Thora Institute

7/09/2007

The Truth about Black Students

[click on image for a better view]

All racial groups, not only blacks, are going to college in increasing numbers. How are blacks doing relative to other groups? When we look at the share of all degrees going to blacks, we find significant positive movement. In 1994, 7.2 percent of all bachelor’s degrees went to blacks. By 2004, black students increased their share to 9.4 percent. In 1994, 8.6 percent of all associate’s degrees went to blacks. By 2004, black students increased their share to 12.2 percent. Once again, the facts about black student achievement differ greatly from what the pundits are saying.

In addition to this story missed by the pundits and the rest of the media, the current issue of the Thora Institute’s Black Directions newsletter discusses:

• Why the Claim of a 50 Percent Black High School Graduation Rate is Wrong
• The Evidence that Black Standardized Test Scores are Rising
• The Actual Facts about the State of Black English
• Two Programs Proven to Increase Black Educational Achievement

To order this issue of Black Directions, send a check or money order for $9 made out to “Thora Institute LLC” to “Truth about Black Students,” Thora Institute LLC, P.O. Box 367, New Haven, CT 06513-0367.

To keep abreast of the latest high-quality social science research on black America, subscribe to the Black Directions newsletter. Send a check or money order for $36 (33% off) made out to “Thora Institute LLC” for a year’s Black Directions subscription (six issues) to Thora Institute LLC, P.O. Box 367, New Haven, CT 06513-0367. Only Black Directions separates the myths from the facts about black America.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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7/02/2007

The Sophistry of Segregationists

If Brown stands for anything, Brown stands for integration. --Wendy Parker, law professor, Wake Forest University

“Segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever,” proclaimed Governor George C. Wallace in his 1963 inaugural address. In regards to America’s elementary and secondary schools, it looks like Wallace may turn out to be correct: segregation forever.

This year the Supreme Court will issue decisions on two cases involving school desegregation policies in Seattle and Louisville, KY. It is likely that they will find these plans unconstitutional because they use race as a criteria for school assignment. (See Linda Greenhouse, “Court Reviews Race as Factor in School Plans,” New York Times, December 5, 2006.) Such a decision will continue the reversal of integrated schooling in America that has been taking place since the 1990s.

With the 1954 Brown decision, the Supreme Court joined the vanguard of the struggle for black civil rights and racial integration. Since the 1990s, the Supreme Court has been the vanguard of the struggle against black civil rights and racial integration.

The Civil Rights Project has documented that the Supreme Court’s decisions terminating school desegregation plans have resulted in more segregated schools. In every school district with 30,000 students or more, the termination of desegregation resulted in more segregation.

While the nation as a whole produced more integrated schools from the 1960s through the 1980s, schools have been becoming more segregated since the 1990s. In 1991, 66 percent of black students attended majority nonwhite schools. In 2003, 73 percent of black students were in these schools according to the Civil Rights Project’s report.

As bad as increased school segregation is, the greater damage from anti-integration rulings would be the codification of the Brown decision as standing for “colorblindness” and not for integration. Everyone knows that in the Brown decision the Court took a stand against segregation and more generally for policies designed to achieve racial equality, but the anti-integration arguments in the current cases assert that the Brown decision simply opposed the use of race and is indifferent to the existence of racial segregation. This is a travesty.

Any one interested in racial equality and racial justice should be outraged. The “colorblindness” logic represents a resurgence of Jim Crow. It does not institutionalize Jim Crow policies, but it bolsters any and all of the legacies of Jim Crow. If the line of argument of the opponents to school integration wins any attempt to address racial inequality could be ruled unconstitutional. During the hearing, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy asked if a school district could deliberately place a new school in a location that would—without any additional intervention—achieve a racially mixed student body. The lawyer representing the parents challenging the Seattle plan said no. (See Greenhouse.) Any plan for a new school, therefore, that does not yield a school as segregated as the already existing schools is subject to court challenge. By preventing the state from doing absolutely anything to address racial inequality the “colorblindness” advocates do a great deal to ensure the persistence of racial segregation and inequality.

“Colorblindness” means being willfully blind and indifferent to racial inequality and injustice. “Colorblindness” advocates are winning. Why aren’t more people outraged?

--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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6/25/2007

McWhorter’s Culture of Poverty Myth

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[Find out The Truth about "Acting White".]
________________________________________________________________________

[In the Future of Black America debate, I began by pointing out three blatant errors in the dust jacket of John McWhorter’s Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America. These errors are very common, and their presence on the dust jacket is evidence of that fact and evidence of what I see as a crisis of misinformation about black America today. After the Future of Black America debate, John McWhorter graciously invited me to send him my critique of his book. I accepted. Rather than have the main point be obscured by the many problems I find in the book, I have decided to send him three short, focused pieces and make them open letters. The first one is below and gets straight to the heart of the matter.]

Dear John:

It was very gracious of you to invite me to comment on Winning the Race. I’m quite serious when I state that I believe that there is a crisis of misinformation about black America today. I hope that you can join me in working to correct this misinformation. If I am “getting it wrong,” I hope that you will show me my errors.

You invited me to offer my critique of the book because it seems that you presume that my focus on the errors in the dust jacket avoids the main points of the book. This assumption is not right. The dust jacket does a fine job of providing an introduction to the book as it is supposed to. The errors in the dust jacket are the erroneous assumptions of the book.

Let’s look at the key issue of poverty. The dust jacket argues that “conditions for many blacks have grown worse since 1965: Desperate poverty cripples communities nationwide.” Now certainly there are impoverished black communities today, and certainly there were impoverished black communities in 1965. The real issue therefore is whether there is more black poverty today than in 1965.

I harp on this point because it is the essential assumption of Winning the Race. You write:

My argument, then, unabashedly assumes that there is such a thing as a culture of poverty. We must be under no illusion that this book only ‘implies’ this or that it is ‘dressing up’ the culture of poverty argument in new clothes. My explicit aim is to argue that poor blacks indeed have been waylaid by a culture of poverty. I unhesitatingly agree with all those before me who have analyzed poor blacks post-1970 in that way. The only ‘new clothes’ I intend is in my attempt to get at just what led poor blacks to fall into this culture of poverty so deeply at a particular time. This book is, most definitely, one more in the line of arguments that poor blacks’ problems are primarily due to culture rather than economics. Its argument stands or falls on whether my particular argument is effective. (p. 112, emphases in original)

Winning the Race is an attempt to explain why there is more black poverty and unemployment today than in the 1960s. Thus, one sees why the dust jacket claims that there is more black poverty today than in the 1960s. The entire book rests on this claim being true.

