Thora Institute

9/24/2007

Blacks and America’s Religious Divides

Adapted from Many Americans Uneasy with Mix of Religion and Politics, Pew Research Center, 2006, p. 10.

Most Americans believe that the will of the people should determine U.S. laws. Blacks are almost evenly divided with half saying that the Bible should determine U.S. laws and 48 percent saying the people’s will. On this issue black Protestants look more like white evangelicals than white mainline Protestants.

Black clergy appear to be more politically-engaged than white clergy—mainline and evangelical. Black clergy speak out more on Iraq, homosexuality, the environment, evolution, the death penalty and immigration than white clergy. Unfortunately, these quantitative findings do not tell us much about what clergy are actually saying about these topics.

Fifty-nine percent of black Protestants are opposed to abortion; 36 percent of them think it should be allowed. This split is similar to the split among white evangelicals. Black Protestants also look similar to white evangelicals on the issue of gay marriage. Seventy-four percent of black Protestants oppose gay marriage. Seventy-eight percent of white feel the same.

Adapted from Pragmatic Americans Liberal and Conservative on Social Issues, Pew Research Center, 2006, p. 4, 8.

If the America continues to wrestle with issues at the intersection of religion and politics, there could be a realignment of the black political landscape. Many blacks’ religious beliefs appear to align with that of white evangelicals. A sizeable minority of blacks though may support positions more generally accepted by white mainline Protestants.

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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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9/17/2007

What Journalists Need to Know about the SAT

The SAT vs. The long-term trend NAEP

Not everyone goes to college. Of those who do go to college, not everyone takes the SAT. Some take the ACT. Some do not take the SAT or the ACT, because it is not required by their college. For this reason, it is incorrect to think that the SAT provides a good picture of the academic achievement of all high school seniors.

The types of students who take the SAT have changed over time. Children of high socioeconomic status have the longest history taking the SAT. Over time more students of more modest socioeconomic backgrounds have taken the SAT.

This changing SAT demographic matters because socioeconomic background is correlated with SAT scores. (See the relationship of parental education to SAT scores.) As the composition of the students taking the test changes, comparisons to earlier groups of test-takers become less valid. It is difficult to know whether changes in SAT scores over time are due to the changing demographics of the test-takers or to changes in academic achievement.

As if this wasn’t a big enough problem, the SAT has been redesigned recently. These redesigns also make comparisons across time problematic.

For all of these reasons and more, the SAT is a bad measure for trying to assess the academic achievement of students and trends in student achievement. Nonetheless, year after year, journalists continue to use the SAT in this way.

A far better tool for tracking students’ academic achievement over time is the long-term trend scores of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The long-term trend NAEP tests are given to nationally representative samples of 9 year olds, 13 year olds, and 17 year olds every four years. Unlike the SAT, NAEP scores for 17 year olds really do allow us to make conclusions about high school seniors nationally.

There are several versions of the NAEP tests. There is the national, state, urban district and long-term trend. The long-term trend, like its name suggests, is ideal for making assessments of black student achievement over time. The test does not change and the sample is always nationally representative of students.

Over the last 30 years, black students at all three age levels have increased their long-term math and reading NAEP scores. Over the last 10 years, only black 9 year olds and 13 year olds have increased their NAEP scores. The 17-year-olds’ scores have been flat. (White 17 year-olds’ NAEP scores have been flat too.) During this time period, however, the black math SAT scores have improved. While the black students who take the SAT appear to be doing better academically, black seniors in general have stagnated since the mid-1990s. If we want to know how black students are progressing academically, the long-term trend NAEP is the far better measure.

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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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9/09/2007

Race to Incarcerate: Fashion Policing

Is the Rise of Fashion Policing a Sign of a Deeper Problem?

Once upon a time, the idea of a “fashion police” was just an amusing metaphor. Not anymore. A small but growing number of communities, mainly in the South, are indeed requiring police to fine or jail people for the fashion of wearing their pants low enough to reveal their underwear. A Stratford, