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Discrimination and Dis...
 
by
Thomas Sowell
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Read between April 18 - May 2, 2025
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Decades later, after the political climate had changed considerably, colleges and universities engaged in preferential hiring of black faculty, as well as preferential admissions of black students—again, without the academic decision-makers paying any price for their decisions, just as they paid no price for opposite policies earlier. “Affirmative action” in academia was sooner and more sweepingly adopted than in private industries operating in competitive markets.
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In many, if not most, cases the same decision-makers who had discriminated against blacks were now instituting preferential policies favoring blacks.
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A wage rate set above where it would be set by supply and demand in a freely competitive market tends to have at least two consequences: (1) an increase in the number of job applicants, due to the higher wage rate, and (2) a decrease in the number of workers actually hired, due to labor having been made more expensive.
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When, for example, the number of qualified black job applicants refused employment can be easily replaced by otherwise surplus qualified white or other job applicants, that reduces the cost of Discrimination II to the discriminating employer to virtually zero.
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Discrimination II has costs to discriminators in a free market, greater than its costs when a minimum wage law creates a chronic surplus of job applicants.
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What is particularly striking, however, is that there was no significant difference between the unemployment rates of black and white teenagers in 1948. The unemployment rate for black 16-year-old and 17-year-old males was 9.4 percent. For their white counterparts, the unemployment rate was 10.2 percent. For 18-year-old males and 19-year-old males, the unemployment rate was 9.4 percent for whites and 10.5 percent for blacks. In short, there was no significant racial difference in unemployment rates for teenage males in 1948,37 when there was no effective minimum wage. After the effectiveness ...more
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If, however, the real reason for these patterns was that the work experience and job skills of younger black workers made them less in demand than older black workers with more work experience and/or more job skills, then a rising minimum wage rate prices the younger blacks out of jobs first and to the greatest extent.
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The predictable effect of restricting the building of housing, as the population was growing, was a rise in housing prices, when the supply of housing was not allowed to rise as the demand rose. California home prices were very similar to those in the rest of the country before this wave of building restrictions swept across the coastal regions of the state in the 1970s. But, afterwards, home prices in coastal California rose to become some multiple of home prices in the country as a whole.
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It may well be that the racial attitudes and beliefs held by white landlords and realtors in early twentieth-century Harlem were more hostile to blacks than the attitudes and beliefs of white residents and officials in late twentieth-century San Francisco. But, in terms of end results, the actions of the former failed to keep blacks out of Harlem, while the actions of the latter drove out of San Francisco more than half the blacks already living in that city. Costs matter.
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short, people sort themselves out, both in where they choose to live and with whom they choose to interact most often and most closely.
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Later data in 2016 showed that, while the top ten percent of white income earners had incomes nearly eight times that of the bottom ten percent of white income earners, the top ten percent of black income earners had incomes nearly ten times the income of the bottom ten percent of black income earners.
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The new black arrivals were overwhelmingly more numerous than the existing black population. In Richmond, California, for example, there were only 270 black residents in 1940 but the Kaiser industries brought in more than 10,000.41
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A timeless explanation of discrimination against blacks, such as racism, cannot account for either the progress or the retrogressions that took place on a large scale at differing times. This is not to deny that there has been racism, but the evidence suggests that the discrimination that took place was not simply Discrimination II, for that would leave unexplained the large swings in the magnitude of discrimination against blacks.
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These striking changes in the progress and retrogressions in black-white relations over time have been too large and too numerous in different settings to be simply Discrimination II—based on a false perception by whites—and more closely fit the consequences of Discrimination IB, a correct perception of behavioral changes in local black communities outside the South, as those communities began to consist increasingly of people steeped in a culture that originated in the South, and was unwelcome in the North by both black and white Northern communities.
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But to argue that the black population as a whole was misperceived, and that this explains the retrogressions, is to argue that the preexisting black population and the pre-existing white population were both mistaken when they reached very similar conclusions about the behavior of the incoming migrant population.
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Professor Wilson’s sarcasm and anger were directed at people whose reactions reflected a greater concern for their own personal safety than for his sensitivities. His account suggests that they were not racists, for merely by wearing a tie he avoided tensions on both sides, even though wearing a tie did not change his race.
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In a sense, Professor Wilson’s reactions were similar to those of people who blame store owners for the high prices charged in low-income, high-crime neighborhoods, rather than blame those whose behavior raised the costs that the stores’ prices have to cover.
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In early colonial America, more than half the white population in colonies south of New England arrived as indentured servants.
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In nineteenth-century Detroit, blacks were not allowed to vote in 1850, but they were voting in the 1880s, and in the 1890s blacks were being elected to statewide offices in Michigan by a predominantly white electorate. The 1880 census showed that, in Detroit, it was not uncommon for blacks and whites to live next door to each other.55 The black upper class had regular social interactions with upper-class whites, and their children attended high schools and colleges with the children of their white counterparts.
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These were not just coincidental mood swings among whites across the North. The behavior of blacks themselves had changed.
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Neither eras of progress in race relations nor eras of retrogression were simply inexplicable mood swings among whites. Both represented responses to demonstrable changes in local black populations.
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Moreover, in the early twentieth century, the rise to dominance of genetic determinism as a supposedly “scientific” doctrine strengthened the hand of those white officials who were prepared to write off the potential of black and other minority children, as the Progressives of that era did.
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This might be considered a special case of the more general assumption that outcomes would tend to be even, or random, in the absence of malign interventions.
