Gentle Respect

Interesting article in The Economist about black poverty and lagging achievement.

[Roland Fryer's] most striking contribution to the debate so far has been to show that black students who study hard are accused of “acting white” and are ostracised by their peers. Teachers have known this for years, at least anecdotally. Mr Fryer found a way to measure it. He looked at a large sample of public-school children who were asked to name their friends. To correct for kids exaggerating their own popularity, he counted a friendship as real only if both parties named each other. He found that for white pupils, the higher their grades, the more popular they were. But blacks with good grades had fewer black friends than their mediocre peers. In other words, studiousness is stigmatised among black schoolchildren. It would be hard to imagine a more crippling cultural norm.

A study by Richard Sander of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that when the bar is lowered for black applicants to law school, they are admitted to institutions where they cannot cope. Many who drop out of top-tier colleges might have thrived at slightly less competitive ones. Mr Sander calculated that the net effect of pro-black preferences was actually to reduce the number of blacks who passed the bar exam. That is, racial preferences for black law students result in fewer black lawyers. John McWhorter, the author of “Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America”, argues that lowering the bar for blacks also reduces their incentive to excel at school. “As long as black students have to do only so well, they will do only so well,” he says.

This does not mean that discrimination does not exist:

That said, blacks certainly face barriers in the job market. Two economists, Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, sent out 5,000 replies to job advertisements in Boston and Chicago. Each fictitious applicant was randomly assigned either a black-sounding name, such as Jamal or Lakisha, or a white one, such as Emily or Greg. For every ten jobs the “whites” applied for, they were offered one interview. The “blacks” had to post 15 letters to elicit the same response. Clearly, some managers are racist. But many are not. And many firms are desperate to hire and promote blacks, if only to avoid lawsuits.