Education, Inequality, and Race

American blacks are much better educated than they were a generation ago:

In 1968, just 54 percent of young black adults had a high school diploma. Today, 92 percent do. In 1968, about 9 percent of young African-American adults had completed college. Today, roughly 23 percent have.

However, their incomes have not gone up by as much as this might predict: 

The median income for a white head of household with a college degree is $106,600. The median income for a comparable black college graduate is only $82,300.

As David Brooks says,

It turns out that increasing educational opportunities does not by itself reduce income disparities. 

I think this is one of the most important discoveries of the past 30 years: that investing in education has little effect on inequality, and that while educated people still make more money than others, we have entered the realm of diminishing returns in terms of education's economic payoff. There are only so many good slots in the system, and creating more college graduates than there are good slots just leads to credentials creep and falling wages.

I think this is highly relevant to the current political climate. If the stagnating incomes of working class people are driving protests worldwide, as I think they are, then it could be that the failure of African American incomes to rise might be one of the reasons for the restlessness and anger we are seeing all around us. The system tells you that all you have to do is get education or training and get a job and work hard and you will be ok – which to us means security and a middle class lifestyle – and many people clearly feel that they have been lied to, that billionaires keep rising while they keep being kicked down. I do think police violence is a big problem in America, but I also think that rising incomes and a sense of a shared national fate are great tonics for reducing violence of all sorts.

In this sense I absolutely agree with angry people on the left that the system isn't working as it should.

But while I think are some things we could do to make life better for working people, black and white (remember that American police shoot more white people than black people, almost all of them from the working class), I do not think we have even a faint notion of what sort of system would solve these problems and get us back on the path to a middle class life for everyone rather than Gilded Age extremes.

If you listen to what people are saying in Seattle's "autonomous zone" about how they are going to live without capitalism, it's laughable.

I think some cities ought to abolish the police forces they have and start over, as Camden did, but I think it's just silly to believe that a modern society can survive without a police force.

The system we have is violent, heartless and unfair, but the ideas for radical change I have seen are pathetic. I just don't see any viable path but to keep struggling along within the system we have to make life better one small measure at a time.

The Self-Perception of Poor White Americans

The latest from the social science journals:

Poor White Americans report feeling “worse off” than poor Black Americans despite the persistent negative effects of racism on Black Americans. Additionally, some health issues are rising among White but not Black Americans. Across two representative samples, we test whether White = wealthy stereotypes lead White Americans to feel relatively worse off than their racial group and whether these perceptions have health consequences. Across both samples, White Americans perceived their own status to be significantly lower than the status of the majority of White Americans. In contrast, Black Americans perceived their own status to be significantly higher than the majority of Black Americans. Critically, status comparisons between the self and one’s racial group predicted the experience of fewer positive emotions among White, but not Black, Americans, which mediated reduced mental and physical health. We conclude that race/class stereotypes may shape how poverty subjectively feels.

I can't read the whole article, but I wonder about the role of shame in this. White Americans seem to feel more ashamed about losing a job or other setbacks then black or Hispanic Americans, so they are more likely for example to stop going to church after losing a job or getting divorced. This is usually interpreted as showing that white Americans believe more in the ideology of "standing on your own feet" etc., while minority Americans are more likely to believe that much of what happens is beyond your control. 

Tyler Cowen Interviews John McWhorter

John McWhorter is a linguist and African American who briefly became a famous culture warrior for attacking the whole notion of Ebonics. When he sat down to be interviewed by Tyler Cowen, he obviously expected to be asked about his views on race politics, because that's all interviewers ever ask him about. But Tyler Cowen is a different sort of interviewer, interested in a world of things outside politics. The interview starts like this:

TYLER COWEN: Let’s start with linguistics. I’ve read that the Estonian language has 14 case endings, eight dialects, 117 subdialects, and the core population of speakers is only a bit over a million. Now, why is Estonian so complicated?

JOHN MCWHORTER: What a wonderful opening question.

