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EuP · #1 (**permalink**) 12-11-2004, 05:09 AM

Discrimination Myths that Everyone Believes

The ideology that informs the thinking of present-day "civil rights" agitation is cluttered with misconceptions. It is not true, for example, that discrimination must lead to poverty. As Thomas Sowell observes, the Chinese have never enjoyed an equal playing field in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, or Vietnam, yet the Chinese minority in these countries – a mere five percent of the population – owns most of these nations’ total investments in a variety of key industries. In Malaysia, the Chinese minority suffers official discrimination at the hands of the Malaysian constitution, and yet their incomes are still twice the national average. Italians in Argentina were subject to discrimination but ultimately outperformed native Argentines. Similar stories could be told about Jews, Armenians, and East Indians. In the United States, the Japanese were so badly discriminated against that 120,000 of them were confined in detention camps for much of World War II. Yet by 1959 Japanese households had equaled those of whites in income, and by 1969 they were earning one-third more.

Another misconception is that statistical disparities between groups necessarily prove the existence of discrimination. Here again Sowell’s work is essential. There are a great many morally neutral explanations that can account for these differences. Ethnic groups in America often differ considerably in average age, sometimes by as much as a quarter century. That factor alone would be enough to account for a considerable portion of income differences between groups, since an older group will tend to have more education, more job experience, and more accumulated wealth. The various ethnic groups are also distributed very differently across the country, some concentrated in largely low-paying areas and others in high-paying areas. Thus the difference in incomes between Asian Americans and whites (with Asian Americans earning more), and between whites and American Indians or Hispanics, essentially disappears when we control for geographical distribution, education level, and proficiency in the English language. For a quarter century, in fact, college-educated black couples have earned slightly more on average than college-educated white couples, yet "civil rights" leaders prefer to obscure the real situation by looking at the two races in the aggregate. Only that way can they claim that "racism" is the explanation for white-black income differences.

Then there are behavioral differences that have an economic impact. For example, fully half of Mexican-American women marry in their teens, while only 10 percent of Japanese-American women marry that young. This cultural factor alone would account for considerable differences in incomes between the two groups, since a young married woman will tend to have less mobility and fewer educational opportunities than a young single woman.

One of many factors that can affect whether a statistic will be enlightening or misleading is the level of aggregation at which the data is studied. For example, we may possess a statistic on salaries earned by blacks holding doctoral degrees versus the salaries earned by Asians with doctoral degrees. The Asians may well be found to have higher incomes. But is this evidence of discrimination? Disaggregate the data and it turns out that that Asians and blacks tend to have doctoral degrees in different fields, with vastly differing levels of remuneration. Asians, for instance, are many times more likely than blacks to hold doctorates in chemistry, engineering, and mathematics, whereas blacks are much more likely to hold doctorates in education, and indeed fully half of all black doctorates are in that relatively low-paying field.

The issue of members of minority groups holding terminal degrees recalls one of the most potent sources of campus activism in the 1980s and 1990s: student campaigns for more "diversity" among college faculty. Everyone knew perfectly well that these calls for "diversity" referred only to those groups that had a place in the left’s victimological pantheon. Few campaigns were to be found on behalf of more Scandinavian professors or more traditional Catholics among the faculty, even though the latter were, if anything, even less represented in higher education than were members of racial minorities.