Human Rights Nonsense (42): The Unbearable Lightness of Racial Sensitivities

(source)

I’m very much opposed to hate speech, and also keenly aware of the effects of language on human rights (see here and here for instance). I’m therefore also in favor of moral rules against people calling each other “nigger” for example. However, this story is a good illustration of how taboos such as these can be taken too far:

A Bronx teacher has filed a lawsuit claiming she was fired for using the word ‘negro’ in class. “Negro” is the Spanish word for the color black.

Petrona Smith … says … that she was fired from teaching at Bronx PS 211 in March 2012 after a seventh-grader reported that she’d used the “N” word, according to The New York Post.

Smith doesn’t deny using the word. But she argues that everyone uses it, when speaking Spanish. She was teaching the Spanish words for different colors, and the color “black” in Spanish is “negro.”  She also taught the junior high school students, in this bilingual school, that the Spanish term for black people is “moreno.” And by the way, Smith, who is from the West Indies, is black. (source)

Here‘s a similar and perhaps even more ridiculous case.

The Ethics of Human Rights (73): The Link Between Corporate Social Responsibility and Reparations for Slavery

Advertising for Mercedes-Benz, from the Nazi propaganda magazine Signal, c1943

(source)

Daimler-Benz … avidly supported Nazism and in return received arms contracts and tax breaks that enabled it to become one of the world’s leading industrial concerns. (Between 1932 and 1940 production grew by 830 percent.) During the war the company used thousands of slaves and forced laborers including Jews, foreigners, and POWs. (source)

Can companies violate human rights and should they be held morally and legally responsible if they do? Or are companies just legal fictions that can’t do anything? In the latter case, if a company seems to be engaged in wrongdoing, then it’s really just the employees, the bosses or the shareholders – or all of them – that have done wrong. It’s therefore always the individuals who should be held responsible and not the company as such. This latter view is expressed in the following quote:

[C]orporate action and corporate responsibility is something of a metaphor. Corporations don’t misbehave, speak, think, and so on. People acting on behalf of corporations do. I support applying the First Amendment to the “speech of corporations” because I think the restrictions on such speech end up interfering with the rights of people, both as listeners and as people who associate in order to create an enterprise in which some of the employees speak on the enterprise’s behalf. “Corporations have First Amendment rights” is useful shorthand for conveying that, but we have to recognize that it’s just shorthand.

And because this is just shorthand, I find it hard to fault the Mercedes-Benz of today for the actions of the Mercedes-Benz of the Nazi era. Whatever Mercedes-Benz officers and employees did then is their responsibility — not the responsibility of the very different people who run the company today. And that action during the Nazi era strikes me as not really relevant to Mercedes-Benz’s current actions, or to what should be our attitudes with regard to the company and its products today. (source)

That sounds persuasive, until you start to think about the transtemporal aspect of things. Indeed, current Mercedes employees or bosses are not the same as those of the Nazi era, but the company is. It’s Mercedes now and it was Mercedes then. It’s not absurd to suggest that the company profited from its Nazi era wrongdoing – or from the wrongdoing of its people back then – and that this advantage extends to our current time.

I’ll explain. Suppose that the Nazis liked company X and its people, and that this liking led to the government backed discrimination or even elimination of competitors Y and Z. Y and Z never recovered after the end of the Nazi era, and hence company X continues to this day to profit from the absence of competitors Y and Z. And I could suggest numerous other examples of ongoing advantages resulting from actions taken decades ago (e.g. continuing returns on savings which accumulated while the wrongdoing took place and which resulted from the wrongdoing; continuing returns on expropriated goods, etc.).

(source unknown)

This discussion is similar to the one about reparations for slavery. None of the current white citizens of the US are responsible for the slavery that ended more than a century ago, and yet they do still profit – as a group – from the defunct institution, even those whites who don’t have forefathers directly implicated in slavery or who came to the US after the end of slavery. Of course, those who do have implicated forefathers profit directly from the wealth their forefathers accumulated through slavery and subsequently transferred across generations. But whites in general profit from the fact that slavery has imposed disadvantages on blacks even after its demise (lack of education, lack of certain skills, segregation, forced migration etc.). These disadvantages were and still are benefits to whites. For example, they make it easier for whites on the job market and elsewhere.

However, the guy quoted above may insist that the “group of currently living whites” is a lot like Mercedes: the group is a social fiction in the sense that it can’t act and hence can’t be responsible. Only individual whites can act. And what they do today can’t have effects on the past. Hence they can’t be responsible for what happened in the past. A fortiori, the group of whites can’t be responsible either. I agree that all of this is correct, but it doesn’t follow that the group shouldn’t be forced to pay reparations. Just as Mercedes today, it continues to profit from wrongdoing done in its name in the past, and that is unjust. Hence they should pay compensation for the unjust profit they reap.

More on corporate social responsibility here, here and here.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (51): Nature or Nurture?

Album cover of Frank Zappa’s “Them or Us”

Are we born as blank slates, and do we get our violent and malevolent inclinations through upbringing and social contact? Or are we born evil? I can’t possibly answer those questions in a blog post, or anywhere else for that matter. But we can get some clues if we focus on one type of rights violation, namely racism.

The available evidence seems to suggest that people are not naturally racist. I’ve discussed some recent findings here. Human evolution has indeed fostered a strong sense of group solidarity, and the dark side of this solidarity is a natural tendency to define outsiders as enemies. This is problematic from the point of view of human rights because it means that the interests and rights of outsiders are routinely discounted. However, “groupism” isn’t necessarily the same as racism. Outsiders can be virtually anyone: foreigners, heretics, infidels, Manchester United fans etc. Race can but doesn’t have to determine the inside-outside border. In fact, throughout much of early human history, when contact between races was the exception, groups have defined insiders and outsiders on other grounds than race. Racism is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the words of Robert Wright:

So it’s not as if the human lineage could have plausibly developed, by evolutionary adaptation, an instinctive reaction to members of different races. (source)

It seems we are ourselves responsible for the rights we violate. We can’t accuse nature or evolution.

More on groupism here. More posts in this series here.

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.

Discrimination (15): Is Assortative Mating a Form of Discrimination?

(source)

Assortative mating is the selective mating between individuals whose choice of marriage partners is determined by similarity of social environment. (It’s a form of homogamy, the mating of like with like). One example is the preference to mate with individuals of the same race. Take this case:

Is it racist when a white woman declares, when asked out on a date, that she will only date white men? … She, a white women, took her boss, an African American, to court on sexual harassment charges. During the hearings, he commented that she had said to him that she did not date African Americans, and he maintained that that was racist. (source)

Let’s not focus on the African American man’s apparent attempt to deflect harassment charges by playing the race card. That’s not what I want to discuss here – and, anyway, the story cited above doesn’t provide sufficient information to allow us to judge the intentions of either party. Let’s instead take the general case of a person of one race refusing to date and marry a person of another race for no other reason than race.

Is this kind of assortative mating racist? I think it is. It shows a general dislike of people of another race. It’s prejudiced and bigoted and it implies writing off whole groups of people on the sole basis of their skin color. However, is it also discrimination? I guess not. If it were discrimination, we would be allowed to use the power of the law to fight it, and no one wants the law to mess with people’s mating choices as long as both partners are consenting adults. (Polygamy may come to mind as a counterexample, but my view on the legality of polygamy is much more liberal than the conventional view; I’ll explain in another post).