[laughter]

MCWHORTER: It’s 16 cases actually, and the reason is that Estonia is like the size of New Jersey. It might be the size of Trenton. So, it’s a very small group of people, and very few people have ever had any reason — I can’t believe this is the first question — to learn Estonian as a second language. If you try, you fail.

As a result, it gets more and more complicated, more and more ingrown. Whereas, Finnish, which is a sister language to Estonian, is actually kind of easy. It’s easy Estonian. So Estonian is a small language that’s almost never learned by adults and therefore almost never screwed up. That is why it is so complicated.

They go on to discuss language in a wonderful way for twenty minutes or so, then move on to music, and only get to politics toward the end, and that part is also a lot more interesting than most American conversations about race politics. Highly recommended.

One more  bit:

COWEN: What is interesting about the language Saramaccan?

MCWHORTER: [laughs] This is delightful.

[laughter]

MCWHORTER: The sorts of things I’m usually asked — this is great. Saramaccan — okay, here’s what happens. Let’s say that you’re in South America. You’re up on the northern edge, and it’s 1660 something, and it is an English plantation colony. You bring in Africans to work there. They speak two languages. For whatever it’s worth, they’re called Fongbe and Kikongo. Some others, but they don’t really play much of a part. So you have slaves speaking those.

The English leave the place, and the Dutch come in. There’s a trade, and so New Amsterdam becomes New York. Suriname goes from the English to the Dutch. We here don’t care about the Suriname part, but that was the trade. Now the Dutch are running it. You’ve got English and Dutch. Then some Portuguese-Jewish slave owners come in from Brazil. That’s this whole other story of wandering Jews. They probably bring slaves with them.

So 350 years later, what is spoken by the slaves there who were lucky enough to escape into the rainforest and were never caught? That is what Saramaccan is. So they have their own language, and it’s been studied by many people, I am one of a great many. But it’s fascinating because it’s a mixture of all these languages. Then it’s got other stuff that it does all by itself and it’s tonal, so it’s absolutely fascinating.

Reno City

Reno City was a mostly working class, mostly African America community in the District of Columbia that grew up after the Civil War and was eventually swept away to make room for upscale development. The name comes from Fort Reno, part of the Civil War defenses of Washington. The fort is shown above on one of my favorite DC maps, created by a War Department cartographer who drew the new forts and the road that connected them onto the best prewar map of the District, published  by Boschke in 1861. At the end of the war a settlement of black refugees or "contrabands" grew up southeast the fort, which seems to have been the nucleus of the eventual settlement.

However, this is actually hard to document, because maps made between 1865 and 1890 show very few people living in the area. Above is the location of Reno City shown on the 1874 Hopkins map, with only a few names listed, and we know that the Dovers were well-off white folks.

But the plan for Reno City already been hatched, as this 1870 plat shows. The school shown at the nearby intersection ("S.H.") was an African American school. So there were black folks living in the area. Plus, it seems unlikely that developers would have planned what became Reno City unless they knew there would be demand for the small houses and lots they envisaged for the property.

This 1891 map shows the street plan as it had developed by then. Maps do not show houses on most of the lots until later, though, so the neighborhood was built up gradually over time.

A detailed map from 1907 showing the houses that had been built by then, along with the reservoir that had been built within the old fort, using parts of the earthworks.

But even before the community reached its peak, forces began to gather bent on its destruction. In 1870 when Reno City was first imagined this was a rural area, the land not much valued. If you look back at the 1891 map you see that by then things were changing. A streetcar ran up Wisconsin Avenue from Georgetown, American University had been founded, and the vacant land in the area mostly belonged to developers like the Chevy Chase Land Company. Reno City, with its small frame houses on small lots (shown above in 1935), occupied mostly by African Americans, came to be seen as an obstacle blocking the development of northwest Washington, DC as an upscale community. Who wanted to live next to that riffraff?

So plans were set in motion to remove them. As this news story from the Evening Star of August 28, 1924 says, the DC surveyor had recommended condemning the whole place to make room for schools, an expanded reservoir, and a park. Because, he says,

In its present state the Reno subdivision is objectionable and a "blight" upon the locality because it is out of harmony with the highway plan and will preclude its development in an orderly and comprehensive manner. 