I state over and over again, that there has been no sustained increase in black poverty since the 1970s because Winning the Race is premised on this false idea. In 1966 (a 1965 estimate is not available from the Census Bureau’s “Historical Poverty Tables”), the black poverty rate was 41.8 percent. In 2005, the year Winning the Race was published it was 24.9 percent—nearly half of what it was in 1966. This rate is still way too high, but I see no evidence here that blacks “have been waylaid by culture of poverty” post-1970.

It is also wrong to presume that we can read cultural values from economic outcomes. The leading black public intellectuals like you, Juan Williams, Orlando Patterson, Bill Cosby and too many others divorce black economic outcomes from the goings on of the American labor market and the American economy. This is incorrect.

If we examine the statistics on the economic state of black and white America, it is clear that we cannot treat black economic outcomes as a “black thing” that has nothing to do with the American economy. Below is a graph of the black and white unemployment rates. Blacks have a higher unemployment rate than whites. I will address reasons why this is below. What I want to first focus on is the relationship between the black and white unemployment rates. The rates are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. [click on image for a better view]

Source: “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey,” Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What should be clear is that the black and white employment rates move in sync. When the black unemployment rate increases, so does the white. When the white decreases, so does the black. If a presumed crisis of cultural values produced the black unemployment rate and presumably good white cultural values produced the white unemployment rate, we would not see these parallel trends. It is the overall changes in the American economy, not black culture, which drive the largest changes in the black unemployment rate.

The increases in the black unemployment rate and the white unemployment rate are caused by economic recessions. All of the nearly vertical increases in the black and white unemployment rates correspond to recessions. The overall economic condition of blacks is strongly shaped by the overall economic condition of the American economy. The false idea that culture determines black economic outcomes obscures this important fact.

If we turn to poverty rates, we can see the same points illustrated again. It is harder to see the parallel trends between the black and white poverty rates because the black poverty rate has been roughly 3.5 times the white rate. An increase of 1 percent in the white poverty rate corresponds to about a 3.5 percent increase in the black rate. For blacks and whites respectively, the highest poverty rate is in 1966 and the lowest in 2000. The relatively slight increases in poverty in the graph correspond with economic recessions. The recession of 2001 reversed some of the poverty reduction experienced in the 1990s.

Source: “Historical Poverty Tables, Table 2, All People,” U.S. Census Bureau.

One comes across a startling finding if one examines the ratio of black to white poverty rates overtime. It is important to note that before 1973, the Census figures did not separate white Hispanics from white non-Hispanics. White Hispanics have had higher poverty rates than white non-Hispanics. White Hispanics increase the white poverty rate, and therefore lower the black-white poverty ratio before 1973 by some unknown degree. Beginning in 2002, blacks who identify as being of more than one race are not included in the statistics. This removal of multiracial blacks increases the black-white poverty ratio slightly, because multiracial blacks have a lower poverty rate. In 2005, for example, the black-white poverty ratio including multiracial blacks was 2.88. Excluding multiracial blacks, it was 3.00.

While the black-white poverty ratio historically has been roughly 3.5, when one looks closely one sees that it has actually been trending downward. You can see this more clearly if you look at the average by decade. The black poverty rate has been 3 times the white rate since 2000. This is a huge disparity. But when black public intellectuals wax romantic about earlier decades, they are simply not looking at the evidence. The black poverty rate was 3.8 times the white rate over the 1970s. Again, the presence of Hispanics in the white category likely means that the ratio in the 1960s and 1970s is actually higher than what we see in the graphs.

Contrary to what you claim in Winning the Race, that black poverty has worsened since the 1970s, in both absolute and relative measures there is less black poverty today than in the 1960s. There is a very positive downward trend in the black-white poverty ratio. This finding is exactly the opposite of what one would find if blacks were afflicted with a culture of poverty. Black public intellectuals should be celebrating this declining ratio but instead they are condemning poor blacks based on fictions.

Even with these improvements, the economic condition of blacks is still far from ideal. Unfortunately, we cannot look to the leading black public intellectuals for solutions to the high rates of black unemployment and poverty because they have ignored the facts, misread the trends and misdiagnosed the problems.

The economic conditions of blacks improve when the America economy improves. We need policies that strengthen the American economy and that reverse the growing income and wealth inequality. Blacks are worse off than whites economically to a significant degree because blacks have lower educational outcomes than whites. The major reason for the lower black educational outcomes is because of the lower quality of black educational opportunities which begin from even before kindergarten. There are effective programs that reduce these disparities running today. We need to push policy makers to make them widely available. And last but not least, there is considerable evidence that blacks still face discrimination in the labor market. We have unfinished business in the area of black civil rights. Improving the economic state of black America requires that (1) we improve the American economy, (2) improve the quality of black educational opportunities, and (3) eliminate anti-black discrimination in the labor market. Spending all of our energy fighting a mythical culture of poverty is a waste of time and resources since it does not exist.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

6/18/2007

Twisted Justice

Source: Adam Liptak, “Ruling Likely to Spur Convictions in Capital Cases,” New York Times, June 9, 2007.

In capital cases, only people willing to apply the death penalty are allowed to serve on juries. According to the New York Times, past research has shown that these pro-death-penalty jurors are more likely to find a defendant guilty, and they also tend to be more racist, sexist and homophobic than other jurors.

A recent decision by the Supreme Court makes it easier to eliminate anyone from a jury in a capital case who is not enthusiastically pro-death penalty. The Court argued that it would be legitimate to exclude a juror who “stated six times that he could consider the death penalty or follow the law,” because the juror did not display, as an appeals court judge stated, a “bloodthirsty eagerness” to apply the death penalty.

Once again the current Supreme Court has put on display their twisted sense of justice. Justice John Paul Stevens captures the problem well:

In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the majority had “gotten it horribly backwards” by creating the impression that “trial courts should be encouraging the inclusion of jurors who will impose the death penalty rather than only ensuring the exclusion of those who say that, in all circumstances, they cannot.”

The practices upheld by the Court will lead to exclusion of at least half of potential jurors from capital cases.