No one has a right to his or her mate of choice, and no one can use the force of law to compel the consent of this mate of choice. Hence, there’s a lot of racism and bigotry that we can’t fight with the force of law and thus have to accept. We can try to change people’s minds over time, educate future generations and so on, but if this doesn’t convince everyone to regard all individuals as potential mates then there’s no more we can do.

I argued here that we can only speak about discrimination when there is a violation of rights. The account above is yet another example.

More posts in this series are here.

Annals of Heartlessness (31): A Real Life Variation of Singer’s Pond

Hurricane Sandy

(source)

If Peter Singer were dead, he would be turning in his grave. Here’s a really sad and damning anecdote related to Hurricane Sandy:

[M]om and children trapped in a car filling with water. Mon tries to get them to safety, but a wave sweeps the little boys away. Residents nearby refuse any help, even just phoning 911. … She is black; the neighbors white. …

Police on Thursday said two brothers, ages 2 and 4, who were swept away Monday night when waves of water crashed into an SUV driven by their mother in Staten Island were found dead.

Glenda Moore left her Staten Island home with two children and was driving to a family member’s house in Brooklyn when her car became submerged underwater. She freed her two kids from their car seats but rushing waves of water swept the kids away from her arms.

“It went over their heads… She had them in her arms, and a wave came and swept them out of her arms,” the mother’s aunt told the NY Daily News.

Local Staten Island newspapers have reported the mother unsuccessfully tried to get help from neighbors but the New York Daily News is reporting another side of the story:

According to the sister, a dripping-wet Moore banged on doors looking for help in the middle of the hurricane, but couldn’t find anyone willing to help her.

“They answered the door and said, ‘I don’t know you. I’m not going to help you,’” said the sister. “My sister’s like 5-foot-3, 130 pounds. She looks like a little girl. She’s going to come to you and you’re going to slam the door in her face and say, ‘I don’t know you, I can’t help you’?’”

Moore spent the night huddled on a doorstep as the hurricane’s assault continued. At daybreak, her sister said, the desperate mother walked until she found a police car and related her heart-breaking story. (source, source)

A horrible illustration of the bystander effect, I guess, or perhaps of something even more sinister. By the way, more on the “Singer’s Pond” reference is here, if you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. More in the annals of heartlessness is here.

Measuring Human Rights (30): Distortions Caused by the Exclusion of Prisoners

A 12-year-old boy in a detention center in Biloxi, Mississippi, that is operated by a private security firm

(source, source)

I’ve already cited one example of human rights measurement gone wrong because of the exclusion of the prison inmate population: violent crime rates seem to go down in many countries, but a lot of the decrease only happens because surveys and databases exclude the crimes that take place inside of prisons. Crime may not have gone down at all; perhaps a lot of it has just been moved to the prisons.

I’ll now add a few other examples of distortions in human rights measurement caused by the exclusion of the prisoner population. The cases I’ll cite result in distortions because the exclusion of the prison population is the exclusion of a non-representative sample of the total population. For example, it’s well-known that African-Americans make up a disproportionate share of the inmate population in the U.S. Becky Pettit, a University of Washington sociologist, argues in her book “Invisible Men” that we shouldn’t take for granted some of the indicators of black progress in the U.S.:

For example, without adjusting for prisoners, the high-school completion gap between white and black men has fallen by more than 50% since 1980 … After adjusting … the gap has barely closed and has been constant since the late 1980s. (source)

We see similar results when counting or better recounting voter turnout numbers, employment rates etc.

(source)

It should be rather easy to include prisoners in most of these measurements – certainly compared to the homeless, illegal immigrants and citizens of dictatorships. The fact that we almost systematically exclude them is testimony to our attitude towards prisoners: they are excluded from society, and they literally don’t count.

More posts in this series are here.

Human Rights Quote (87): African American Voting Rights

African-Americans demonstrate outside GOP convention hall, Chicago, Illinois, July 1960, Photo by Francis Miller, Time Life Pictures, Getty Images

(source unknown)

The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the Voting Rights Act and other legislation didn’t do much for the likes of Jarvious Cotton:

Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather, he is being denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises — the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

African Americans make up about 14 percent of the U.S. population, but they represent about a third of those ineligible to vote because of criminal convictions. For some reason – and no, it’s not their inherent criminal nature – their incarceration rate is higher and their punishments are more severe.

Some argue that current attempts to introduce voter ID laws are one more iteration of the centuries old effort to disenfranchise African Americans.

More on voting rights for felons, on Jim Crow, on the KKK, on racism, and on incarceration rates by race.

Political Graffiti (208): A Negro in the Whitehouse

(source)

More on Obama. A related poem. More political graffiti.

Hate (8): Tolerance and Hate Speech

1844, Mormon founder Joseph Smith is murdered in an Illinois prison by a lynch mob; soon after, many of his followers migrate to Utah

(source, source)

Jeremy Waldron claims that tolerance is more than merely the absence of violent assault on people who have adopted beliefs and practices we don’t like, and more than simply abstaining from persecution and legal sanction. He says that tolerance also implies the absence of hate speech and a legal prohibition of hate speech. Members of minority groups whose beliefs and practices are strongly disapproved of by the rest of society, have a right to go about their lives without the threat of constant hatred, vilification, insult and humiliation. They have a right to visit the shops and restaurants they want to visit, and to generally interact with others without being treated as pariahs.

And, indeed, that sounds quite reasonable. People undoubtedly have and should have such rights. But others have rights as well: hate mongers have a right to free speech, and racist shop keepers and restaurant owners have a right to ban whoever they want from their private property, under certain circumstances.

When the rights of the haters and the rights of despised minorities come into conflict, the different rights have to be balanced. I argued before that the right of private property of racists, or the freedom of association of prejudiced groups wanting to exclude homosexuals for example, should no longer be protected when these racists and bigots have become so numerous and authoritative that the objects of their racism or bigotry no longer have any alternative options and risk having their own rights violated. In the Jim Crow era, for example, it was very difficult for blacks to move around, find decent housing etc. because there were so many transport companies and landowners discriminating against them that their options were seriously diminished. Hence their rights were violated, and violated to such a degree that limitations on the rights of their tormentors were justified.

Similarly, in our current example, hate speech should only be banned and the right to free speech of hate mongers should only be limited when there’s an impact on the rights of their targets. Claiming, as Waldron seems to do, that a tolerant society generally requires such bans and limits will not do. That’s just not enough as a justification. For example, writing blood libel on an obscure blog that nobody reads should probably not be prohibited. On the other hand, burning crosses in the front yards of black people and forcing them to move elsewhere is a violation of their right to freely choose their residence. The same is true if people dare not walk the streets because of the risk of being constantly cursed at. These two cases of expressions of hate speech can and should be banned because they result in rights violations. Other expressions of hate speech should be protected. A general claim that tolerance requires not just constraints on coercion and violent persecution but also a general respect for people’s dignity and a social atmosphere free of hatred, insult and defamation, goes too far. It would be nice if the world was free of hate and if respect for dignity was the normal attitude, but there’s no right to such a world. Nor should there be.