The result was a series of land grabs, as mapped here by a local historian. By 1951, everyone was gone.

You don't have to imagine that the DC surveyor was in the pay of the Chevy Chase Land Company; this problem is much deeper and more insidious than that. In the US local governments are still largely funded by property taxes, and at that time they were almost entirely funded by property taxes. This means that to have money for things like schools, roads, water, and sewers, communities need valuable property within their borders. Back then, and still today, poor people are usually a loss for communities, because they cost more in services than their land pays in taxes. Just a few years ago there was a move in Prince William County, Virginia, a DC suburb now much like Chevy Chase was in 1924, to ban the construction of townhouses because the residents of town houses cost the county too much money. Race was an additional factor in 1924 and still is today; one reason the existence of Reno City was blocking upscale development was that so many residents were black, and one reason many folks in PW County want to stop townhouses is that many who buy them are immigrants. But the basic arithmetic of taxes and spending drives city managers in that direction, and also provides a perfect cover for racism when one is needed.

It could be argued, and was, that the "sensible" thing for the city to do was to evict the residents of Reno City, promote the construction of wealthy neighborhoods round-about, and use the money to provide better services for poor folks in other parts of the city. Of course, the residents of Reno City did not see it that way. They protested, and by 1941 the NAACP protested with them. But to no avail; the stars of property speculation, the city's need for revenue, white power, and progress had aligned against them, and so they had to go.

George Packer and the NYC Public Schools

George Packer has a long essay in the Atlantic explaining how his experience sending children to the New York City public schools turned him against progressivism. New York has a crazy system with all different kinds of schools -- neighborhood schools, regional schools, magnet schools, charter schools -- and educated parents desperately game the system to get their kids into what are considered the best schools. This creates all kinds of moral traps for a liberal, since the "better" schools are much whiter than the system as a whole. Anyway Packer's kids eventually ended up in a neighborhood school that was a little weird -- no multiplication, a year-long unit on the geology and bridges of the city -- but ethnically mixed, with committed teachers and plenty of learning. His son was happy there.

The problems started when the city started allowing parents to opt out of standardized testing, and the principal launched a crusade to get the whole school to opt out of what she considered racist tests that put too much stress on students. Packer notes that although this caused huge anxiety to the parents his son seemed not to care at all, and found the test no more stressful than any other day. For the father, though, the experience felt like a totalitarian attempt to shame him into renouncing his own principles. It was the first of many.

Then came the bathroom blow-up, when to satisfy one trans kid the principal proclaimed all the bathrooms in the school unisex, without bothering to inform the parents. After a lot of drama, the kids simply ignored the new signs and went back to using the bathrooms that used to be assigned to their sex. Eventually the school system, in a moment of sanity, announced a policy that schools had to have one unisex bathroom but the rest could remain gendered.

Then came one of the other weird things about the NYC system, the competitive exams for middle school. Packer's son went through the testing and ended up in a school he and his parents found satisfactory, but the next year Mayor de Blasio eliminated the exams as racist and unfair. There was a meeting at Packer's son's school, but the presenter merely announced the change and then refused to answer questions.

De Blasio's schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has answered critics of the diversity initiative by calling them out for racism and refusing to let them "silence" him. As part of the initiative, Carranza has mandated anti-bias training for every employee of the school system, at a cost of $23 million. On training slide was titled "White Supremacist Culture." It included "Perfectionism," "Individualism," "Objectivity," and "Worship of the Written Word" among the white supremacist values that need to be disrupted. In the name of exposing racial bias, the training created its own kind.

