are therefore equal. When this universality and equality of rights is accentuated, people do not see that others who have the same equal rights profit more from these rights. Human rights signal freedom and equality, and give the impression of guaranteeing freedom and equality, but in reality give those who are better off tools to improve their situation even more, and at the expense of the poor. Instead of real equality there is only legal and formal equality, and the latter takes us further away from the former because the rich can use their equal rights to promote their interests. Rights, according to Marx, give us the freedom to oppress rather than freedom from oppression.

Human rights, he says, are a set of false ideas that have to cover up class rule and make it acceptable. The continuation of inequality by political and legal means is based on the combination of coercion and false consciousness. Christians are equal in heaven and thereby maintain inequality on earth, and believers in human rights are equal in the heaven of their political ideals and thereby forget the inequality that these ideals help to maintain.

I think that view is far too pessimistic and takes the signaling thing way too serious. It ignores the transformative power of human rights. There is signaling going on in human rights talk, but a lot of other stuff as well. Some talk is really aimed primarily or exclusively at a real transformation of reality toward a higher level of human rights protection. And a lot of that talk really works in the sense that life is changed by speech. Sometimes human rights aren’t about human rights, but often they are.

Religion and Human Rights (29): When Freedom of Association and Anti-Discrimination Clash

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 the university and in violation of its anti-discrimination policy. Withdrawal of recognition means that the group loses some subsidies and access to university resources, not that it has to cease to exist.

The group claimed that the university decision violated it’s freedom of association and freedom of religion. It also claimed that the university’s non-discrimination policy backfired and in fact created a new instance of discrimination, namely discrimination based on religion (because the group felt singled out; a Hispanic group excluding non-Hispanics did not suffer the same fate). (More on self-defeating human rights policies here). The university contested this reasoning, claiming that the group was free to organize its activities elsewhere.

In my opinion, the Christian group is clearly bigoted and deserves condemnation for that, but groups should be free to decide who can and cannot become a member. And so there’s nothing wrong, in principle, with Christian groups banning gays. Forcing a group to accept members who violate the group’s fundamental rules and principles would empty freedom of association of any content because it would lead to the dissipation of the group’s identity. There is no group without identity, and hence no freedom of association without identity. And identity by definition means exclusion. Communist groups that are forced to accept capitalist members, or neo-Nazi groups that are forced to accept Jews, cease to exist as coherent groups. In case of religious groups, this would also violate the groups’ freedom of religion.

Also, the claim by gays that they are discriminated is weakened by the fact that they have numerous alternatives. It’s not like their non-membership of the Christian group produces a lot of harm to them, in terms of diminished choices, missed opportunities, lost resources etc.

An aside: I always fail to understand why people would want to join groups where they are manifestly unwelcome, except perhaps to cause a stir. Of course, this is no argument in favor or against any of the previous claims, except perhaps a pragmatic argument against the university’s position: if indeed gays will not join the anti-gay Christian group because they don’t have an incentive to associate with people who are hostile, then there’s no reason for the university to move against the group, since no discrimination will occur.

How is this different from what libertarians often claim about private discrimination? (Rand Paul for example recently claimed that the Civil Rights Act should not make “private segregation” illegal and should not force white restaurant owners to accept black customers). The difference is that segregation and Jim Crow were so widespread that blacks had considerably fewer options and suffered considerable disadvantage. The same isn’t true of gays on campus: there are enough associations that accept them. Hence, the discrimination that is imposed by the Christian group is real but not consequential enough to warrant a limitation of its freedom of association or religion.

Another argument in favor of the Christian group: non-discrimination policies have the laudable goal of promoting diversity and allowing every member of society to have the same options and choices. But how do you promote diversity if you don’t allow groups to have a coherent identity? And how do you promote options when you make it impossible for Christians to join a “truly” Christian group?

All this doesn’t mean that there will never be cases in which actions against groups are justified. In some instances, the demands of non-discrimination will outweigh the rights to freedom of association and religion. See here and here for more information on the need to balance different rights against each other.

Here‘s a post on a similar case, involving a British racist party being forced to accept non-white members.

Discrimination (3): Libertarianism and Private Discrimination

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. Similarly, banks should be allowed not to lend to blacks, real-estate agents not to sell to blacks, private homeowner groups should be able to band together and keep out blacks etc. Same when the targets are Jews, gays, immigrants and so on.

The standard libertarian position is that only government enforced or government protected discrimination is wrong. Private actors should be allowed to discriminate. A private restaurant owner for instance should be allowed to refuse to serve blacks. However, government rules forcing restaurant owners not to serve blacks are not allowed, even though for the blacks in question the results are much the same.

It’s not that most libertarians think this kind of discrimination is acceptable and would engage in it themselves. They reject legislation against private discrimination because they consider the right to private property and the sovereignty of property owners much more important than the fight against private discrimination. They also argue that market mechanisms, which they also like a whole lot, will – over time – weed out such discrimination. A restaurant owner who refuses to serve blacks will do a lot worse than his competitors who are more open minded. He will lose benefits of scale, will have to raise his prices and ultimately also lose the bigoted white customers who detest eating in the presence of blacks but detest even more paying unreasonable prices.

Here’s a good statement of the libertarian position by a self-confessed libertarian:

(1) Private discrimination should, in general, be legal (this includes affirmative action preferences, btw). Many libertarians would make exceptions for cases of monopoly power, and most would ban private discrimination when the government itself ensured the monopoly by law, as with common carriers like trains; (2) The government may not discriminate. If necessary, the federal government should step in to prevent state and local governments from discriminating; (3) The government may not force private parties to discriminate, and the federal government should, if necessary, step in to prevent state and local governments from forcing private parties to discriminate; (4) The government must protect members of minority groups and those who seek to associate with them from private violence. If the state and local government won’t do so, the federal government should step in. (source)

Note the mention of violence in this quote: private violence against blacks isn’t allowed, private discrimination is. Why the difference? Again, property rights. Laws against violence don’t usually violate anyone’s property rights.

(source)

Now, what’s the problem with this libertarian position? Property rights are obviously very important. You don’t need to be a libertarian to believe that. I argued strongly in favor of property rights here. Likewise, the free market does an enormous amount of good. The problem with the libertarian view is absolutism and a rejection of value pluralism. There are many values in life, and many different strategies to realize them. And sometimes, some values or strategies come into conflict with each other. When that happens – as is the case here – you have to be willing to balance them and see which one should take precedence. Privacy and free speech, for example, are both important, but what do you do when a journalist exposes the private life of a public figure? You balance the right and wrong: which value is better served by publishing? Free speech or privacy? In some cases, we may believe that free speech is more important than the right to privacy (for example when the politician’s private life has relevance for his functioning). In other cases privacy will trump speech (for example when the facts published have no political meaning). Such decisions can only be taken case by case because the specifics always differ. Doctrinaire and absolutists positions in favor of one value or the other won’t do. And unfortunately many libertarians, and certainly Rand in this case, seem to think that their preferred values – property, freedom and the market – should always have priority over all other values.

Is legislation such as the Civil Rights Act an infringement of property rights and the freedom to do with your property as you want? Of course it is. Are such infringements always wrong? Of course they aren’t. Sometimes they are a necessary evil to gain a greater good.

There a resemblance between the libertarian views on private discrimination and the more widely accepted view in the U.S. that free speech rights and the First Amendment can only be invoked against the government, as if private actors can’t violate people’s right to free speech. The dominant U.S. free speech doctrine reflects an antiquated view of human rights as exclusively vertical. Of course, the government probably does most of the violations, particularly of a right such as free speech, but probably not in the case of the right not to be discriminated against. That’s more of a private monopoly, and markets, protest marches, boycotts, activism etc. won’t solve that problem by themselves. Just look at the market: it didn’t solve segregation, and neither would it have had it been more free. In fact, it’s likely that bigoted white customers who detest eating in the presence of blacks, will not find themselves in white only and hence more expensive restaurants, but will band together and boycott non-segregated restaurants which then lose far more business among whites than they gain from allowing blacks. Such boycotts are absolutely in line with property rights and the free market, which shows that the market can make discrimination worse instead of destroying it. (For a more sympathetic view of the power of the market, go here).