When he was on the Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall went even further and objected to the exclusion of anti-death penalty jurors. He argued, rightly in my view,

The exclusion of jurors opposed to the death penalty, he said, “allows the state a special advantage in those prosecutions where the charges are most serious and the possible punishments the most severe.”

It seems to me that excluding half of the potential jurors corrupts the ideal that one should have a jury of one’s peers.

Part II: For the Justice Department, Religion is In, Race is Out

Source: Neil A. Lewis, “Justice Department Reshapes Its Civil Rights Mission,” New York Times, June 14, 2007.

In pursuing civil rights cases, it should not be a matter of choosing religious discrimination or racial discrimination, but with the current administration, this seems to be the case. The Bush Justice Department is aggressively pursuing cases it defines as religious discrimination but displaying little interest in race-based hate crimes and voting rights violations against blacks.

Some of the cases the Justice Department has pursued are questionable as to whether they are really examples of religious discrimination. For example, the Times illustrates one recent questionable initiative:

Intervening in federal court cases on behalf of religion-based groups like the Salvation Army that assert they have the right to discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money.

The government is therefore fighting to allow religious groups to discriminate.

Along with this focus on religion, the Justice Department is recruiting more from religious universities and less from the top-ranked universities than in the past.

Part III: Throwing Out a Case for Having Too Much Evidence of Discrimination

Source: Linda Greenhouse, “Justices Limit Discrimination Suits Over Pay,” New York Times, May 29, 2007.

Lilly M. Ledbetter was the only female among 14 men in a Goodyear Tire plant in Gadsden, Ala. For almost 20 years she was paid less than her male co-workers--including those with less seniority than she had. The Supreme Court decided that she could only sue Goodyear within the first 180 days of experiencing pay discrimination. Of course, it is just about impossible for someone to be certain of pay discrimination and to have evidence for a case in this six-months time frame. The Court has made it a lot more comfortable for employers who discriminate.

Sadly, we will see more twisted justice from the Supreme Court for years to come. Register and vote for an administration with a better sense of right and wrong.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

6/11/2007

Income Inequality Increasing; Male Incomes Declining

The Great Debate

United States
France
Canada
Denmark.

Hint: It’s not the United States.

According to current research discussed in a new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, an individual has the best chance of achieving relative upward mobility in Denmark. Of the countries listed above, the United States had the least relative mobility. Of the nine countries examined in the report, only the United Kingdom is a less economically mobile society. Canada is more than twice as economically mobile as the U.S. “Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?” the title of the Pew Charitable Trusts report, finds the American Dream sick and in the hospital.

It is not clear whether the U.S. ever offered as much economic mobility as it claimed to, but, today, one’s parents’ economic status plays a large role in one’s possibilities for economic success. The Pew report states:

Most studies find that, in America, about half of the advantages of having a parent with a high income are passed on to the next generation. This means that one of the biggest predictors of an America child’s future economic success—the identity and characteristics of his or her parents—is predetermined and outside that child’s control. To be sure, the apple can fall far from the tree and often does in individual cases, but relative to other factors, the tree dominates the picture.

It is possible to advance relative to others in American society, but if one wishes to be rich generally it is better to have rich parents or be born in Denmark.

Most Americans probably failed to recognize the limited relative mobility in the U.S. because, we have had a good deal of absolute mobility. Relative mobility refers to how much shuffling there is of people’s position in income rankings. Absolute mobility refers to increases of income even if the ranking stays the same.

For most of the past century, Americans’ individual incomes have generally increased overtime. This historic trend appears to have come to an end. We can see this in men’s income. Between 1964 and 1994, adjusted for inflation, the median income of men in their thirties rose 5 percent from $31,097 to $32,801. When comparing men in their thirties from 1974 to 2004, the picture is starkly different. Men’s incomes declined 12 percent from $40,210 to $35,010.

Although absolute mobility does not occur broadly for men anymore, it is still occurring for American families. Because women increasingly work, their added incomes have caused household incomes to rise even as men’s individual incomes declined.

Part of the reason for men’s declining incomes is that the American economy generally has grown much more slowly post-1960s compared to pre-1960s. Another important factor is that the benefits of increasing American productivity are not being distributed widely. Productivity and income used to grow together prior to the 1970s. Since the 1970s the productivity growth has been increasingly disconnected from income growth. The benefits of economic growth have been increasingly concentrated among the rich.

Between 1979 and 2004, the income of the poorest one-fifth of Americans grew 9 percent. Over the same period, the income of the richest fifth grew 69 percent and the richest 1 percent by 176 percent. An article in the New York Times states the recent economic trends make it appear as if “every household in [the] bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent.” (David Leonhardt, “Larry Summers’s Evolution,” New York Times, June 10, 2007.)

Americans seemed to have been satisfied with the American economic policy because although there was little relative mobility, there was a significant degree of absolute mobility. With declining absolute mobility and increasing income inequality, there may be opportunity for creating new and innovative economic policies. Now might be a good time for the so-called black leaders to start articulating an economic vision that will help poor Americans. The so-called black leaders need to remember that Martin Luther King Jr. died beginning the Poor People’s Campaign. Will they continue where King left off?

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

6/04/2007

Health Care for All?

The Great Debate

Algernon Austin, Thora Institute and Demos
John McWhorter, Manhattan Institute
Orlando Patterson, Harvard University
Moderator: Felicia Lee, New York Times

The Future of Black America: The Burden of History or the Audacity of Hope?
Does the twenty-first century require a new black politics? For many, the success of Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Oprah and Richard Parsons signals the emergence of a post-race America where anyone with the right values and skills can succeed. For others, the persistence of segregated schools and the increasing numbers of blacks in America's prisons indicate that we are still living in the shadow of Jim Crow. What are the major obstacles to a prosperous future for black America? What are the best policies for moving forward - an effort to change values, an anti-discrimination offensive, or something else? Is it useful to continue to think about politics through the lens of race?

June 13, 2007, 6:30 PM
Donnell Library, Manhattan, NYC
20 West 53rd between 5th and 6th
Register here or call (212) 633-1405 x533

Sponsored by Demos and the Donald and Paula Smith Family Foundation

[Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com]

[Find out The Truth about "Acting White".]
________________________________________________________________________

[re-post]

In 2004, 19.7 percent of black Americans did not have health insurance, according to the Census Bureau. For Americans generally, the percent without health insurance has been rising. It reached 15.7 percent for all Americans in 2004. Blacks are more likely to be uninsured than nonblacks.

