In the poll mentioned above, British adults said that they wanted to reduce inequality even at a cost to overall wealth. In general, though, even when people say they want to reduce inequality, the preferences they reveal in their voting patterns look quite different. It may be that the calculation the typical voter is making when they say that they want to reduce inequality is that they feel less well-off than average, so reducing inequality would make them richer relative to the general population.
When they are confronted with a policy that they fear would make them poorer, they change their mind. If your pay is consistently increasing, does it matter all that much if the amount the CEO of your company gets paid has gone up by more?
Under those circumstances, inequality feels much more unfair — think about the wave of protest that happened across the world in the aftermath of the Great Recession, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement. Voter tolerance for inequality is much higher when things are going well. Wealth typically echoes and reinforces other inequalities in our society; when the rich get richer faster than the poor, these other inequalities may be exacerbated too as privileged groups become wealthier and, by extension, grow in social and political power.
Restricting the amount of power that wealth grants can help tackle this, but tackling this reason for continued inequality is mostly about each society finding the right balance that works for its economy, political system, and citizens. Both Mr and Mrs Smith naturally accept that she is inferior…which is laughable today. Imagine being a white, British man in It would be strange to think of this as a topic for discussion; it was simply the way of things.
Most of those unquestioned assumptions have now been thoroughly dismantled. One example is the idea of the social model of disability. A traditional model of disability takes it that people are disabled. Adaptations can be made, such as adding lifts to buildings where the keypad includes braille, cutting kerbs for wheelchair users, and assorted medical interventions.
The social model of disability turns this on its head. You can undoubtedly think of further examples yourself. The social model of disability has been criticised. Yet it illuminates how we perceive inequalities more generally. Do we see the person who is at the lower end of the inequality as inferior or merely disadvantaged? Switching from the former perspective to the latter brings a lot of inequalities to light which might otherwise have been ignored.
Was the wife of our British man in less able to hold an intelligent conversation than him because she was inferior — or because the education system of the time never gave her a chance? Both the husband and the wife might have said the former; we would undoubtedly say the latter. And there remain areas in our society that some would identify as unequal and in need of changing, while others would see them as natural. Stupid people earn less than more intelligent people — is that natural, or discrimination?
Parents are allowed to tell their children what to do but their children may not get a say in most parts of their life, including the school they attend, the friends they spend time with and the clothes they wear — is that natural, or discrimination?
A human can keep a hamster in a cage that it can never escape from — is that natural, or discrimination? Most people in the 21st century would say that these are all natural, or at the very least, justified and you might well think these examples are ridiculous. Until opinions change and a new consensus forms, old inequalities — of whatever kind — persist. A real-life example of tackling inequality is the difficulty of assessing students at school.
There are significant gaps in attainment among pupils at UK schools along lines of race, gender, family wealth and location within the country. Not really. Louis, Baltimore, and Chicago are exhibiting behavioral pathology, plain and simple. The people they kill are mainly black, and the families who live with the misery are mainly black. Ascribing that to white racism is laughable. Nobody believes it.
Consider educational test-score data. Antiracism advocates are, in effect, daring you to say that some groups send their children to the elite universities in outsize numbers compared with other groups because their academic preparation is magnitudes higher and better.
Such excellence is an achievement. One is not born with the knowledge, skills, and academic ability to gain admission into elite colleges. The people who acquire these skills do so through effort. Why do some youngsters acquire the skills while others do not? That is a deep question requiring a serious answer. The simple answer—that this disparity is due to racism, and anyone who says otherwise is a racist—is not serious.
Do such disparate outcomes have nothing to do with behavior, with cultural patterns, with what peer groups value, with how people spend their time, with what they identify as being critical to their self-respect? Anyone who believes that is, at best, a fool. Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou interviewed Asian families in Southern California, trying to learn how their kids get into Dartmouth, Columbia, and Cornell at such high rates.
It defies common sense, as well as the evidence, to assert that they do not, or, conversely, to assert that the paucity of African-Americans performing at the very top of the intellectual spectrum—I am talking about academic excellence and about the low relative numbers of blacks who exhibit it—has nothing to do with behavior, that it is due entirely to institutional forces. That is an absurdity.