If we were to adopt such a right, we’d run the risk of terminating debate altogether. If tolerance includes a general ban on hate speech it’s likely that it will also imply banning vehement discussion of other people’s supposed errors. You don’t need to engage in hate speech in order to have a vehement and lively discussion and criticism of others, but a lot of such criticism can be readily understood and perceived by its targets as an expression of hate and an insult to dignity. These targets can then use the power of law to shut down the debate, and that’s not something we want. Ideally, specific instances of speech should not be judged as inadmissible instances of hate speech and proper objects of legal sanction simply on the basis of the feelings or perceptions of the targets, but only on the basis of the objective consequences for the rights of the targets. Tolerance that includes a ban on all hate speech is a tolerance that in the end may silence us all.

More on tolerance, hate speech, defamation and insults. More posts in this series are here.

Capital Punishment (46): “Looking Deathworthy”

That’s the provocative title of a new paper showing a correlation between the likelihood of receiving a death sentence and the perception of having a stereotypically Black appearance:

Researchers previously have investigated the role of race in capital sentencing, and in particular, whether the race of the defendant or victim influences the likelihood of a death sentence. In the present study, we examined whether the likelihood of being sentenced to death is influenced by the degree to which a Black defendant is perceived to have a stereotypically Black appearance. Controlling for a wide array of factors, we found that in cases involving a White victim, the more stereotypically Black a defendant is perceived to be, the more likely that person is to be sentenced to death.

We already knew that both the race of the victim and the race of the defendant influence capital sentencing. Black defendants are executed more often than they should be in a system that pretends to treat all equally before the law and that ostensibly denies that racism should be allowed to determine judicial outcomes.

Now it seems that there’s a subgroup of African Americans who are treated even worse, namely those people who are perceived to have a stereotypically Black appearance (e.g., broad nose, thick lips, dark skin). People apparently associate those stereotypical physical traits with criminality. No surprise that this bias isn’t limited to capital cases:

Even with differences in defendants’ criminal histories statistically controlled, those defendants who possessed the most stereotypically Black facial features served up to 8 months longer in prison for felonies than defendants who possessed the least stereotypically Black features. (source)

Some more evidence is here. This form of bias has been called colorism, and it has effects way beyond the criminal justice system.

More posts in this series here.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics (39): Availability Bias

example of availability bias on a newspaper’s frontpage

(source)

This is actually only about one type of availability bias: if a certain percentage of your friends are computer programmers or have red hair, you may conclude that the same percentage of a total population are computer programmers or have red hair. You’re not working with a random and representative sample – perhaps you like computer programmers or you are attracted to people with red hair – so you make do with the sample that you have, the one that is immediately available, and you extrapolate on the basis of that.

Most of the time you’re wrong to do so – as in the examples above. In some cases, however, it may be a useful shortcut that allows you to avoid the hard work of establishing a random and representative sample and gathering information from it. If you use a sample that’s not strictly random but also not biased by your own strong preferences such as friendship or attraction, it may give reasonably adequate information on the total population. If you have a reasonably large number of friends and if you couldn’t care less about their hair color, then it may be OK to use your friends as a proxy of a random sample and extrapolate the rates of each hair color to the total population.

The problem is the following: because the use of available samples is sometimes OK, we are perhaps fooled into thinking that they are OK even when they’re not. And then we come up with arguments like:

• Smoking can’t be all that bad. I know a lot of smokers who have lived long and healthy lives.
• It’s better to avoid groups of young black men at night, because I know a number of people who have been attacked by young black men (and I’ll forget that I’ll hardly ever hear of people not having been attacked).
• Cats must have a special ability to fall from great heights and survive, because I’ve seen a lot of press reports about such events (and I forget that I’ll rarely read a report about a cat falling and dying).
• Violent criminals should be locked up for life because I’m always reading newspaper articles about re-offenders (again, very unlikely that I’ll read anything about non-re-offenders).

As is clear from some of the examples above, availability bias can sometimes have consequences for human rights: it can foster racial bias, it can lead to “tough on crime” policies, etc.

More posts in this series are here.

Human Rights in the U.S.A.

The United States is far from the worst violator of human rights, but neither is it the Shining City on the Hill that many take it to be. See what you make if this:

• America, where people get into a frenzy about personal freedom when someone wants to limit the maximum size of soda cups, and yet consistently accept world record incarceration rates.
• America, where felons can more quickly recover their right to bear arms than their right to vote.
• America, where white people with a criminal record are more likely to get a callback after a job interview than black people without a criminal record.
• America, where the depiction of naked people making love is less a matter of free speech than the depiction of people killing each other.
• America, where the right to life of the unborn is more important than the right to life of the living.
• America, where the courts express themselves on issues such as the appropriate hotness of coffee but remain strangely silent about the extra-judicial execution or torture of U.S. citizens.
• America, the “land of opportunity”, has less social mobility than many of the so-called  ”socialist” countries of Europe.
• America, where the Supreme Court has decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offence whatsoever – this is the same Supreme Court that doesn’t allow its proceedings to be televized.
• Etc.

And then remember that a large majority of countries is even worse than this. Have a nice day.

The Causes of Poverty (58): Low Average Intelligence in Poor Countries?

girl in a school in Africa

(source)

The claim that poverty is caused by the stupidity of the poor has an international equivalent: some people look at the fact that most wealthy countries in the world are mainly populated by white people, combine this fact with the claim that non-Western countries have lower average IQ, and conclude that they have found the reason why poor countries are poor.

This is of course a nasty piece of victim blaming on a global scale. It’s also borderline racist. Moreover, if successful, this view will make poverty reduction impossible, given the genetic determinism that is often paired with IQ analysis. If kids get their IQ from their parents, if IQ determines wealth, and if nothing else causes poverty, then why bother doing anything at all?

For example, a book by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen titled “IQ and the Wealth of Nations” suggests that the average IQ in Africa is around 70, much lower than in East Asia or the West. They also claim that lower average IQ scores are the cause of low levels of development, income, literacy, life expectancy etc.

There are many problems with this theory. First, most of their data are made up. IQ score aren’t available for many countries. At best, the scores are extrapolated on the basis of tiny samples. Second, the theory confuses cause and effect. It’s poverty that drives down IQ rates. The Flynn effect suggests that factors such as improved nutrition, health care and schooling improve IQ test performance. IQ determinism is simply wrong.

Even if the data could tell us that poor countries have indeed relatively low average IQ rates, that’s no reason to assume that low IQ causes poverty. Causation may go the other way, and it’s also possible that there’s something else, a third element that causes both poverty and low IQ, for example the experience of colonialism. The colonizers were no more interested in creating education institutions than in fostering sustainable, non-extractive economies. Don’t forget about the omitted variable bias. However, now we’re assuming that the data can tell us about IQ, and they currently can’t.

Other posts in this series are here.

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.

Political Jokes & Funny Quotes (116): White Pride

(source unknown)

If your proudest achievement is being white then that says a lot about what you’ve done with your life.

More political jokes here.

Political Graffiti (183): Anti-Racist Revenge on Tintin

(source)

Those silly Africans finally got the better of Belgium’s second most famous racist (second in place behind this one). Pity the poor dog had to share his fate. Read the whole story here.

More political graffiti here.