Packer summarizes his thinking:

In politics, identity is an appeal to authority -- the moral authority of the oppressed: I am what I am, which explains my view and makes it the truth. The politics of identity starts out with the universal principles of equality, dignity, and freedom, but in practice it becomes an end in itself -- often a dead end, a trap from which there's no escape and maybe no desire for escape. Instead of equality, it sets up a new hierarchy that inverts the old, discredited one -- a new moral caste system that ranks people by the oppression of their group identity. It makes race, which is a dubious and sinister social construct, an essence that defines individuals regardless of agency or circumstance -- as when Representative Ayanna Pressley said, "We don't need any more brown faces that don't want to be a brown voice; we don't need black faces that don't want to be a black voice."

At times the new progressivism, for all its up-to-the-minuteness, carries a whiff of the 17th century, with heresy hunts and denunciations of sin and displays of self-mortification. The atmosphere of mental constriction in progressive milieus, the self censorship and fear of public shaming, the intolerance of dissent -- these are qualities of an illiberal politics.

I asked myself if I was moving to the wrong side of a great moral cause because its tone was too loud, because it shook loose what I didn't want to give up. It took me a long time to see that the new progressivism didn't just carry my own politics further than I liked. It was actually hostile to principles without which I don't believe democracy can survive. Liberals are always slow to realize that there can be friendly, idealistic people who have little use for liberal values.

Listen, people of the left, when you lose the George Packers of the world, you have lost every election before a single vote is counted.

I worry that if we can't get identity politics under control there is no future for liberalism in America.

Celebrating Brutality

Dave Weigel passes along this charming photograph, which has been making the rounds of conservative Facebook groups. It brings to the fore the basic mindset that underlies so much of what humans do wrong, our habit of dividing the world into US and THEM, making THEM into enemies and then wanting not just to defeat but to humiliate those enemies. Lost here is any notion that the people of Ferguson are our fellow citizens, our fellow human beings.

Then again maybe it just means that some people prefer fighting to hugging, especially when they feel assulted.

In opposition to this sort of thing I suggest the following, from our most eloquent President:

Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?

--Abraham Lincoln

Cairo

I've been reading about Cairo, Illinois, where the Mississippi and the Ohio come together. I used to live in southern Illinois, so I know that Cairo is pronounced Kay-ro, and that it is located in a place called Little Egypt because it was the land between the rivers. With such a terminologically confused start, the town probably was not ever destined for great things. But it had some success as a river town, and in the 1920s it had 15,000 inhabitants. After that it entered an era of slow decline.

Then came the Civil Rights movement. Cairo was always a southern town in a northern state, its soil in Illinois but its soul in Tennessee. Its white leaders took a rock hard stand against integration. In 1967 there was a bloody riot, and many houses and businesses were burned. Black leaders then organized a boycott of white-owned businesses that wouldn't hire black employees. They kept it up for three years, from 1969 to 1972. But rather than integrate, dozens of businessmen packed up and moved elsewhere. What was left was something like a ghost town. Now Cairo has only 3,000 inhabitants and a 26% poverty rate, and it has become a common stop for travelers seeking the forgotten backwaters of America. Here is blogger John Henion:

My first impression of Cairo was that it seemed like a nice place but I was glad I didn’t live there. I was ready to leave. And then I drove one block over.

Right on the levee of the Ohio River was what I can only describe as a modern day ghost town. It was as if a prosperous little downtown area with high-end hotels, restaurants, supper clubs and streets lined with ornate lamps had been abandoned overnight.

Strangely, it was beautiful.

I couldn’t resist. I had to snap some photos. I found a dilapidated old hotel and got my camera out. While I was working on my composition, there wasn’t another soul or sound around. But this silence was suddenly interrupted by a low rumble and a horrible scraping noise. I looked over my shoulder to see a slow moving truck emerge from an alley with a lawn chair crumpled and dragging underneath it. Instead of getting out and dislodging the lawn chair the driver just carried on, business as usual. That is, he carried on until he decided that what was important enough to interrupt this progress was calling out to me, “You’re supposed to take pictures of something pretty, fucker!”

At first I figured my new friend, this lawn-chair-scraper-guy was just bored and thought it would be funny to shout at me, the only other soul on this stretch of nothingness. But I’d later learn that there might be more to his commentary than meets the eye. . . .

