“The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” is an Atlantic article by Ta-Nehisi Coates, recent winner of a MacArthur “genius” award.
There is a lot of interesting stuff in the article, but to me some of the most interesting is how the writer and editors think about ambiguous facts.
For her research, Pager pulled together four testers to pose as men looking for low-wage work. One white man and one black man would pose as job seekers without a criminal record, and another black man and white man would pose as job seekers with a criminal record. The negative credential of prison impaired the employment efforts of both the black man and the white man, but it impaired those of the black man more. Startlingly, the effect was not limited to the black man with a criminal record. The black man without a criminal record fared worse than the white man with one. “High levels of incarceration cast a shadow of criminality over all black men, implicating even those (in the majority) who have remained crime free,” Pager writes. Effectively, the job market in America regards black men who have never been criminals as though they were.
It is uncertain as to why employers in this particular study were unenthusiastic about hiring black workers. It is possible that there was an association between “black” and “criminal” as the writer/editors suggest. But isn’t it also possible that employers avoid hiring people who could sue them for employment discrimination? Every black worker carries an additional expected litigation cost compared to a white worker. Alternatively, perhaps it it is the media itself, which loves to report on how black Americans do worse than white Americans in school (2009 posting on the subject). Perhaps it is the New York Times that has reduced the value of blacks in the marketplace by continuously reminding employers that race can be used as a rough guide to academic achievement. Yet the author and writer are confident that they can get inside the minds of the employers surveyed and know precisely why they preferred to hire non-black workers.
Much of the article concerns Detroit, whose decline is characterized as an unavoidable natural phenomenon, akin to an earthquake or hurricane: “Over the past half century, deindustrialization has ravaged much of Detroit. African Americans have had to deal not just with vanishing jobs but with persistent racism.” Are there no humans in Michigan who played any role in making Michigan an unattractive place to do business? (There are plenty of newly constructed car factories in South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Texas, and Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. (WSJ article from 2008)) The author and editors seem comfortable with that inference.
As the U.S. continues to slip downward in the world ranking of GDP per capita (CIA Factbook), I wonder if this will be Americans’ (both black and white) way of explaining the slippage: “we had nothing to do with it.”
[Separately, why would an employer want to deal with people like this, who blame their failures on external factors? Why not build a facility in a location where workers will take responsibility for the quality of their work? And if that is the goal, how to find such a place? If the goal is a factory within the U.S. (perhaps to capture government handouts/corporate welfare), is the answer to find a map of Atlantic subscribers and locate where the smallest percentage of residents subscribe?]
The perception is that black workers (manual labor) don’t show up on time, complain more, slack off when they can. Whether this is due to experience or bias, I don’t know; I know a few “blue collar” white guys and this is what they tell me ,including a business owner that only hires white guys.
Concerning Detroit, to not mention CPUSA-member Coleman Young (mayor for 20 years) or Kwame Kilpatrick, or that current Detroit has a nearly all-black city council yet can’t seem to get anything accomplished, seems to be intellectually dishonest.
Thought experiment: let’s suppose you are an employer and are considering hiring one of two candidates. Please put aside any priors you might have about the competence and personality of these candidates for the purposes of this hypothetical. The candidates are in all respects identical (same gender, race, age, IQ, degree, quality of university).
One of them is very active in social media, posting often on Twitter, Facebook, and has a tumblr. This person feels very strongly about issues like ‘social justice’ and it is obvious from his/her posts that he/she is passionate about the use of government to correct inequality and injustice in our society.
The other candidate … has basically nothing about him/herself online. No Twitter, a minimal Facebook page, perhaps a spartan LinkedIn profile. You have no idea what his/her politics are at all.
Am I irrational or misguided for having a strong preference against the first candidate, and a strong preference for the second?
I don’t find the explanations given in the posting any more compelling than the explanations given in the article. Given the history of recent, blatant, severe racial discrimination in the US, wouldn’t the Occam’s Razor explanation be that the discrimination continues (albeit less blatant and severe)?
The litigation risk for hiring a black employee is supposed to be balanced by the litigation risk of not hiring them.