Racism, A Collection of Images (2)

the black servant stereotype (in case you're wondering why there's a mannequin at the table: it's Cynthia, a major 1930s celebrity, fixture of the trendy dinner parties and gossip columns of the day; read more about her at the source link below)

(source)

the black servant stereotype seems to be very much alive

(source)

and of course there's also a black male servant stereotype

(source unknown)

Turkish news anchor appears in blackface in the coverage of President Obama’s trip to Turkey

(source, more on blackface here)

macabre and racist valentine card with lynching theme

(source unknown)

African Americans aren't the only victims of stereotyping

(source)

Mexicans it seems are sombrero wearing, violent, fat, moustachioed goofs (re: silly laugh) fond of conspicuous wealth (aka golden tooth)

(source)

1882, Strong anti-Chinese sentiment in California leads to the federal Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspends immigration from the East. The political cartoon above, titled "The Only One Barred Out," mocks the legislation.

(source)

More collections of racist images here and here.

Racism (24): What’s Wrong With Residential Segregation?

(source)

Residential segregation can be the outcome of racial animus or racial prejudice, for example when whites decide that they don’t want to live near blacks for no other reason than race. In that case, segregation is a symptom of racism and is evidently wrong. What to do about it is less clear: forcing people to live somewhere is also wrong.

But residential segregation can also result from less prejudiced motives, sometimes even from rational ones: whites may be relatively wealthy and therefore decide that they prefer to live in a nice suburb. Automatically, they end up together with other whites. (Perhaps the wealth disparity has something to do with racism, but not the segregation itself). Yet, even in that case, segregation has harmful consequences and we will have to do something about it.

Residential segregation is harmful in several ways. When relatively wealthy whites move en masse to the suburbs, the relatively poor blacks who stay in the inner cities find themselves in an increasingly impoverished area. Shops will disappear; house prices will fall and will put pressure on people’s assets, etc. The reduced tax base will make it harder for the local government to fund high quality public goods. As a result, the quality of education and other public services will drop, which will start a vicious circle of poverty.

Physical segregation of races will reduce self-esteem and self-confidence among the members of the group that is worse off after segregation. It may also foster racial animus against those who are better off. And, finally, so-called membership poverty will kick in. People will see a reduction in the number of role models, and the remaining role models will by definition be relatively poor and hence not always the ones providing the most beneficial inspiration. Criminal role models also become more prominent, as the simple arithmetical result of the disappearance of the middle class. Furthermore, when people witness high rates of failure among group members, this will also negatively affect their aspirations and effort, which in turn will make a negative economic logic take root: for example, when few group members start businesses, few other members will have the opportunity to work for them or trade with them.

However, residential segregation is not entirely negative for the poor minorities remaining in the inner cities. As house prices in the cities fall, relatively poor blacks are more likely to become homeowners. However, that’s a small silver lining to an enormous black cloud.

By the way, some numbers are here, here and here. More on segregation here.

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.

Measuring Human Rights (24): Measuring Racism, Ctd.

(source, more about the watermelon stereotype here)

Measuring racism is a problem, as I’ve argued before. Asking people if they’re racist won’t work because they don’t answer this question correctly, and understandably so. This is due to the social desirability bias. Surveys may minimize this bias if they approach the subject indirectly. For example, rather than simply asking people if they are racist or if they believe blacks are inferior, surveys could ask some of the following questions:

• Do you believe God has created the races separately?
• What do you believe are the reasons for higher incarceration rates/lower IQ scores/… among blacks?
• Etc.

Still, no guarantee that bias won’t falsify the results. Maybe it’s better to dump the survey method altogether and go for something even more indirect. For example, you can measure

• racism in employment decisions, such as numbers of callbacks received by applicants with black sounding names
• racism in criminal justice, for example the degree to which black federal lower-court judges are overturned more often than cases authored by similar white judges, or differences in crime rates by race of the perpetrator, or juror behavior
• racial profiling
• residential racial segregation
• racist consumer behavior, e.g. reluctance to buy something from a black seller
• the numbers of interracial marriages
• the numbers and membership of hate groups
• the number of hate crimes
• etc.

newspaper clipping about an interracial marriage; February 10, 1955

(source)

A disadvantage of many of these indirect measurements is that they don’t necessarily reflect the beliefs of the whole population. You can’t just extrapolate the rates you find in these measurements. It’s not because some judges and police officers are racist that the same rate of the total population is racist. Not all people who live in predominantly white neighborhoods do so because they don’t want to live in mixed neighborhoods. Different crime rates by race can be an indicator of racist law enforcement, but can also hide other causes, such as different poverty rates by race (which can themselves be indicators of racism). Higher numbers of hate crimes or hate groups may represent a radicalization of an increasingly small minority. And so on.

Another alternative measurement system is the Implicit Association Test. This is a psychological test that measures implicit attitudes and beliefs that people are either unwilling or unable to report.

Because the IAT requires that users make a series of rapid judgments, researchers believe that IAT scores may reflect attitudes which people are unwilling to reveal publicly. (source)

Participants in an IAT are asked to rapidly decide which words are associated. For example, is “female” or “male” associated with “family” and “career” respectively? This way, you can measure the strength of association between mental constructs such as “female” or “male” on the one hand and attributes such as “family” or “career” on the other. And this allows you to detect prejudice. The same is true for racism. You can read here or here how an IAT is usually performed.

Yet another measurement system uses evidence from Google search data, such as in this example. The advantage of this system is that it avoids the social desirability bias, since Google searches are done alone and online and without prior knowledge of the fact that the search results will be used to measure racism. Hence, people searching on Google are more likely to express social taboos. In this respect, the measurement system is similar to the IAT. Another advantage of the Google method, compared to traditional surveys, is that the Google sample is very large and more or less evenly distributed across all areas of a country. This allows for some fine grained geographical breakdown of racial animus.

More specifically, the purpose of the Google method is to analyze trends in searches that include words like “nigger” or “niggers” (not “nigga” because that’s slang in some Black communities, and not necessarily a disparaging term). In order to avoid searches for the term “nigger” by people who may not be racially motivated – such as researchers (Google can’t tell the difference) – you could refine the method and analyze only searches for phrases like “why are niggers lazy”, “Obama+nigger“, “niggers/blacks+apes” etc. If you find that those searches are more common in some locations than others, or that they become more common in some locations, then you can try to correlate those findings with other, existing indicators of racism such as those cited above, or with historic indicators such as prevalence of slavery or lynchings.

More posts in this series are here.

Racism (23): Residential Segregation in the U.S.

A nice illustration complementing this previous post:

residential segregation in the US

(source, click image to enlarge)

More on segregation here.

Human Rights Facts (66): Life Expectancy Across Social Groups in the U.S.

blood flow

(source)

I’ve written before about some very significant health disparities across segments of the population of the U.S. (see here, here. here, here, here and here). Health disparities across racial, gender or income groups are a strong indication of injustice since most if not all such disparities have no basis in biology and must therefore have social or political causes. They lead to a shorter life and a lower quality of life for the average person in certain social groups. For example, this study shows that

the life expectancy gap between the 3.4 million high-risk urban black males and the 5.6 million Asian females was 20.7 years in 2001.

See also these graphs:

(source)

The causes of disparities like these are other types of disparities:

• differences in health care access and utilization (through differences in health insurance and different access to good quality medical facilities)
• different homicide rates
• different HIV rates
• differences in nutritional behavior and food availability (see the concept of “food deserts”)
• different poverty rates
• etc.

More data on life expectancy here.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (65): The Lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith

(source, photo by Lawrence Beitler)

(source)

This infamous lynching took place in Marion, Indiana on August 7, 1930.

[Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith] had been arrested the night before, charged with robbing and murdering a white factory worker, Claude Deeter, and raping his white girlfriend, Mary Ball. A large crowd broke into the jail with sledgehammers, beat the two men, and hanged them. When Abram Smith tried to free himself from the noose as his body was hauled up by the rope, he was lowered and then his arms broken to prevent him from trying to free himself again. Police officers in the crowd cooperated in the lynching. A third person, 16 year old James Cameron, narrowly escaped lynching thanks to an unidentified participant who announced that he had nothing to do with the rape or murder. (source)

The photograph was the inspiration for a poem by Abel Meeropol, called “Strange Fruit”, immortalized  in the song of the same name, performed by Billie Holiday:

More iconic images of human rights violations in general are here, and another iconic image of lynching is here. More on lynching here (some data here, here and here).

Racism (22): Implicit Racism in Criminal Justice, Ctd.

(source)

Being less than white in the US is not an asset when you’re in court, in more than one sense. It’s well known that black defendants face prejudice in the criminal justice system. There’s in fact a double injustice going on: dark skinned people get a raw deal from juries, and there are more of them facing juries because of racial profiling. But something similar is happening on the other side of the court room:

In this paper, I find that cases decided by black federal lower-court judges are consistently overturned more often than cases authored by similar white judges. I estimate this effect by leveraging the fact that incoming cases to the U.S. courts are randomly assigned to judges, which ensures that black and white judges hear similar sorts of cases. The effect is robust and persists after matching exactly on measures for judicial quality (including quality ratings assigned by the American Bar Association (ABA)), previous professional and judicial experience, and partisanship. Moreover, by looking more closely at the ABA ratings scores awarded to judicial nominees, I demonstrate that this effect is unlikely to be attributable exclusively to differences between black and white judges in terms of quality. This study is the first to explore how higher-court judges evaluate opinions written by judges of color. (source)

If we assume that it’s likely that black judges are more sensitive to the possibility of racial injustices suffered by defendants – and that assumption doesn’t require a huge leap of faith – then we’ll have a vicious feedback loop: if the decisions of black judges are more often overturned, then that will also harm black defendants. Add this to the harm done by prejudiced juries and police officers, and you’ll have a good explanation for this.

Racism (21): The Recession Isn’t Colorblind

(source)

The recession obliterated more than half of the wealth (assets minus debts) of the average black and hispanic household in the U.S. White households lost “only” 16%. (Assets are houses, cars, savings and checking accounts, stocks and mutual funds, retirement accounts, etc. Debts are mortgages, auto loans, credit card debt, etc.). The main culprit was the bursting of the housing market bubble.

As a result, the average black household had just $5,677 in wealth in 2009; the typical Hispanic household $6,325; and the typical white household $113,149. In relative terms, this means that in 2009, the median wealth of white households in the U.S. was 20 times that of black households, and 18 times that of Hispanic households; this difference is twice the size it used to be before the recession. Also, a third of black and Hispanic households now have zero or negative net worth.

Moreover, since the official end of the recession in mid-2009, the housing market in the U.S. has remained in a slump while the stock market has recaptured much of the value it lost from 2007 to 2009. Given that a much higher share of whites than blacks or Hispanics own stocks — as well as mutual funds and 401(k) or individual retirement accounts (IRAs) — the stock market rebound since 2009 is likely to have benefited white households more than minority households. (source)

Add to that the racial differences in unemployment rate, poverty rate and income, and you have what one could call a “racist recession”.

More on wealth inequality here.

Self-Defeating Human Rights Policies (6): The Social Effects of Incarceration

(source)

[T]he effects of [the] change in the imprisonment rate [in the U.S.] … have been concentrated among those most likely to form fragile families: poor and minority men with little schooling. Imprisonment diminishes the earnings of adult men, compromises their health, reduces familial resources, and contributes to family breakup. It also adds to the deficits of poor children, thus ensuring that the effects of imprisonment on inequality are transferred intergenerationally. … Because having a parent go to prison is now so common for poor, minority children and so negatively affects them, the authors argue that mass imprisonment may increase future racial and class inequality — and may even lead to more crime in the long term, thereby undoing any benefits of the prison boom. U.S. crime policy has thus, in the name of public safety, produced more vulnerable families and reduced the life chances of their children. (source, source)

Timeline of total number of inmates in U.S. prisons and jails (click image to enlarge)

This is an example of a self-defeating human rights policy: in an attempt to improve the protection of security rights and property rights of a population, a policy of increased incarceration rates has an adverse effect on the rights of the incarcerated, their families and children, and possibly even society at large (as increased inequality resulting from high incarceration rates among society’s most vulnerable groups will perhaps lead to more crime – although we can’t assume that increasing poverty and inequality will automatically provoke those who are impoverished because of incarceration to resort to crime).

More on incarceration rates, the war on drugs and hereditary poverty. More human rights quotes.

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…

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (84): “Small Mistake” Leads to Jail Time, Job Loss and Most Likely Poverty

a real criminal

(source)

Ikenna, a 28-year old construction worker, went to deposit a $8,463.21 Chase cashier’s check at his local Chase branch, only for the teller to decide that neither he nor his check looked right and he got tossed in jail for forgery … The next day, a Friday, the bank realized its mistake and left a message with the detective. But it was her day off, so he spent the entire weekend in jail.

By the time he got out, he had been fired from his job for not showing up to work. His car had been towed as well. It ended up getting sold off at auction because he couldn’t afford to get it out of the pound. He had been relying on that cashier’s check for his money but it was taken as evidence and by the time he got it back it was auctioned off.

All this while the cashier’s check had been issued by the very bank he was trying to cash it at. …

[M]iddle-class people enjoy all sorts of protections against misfortune. For poor people, a single thing going wrong can lead to a life-altering spiral — they lack the social and financial resources to overcome one problem, so a flat tire become a late day at work which becomes a lost job, an overcharge fee busts a checking account, which in turn becomes a ruined credit rating. (source, source, source)

Note that Ikenna is black, which was probably not completely irrelevant when his trustworthiness was questioned.

This point is related to the so-called bee-sting theory of poverty. More absurd human rights violations here.

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.

Racism (19): Racial Inequality in U.S. Incarceration Rates

Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption

The boom in incarceration rates in the U.S., following the War on Drugs and other sentencing reforms inspired by the “tough on crime” ideology, has had devastating effects on the rights of the incarcerated – many of whom are in prison for deeds that resulted in little or no harm to anyone – but also on the rights of their family members, none of whom did anything wrong. These rights violations have fallen disproportionally on an already disadvantaged group of American society, namely African-Americans. And it’s their children who suffer along:

Timeline of total number of inmates in U.S. prisons and jails (click image to enlarge)

• 1 in 40 white children born in 1978 and 1 in 25 white children born in 1990 had a parent imprisoned;
• 1 in 7 black children born in 1978 and 1 in 4 black children born in 1990 had a parent imprisoned;
• inequality in the risk of parental imprisonment between white children of college-educated parents and all other children is growing; and
• by age 14, 50.5% of black children born in 1990 to high school dropouts had a father imprisoned. (source, source)

parental incarceration by parents' education and race

(source)

Children especially are placed at considerable risk by policies of incarceration. Incarcerated men are less likely to contribute financially or otherwise to their families and their children’s education. The same is true even in the case of formerly incarcerated men, because of their inferior earnings. Hence, the effects of incarceration place children at a significant economic disadvantage, which is punishment without a crime, worthy only of a dictatorship.