Nathan Kirkman of TIME:

What's left, after decades of white flight and economic stagnation, is an expanse of abandoned buildings, bulldozed lots and forgotten history. . . . "I describe this town in three words," says Preston Ewing Jr., Cairo's unofficial historian and former president of the local NAACP chapter: "poor, black and ugly."

Stephanie Zimmerman:

The Elias Ace Hardware in Cairo is open, but the Shell is closed. The Washateria is open, but the CutMart has closed. There is no McDonald's, no Burger King, no Arby's. There is no recreation center, no bowling alley, no movie theater. The Spirit House — for liquor — is open, but the Christ Temple — for souls — is closed. Churches are for sale, prices reduced. The Martin CME Temple on Poplar Street is available, its public auction sign nailed to a dead tree stump.

Congregating in the streets is now the recreational pastime. At 24th and Sycamore, a former swimming pool is permanently filled with concrete and grown over with weeds, the city's response to court-ordered integration.

It's a sad story of the America we don't like to think about, where industrial decline and racism combine to destroy places and lives.

The Strange World of Monticello

Now that the first shocked or triumphalist reactions to proof of the liaison between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings have passed, we are starting to see interesting writing about what life at Monticello must have been like. This is Michael O'Brien writing in the TLS, reviewing a book by Annette Gordon-Reed:

Gordon-Reed begins by reconstructing the background and life of Sally's parents, the "bright mulatto" slave Elizabeth Hemings and John Wayles, English migrant, lawyer and debt collector, whose daughter Martha married Thomas Jefferson in 1772. Hence, notoriously, Sally was the half-sister of Jefferson's wife and the two were said to look alike. For some white Southerners, this quasi-incest has served as an explanation, because Jefferson can be seen as having reached out to his dead wife through Sally. A less familiar fact . . . is that, because there was interracial sex and resultant children over two generations -- Wayles with Elizabeth Hemings, Jefferson with Sally Hemings, assorted white employees and neighbours with other Hemings women -- Monticello was an intricately claustrophobic site of family ties, acknowledged and hidden. Slaves and free people had relationships based on power and dependency, but also on blood. Sally was a maid to Jefferson's daughter Polly, but Sally was also Polly's aunt, and Sally's children by Jefferson were Polly's cousins, just as Polly's son by Francis Eppes was cousin to Sally's children. These people could be mistaken for each other by strangers. This consanguinity was a central fact at Monticello, for the Hemingses formed a mulatto elite, and they kept aloof from darker slaves, with whom they almost never intermarried.

Skippy Gates Arrested, Cries Racism

In a bit of news that is amusing but, on reflection, really depressing:

Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation's most prominent African American scholars, was arrested last week at his home near Harvard University after trying to force open the locked front door.

According to a report by the police department in Cambridge, Mass., Gates accused police officers at the scene of being racist and said repeatedly, "This is what happens to black men in America." . . . .

Gates, 58, was arrested Thursday by police looking into a possible break-in for disorderly conduct "after exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior" at his home, according to the police report. Officers said they tried to calm down Gates, who responded, "You don't know who you're messing with," according to the police report.

Ogletree said Gates was ordered to step out of his home. He refused and was followed inside by a police officer. After showing the officer his driver's license, which includes his address, Ogletree said Gates asked: "Why are you doing this? Is it because I'm a black man and you're a white officer? I don't understand why you don't believe this is my house." Ogletree said Gates was then arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and racial harassment.

You gotta love the detail of an elderly black man being charged with "racial harassment" by a white cop.

Gates, whom I met when he taught at Yale, always struck me as a very nice, rather mild-mannered man who wanted his students to love him. He was also a darling of the academic establishment, because his approach to racial issues was so nuanced and free from anger. I remember hearing him say once that all the angst over what blacks wanted to be called was silly, and that made most sense was to be called "colored." And yet here he is in the classic confrontation of black men and white cops, bursting with resentment. Whenever I start to feel good about race relations in America, something like this happens to remind me how much anger and suspicion simmers just under the surface.