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In the heady atmosphere of the times, when the Brown v. Board of Education decision was widely hailed by blacks and most whites, except among white Southerners, as a long overdue end to government-imposed racial segregation and discrimination, the ringing assertions made by Chief Justice Warren were widely accepted.
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Clearly, racially segregated schools were not inherently inferior. There is no question that most black schools in the South at that time, and many in the North, had inferior educational outcomes. And no doubt inferior resources supplied to black schools had a role in these outcomes, though not necessarily the sole role or the most important role.
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In any event, the crusade to racially integrate public schools, during the decades following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, generated much social turmoil, racial polarization and bitter backlashes, but no general educational improvement from seating black school children next to white school children.
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The educational track record of such self-sorting has been far more successful than third-party sorting, whether the third parties sorted by race or by residential location, or by a belief that racial diversity would lead to higher educational achievements.
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sorting a way of reducing counterproductive frictions that impede education. Successful charter schools give a glimpse of what can be accomplished by black children in low-income ghettos when self-sorting frees them from the disruptions and violence of unruly classmates, just a small number of whom can prevent a whole class from getting a decent education.
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This was essentially the same assumption behind the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, that separate facilities were inherently unequal. Although that decision did not explicitly state that racial mixing was essential for black children to get an equal education, that was the logical corollary of what the decision did say.
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Contrary to those who attribute social pathologies in the ghettos to external causes in general, and white racism in particular, some of the strongest opposition to government programs that insert people from ghettos into middle-class neighborhoods came from black residents in those middle-class neighborhoods.
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“Some blacks feel that ‘those people’ make it tough on those of us trying to make something of ourselves,” says Shirley Newsome, a homeowner in Kenwood-Oakland and a longtime voice of moderation. “That’s why white America doesn’t want me living next to them, because they look at me and figure I’m from a place like public housing.”
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Advocates of unsorting neighborhoods, whether by race or by class, argue that living in a better neighborhood will produce benefits for both the adults and the children who are moved in, and benefits of “diversity” for society at large. But these expected benefits to the newcomers from housing projects and high-crime neighborhoods have repeatedly failed to show up in extensive empirical studies by a wide variety of researchers on the federal government’s “Moving to Opportunity” program.
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Similarly, moving had few positive effects on educational achievement for youth.”
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Here, yet again, we see the implicit assumption that there would be no disparate outcomes unless there were disparate treatment. Moreover, that assumption seems almost impervious to evidence.
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One major difference between people sorting or unsorting themselves, on the one hand, and government officials sorting or unsorting them, on the other hand, is that people who sort or unsort themselves receive both the benefits and the costs of doing so. But government officials receive neither the benefits nor the costs of unsorting other people—and so may persist in the process, in utter disregard of benefits or costs that fall on others.
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More fundamentally, negative consequences to the pre-existing residents of the communities into which they have been placed are seldom, if ever, mentioned—much less measured—in these studies. It is as if any benefit, however small, to the new residents automatically outweighs any costs, however large, to the pre-existing residents.
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This process represents a major departure from American legal principles in both criminal and civil cases, where the burden of proof is usually put on those making an accusation, rather than expecting the accused to prove their innocence.
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Most employers, including large corporations, find it expedient to settle such cases out of court, even when they have not violated anti-discrimination laws—and the number of such settlements is then used by critics to claim that employment discrimination is widespread.
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the time of the PepsiCo settlement, an empirical study had already shown that companies using criminal background checks tended to hire more blacks than companies which did not use such checks.
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In short, racism has not been sufficient to prevent a demand for black workers in a competitive market. It would be painfully ironic if anti-discrimination laws have been among the factors which reduced that demand in later times. Intentions, whether good or bad, do not predestine outcomes.
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While the rejection rate for white applicants was 22.3 percent, the rejection rate for Asian Americans and Native Hawaiians was 12.4 percent.2 But such data seldom, if ever, saw the light of day in most newspapers or on most television news programs, for which the black-white difference was enough
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to convince journalists that racial bias was the reason.
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In short, the three groups’ respective rankings in terms of the kinds of mortgage loans they could get was similar to their respective rankings in average credit ratings.
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With credit ratings being what they were, the statistics were consistent with Discrimination IA (judging each applicant as an individual), but were reported in the media, in politics and in academia as proof of Discrimination II, arbitrary bias against whole groups.
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What was equally implausible was that black-owned banks were discriminating against black applicants. But in fact black-owned banks turned down black applicants for home mortgage loans at a higher rate than did white-owned banks.
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That is because, despite equal numbers of households in each 20 percent, there are far more people in the top 20 percent of households.
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Most households in the bottom quintile have no one working.8 How surprising is it when four people working earn more income than one person working? That is yet another of the errors of omission, when the truth would undermine a prevailing preconception.
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If, for example, each of the two tenants had an income of $20,000 a year initially, and later both reach an income of $30,000 a year, leading to each living in a separate apartment afterwards, that will mean a fall in household income for these individuals from $40,000 a year to $30,000 a year. There will now be two low-income households instead of one, and each household will be poorer than the one they replaced. Again, a rise in individual income can be reflected statistically as a fall in household income.
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Clearly, omitting individual income statistics, and using household income statistics instead, is less useful to someone seeking the truth about economic differences among human beings. But household income statistics can be very useful for someone promoting political or ideological crusades, based on statistics that exaggerate income disparities among people.
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What would be relevant to testing the hypothesis that blacks are disproportionately targeted for arrest by the police, or disproportionately convicted and sentenced by courts, would be objective data on the proportions of particular violations of the law committed by blacks, compared to the proportions of blacks arrested, convicted and sentenced for those particular violations.