Anonymous: The intent of the original posting was not to show that one explanation for ambiguous data is more convincing than another. It was pointing out that the author and editors drew unambiguous conclusions from ambiguous data. Note your personal favorite explanation of “discrimination” is much broader than what Mr. Coates wrote. “Discrimination” would include an employer who believes that the quality of a worker can be predicted, at least to some extent, by skin color. That doesn’t require the belief, asserted by Mr. Coates, that the skin color of a potential worker is predictive of the worker’s criminal record.
Somewhat related, I just read about how people in Detroit have been using a new software application to help organize improving various aspects of the city…
http://motorcitymuckraker.com/2015/10/09/more-than-10000-problems-fixed-through-improve-detroit-cell-phone-app/
But isn’t it also possible that employers avoid hiring people who could sue them for employment discrimination? Every black worker carries an additional expected litigation cost compared to a white worker.
The problem with this is that there was plenty of discrimination when it was perfectly legal.
Regarding this:
Separately, why would an employer want to deal with people like this, who blame their failures on external factors? Why not build a facility in a location where workers will take responsibility for the quality of their work?
Is there any evidence that Detroit auto workers don’t take responsibility for their work? The decline of Detroit is now quite an old story. The most important failure of Detroit occurred back in the middle 1970s when American consumers turned to Japanese cars after gasoline became much more expensive. The big 3 American auto makers failed massively in their response to that challenge from Japan. Also, southern workers are not any more responsible then Midwestern workers, they’re just cheaper.
With Detroit specifically, I understood that building new manufacturing plants deep in the countryside, and far away from existing manufacturing plants, was a union -busting or union-avoiding tactic.
One thing not well understood is that Detroit stands out somewhat from large cities with large African-American populations, though there are a few comparable examples with small cities. The more usual pattern, as happened in Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Philadelphia, is for the white-black distribution to stabilize at something around 50-50, and for African-American mayors to be replaced by White mayors, or for the races to essentially rotate control of City Hall. Detroit is unusual not just for the awfulness of Coleman Young, but that he and politicians like him controlled the city government for decades, and the African-American percentage just kept growing and growing to the point where it got past 80%. Even in Washington, which had Marion Barry, the African-American population eventually got back under 50% and Barry was removed from office before he could do too much damage.
I actually agree with the implied point, if that is what it was, about affirmative action. Recently there has been an attempt to extend this to veterans. The result has been a greater unwillingness of employers to hire veterans, due to the perception that they will be hard to fire, and to the perception that they have been mentally damaged by their service and therefore needed protection. I suspect that affirmative action backfired with getting more visible minorities more securely into the labor force. You could bring up women as a counter-example, but I think in that case any negative effects are balanced by male employers just liking having women, especially young women, around the office.
Protected classes make up about 80% of my employer’s workforce. Management holds these workers, especially black workers, to very low performance standards. This makes my job quite easy. As a member of a non-protected class, management holds me to a higher performance standard but it’s not all that high – just sufficiently higher than the protected classes. The low standard of the protecteds effectively pulls down my standard. Sort of like “crabs in the bucket”!
Paddy – I have done a fair amount of construction using both white and black contractors (whose workforces match their race) and I will give you my impressions of black vs. white (to the extent it is possible to generalize):
1.Showing up on time – not a strong point for American blacks. Their circumstances (need to take mass transport or drive unreliable vehicles) offers a partial but not full explanation.
2. Slacking off – not really. Some of these guys work way harder than I ever will (although Mexicans have both races beat by far).
In the high end suburbs where I am located, white contractors seem to have the idea that the cost of the job should be proportionate to local real estate prices which doesn’t make any sense – it costs the same amount of money per fixture or per outlet to rough wire or plumb a house in the ghetto as it does to do one in the suburbs. I have been quoted prices that are multiples of what black contractors from the nearby city charge. Do the white contractors do nicer work for their many times higher prices? Somewhat, but it’s all inside the walls and either it passes inspection or not, either the water flows or not, either it leaks or it doesn’t. In addition, the white contractors tend to do things the way their father showed them (a lot of them are multi-generational in the business) which means that they are using labor intensive and expensive materials and techniques that were current 50 or more years ago – cast iron and lead waste pipes, sweated copper water lines, etc. (which accounts for some but not all of their amazing high prices) whereas the black tradesmen are used to working with a more price sensitive customer and are willing to use the latest up to date materials and techniques if they are cheaper (and often better – with PEX the days of your plumber burning your house down with his torches are over) and they are willing to do a job in the way I want it done whereas white tradesman are totally locked into their ways and refuse to take advice.