More data on incarceration are here. More human rights facts are here.

Human Rights Nonsense (26): Anti-White Bias Bigger Problem Than Anti-Black Bias?

White, it seems, is the new black:

Both white Americans and black Americans perceive significant progress in the fight against anti-black bias, but white Americans believe the progress has come at their expense, a new survey finds.

The researchers contacted a random national sample of 209 whites and 208 blacks, and asked them how much discrimination each group faced, on a scale of one to ten, for each decade since the 1950s.

Black Americans saw anti-black bias as declining steadily, from 9.7 in the ’50s to 6.1 in the ’00s. Over the same period, they perceived a small increase in anti-white bias, from 1.4 to 1.8.

White Americans saw an even steeper decline in anti-black bias: from 9.1, in the ’50s, to 3.6, in the ’00s. But more striking, according to the researchers, was the sharp increase in perceived anti-white bias: Among whites, it shot up from 1.8 to 4.7.

White Americans, in short, thought that anti-white bias was a greater societal problem by the ’00s than anti-black bias. (source, source)

(source)

So why bother with all those data indicating that anti-black discrimination is still a huge problem after decades of struggle?

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)

Measuring Human Rights (19): Measuring Racism

This blog contains numerous statements similar to this one:

There are large and important differences between blacks and whites in nearly every facet of life – earnings, unemployment, incarceration, health, and so on. (source)

We can assume that racism and discrimination are at least partially to blame for such discrepancies in life prospects between races, and that these discrepancies are therefore indicators of racism. If we want to measure racism, we’ll look at those discrepancies: are they becoming more important, then there’s more racism, and vice versa.

Of course, there are other explanations for such discrepancies (e.g. the stigma of acting white and the war on drugs) and there are also other, perhaps better indicators of racism.

For an example of other indicators, one can look at the frequency of the use of expressions of racism, such as racial epithets. This is an overview of the use of “nigger” in Google Books (via the Ngram tool):

(click to enlarge)

It seems the epithet is used much less than it used to be, but there’s no real pattern. Why did it increase in the late sixties and why did it go down again in the late seventies? Was that a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement? One can only speculate. And the same is true for the increase during the Great Depression and the decrease following the abolition of slavery. Also, when you use this as a measure of racism, it can only be a measure of overt racism. Political correctness may hide racism.

Another possible measure of racism is the frequency of discussions about racism. Again, an Ngram:

(click to enlarge)

Talk about racism only became common very recently, in the 1970s. Now, is that because there’s more racism since the 1970s? Most likely not. Frequent talk about racism can also be a sign of increased opposition to racism.

Another indicator of racism are the numbers of interracial marriages and interracial dating. If this becomes more common, one can assume that there’s less racism.

Residential or educational segregation may indicate racial animus on the part of people avoiding black neighborhoods or schools, but it may also be merely an economic issue or it may be motivated by worries about the quality of education.

More posts in this series are here.

Human Rights Maps (128): Apartheid in South Africa

Apartheid in South Africa was a system of legal racial segregation enforced by the National Party government in South Africa between 1948 and 1994, under which the rights of the majority non-white inhabitants of South Africa were curtailed and minority rule by white people was maintained. Racial segregation in South Africa began in colonial times, but apartheid as an official policy was introduced following the general election of 1948. New legislation classified inhabitants into racial groups (“black”, “white”, “colored”, and “Indian”), and residential areas were segregated, sometimes by means of forced removals. From 1958, black people were deprived of their citizenship, legally becoming citizens of one of ten tribally based self-governing homelands called bantustans, four of which became nominally independent states. The government segregated education, medical care, and other public services, and provided black people with services inferior to those of white people.

Apartheid sparked significant internal resistance and violence as well as a long trade embargo against South Africa. A series of popular uprisings and protests were met with the banning of opposition and imprisoning of anti-apartheid leaders. As unrest spread and became more violent, state organizations responded with increasing repression and state-sponsored violence.

Reforms to apartheid in the 1980s failed to quell the mounting opposition, and in 1990 President Frederik Willem de Klerk began negotiations to end apartheid, culminating in multi-racial democratic elections in 1994, which were won by the African National Congress under Nelson Mandela.

(source, click image to enlarge)

(source, click image to enlarge)

More on racism, segregation and South Africa. More human rights maps.

The Causes of Poverty (41): Racism

Poverty in Baltimore

There’s a clear discrepancy between poverty rates for blacks and whites in the U.S. (as between races in many other countries):

The question is to what extent racism is to blame. I mentioned here, here and here that some of the irrational and self-destructive behavior of a lot of poor people causes many to believe that the poor are themselves to blame for their poverty and that one shouldn’t look for external reasons such as racism.

If you finish high school and keep a job without having children before marriage, you will almost certainly not be poor. Period. I have repeatedly felt the air go out of the room upon putting this to black audiences. No one of any political stripe can deny it. It is human truth on view. In 2004, the poverty rate among blacks who followed that formula was less than 6 percent, as opposed to the overall rate of 24.7 percent. Even after hearing the earnest musings about employers who are less interested in people with names like Tomika, no one can gainsay the simple truth of that advice. Crucially, neither bigotry nor even structural racism can explain why an individual does not live up to it. (source)

Opinions like this are very common:

But are these opinions correct? Is it true that “neither bigotry nor even structural racism” can explain why an individual does not make a few simple choices that will drastically improve her life?

At first sight, it does seem that a few simply rational decisions about life will allow you to escape or avoid poverty. But on closer inspection that’s just begging the question: if things are so simple, why don’t people make those choices? Hell, it’s so simple that it should be obvious even to the stupidest among the poor! But if it’s not stupidity that causes people to fail to take the advice of finishing high school and not having children early, and not bigotry or racism, then what?

[The] insistence that the failure of so many blacks to avoid the perils that come with not finishing high school and getting pregnant before marriage cannot be explained by structure or bigotry is too outrageous to let pass with no reply. In fact they can be easily explained by structure. …

The school systems in black neighborhoods are underfunded and undeniably worse on average than those in white neighborhoods.  The quality of the school, its teachers and leadership has a direct influence on graduation rates.  Sex ed and access to contraceptives are also far worse in black communities.  The public health failures come well before this for many black youth.  The failure to provide adequate health care and nutrition to black adolescents has been linked to the behavioral and learning disabilities so prevalent in black schools.  The diagnosis of a learning disability is one of the biggest predictors of eventually dropping out of school, particularly in poor urban schools. (source)

And having more trouble finding a job because you’re name sounds black obviously has an impact on your prosperity, also for your children. And growing up in a poor family has consequences for your adult prosperity. When we look at incarceration rates by race, and assume – wrongly – that there’s no racism in play, what do you think it does to a child having to grow up without a father?

This means that there’s one less parent to earn an income, one less parent to instill the sort of discipline all children need to graduate school and avoid unplanned pregnancies.  Even if the incarceration only lasts briefly, it still means that once the parent is out of jail he or she will find it much harder find employment. (source)

More posts in this series are here.