The growing number of uninsured is only one of several critical problems facing the American health care system. The New York Times highlighted another problem in its series of articles on diabetes in January of last year: the American health care system does far too little in terms of preventive care.

Blacks are more likely than nonblacks to be diabetic. Diabetes is the fourth leading cause of death among blacks. The New York Times article "In the Treatment of Diabetes, Success Often Does Not Pay" by Ian Urbina (January 11, 2006) illustrated how dysfunctional the American health care system is. Effective diabetes treatment centers were closed down because they did not make money, and they did not make money because they provided good preventative medicine. Urbina writes:

[The diabetes treatment centers] were victims of the byzantine world of American health care, in which the real profit is made not by controlling chronic diseases like diabetes but by treating their many complications.

Insurers, for example, will often refuse to pay $150 for a diabetic to see a podiatrist, who can help prevent foot ailments associated with the disease. Nearly all of them, though, cover amputations, which typically cost more than $30,000.

Patients have trouble securing a reimbursement for a $75 visit to the nutritionist who counsels them on controlling their diabetes. Insurers do not balk, however, at paying $315 for a single session of dialysis, which treats one of the disease's serious complications.

The United States spends a greater proportion of its wealth on health care than any other county, but Americans have rather little to show for it. In international comparisons, American health care ranks highly for treating some specific diseases, but overall the American system tends to fall near or at the bottom of developed Western nations. In 2000, the World Health Organization ranked the U.S. healthcare system 37th in the world.

In December of 2005, the New York Times had another important article on the American health care system. Eduardo Porter in "Health Care for All, Just a (Big) Step Away" (December 18, 2005), explained that, from a purely economic standpoint, the U.S. could fairly easily shift to a universal health care system that would provide health insurance for everyone.

What Porter explained was that the federal government provides about $130 billion to businesses in tax breaks to encourage them to provide health insurance to their employees. If the federal government collected these taxes and added a little more revenue, it could provide health care for all. The 20 percent of blacks without health care would be much better off under this system.

Randolph K. Quaye (African Americans’ Health Care Practices, Perspectives, and Needs (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 2005), 50-51) comes to this conclusion after assessing the American health care system and the needs of black Americans:

Countries that have provided universal health care coverage for all their citizens have realized the massive health care cost savings associated with such a policy. As we in the United States struggle to contain health care costs, it is time to recognize that tax incentives for health care coverage only to big corporations will in the long run not be in the best interests of this country. As has been demonstrated, the loss of manufacturing jobs overseas and the high cost of prescription drugs in the face of a potentially bankrupt Medicaid and Medicare systems will in the end frustrate the aspirations of younger and older Americans. The time to act is now, and act we must.

Quaye concludes that blacks and other Americans would benefit from a system that provides health care for all.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

5/28/2007

Take from the Poor, Give to the Rich

The Great Debate

Algernon Austin, Thora Institute and Demos
John McWhorter, Manhattan Institute
Orlando Patterson, Harvard University
Moderator: Felicia Lee, New York Times

The Future of Black America: The Burden of History or the Audacity of Hope?
Does the twenty-first century require a new black politics? For many, the success of Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Oprah and Richard Parsons signals the emergence of a post-race America where anyone with the right values and skills can succeed. For others, the persistence of segregated schools and the increasing numbers of blacks in America's prisons indicate that we are still living in the shadow of Jim Crow. What are the major obstacles to a prosperous future for black America? What are the best policies for moving forward - an effort to change values, an anti-discrimination offensive, or something else? Is it useful to continue to think about politics through the lens of race?

June 13, 2007, 6:30 PM
Donnell Library, Manhattan, NYC
20 West 53rd between 5th and 6th
Register here or call (212) 633-1405 x533

Sponsored by Demos and the Donald and Paula Smith Family Foundation

[Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com]

[Find out The Truth about "Acting White".]
________________________________________________________________________

“Innovative and zealous firms have lured unsophisticated shoppers by the hundreds of thousands into a thicket of debt from which many never emerge,” states the coverstory of Businessweek. (Brian Grow and Keith Epstein, “The Poverty Business: Inside U.S. Companies’ Audacious Drive to Extract More Profits from the Nation’s Working Poor,” Businessweek, May 21, 2007.)

American companies have discovered a new gold mine: the working poor. They are finding ever new ways to lend to the working poor for higher and higher interest rates. Businessweek reports that in 1989 poor households paid 16.8 percent more on their interest rate for their auto loans. In 2004, poor households were paying 56.1 percent more. In mortgage loans, the poor paid 6.4 percent more than the rich in 1989. In 2004, they were paying 25.5 percent more. For a wide range of products, from college loans to car loans, the poor are paying more.

Some auto dealers serving poor clients no longer post the prices of the cars they sell, but use software to mine customers’ financial records to find out the maximum the person can afford to pay. Tax-preparation companies give advances on poor people’s Earned-Income Tax Credit and they can then skim 10 percent off of the tax returns of the working poor. A 10 percent rate is a bargain compared to the interest rates exceeding 100 percent charged by other types of lenders who target the poor.

Now would be a good time to bring back usury laws that limit the amount of interest a company can charge. Businessweek also suggests bringing more mainstream banking to poor communities and educating customers.

How the New Loan Sharks Divide Up $250 Billion

[click on image for a better view]

--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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5/21/2007

Turning Tides in the War on the Poor?

The Great Debate

Algernon Austin, Thora Institute and Demos
John McWhorter, Manhattan Institute
Orlando Patterson, Harvard University
Moderator: Felicia Lee, New York Times

The Future of Black America: The Burden of History or the Audacity of Hope?
Does the twenty-first century require a new black politics? For many, the success of Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Oprah and Richard Parsons signals the emergence of a post-race America where anyone with the right values and skills can succeed. For others, the persistence of segregated schools and the increasing numbers of blacks in America's prisons indicate that we are still living in the shadow of Jim Crow. What are the major obstacles to a prosperous future for black America? What are the best policies for moving forward - an effort to change values, an anti-discrimination offensive, or something else? Is it useful to continue to think about politics through the lens of race?