Is this a good thing? Is it due to the ongoing practice of antiblack racism? Some people say these things. Do they really believe these things, or are they daring you to deny them?
The 21st-century failures of too many African-Americans to take advantage of the opportunities created by the civil rights revolution are palpable, yet they are denied at every turn. This position is untenable. The end of Jim Crow segregation and the advent of equal rights for blacks were game changers.
A half-century later, the deep disparities that remain are shameful and are due in large part to the behaviors of black people. People tout the racial wealth gap as, ipso facto, an indictment of the system—even while black Caribbean and African immigrants are starting businesses, penetrating the professions, and presenting themselves at Ivy League institutions in outsize numbers.
True, they are immigrants, not natives, and immigration can be positively selectived. But something is dreadfully wrong when adverse patterns of behavior readily visible in the black American population go without being adequately discussed—to the point that anybody daring to mention them is labeled a racist.
The letter was supposedly advice—but failure to narrow the disparity meant that the district could be found guilty of a civil rights violation and potentially lose federal funding. Of course, if teachers, principals, guidance counselors, and school-based police officers are discriminating by race when they discipline students, the Department of Education and the Department of Justice should get involved.
But based on all that we know—for instance, about crime and incarceration rates—it is at least plausible that there is an objective racial disparity in the frequency of disruptive behavior that occasions a difference in the suspension statistics.
If behavior, not racism, is at the bottom of racially disparate suspension rates, think of the disservice being done—to the schoolchildren who act out by failing to teach the lesson that bad behavior has consequences , to classmates including, of course, minority students who are hindered from getting an education by disruptive classroom behavior, and to teachers, who are trying to maintain a safe environment for learning.
One more example of how this bluffing can do harm: the affirmative-action debate. We are now on the verge of permanently including African-Americans in elite and selective academic institutions through an openly acknowledged use of different standards.
That is horrible—and not because of the Fourteenth Amendment, though the Supreme Court may yet find it so. It is patronizing. It is horrible for black Americans to embrace, and the establishment to adopt, a set of practices rooted in the soft bigotry of low expectations. Yet other than Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, and a few others, there is not even a debate among African-Americans about what should be a first-order question, if the goal is to attain genuine racial equality.
If the negative cultural patterns in some African-American communities are said to be a necessary consequence of oppression, what is one to make of positive cultural patterns of behavior?
Are they, too, a necessary consequence of oppression? If an individual or a community refuses to take responsibility for failure, how can they claim any glory for success? No blame? No skin in the game? Then no credit. You cannot help the hand you are dealt; but you can decide how to play it.
To cast oneself as a helpless victim, to filter experience constantly and at every instance through a sieve that catches everything that one has control over while leaving the outcome to invisible, implacable historical forces: something is pathetic about that posture. It is past time for all of us to start performing without a net.
One will never win a Nobel Prize in physics unless one learns calculus at the age of What black parents are insisting that their year-old kids learn calculus—those few kids capable of doing so? White people are not responsible for the fact that black people are, or are not, doing this. Here an insight by UCLA sociologist Rogers Brubaker is crucial for understanding race and inequality: one should never invoke racial aggregates as the subjects of social analysis unreflectively.
Black people are not a this or a that. They are a population in excess of 30 million, with cultural patterns as variegated as one would expect in such a large aggregation. Moreover, American society is a polyglot mixture where cultural dynamics influence one another. For example, some middle-class, suburban white kids download rap music produced by black artists from the inner city. These musicians come to have a market substantially influenced by the preferences of their middle-class white customers.
Another example involves the drug trade, which in the U. It involves people of every race in every geographic location and every walk of life. But the street trafficking in drugs in large urban areas is largely in the hands of black and Latino youth—in substantial part because the only people who would do such dangerous, low-paying work are those whose alternative employment opportunities are scant.
It is no surprise that those incarcerated for street-level trafficking are disproportionately blacks. Their arrests and imprisonment are not in themselves evidence of racism—or evidence of black culture. But given the bare facts of racial stigma in American society, many observers will be inclined to think so. This point about racial stigma is fundamental. They, too, have been victims in various ways. Yet they have advanced in our society even as the blacks of inner-city Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Oakland continue to lag.