Strangely, Rand Paul himself invoked the parallel between private discrimination and free speech, but twists it to serve his goals:

INTERVIEWER: But under your philosophy, it would be okay for Dr. King not to be served at the counter at Woolworths?

PAUL: I would not go to that Woolworths, and I would stand up in my community and say that it is abhorrent, um, but, the hard part—and this is the hard part about believing in freedom—is, if you believe in the First Amendment, for example—you have too, for example, most good defenders of the First Amendment will believe in abhorrent groups standing up and saying awful things… It’s the same way with other behaviors. In a free society, we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior. (source)

So we have to tolerate discrimination that actually harms real people, just like we tolerate awful speech that most likely doesn’t hurt a fly? Words don’t equal behavior, although sometimes there may be a thin line between them (which is why hate speech laws can sometimes be justified).

More on libertarianism, segregation, Jim Crow and discrimination. And there’s a post here on the related question whether racist political parties can or should be forced to accept members of another race.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (20): Stereotype Threat, Ctd.

In a previous post about the stereotype threat, I defined it as follows: the threat of stereotypes about one’s capacity to succeed at something reduces the chances of success; when the belief that people like you (African-Americans, women, etc) are worse at a particular task than the comparison group (whites, men, etc) is made prominent, you perform worse at that task.

Here’s some new evidence:

The paper explains how workers’ expectations of being discriminated against can be self confirming, accounting for the persistence of unequal outcomes in the labour market even beyond the causes that originally generated them. The theoretical framework used is a two stage game of incomplete information in which one employer promotes only one among two workers after having observed their productivity, which is used as a signal of their ability. Workers who expect to be discriminated against exert a lower effort on average, because of a lower expected return, thereby being promoted less frequently even by unbiased employers. This implies that achievements of minority groups may not improve when the fraction of discriminatory employers actually decreases, and such a mechanism is robust both to trial work periods and to affirmative actions like quotas. (source)

More on racism in employment here and here. More on prejudice, stereotypes, and racism.

Racism (13): Race and Employment, Ctd.

Someone’s race can make it less likely to be called back for a job interview, to escape unemployment, or to have an average or above average income (see here).

Decades of racial progress have led some researchers and policymakers to doubt that discrimination remains an important cause of economic inequality. To study contemporary discrimination we conducted a field experiment in the low-wage labor market of New York City. The experiment recruited white, black, and Latino job applicants, called testers, who were matched on demographic characteristics and interpersonal skills. The testers were given equivalent resumes and sent to apply in tandem for hundreds of entry-level jobs. Our results show that black applicants were half as likely to receive a callback or job offer relative to equally qualified whites. In fact, black and Latino applicants with clean backgrounds fared no better than a white applicant just released from prison. Additional qualitative evidence from our testers’ experiences further illustrates the multiple points at which employment trajectories can be deflected by various forms of racial bias. Together these results point to the subtle but systematic forms of discrimination that continue to shape employment opportunities for low-wage workers. (source)

More on discrimination and racism.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (39): School Refuses Child of Same-Sex Couple

A preschooler is caught in the middle of a fight between religion and sexuality. Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School, in Boulder, has refused to readmit a preschooler because the child has two moms. Her parents are lesbians.

“God and Jesus would not allow discrimination in that way,” said Joellen Raderstorf, one of about two dozen demonstrators who turned out at Sunday’s church service.

Most of the protesters stood silently, across the street, holding signs. One read “God loves all people.” Some of them went inside during mass. The priest addressed the situation in his sermon.

“He feels like it’s a calling to be strict with upholding the Catholic principles,” said Dave Ensign, president of the Board of Directors of Boulder Pride, a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender organization.