June 13, 2007, 6:30 PM
Donnell Library, Manhattan, NYC
20 West 53rd between 5th and 6th

[Find out The Truth about "Acting White".]
________________________________________________________________________

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press reports big increases in Americans’ concern for the poor. Between 1994 and 2007, Americans’ desire to have the government provide a social safety net increased by at least 10 percentage points across three measures.

This increasing concern for the poor spans all of America’s major social and political divides. “Some of the biggest increases in concern for the needy,” the Pew Center observes, “have come from unexpected sources: political conservatives, Southern whites and older Americans.” In response to the idea that “the government should help more needy people even if it means going deeper into debt,” the percentage of self-described conservatives agreeing increased 20 percentage points to 48 percent between 1993 and 2007. Forty-nine percent of whites, today, agree that the poor “have it hard”; in 1994, only 35 percent agreed.

We can examine the changes by race, political affiliation and income in the percent of people who agreed to all three of the safety net questions. The questions are (1) “The government should help more needy people even if it means going deeper into debt”; (2) “The government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep”; (3) “It is the responsibility of the government to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves.”

Percent of White and Black Support for a Social Safety Net
Whites increased their support for a social safety net 13 percentage points. However, even with an increase more than twice the size of the black increase, whites are still less likely to support the government helping the poor than blacks. [Click on images for a better view.]

Percent of Support for a Social Safety Net by Political Affiliation
Democrats and Independents had similar strong increases in support for a social safety net. Republicans had weaker gains and continue to be the least supportive of the three political groups. Democrats are the most supportive.

Percent of Support for a Social Safety Net by Household Income
Perhaps not surprisingly, the poorest Americans showed the biggest increase in support for government help for the poor among income groups. All other income quartiles had increases about half as big as the poorest quartile. The lower middle quartile increased 12 percent to a level of 43 percent in favor, the upper middle quartile increased 10 percent to 40 percent support, and the highest quartile increased 13 percent to 29 percent agreeing. In 1994 and 2007, the lower ones income the more likely one is to support government aid for the poor.

Source: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 2007.

Americans are more interested in having government help the poor, but are our elected officials concerned about helping the poor? The current crop of presidential candidates is made up mainly of multimillionaires. Imagine what our political system might be like if non-millionaires had a fair shot at getting elected. Nonetheless, non-rich Americans should not further diminish their political power by not voting. Register and vote.

--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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[Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin]

5/14/2007

One-Third of Black Diabetics Unaware

Poor public health policy

Insufficient health care insurance benefits

The lack of screening for diabetes

Poor access to helpful information

Poor lifestyle choices.

What Is Diabetes?
The normal digestive process is as follows: After eating, glucose and other nutrients circulate in the bloodstream. The pancreas then produces and releases insulin into the blood to help transport glucose into the cells. Insulin is created by beta cells located in the pancreas. Insulin works like a unique key that contacts each cell, unlocking a doorway for glucose to enter. Glucose feeds virtually all cells in the body, especially the brain and muscle.

Type 1 diabetes (T-1) occurs when most or all of the beta cells inside the pancreas have been destroyed by a person’s immune system. Consequently, these patients need insulin from outside sources.

Type 2 diabetes (T-2) occurs when some of the body’s cells cannot recognize the insulin molecules. Consequently, these cells do not allow insulin to unlock the doorway for glucose to enter. This allows the glucose to accumulate in the blood and continue to circulate, damaging the body.

Gestational diabetes is diagnosed as elevated blood glucose levels during the 24th and the 28th weeks of pregnancy. However, blood glucose levels return to normal after delivery. These women have a much higher chance of developing diabetes in later years.

Do You Have Diabetes But Don’t Know It?
Early symptoms of Type 2 diabetes include the following:

Increased urination – The kidneys are trying to reduce the amount of glucose in the bloodstream.

Increased thirst – The body is trying to replace the water loss due to increased urination.

Increased appetite – The cells of the body are starving.

Fatigue – Reduced amount of absorbed glucose equals reduced energy.

Weight loss – Cellular starvation forces the body to use up its stored fat.

Blurred vision – Small capillaries in the eyes begin to multiply and/or rupture.

Slow-healing wounds and infections – Poor circulation inhibits the healing process.

Type 2 diabetes can be prevented through early screening, good nutrition and ongoing physical activity.

Early screening helps. The simplest means for early detection is a blood sugar test, measured after a person has fasted for at least eight hours. About 54 million Americans are “pre-diabetic.”

Good nutrition means eating balanced meals at all times. This involves eating a combination of high fiber carbohydrates, low fat protein, polyunsaturated fats, and flat water. For more information on nutrition go to www.ImTypeFree.com.

Increased daily activity means more than walking and strength training. It means playing with the kids in the park, running with the dog, parking your car a little farther from the store, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, etc.

Diabetes is a leading cause of:

Strokes

Kidney failure

Adult blindness

Non-trauma lower limb amputation

Nerve damage

Pain in the feet and legs

Loss of feeling in the feet

Erectile dysfunction

Lost control of bladder, bowels, stomach

Cardiovascular disease.

Stroke and heart attacks are the leading cause of death in people with diabetes.

How to Avoid Type 2 Diabetes

Good nutrition – snack on and eat more nutritious foods.

Increased physical activity – at least 30 minutes a day of moderate exercise/activity.

Visit your physician at least once per year.

Take your prescribed medication.

Get helpful information from websites, books, your medical team, etc.

For more information go to www.ImTypeFree.com, a web community for diabetes care and nutrition, and consult your physician.

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[Find out The Truth about "Acting White".]

5/07/2007

Another Reason to Worry about NCLB

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”

--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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The evidence that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is not working as intended continues to accumulate. Faced with extreme pressure to improve test scores quickly--without the benefit of educational reforms that have been proven to improve test scores quickly--states are finding ways to creatively interpret the requirements and fudge the results.

One particularly harmful way that school systems have “met” the requirements is by retaining low-performing students. If the low-performing students are held back in the third grade then they will not be tested in the fourth grade. A school system can make its average test scores appear to be improving by essentially deleting the lower scores from the average in this manner.

This practice is just what early critics of the Act feared. Holding students back greatly increases the likelihood that they will drop out of school.

The educational researcher Walt Haney is the one who has discovered this practice in Florida. The state was celebrated for producing a large increase in test scores. But it simply held back more black third-grade students. Below are excerpts from Haney's report, “Evidence on Education Under NCLB (and How Florida Boosted NAEP Scores and Reduced the Race Gap).”