Related Articles

• “Depressing Because It Is So Persuasive” Ctd (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
• “Depressing Because It Is So Persuasive” (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
• Those Who Broke it Can’t Always Fix It (theatlantic.com)
• “”Race, Wrongs, And Remedies”" and related posts (advicegoddess.com)
• Letters: The Causes of Poverty, and the Cures (nytimes.com)

Human Rights Maps (124): The Great Migration

The Great Migration was the movement of 2 million African Americans out of the Southern United States to the Midwest, Northeast and West from approximately 1910 to 1930. The cause of this massive population flow was racism and racist violence, combined with a lack of employment opportunities. The industrial cities of the Northeast and the Midwest looked much more appealing, although blacks encountered racism there as well, primarily from unskilled whites fearing labor competition. The Second Great Migration took place from 1940 to 1970 and involved roughly 5 million people. By the end of the Second Great Migration, African Americans had become an urbanized population. Only half of African Americans remained in the Southern states. Before the 1860s, less than eight percent of the African American population lived in the Northeastern or Midwestern United States.

(source, click image to enlarge)

It appears that there’s now a Great Migration in Reverse going on.

More on racism. More human rights maps.

Human Rights Maps (123): Lynchings in the U.S.

(source)

map of lynchings by state and county in the US 1900-1930

(source; the legend is not very clear but the main message is; what is a lynching according to this map? “There must be legal evidence that a person was killed. That person must have met death illegally. A group of three or more persons must have participated in the killing. The group must have acted under the pretext of service to justice, race or tradition.”)

More data on lynchings are here. More textual information on lynchings and racism here and here respectively. More human rights maps 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)

Racism (17): Racism is Ghostbusting

There’s a huge assumption underlying talk by racist and anti-racists alike, namely that there are different races. That may be an uncontroversial assumption at first sight, but once you start to think about it things get muddled. Are there races? Not in the biological sense. Most genetic variation occurs within so-called racial groups, not between them.

Races are social constructs rather than a biological reality. Centuries of interbreeding have made it impossible to distinguish different human gene pools. Differences between groups of homo sapiens sapiens are purely cultural and constructed. The apparent skin, hair or other physical differences are indeed natural and biological but they are

• only skin deep, which means genetically irrelevant and certainly irrelevant for comparative merit or superiority,
• and they are gradual variations rather than discrete groupings (some “black” people are more similar to “white” people than to others from their “race”).

Groups are self-identifying and other-identifying entities, and this identification is based on beliefs concerning shared culture, ancestry and history and on the removal of the gradual nature of differences in appearances. They are constructs, the product of beliefs and traditions, a particular way that some people talk about themselves and others.

Racism is a specific way people talk about themselves and others. It isn’t a descriptive exercise about factual differences between the “biologies” of different groups; it’s a normative exercise in which groups form beliefs about the merits of other groups, and these other groups are constructed through talk about them. They are not “natural” entities, and their members aren’t scientifically identifiable. Superficial characteristics that form a continuum are given extraordinary importance (skin color determines merit) and the gradual continuum is believed to be ruptured. Individual differences are grouped into discrete race differences, and individuals are reduced to a constructed entity.

An example. Some say that racial disparities in the US are caused by a specific culture or mentality that is rampant in “black America”, namely a culture of crime, family breakdown and lack of educational aspiration and achievement. Black America, it’s claimed, “should do something about this”! But once you try to imagine this “black America”, you’ll find that it’s impossible. There is no black America, let alone a black culture. There are certain individuals who are situated at a certain point in a skin color spectrum who may or may not belong to “black America” and who may or may not exhibit certain mentalities. But that is all one can say. There’s no way one can plausibly claim that all or most members of “black America” exhibit certain mentalities, first because it’s impossible to unequivocally determine a threshold value of skin color which puts a person inside or outside “black America”, and second because with each randomly determined threshold value you’ll end up with a very diverse group of people exhibiting many different mentalities.

(source)

Does that mean that all talk about race is superfluous? If so, then the same is true about all talk about racism. But that’s not the case. The absence of a factual reality about race doesn’t remove the salience of race in the minds of racists. Hence, racism can have consequences even in the absence of races.

Members of socially constructed racialized identities suffer real harms, and laws might have to distinguish individuals according to their racialized identities in order to compensate for such harms. (source)

People continue to label each other and themselves according to racial categories, and to act accordingly. If we want to address the negative consequences of those labels and actions, we have no choice but to use the same labels. If people impose disadvantages on another group, based on the random delineation and construction of that group, countermeasures can’t help but work with the same group. Also, this group may find the concept of its race useful in its efforts to mobilize against racist measures. It just has to careful that it doesn’t start to believe the essentialist claptrap of its racist foes and that it remains conscious of the ghostlike nature of the concept of race.

Human Rights Nonsense (23): Abortion = Anti-Black Genocide

In this photo made Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010, an anti-abortion billboard is shown in Atlanta. The eyebrow-raising ads featuring a young black child are an effort by the anti-abortion movement to use race to rally support within the black community. The reaction from black leaders has been mixed, but the "Too Many Aborted" campaign, which so far is unique to only Georgia, is drawing support from other anti-abortion groups across the country. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)

(source)

Pro-life activists have propagated the narrative that the relatively free abortion rules in the U.S. are somehow a conspiracy to eliminate African-Americans. The organization that funded the billboard depicted above states that after the civil rights era, racists went “underground,” and that today “abortion is the tool they use to stealthily target blacks for extermination”; ” the black community is being targeted by abortionists for the purpose of ethnic cleansing” etc. (source).

In the U.S., black women do in fact have more abortions, but it’s a mighty leap to suggest that this should be explained by a genocidal conspiracy. And even if we would agree that there is a conspiracy at work, it’s an awfully unsuccessful one: fertility rates among black women remain higher than the national average and have inched up in recent years (source).

One piece of “evidence” for the conspiracy thesis is the location of abortion clinics: most are supposedly strategically located in black neighborhoods. However, that claim is incorrect.

It’s odd that those who are alleging racism are the ones being racist here: the conspiracy theory only holds if black women are either callous about their unborn children, or malleable tools in the hands of racist and coercive abortion doctors.

Also odd is the fact that most pro-lifers don’t seem all that worried about other, perhaps more real threats to black children – gun violence, incarceration rates and poverty – or about the general effects of racism on life prospects. If you want to worry about discrimination, racism or genocide, there’s lots of other places where you’ll have no difficulty finding it. And if you want to worry about abortion, maybe it’s good to focus on contraception, sex education, poverty and family stability instead of leaping to the most extreme and unlikely explanations. But perhaps you’re not interested in what you want to explain and only in how you explain it.

By the way, there’s a related and far more serious problem: sex-selective abortion, rather than race selective. But not in the US, fortunately. If you’re looking for the real abortion scandal, there you have it.

More on abortion. More human rights nonsense.

(image source)

Related Articles

• What A Horrible Doctor Can Teach Us About Abortion In America [Roe Vs. World] (jezebel.com)
• Anti-abortion push gains momentum (politico.com)
• Abortion foes upbeat; see chance for tougher curbs (sfgate.com)

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)

Capital Punishment (33): It’s Not What You Do, But What You Do to Whom

the hanging of Rainey Bethea, the last public execution in the U.S.

In the U.S., and probably also in other countries that still use the death penalty, not all murders are alike. Ostensibly, the death penalty is the supreme punishment for the supreme crime, i.e. murder. But some cases of the supreme crime are more likely to result in the supreme punishment than others. For example, it’s well-known that a black person who has committed murder is more likely to be executed than a white person, even if the details of their crimes are very much alike.