“People who understand the Catholic teaching will understand why the decision was made,” said Fabien Ardila, a member of the parish.

More absurd human rights violations. More on gay rights.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (19): Ideology

Reinhold Niebuhr

(source)

From Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society:

Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.

That’s the basis of trickle down economics which is a theory about how inequalities ultimately benefit everyone. It’s also the basis of tax schemes such as a flat tax that limit forced redistribution, because the invisible hand will redistribute wealth or make it trickle down automatically.

And, when trickle down is discredited and when it turns out to be difficult to prove that inequality is a universal value, we hear that inequality isn’t as big a problem as it seems, and that this is the land of opportunity where even people who are on the wrong side of inequality can make it through hard work and discipline. Even Obama seems to believe this, as is clear from his inauguration speech. That’s a classic case of the anecdote turned into a “scientific” law. Data show that social mobility isn’t what the American Dream dreamers think it is. Implicit in this story is that existing inequalities are the sole responsibilities of individuals who haven’t made diligent use of the many opportunities this land has generously provided them. Discrimination, injustice, greed and lack of compassion are obscured as causes of inequality.

In reality, inequalities are indeed greater than could possibly be defended rationally, in the words of Niebuhr. The defense based on trickle down economics has failed, as has the defense based on the claim that inequalities are the sole result of individual choices and a lack of response to opportunities (this defense completely rejects effects of discrimination, which seems to be misguided).

However, it’s not because inequalities are greater than they should be that all inequalities are wrong. Some inequalities are unavoidable or even valuable. We do want Einsteins and Picassos. Society should reward merit. We all benefit from the recognition of exceptional individuals. Nietzsche for example rightly protested against the modern habit of cutting everyone down who dares to stick his head up. Equality of outcome is in many respects distasteful. And apart from the valuable inequalities, there are unavoidable inequalities. Some inequalities that are the result of the “lottery of birth” are impossible to correct: some people are born with more talent than others or with talents that are more appreciated in the economic or cultural market; and there will always be people who are born in privileged families.We wouldn’t want to engage in genetic engineering in order to redistribute talent, and neither would we be willing to redistribute children across families (at least not for the purpose of equality of opportunity).

Other aspects of the lottery of birth, however, are more difficult to defend. Why should the good luck of being born in a wealthy family with educated parents guarantee you a better education, better healthcare and better economic prospects? But of course it isn’t just the contingency of your place of birth that determines your opportunities and you future place in society. Some people are pulled down by discrimination or bad luck. We justifiably don’t accept that people’s prospects in life are fully determined by their family, luck or discrimination.

Again, equality of opportunity is different from equality of outcome: most of us don’t think it’s a good idea to strive towards equality of outcome in most spheres of life. We’re quite happy to accept that some people earn less money, have less vacation time, have lower social status and recognition levels and have more uncomfortable, dangerous, or physically draining work etc. What we don’t accept is that those outcomes are predetermined by the family they happen to be born in, by discrimination they suffer or by other instances of bad luck.

Read more on equality of opportunity.

Human Rights Nonsense (14): Tanning Tax Discriminates Against Whites

Another fine example of frivolous use of the language of human rights:

Does New 10% Tanning Tax Discriminate Against Whites? … I [have] a question about the intersection of taxation and civil rights law. It strikes me that the health care bill which requires that indoor tanning salons will charge customers a 10% tax beginning in July will necessarily only impact tanning salon customers. I have never been to a tanning salon, but since their purpose is to turn light skin darker, I can only assume that the overwhelming majority, if not totality, of customers are white. Does Adarand apply to taxation decision as it does to spending decisions like the Section 8(a) program? (source)

Now, how can we expect people to get upset about discrimination if the word is used interchangeably for Jim Crow, apartheid, gender inequality and the suffering of the tanned? A somewhat less snarky and more serious discussion of taxation and equality is here. More human rights nonsense is here.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (36): You’re Gay? Let’s Cancel the Prom

An 18-year-old lesbian student who wanted to take her girlfriend to her senior prom is asking a federal judge to force her Mississippi school district to reinstate the dance it canceled rather than let the couple attend.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi on Thursday filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Oxford on behalf of 18-year-old Constance McMillen, who said she faced some unhappy classmates after the Itawamba County School District said it wouldn’t host the April 2 prom.