When results of NAEP [National Assessment of Education Progress tests] for 2005 were released, the state of Florida seemed to have made remarkable progress. . . .

Florida’s fourth graders seemed to have moved slightly ahead of fourth graders nationwide on the NAEP 2005 math results. But even more startlingly, Florida seemed to have made dramatic progress in reducing the “race gap” in achievement.

But what had really happened in Florida? It turns out that the apparent dramatic gains in grade 4 NAEP math results are simply an indirect reflection of the fact that in 2003-04, Florida started flunking many more students, disproportionately minority students, to repeat grade 3.

. . . these were disproportionately more Black and Hispanic children (15-20% of whom were flunked) than White ones (about 4-6%% of whom were flunked in grade 3). Thus it is clear that the NAEP grade 4 results for 2005 reflected not any dramatic improvements in elementary education in the state. Rather they were an indirect reflection of Florida policy that resulted in two to three times larger percentages of minority than White children being flunked to repeat grade 3.

This is, regrettably, a tragedy in the making. Research now makes it abundantly clearly that flunking children to repeat grades in school is not only ineffective in boosting their achievement, but also dramatically increases the probability that they will leave school before high school graduation . . .

High stakes testing – by which I mean making important decisions based on test results alone – has been increasing in recent decades in the U.S. This trend by no means began with the NCLB Act of 2001, but it certainly has been fueled by the NCLB legislation. The mania to make test score averages appear to increase has resulted not just in fraud in Florida, but also to school administrators in at least three jurisdictions (in Texas, New York and Alabama) actually pushing
young people out of school in order to make high school test results look better. (The three cases are documented in our report The Education pipeline in the United States, 1970–2000, Haney et al., 2004).

If the black high school graduation rate declines in the near future, many people will see this as further “evidence” of a cultural crisis in black America, but at least some people will know that it is an effect of the terrible No Child Left Behind Act which is literally leaving black children behind. There are ways to increase black test scores and graduation rates, but with No Child Left Behind effective rhetoric won and effective educational policy lost.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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[Find out The Truth about "Acting White".]

4/30/2007

Is the No Child Left Behind Act Increasing the Black School Dropout Rate?

One of the 10 Best Black Books of 2006! --Kam Williams, African American Literary Book Club

I taught Getting It Wrong to my undergrad black politics class. The book is a real tonic. --Adolph Reed, University of Pennsylvania

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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________________________________________________________________________

[re-post]

Reading Dropouts in America: Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis, edited by Gary Orfield, it is clear that many researchers who study high school dropouts are worried that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) will increase the high school dropout rate for blacks and other disadvantaged groups. NCLB is the most recent and wide-reaching initiative of the movement for high-stakes testing in schools. With high-stakes testing, students are prevented from progressing with their education if they fail to pass a specific test. Since NCLB only became law in 2002, adequate data on this policy is still being collected. The researchers in Dropouts in America have based their analyses largely on other older high-stakes testing policies.

Over the past two decades, many states have instituted state-level high-stakes testing as a basis of promoting students. Under these policies, students who fail to pass a high-stakes test are held back to repeat a grade. Examining data from the mid-1980s to 2001, researchers have shown than states with high-stakes testing have had higher dropout rates than states without these policies.

In the mid-1990s, Chicago instituted a high-stakes test for students to enter high school. Students who did not receive a minimum score on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills were not allowed to enter the ninth grade. This policy produced a dramatic increase in the retention of black students in the eight grade. While the policy did produce an increase in test scores, it also increased the black high school dropout rate.

This research and many prior studies suggest that the high-stakes testing of NCLB may increase the black school dropout rate. The Act has a provision to require schools to be assessed based on graduation rates in addition to test scores, but the graduation rate requirement has not been enforced. This means that schools would actually benefit from having lower-performing students dropout. Average test-scores will increase if there are fewer lower-performing students in a school.

While it is good to push schools to better educate black students, a policy that produces more black dropouts does more harm than good. It is possible to improve black students’ achievement without resorting to the drastic and punitive measures of NCLB that are likely to increase the dropout rate. Conveniently, many of the policies that would improve black student achievement would also reduce the black student dropout rate.

The fact about a third of black high school dropouts go on to obtain a GED credential shows that academic achievement is not the only reason students dropout of school. The GED is designed so that 40 percent of students who received a high school diploma could not pass it. Any black student who received a GED is academically capable of completing high school.

Students dropout of school for a variety of reasons. Some are doing poorly in school. Many are simply bored with school and do not see its relevance to life outside of school. Some have conflicts with other students or with teachers. Some decide to work instead of going to school. Some dropout because they have a child or need to take care of a family member.

Smaller classes, more motivated, knowledgeable, and creative teachers, and more experiential and applied curricula would both increase black student achievement and prevent black students from dropping out because of boredom. NCLB seems to be producing schools that emphasize repetitive drilling for the high-stakes tests. Both students and high quality teachers who need schools to be more interesting and creative are likely to leave under these circumstances.

Students who have fallen behind academically need extra support, not additional academic punishments. Many of the students who are being held back in the ninth grade, have had academic difficulties for much of their school career. Indeed, one of the best high school dropout prevention programs is a highly effective pre-school program. After consistently doing poorly in school, low-performing students choose to drop out rather than to be subjected to additional academic embarrassment.

More moderately low-performing students could benefit from tutors and summer school instead of retention. Good alternative schools can be effective for students with more serious academic needs or for students with other social or personal problems.

Although passing the GED test is not easy, the GED credential when held by nonwhites is not valued by employers. Since a large number of high school dropouts later regret not finishing high school, they should be encouraged to obtain a high school diploma as an adult. For dropouts who are not planning on using a GED as a stepping stone to college, it may be particularly useful for them to obtain their high school diploma through an adult high school program instead of a GED.

There are ways to improve black students’ academic achievement without increasing the black dropout rate. It is too early to know for certain whether NCLB is such a program. Based on the existing research, few educational researchers would bet that it is.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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4/23/2007

The Truth about “Acting White”

Source: Adapted from Girl Scout Research Institute, Feeling Safe: What Girls Say, 2003, 41.

The proponents of the “acting white” hypothesis claim that black students experience much more academic teasing than white students, but they have never presented any direct evidence to support this assertion.

