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 ast week, the
Washington Post ran a front page, above-the-fold story, headlined
"Discrimination's Lingering Sting/Minorities Tell of Profiling,
Other Bias." The story reports the results of a survey by the Post,
the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University. The
gist of the survey is that in a wide variety of areas — police
stops, employment, physical assaults, service at restaurants and
stores, etc. — blacks are more likely to report that they have
been discriminated against because of their race than whites are,
with Hispanics and Asians falling in between.
But despite the stop-the-presses headline treatment, there is much
less to the study than meets the eye, and in fact its findings do
little to support the liberal agenda.
The basic limitation with the study is that it is not reporting
the "sting" of actual discrimination at all, but only whether people
think they have been discriminated against. On the second
page of the story, on page A16, in the story's seventh paragraph,
it is obliquely acknowledged that the study is measuring only people's
perceptions and not necessarily reality, and it is not until the
24th paragraph that the Post story says outright, "An honest
error or an unintended slight may be misconstrued as an act of racial
intolerance."
Moreover, there is a half-empty versus half-full way of looking
at the data. For the study's overarching question, "During the last
10 years, have you experienced discrimination because of your racial
or ethnic background, or not?," more than half — 53 percent
— of African Americans said no. That is surely an astounding
indicator of progress. Less than a generation after Martin Luther
King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech and formal, de jure segregation,
more than half of black Americans say they are not being discriminated
against at all.
For Hispanics and Asian, the figures are even better: Six in ten
say they have suffered no discrimination in the past ten years (for
whites, the number is eight in ten).
The study also indicates that white-on-black discrimination is not
the only kind. For instance, 35 percent of African Americans say
they have lost out on a job or promotion because of their race,
versus only 10 percent of whites. One way to look at this is that--assuming
that the figures reflect reality and that the each individual who
answered positively has suffered the same number of hiring/promotion
denials — if you are black, you are three-and-a-half times
more likely to suffer workplace discrimination than if you are white.
But, on the other hand, there are six times as many whites as blacks
in the United States. And that means that there are 1.7 times as
many instances in which whites are discriminated against in the
workplace as instances where blacks are the victims. In other words,
the study could be cited to support the conclusion that "reverse"
discrimination is a much more widespread problem than "old-fashioned"
discrimination.
The numbers are even more sobering when the question is, "Have you
ever been physically threatened or attacked because of your race
or ethnic background?" Seventeen percent of blacks said they had,
almost double the number of whites (9 percent). So blacks are twice
as likely to report that they have been physically threatened or
attacked — but there are more than three times as many racial
assaults on whites as on blacks reported.
Two days after it published the results of this survey, the Post
reported on a study by University of Michigan psychologist Lilia
Cortina. This study, which was not focusing on race or ethnicity,
surveyed 1,100 federal court employees. It found that 71 percent
of them believed they had been insulted, ignored, or otherwise dissed
by co-workers or superiors during the past five years.
The point is that there is a lot of perceived incivility in society.
There is also much disappointment in life. When bad things happen,
there is a universal human tendency to blame someone else. There
is also a need to ascribe some motive to the wrongdoer.
The original Post article quotes Lawrence Bobo, a professor
of Afro-American studies and sociology at Harvard, who asserts that
the study reflects "the steady occurrence of slights and put-downs
you know in your gut are tied to race but that rarely take the form
of blatant racism. No one uses the N-word. There is not a flat denial
of service. It is insidious, recurrent, lesser treatment."
The trouble is, the subtler the slights, the greater the likelihood
that they may not be slights, or at least racial slights, at all.
The media do minorities no favor by suggesting that discrimination
is more widespread than it really is.
There is no doubt that bigotry still exists in our country and I
have no doubt that African Americans suffer from it the most. But
it is also undeniable that there is less of it than there used to
be, and that black bigotry against whites is also a problem. The
study helps document all this, but none of this is news, and so
the study is not very helpful even after its limitations are recognized.
The tougher questions are: (1) Why does bigotry still exist?; and
(2) What is to be done about it? The study offers no guidance on
these, more important questions.
One suspects that the powers that be at Harvard and the Washington
Post believe in their hearts that white parents teach their
children to be bigots and that the way to solve the problem is by
the use of racial preferences. The fact of the matter, however,
is that prejudice nowadays is more likely to have its origin and
certainly its reinforcement in the easily observable and undeniable
pathologies of the inner city — no justification for bigotry,
but a fact that has to be grappled with — and that racial preferences
make race relations worse, not better, by confirming stereotypes,
fostering white resentment, and feeding a victim mentality among
African Americans.
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