How easy it actually is suing for employment discrimination? In the UK one must be independently wealthy irrespective of the job or backed up by someone footing the legal costs (some anti discrimination group that is willing to take on the case). Otherwise it costs a lot of money upfront, with no guarantee of positive outcome. Large corporations can play a long attrition game that is economically unviable for the claimant. Smaller businesses are more liable, but only if the business turnover so small they do not have *any* spare money for legal advice. Provided the directors are happy to take the hit, a small business could always declare bankruptcy and make the issue disappear.
So, how can a normal employee be a realistic risk of legal liability? Do people in the US of A get all expenses paid until a lawsuit is decided? do they get free legal representation?
Federico: The idea that the U.S. could have 760,000 lawyers representing only the independently wealthy is a curious one (see http://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/lawyers.htm ). http://www.ivancielaw.com/federal-employment-law/san-diego-employment-attorney-contingent-fee-faqs/ explains one avenue by which an American with minimal assets can sustain a lawsuit on the plaintiff side. Most anti-discrimination statutes in the U.S. provide for a victorious plaintiff to recover attorneys’ fees as well (so a contingent fee lawyer could actually get paid twice; once as a share of damages awarded and a second time with an award of fees for the hours spend on the case).
One of the “anti discrimination groups” that you posit is the U.S. government, e.g., in the form of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. So the “long attribution game” that you imagine a large company to be playing is against an opponent with a printing press for U.S. dollars. See http://www.quarles.com/publications/employment-practices-liability-insurance-buyer-beware/ for an example of what a company might spend to defend and ultimately settle an EEOC complaint.
Phil, the link you posted suggest that, even if one is represented in a no win/no fee basis there might be substantial costs. It is also unclear which percentage of claimants do get Federal support in their suit, or in which percentage of cases the Federal government does pursue the issue. I presume that claimants need to stay solvent irrespective of their legal claims. I also presume any legal representative would act in the best interested of the client, which might be not to pursue the claim, because of the overall expense, stress and the fact that any decision might be years in the making.
Thus the rational approach when employing people is NOT to ask ‘is there a chance that this person will unfairly sue me’, but, ‘what is this chance, and what cutoff makes sense to use’. Obviously this is a difficult question to answer, because it depends on what percentage of complaints are rejected by the courts as invalid, and a not better specified number of legitimate complaints that are never raised. If you want a breakdown by gender and ethnicity I suspect the answer is probably even more complex to obtain. As for the cutoff choose your pick!
@Vince,
My experience has shown southern workers aren’t as outspoken as Midwesterners or Yankees, for that matter. They do not question authority, which is decidedly not a popular characteristic of the flyover state bunch and or Yankees.
Ask Volvo, Mercedes and Boeing why they each chose South Carolina? Their reason wasn’t cheaper labor. It’s because there was less bullshit to hassle with from the municipality and the employees.
Mark – I suppose it’s possible that Southerners, with their veneration of the armed forces, rarely question management in factories. On the other hand, I seem to recall that Boeing was going to pay its South Carolina workers significantly less than those in Washington state. I doubt that the municipalities in Washington hassle Boeing much. Mexican workers are even cheaper than Southern workers. This is why see lots of auto plants getting built south of the border. I also recently read about textile mills in the Carolinas that have been dismantled and shipped to Mexico.
Also, you mention less BS from states and cities in the south. The reality of the situation is that the southern states build roads and exempt manufacturers from taxes in order to get jobs.
You also refer to “Midwesterners or Yankees”. Are people from the Midwest not considered to be Yankees?