The educational researcher Ronald F. Ferguson has found that the key to popularity for black and for white students lies in having cool clothes and being funny. For both groups, scholastic achievement is not important to being popular. Black leaders and black public intellectuals have therefore been condemning black children for behaving like average American students.

Much of the concern with “acting white” has been based on a desire to address the very real achievement gap between black and white students. But while leaders have been fixated on the “acting white” hypothesis, they have neglected the real reasons for the gap.

Five Steps to Reducing the Black-White Achievement Gap
While misguided leaders have been calling for a cultural transformation to address the supposed “acting white” crisis, they have ignored far more important educational reforms:

1. Improving and expanding early childhood education. A large body of research shows that black students begin kindergarten behind white students. If we expand and improve the quality of the pre-kindergarten education received by black children we will significantly reduce the testing gap.

2. Improving teacher quality in black schools. A recent study by the Illinois Education Research Council found that 45 percent of black high school students in Illinois attended schools with the lowest teacher-quality ratings. Only 8 percent of white students attended such low teacher-quality schools. Until we eliminate the teacher-quality gap, we will have a test-score gap.

3. Providing small classes and creating small schools. Black students, who are often behind, benefit from the extra attention available in very small classes. Reductions in class size have been shown to boost black student achievement. Smaller schools have been shown to increase black students’ graduation rates.

4. Increasing school integration. While black leaders have been condemning black students based on flawed “acting white” research, America’s schools have been becoming increasingly segregated. Few black leaders have said a word about this issue. Yet historically, integration has been one means by which blacks have gained access to higher quality schools. Effective school integration can also help break down the racial stereotypes of whites and blacks.

5. Making college more affordable. Research suggests that if college were more affordable there would be higher black college enrollment and graduation rates.
It is time to address the real issues holding black students back.

For a detailed discussion of the flaws in the “acting white” research of Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu—the originators of the hypothesis—send a check or money order for $9 made out to “Thora Institute LLC” to “Flaws of ‘Acting White’,” Thora Institute LLC, P.O. Box 367, New Haven, CT 06513-0367.

To keep abreast of the latest high-quality social science research on black America, subscribe to the Black Directions newsletter. Send a check or money order for $36 (33% off) made out to “Thora Institute LLC” for a year’s Black Directions subscription (six issues) to Thora Institute LLC, P.O. Box 367, New Haven, CT 06513-0367. Only Black Directions separates the myths from the facts about black America.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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4/16/2007

Do IQ Tests Measure Intelligence?

a biopsychological potential to process information that can be activated in a cultural setting to solve problems or create products that are of value in a culture. … intelligences are not things that can be seen or counted. Instead, they are potentials—presumably, neural ones—that will or will not be activated depending upon the values of a particular culture, the opportunities available in that culture, and the personal decisions made by individuals and/or their families, schoolteachers, and others.

Gardner argues that there are at least 7 intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical; musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal. Linguistic intelligence and logical-mathematical intelligence are the ones emphasized in school and captured by IQ tests.

Just as formal education appears to improve linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence, all of the other intelligences can be improved with training.

Even people who seem gifted in a particular intelligence or domain will accomplish little if they are not exposed to materials that engage the intelligence. By the same token, as demonstrated vividly by such programs as the Suzuki Music Talent Education Program, shrewd environmental interventions can convert ordinary people into highly proficient performers or experts. Indeed, the ‘smarter’ the environment and the more powerful the interventions and the available resources, the more proficient people will become, and the less important will be their particular genetic inheritance.

It is clear that we value the intelligences not measured by IQ tests. For example, our politicians, salespeople, and therapists draw on interpersonal intelligence to inspire, persuade and guide others. We spend great amounts of money and time admiring exemplars of bodily-kinesthetic and musical intelligences—our athletes, dancers and musicians. Our pilots as well as architects draw on spatial intelligence. It seems that we would be better off if we officially acknowledged the value of these multiple intelligences and the benefits of having people who are multiply talented.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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4/09/2007

Are Black IQs Rising?

One of the 10 Best Black Books of 2006! --Kam Williams, Dallasblack.com

I taught Getting It Wrong to my undergrad black politics class. The book is a real tonic. --Adolph Reed, University of Pennsylvania

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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________________________________________________________________________

Intelligence or IQ tests are among the most controversial topics in social science. There are several reasons for this fact. One reason is that they have been used repeatedly to argue for the innate inferiority of racial minorities. Another reason is because there is disagreement among the specialists over the definition and measure of intelligence.

The racist IQ argument usually rests on claims that IQ tests measure individuals’ genetic endowments primarily and since these endowments are genetic they cannot be changed by social interventions. Average racial group differences are then used to argue for the superiority of one racial group over another.

The sign that an elitist is more interested in race than intelligence is the move from the individual to the racial group in his arguments of superiority. If one were simply an IQ elitist then race doesn’t matter. People with IQ scores above 130, for example, would be the 2.5 percent IQ elite of the population—regardless of their race—and everyone else would be inferior—irrespective of their race. Whites’ IQs cover the entire spread of the IQ distribution, so to be a true white IQ elitist one has to regard the majority of the white population as inferior. The same, of course, goes for IQ elitists of any racial group. Thus, it is really impossible to be an IQ elitist and a racial supremacist at the same time. Racial supremacists only use IQ to try to mask their racism.

Because of this history of misuse of intelligence tests and because of legitimate concerns about racial inequality, it is useful to have an understanding of issues of race and intelligence. First, IQ tests measure nurture at least as much as nature. Scores on IQ tests have been increasing across the globe. In the U.S., one sees an average increase of about 3 points each decade. The tests have to be re-adjusted every decade or so to compensate for this increase. If IQ tests were simply capturing people’s genetic endowment there could not be such a quick and steady rise in scores. Only environmental changes could produce this type of growth.

While it is clear that scores are rising, it is not clear what has caused this increase. Better nutrition is a strong candidate. More and better education is another. One test that is used as an intelligence test, the Armed Forces Qualifying Test , in part, measures the amount and quality of schooling one has had (Hout 2002: 333-339). People who receive more and better schooling tend to score better on IQ tests.