Whatever is wrong with those people? By looking at America this way, one eschews social, political, and moral responsibility for the plight of those people. Yet blacks are not the authors of the stigma that engenders developmental bias against them. When we understand that the way people come to value things or make decisions is partly created via interactions in society, their flourishing, or lack thereof, reflects on society as a whole, as well as on themselves.
The mistake is to ignore the extent to which racial inequality reflects not only cultural patterns among insular groups of people but also the interactions that run through society.
To impute a causal role to what one takes to be intrinsic cultural traits of a subordinate racial group, while failing to see the systemwide context out of which dysfunctional cultural patterns emerged, is to commit a significant error of social cognition. That members of a particular group seem to perform less well routinely on a set of transactions of interest is a matter not of a cultural essence but of the network of social relations that has or has not prepared the members of that group for those transactions.
In the U. This stigma leads nonblack people to be reluctant to enter into intimate social or individual relations with them, which in turn affects the social allocation of developmental resources. Rather, they often act on identity considerations. They ask such questions as: Who am I? How should I live? With whom should I associate? Racial inequality is, in substantial part, the outcome of a system of nonmarket social interactions such as these that entangle us together.
Consider the high out-of-wedlock birthrates among blacks. This pattern of behavior has consequences for socioeconomic racial disparities. But that is not the whole story. Racial intermarriage rates in the U. Are black women, perhaps, receiving marriage proposals from white men and turning them down?
But I strongly suspect that a low rate of cross-boundary mating between these two groups has implications for human development, for resources available to children, and for the generation and transmission of wealth. Moreover, the low rate of intermarriage has implications for the dating and mating market among blacks because they are a small minority of the population—roughly one in eight Americans. If white men and black women were marrying at a higher rate, black men and black women would be interacting in a different way.
Why do they bear their children in such a disorderly manner? This was actually said during the flood of New Orleans that followed Hurricane Katrina. But black people have been in New Orleans for years. That was us crawling up on the rooftops. That was us huddled in the Superdome.
The abject poverty that was exposed to a national audience after the flood was a quintessentially American affair, not simply a measure of the inadequacy of black culture.
It reflected as well upon our social inadequacy. The perspective I am promoting about social capital does not require special, race-targeted social policy.
Most policy initiatives aimed at improving the lives of our most disadvantaged citizens should not, and need not, be formulated in explicitly racial terms or understood as a remedy for racial injuries.
We have to find what works for disadvantaged people in America, period. If we get that right—if we can fashion an American welfare state consistent with our demographic realities, our own values, and our fiscal capacities—we will go a very long way toward assisting African-Americans to develop their full human potential. Finding what works is especially pertinent for education policy. Disadvantaged youngsters who live in large cities are poorly served by the majority—minority school districts on which they and their parents must rely.
This is a huge area for policy innovation, with respect to charter schools and increased options for parents. Are police good or bad for the security and safety of black lives in U. It is hard to imagine a more important question.
Yet one is hard-pressed to find any effective political debate among African-Americans. Instead, we get the shopworn and ineffective stances that people on the left are taking. Social-justice warriors are supposed to care about black lives. A real argument is to be had over public safety and the role of the police, and the answers are far from self-evident. They seem to care more about remaining in lockstep with fashionable liberal opinion.
How should we think about the persistence of racial inequality in America? To deny the relevance of behavioral patterns among some black families and communities is folly. There are no easy answers, but I suggest that the view here is worth considering as a way to account for, and then respond to, an enduring dilemma that confronts and frustrates us still. Take the poor central-city dwellers who make up perhaps a quarter of the African-American population.
Their culture may be implicated in their difficulties, but so is our culture complicit in their troubles; we bear collective responsibility for the form and texture of our social relations. While we cannot ignore the behavioral problems of the so-called black underclass, we should discuss and react to those problems as if we were talking about our own children, neighbors, and friends.
It will require adjusting ways of thinking on both sides of the racial divide. Achieving a well-ordered society, where all members are embraced as being among us, should be the goal.
Our failure to do so is an American tragedy. It is a national, not merely a communal, disgrace. See endnotes in PDF. Your current web browser is outdated. For best viewing experience, please consider upgrading to the latest version. Contact Send a question or comment using the form below. Full Name Email Subject Message. Cancel Cancel. Email Article. More detailed message would go here to provide context for the user and how to proceed.
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