It seems that the moralistic justification of capital punishment – that the worst of crimes should be met with the severest of punishments – is just talk, applicable in some cases but not in others. This inconsistency is incompatible with moral talk, since morality is precisely about general and blind rules. The inconsistency becomes even more clear when we consider that it’s not just the race of the perpetrator that makes it more or less likely that horror is answered with horror. People who murder whites are much more likely to be executed than those who murder blacks:

(source)

I don’t want to sound conspiratory, but it does seem like the death penalty is an instrument in the continued subjugation of blacks and the protection of whites.

On top of the race issue, there’s also a class issue:

A defendant is much more likely to be sentenced to death if he or she kills a “high-status” victim, according to new research by Scott Phillips, associate professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver (DU).

According to his research published in Law and Society Review, (43-4:807-837), the probability of being sentenced to death is much greater if a defendant kills a white or Hispanic victim who is married with a clean criminal record and a college degree, as opposed to a black or Asian victim who is single with a prior criminal record and no college degree.

“The concept of arbitrariness suggests that the relevant legal facts of a capital case cannot fully explain the outcome: irrelevant social facts also shape the ultimate state sanction” Phillips says. “In the capital of capital punishment, death is more apt to be sought and imposed on behalf of high status victims. Some victims matter more than others.”

Phillips research is based on 504 death penalty cases that occurred in Harris County, Texas between 1992 and 1999. (source, source)

More on capital punishment is here.

Related Articles

• The Incapacitation Argument For Capital Punishment (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
• Human Rights Facts (209): Capital Punishment in Japan (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
• Illinois House Votes To Abolish Death Penalty (huffingtonpost.com)
• Should States Abolish Death Penalty to Cut Costs? (abcnews.go.com)

Racism (16): Race and Crime

Banksy mural depicting a scene from the movie Pulp Fiction, starring Samuel L Jackson and Jonh Travolta

It’s well-known that African-Americans make up a disproportionate part of the U.S. prison population. Racists of course have an easy explanation for this, but what is the real explanation? Part of it is probably racial profiling and bias among jury members. Another part of the explanation can be poverty, unemployment and lower education, burdens from which African-Americans also suffer disproportionately. And although crime has many possible causes, there’s some evidence that at least some types of property crime go up during recessions. This indicates that there’s a link between crime and poverty, something which in turn can explain different arrest ratios across races given the different poverty rates across races.

Screenshot from the film Pulp Fiction (1994), showing Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) in their well-known pose

There’s an interesting paper here studying the effects of both labor market conditions and asset poverty on the property crimes involvement of American males. It turns out that poverty and labor market outcomes account for as much as 90% of the arrest rates ratio. More on racism and crime. More Banksy.

Related Articles

• Human Rights Facts (206): Race and Consumer Behavior (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
• Discrimination is the well-documented cause of race disparity in prison (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Nazism Between Utopia and Anti-Utopia

Adolf Hitler

On the one hand, Nazism was clearly a utopian movement. It wanted to create a perfect world for the pure Aryan race, devoid of degenerating forces. In a sense, it was idealistic. It had an ideal view of humanity and wanted to realize it, in part by way of the destruction of the less than ideal human beings and of those who were considered enemies of and dangerous to the better humans. Nazism had a peculiar kind of love for humanity. It’s love for humanity implied the destruction of those who abase, bring down and pollute it. Humanity was of course defined in a very particular way: true humans were the Aryans. The love for Aryans rather than hatred of Jews and other inferior beings was the prime motive. Love was what mattered, not hate, sadism, rancor or revenge. The future mattered, not our origins. People’s origins and race mattered only to the extent that racial mixing would threaten the future existence of the better race. And although there was blind and violent rage, the Nazi killings were in general rational, dutiful, professional, organized, and framed in terms of self-defense against degenerating forces.

On the other hand, as George Steiner has pointed out, Nazism was also a movement based on rancor towards Judaism and towards the impossible promise of unbearable and unattainable moral demands emanating from Judaism. Judaism presented to the world an impossible ideal, and we never hate anyone more than those who present us an impossible ideal. Nazism wanted to exterminate the Jews because Jews continuously confront humanity with its failings. The unbearable perfection caused the destruction of the emissaries of this perfection.

Steiner puts the following words in the mouth of Hitler (in “The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.):

Related Articles

• Human Rights and Utopia (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
• Hitler exhibition in Berlin breaks taboos on how Germany embraced the Nazis (dailymail.co.uk)

Ngrams and Human Rights

You’ve probably already seen numerous examples of the new Google tool Ngram around the internet lately. It’s a tool that allows you to calculate the frequency of keywords in the millions of books available in Google’s collection. Such frequencies can be thought of as approximations of the general use of a word at a certain time, at least if we accept the following conditions:

1. what is written in books reflects general usage
2. Google Books is reasonable representative of the whole written universe, and
3. the stuff written in English is representative of all the stuff written.

Those are big “ifs”, but still the tool is quite useful in my view. Let’s look at a few things that we care about in this small part of the internet. The graph below shows us that the words “human rights” (blue line), somewhat surprisingly, only started to be used frequently in the 1970s and 1980s, and not immediately after the end of WWII and the promulgation of the Universal Declaration (the traditional view of the watershed). Still, we didn’t look back since then and the importance of human rights shows a steep slope. A common alternative concept, “civil rights” (usually meaning human rights enshrined in the law of a nation, red line), is by now less common, although in the sixties it was more common given the prevalence then of the “civil rights movement”. (Obviously, these conclusions about the frequency of the use of keywords can be skewed if the number of books increases over time, as it probably does. Most of this possible effect is neutralized because the graphs give percentages).

(click image to enlarge)

This other graph also struck me. While poverty (blue line) seems to be a more important and older concern than racism (red line), the recent levels of concern evolve in almost exactly the same way. Perhaps not surprisingly given the close link between these two evils:

(click image to enlarge)

Related Articles

• Search how phrases have been used via Google Ngram Viewer (flowingdata.com)
• The Google Word Books Ngram Viewer (webandrank.com)

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)

Political Jokes & Funny Quotes (99): Proof of Anti-White Racism in Spellcheckers

photo by geishaboy500

(source, source)

From some commenters at the Volokh Conspiracy Blog:

Commenter 1: By the way anybody else notice that Hispanic, African-American, or Asian all get flagged by the spell checker if they aren’t capitalized, but white just sails right on through? When are they going to fix that?

Commenter 2, replying sarcastically: I know, it’s almost as though whoever programs the spellchecker thinks that “white” isn’t related to a specific geographical location, and thinks that nouns and modifiers that refer to a specific geographical location are always capitalized in English, and thinks that modifiers that are basic colors are not capitalized in English.

For my part, I capitalize neither “black” nor “white” in any context (except as first word in a sentence, as part of a title, etc.)

But then, I always capitalize “Hitler” and “Satan,” and never capitalize “baby” or “puppy,” so I’m sure you can tell where my sympathies lie, if you are one of those who understand that capitalization has nothing to do with rules of English usage, and everything to do with a secret political agenda dictated from our socialist PC (no pun intended) masters in Redmond.

The Germans, of course, capitalize every noun, and no modifiers at all, a harsh system of inequality that the German Karl Marx railed against in his influential 1867 work “Das Kapital.”

More on racism, prejudice, Marx and PC. More political jokes.