Until recently researchers have argued that the IQ gap between blacks and whites was about 15 points in the 1930s. Between the 1930s and the 1980s, they observed that black IQ scores increased by about 15 points. The 15-point gap remained because white scores also increased by about 15 points over the same period. The encouraging point here is that it is possible to produce what are very big increases in IQ scores in a relatively short period of time. There is no reason for anyone to assume that blacks cannot increase their score to equal the white score given this history of big rises.

The even better news is that this IQ score convergence has already begun. William T. Dickens and James R. Flynn (“Black Americans Reduce the Racial IQ Gap: Evidence from Standardization Samples”) have access to IQ data that provide better quality measurements of black and white IQ scores over time. Dickens and Flynn show that in 1972, the black-white average IQ difference was 16.5 points. They also show, like the prior research, that white IQ scores have been increasing at an average rate of 0.311 points a year since 1972 or about 3 points a decade. Since 1972, however, the black average score has been increasing at 0.45 points a year or about 4.5 points a decade. In 2002, the IQ gap had declined from 16.5 points to 11.8 points.

People who do not bother to examine black standardized test scores routinely claim that blacks are doing worse educationally. The truth is to the contrary. These critics of blacks not only fail to see black improvement, they also fail to realize that achievement gaps require significant amounts of time or significant investments in resources (i.e., large and rapid improvements in black health, nutrition and schooling) to eliminate. The problem is not that blacks are not improving but rather that whites are improving also. If white IQ scores remained at their 1930’s level, blacks IQ scores would be higher than whites' today. If white IQ scores remained at their 1972 level, the IQ gap would be 3 points instead of four times as much. (See Algernon Austin, Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals Are Failing Black America for a discussion of black and white trends on three other standardized tests.)

The good news is that blacks are reducing the IQ gap. The bad news is that, assuming past trends continue, it will still take a while to eliminate it completely.

Next week: Wait a Minute! Do IQ Tests Measure Intelligence?

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Additional References
Hout, Michael. 2002. “Test Scores, Education, and Poverty.” Pp. 329-354 in Race and Intelligence: Separating Science From Myth, ed. Jefferson M. Fish. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Neisser, Ulric, ed. 1998. The Rising Curve: Long-Term Gains in IQ and Related Measures. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.

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4/02/2007

Inequality Updates: Skin Color, Race, Income

Skin Color Discrimination in the U.S.

Light-skinned immigrants in the United States make more money on average than those with darker complexions, and the chief reason appears to be discrimination, a researcher says.

Joni Hersch, a law and economics professor at Vanderbilt University, looked at a government survey of 2,084 legal immigrants to the United States from around the world and found that those with the lightest skin earned an average of 8 percent to 15 percent more than similar immigrants with much darker skin.

“On average, being one shade lighter has about the same effect as having an additional year of education,” Hersch said.

Hersch took into consideration other factors that could affect wages, such as English-language proficiency, education, occupation, race or country of origin, and found that skin tone still seemed to make a difference in earnings.

That means that if two similar immigrants from Bangladesh, for example, came to the United States at the same time, with the same occupation and ability to speak English, the lighter-skinned immigrant would make more money on average.

Although many cultures show a bias toward lighter skin, Hersch said her analysis shows that the skin-color advantage was not due to preferential treatment for light-skinned people in their country of origin. The bias, she said, occurs in the U.S.
Excerpts from Associated Press, “Study Says Skin Tone Affects Earnings,” New York Times, January 26, 2007

Black Cherokees Kicked Out of Cherokee Nation

A Letter from 26 members of the Congressional Black Caucus to the Bureau of Indian Affairs

The undersigned members of the Congressional Black Caucus are shocked and outraged at the March 3 vote by Cherokee Nation members to revoke the tribal citizenship of an estimated 2,800 black descendants of the Cherokee Nation.

The black descendants are of mixed African-Cherokee heritage. Their lineage extends back for well over a century when they accompanied other tribal members to new settlements in Oklahoma after the Cherokee Nation had been expelled from its traditional lands in North Carolina and Georgia. Many African descendant Cherokees died during the forced migration, which has become known as the "Trail of Tears."

The Cherokee Nation fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. After the war it signed a federal treaty, in 1866, committing that its African-Cherokee descendants would be absorbed as citizens of the Cherokee Nation. In 1983, the Cherokee Nation expelled many African descendants by requiring them to show a degree of Indian blood through the Dawes rolls. A tribal court reinstated them in March 2006. The most recent March 3 vote is an apparent attempt to override the March 2006 court decision.

We question the validity, legality, as well as the morality of the Cherokee Nation's March 3 vote to disenfranchise its African descendants. A sizeable number of persons throughout the United States who can rightfully lay claim to Native American tribal citizenship and lineage are of mixed ancestry. The tribal lineage of black Native
American descendants is rich in history and precedent that equals, if not surpasses, that of other racially and ethnically mixed Native Americans who have sought and been granted full tribal status.

We respectfully request an interpretation from the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the March 3 vote, particularly the legality of the vote, as well as what actions can be taken by the Bureau to correct this egregious violation of the rights of Cherokee Nation members of African descent.

We are resolute in our efforts to undo this outrage.

Income Inequality Grows

Income inequality grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans — those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 — receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows.

The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980.

Prof. Emmanuel Saez, the University of California, Berkeley, economist who analyzed the Internal Revenue Service data with Prof. Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, said such growing disparities were significant in terms of social and political stability.

“If the economy is growing but only a few are enjoying the benefits, it goes to our sense of fairness,” Professor Saez said. “It can have important political consequences.”

Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, an advocacy group for the poor, said that the data understates the widening disparity between the top 1 percent and the rest of the country.

He said that in addition to rising incomes and reduced taxes, the equation should take into account cuts in fringe benefits to workers and in government services that middle-class and poor Americans rely on more than the affluent. These include health care, child care and education spending.

“The nation faces some very tough choices in coming years,” he said. “That such a large share of the income gains are going to the very top, at a minimum, raises serious questions about continuing to provide tax cuts averaging over $150,000 a year to people making more than a million dollars a year, while saying we do not have enough money” to provide health insurance to 47 million Americans and cutting education benefits.

Mr. Greenstein’s organization will release a report today showing that for Americans in the middle, the share of income taken by federal taxes has been essentially unchanged across four decades. By comparison, it has fallen by half for those at the very top of the income ladder.
Excerpts from David Cay Johnston, “Income Gap is Widening, Data Shows,” New York Times, March 29, 2007.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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