“Somebody said, ‘Thanks for ruining my senior year.’” McMillen said of her reluctant return Thursday to Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton.

The lawsuit seeks a court order for the school to hold the prom. It also asks that McMillen be allowed to escort her girlfriend, who also is a student at the school, and wear the tuxedo.

The district’s decision Wednesday came after the ACLU demanded that officials change a policy banning same-sex prom dates because it said it violated students’ rights. The ACLU said the district violated McMillen’s free expression rights by not letting her wear a tux.

McMillen said she never expected the district to respond the way it did. “A lot of people said that was going to happen, but I said, they had already spent too much money on the prom” to cancel it, she said.

McMillen said she didn’t want to go back to Itawamba County Agricultural High School in Fulton the morning after the decision, but her father told her she needed to face her classmates.

“My daddy told me that I needed to show them that I’m still proud of who I am,” McMillen told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “The fact that this will help people later on, that’s what’s helping me to go on.” (source)

More absurd human rights violations (some quite a bit more horrible than this one). More on gay rights. More on discriminatory dress codes.

Measuring Equality of Opportunity

People on opposite sides of political debates often agree on very little, but they do agree on the importance of equality of opportunity. There are fierce debates on the necessity of more equal outcomes – less income inequality, redistribution through taxation, less discrimination through affirmative action or hate speech laws, gay marriage rights etc. – but there is almost universal agreement that people should have at least a starting position that guarantees an equal chance of success in whatever life projects one chooses, for those willing to invest an equal amount of effort. More specifically, equality of opportunity is often defined as an equal likelihood of success for all at age 18 (in order to factor in possible inequalities of opportunity determined by education).

Equality of opportunity is by definition an impossible goal. The concept of the lottery of birth means more than being unable to choose to be born in a wealthy family with caring parents who can finance your education and motivate you to achieve your goals. It also means that you can’t choose which talents and genes you are born with. Genetic differences are no more a matter of choice than the character and means of your parents. And genetic differences affect people’s talents, skills and maybe even their capacity to invest effort. So, as long as we can’t redistribute beneficial genes or disable harmful ones, and as long as we don’t want to intervene in people’s families and redistribute children, we can’t remove the impact of genes and parents.

However, we can do something. Equality of opportunity may be impossible but there is less or more inequality of opportunity. Or concern should be to provide as much equality of opportunity as possible, and to expand opportunity for those who are relatively less privileged. This means removing things that hold some people back (e.g. discrimination, unemployment, bad schools etc.), and – more positively – helping people to cultivate their capabilities and expand their choices.

How doe we measure if these interventions are successful? Regular readers know this blog has a thing about measurement, but it seems very difficult to measure equality of opportunity. All we can do is measure some of the elements of opportunity:

• We can measure unequal income and infer unequal opportunity from this. People with low income obviously have less opportunities than other people. However, not all opportunities can be bought and maybe low income isn’t the result of a disadvantaged upbringing or bad schools, but of bad choices, or even conscious choices. Can we say that a child of a millionaire who chose to be a hermit suffered from unequal opportunity? Don’t think so.
• We can measure unequal education and skills (educational attainment or degrees, IQ tests etc.). However, someone who comes from a very privileged family but with low or alternative aspirations may score low on educational attainment or even IQ.
• We can deduce unequal opportunity by the absence of opportunity enhancing government policies and legislation. The Civil Rights Act was self-evidently a boost for the opportunities of African-Americans.
• We can measure social mobility and assume, correctly I think, that very low levels of mobility indicate inequality of opportunity.
• Etc.

Whatever actions we take to enhance opportunity, it will probably always be relatively unclear what the net outcome will be on overall equality of opportunity. Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything. And when we do something, we should also distinguish clearly between things we can do and things we can’t to, or things we feel are immoral (e.g. genetic redistribution or child redistribution). We know that parental attitudes, genetics, talent, appearance, networks and luck have a huge impact on individuals’ chances of success, but those are things we can’t do anything about, either because it’s impossible or because it’s immoral. But we can teach people skills and perseverance, to a certain extent. We can help the unlucky, for example with unemployment benefits. We can regulate firms’ employment policies so as to counteract the “old boys networks” or racism in employment decisions. We can impose an inheritance tax in order to limit the effects of the lottery of family. Etc etc.

More on equality of opportunity.

Human Rights Cartoon (66): Racial Profiling

racial profiling cartoon by Gary McCoy

(source)

More on racial profiling and racism. More cartoons about racial profiling here and here. More about the so-called “Gates Incident” here. More human right cartoons.

Discrimination, A Collection of Images

More on discrimination here. Another set of images on discrimination is here. And other collections of human rights images are here.

(source, other signs like this one are here)

(source, other images on racism are here)

Swedish anti-discrimination campaign

(source, more on the differences in poverty levels across races is here)

(source, more on homosexuality in the military is here)

(more on the concept of a fair trial is here)

What is This Graph About? (9)

The answer is here. More mystery graphs.

Human Rights Poem (75): I, Too, Sing America

Langston Hughes

(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”
Then.
Besides, they’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed,–
I, too, am America.

More on segregation, jim crow, and discrimination. More Langston Hughes. Other human rights poems.

Political Jokes & Funny Quotes (73): Discrimination

(source: Time Life)

Play-time has just finished and the teacher asks Sarah, one of the children in her class: “What did you do during the break?”

Sarah says, “I played in the sand box.”

The teacher says, “That’s good. Go to the blackboard, and if you can write ‘sand’ correctly, I’ll give you a lovely bar of chocolate.”

Sarah does and gets a bar of chocolate. The teacher asks Morris, another of her children, what he did during the break.

Morris says, “I played with Sarah in the sand box.”

Teacher says, “Good. If you write ‘box’ correctly on the blackboard, I’ll give you a lovely bar of chocolate.”

Morris does and gets a bar of chocolate. The teacher then asks Mohammed what he did during the break.

Mohammed says, “I tried to play with Sarah and Morris in the sand box, but they threw rocks at me.”

The teacher says, “Threw rocks at you? That sounds like blatant racial discrimination. I tell you what – if you can go to the blackboard and write ‘blatant racial discrimination’ correctly I’ll give you a lovely bar of chocolate.”

More on discrimination. More on islamophobia. More political jokes.

Human Rights Nonsense (11): Male Prostitute Feels Like Rosa Parks

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 the civil rights struggles of the ’60s. “It’s just the same as when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front instead of the back. She was proclaiming her rights as a disadvantaged, African-American older woman. And I’m doing the same. I’m actually standing up now, and hopefully I can be supported by the male community and be understood as a person. This actually isn’t about selling my body. This is about changing social norms.” (source)

Indeed, the struggle of African Americans against centuries of slavery, lynchings, racism, segregation and discrimination is very much like the problems of male prostitutes who can only now practice their trade in full respect of the law…

Other posts in this series.

Racism (10): Race and Health

In a previous post, I highlighted the fact that African Americans in the U.S. are more likely to die of cancer. It seems that a similar disparity exists for strokes and lead poisoning.

Many ethnic groups have a higher death rate from stroke than non-Hispanic whites. Although the death rate from stroke nationwide dropped 70% between 1950 and 1996, minorities the decline was greatest in non-Hispanic whites. The greatest number of stroke deaths compared to whites occurred in African-Americans and Asians/Pacific Islanders. Excess deaths among racial/ethnic groups could be a result of a greater frequency of stroke risk factors, including obesity, hypertension, physical inactivity, poor nutrition, diabetes, smoking and socioeconomic factors such as lack of health insurance. (source)

lead poisoning by race

(source)

Lead poisoning causes, i.a., cognitive delay, hyperactivity, and antisocial behavior.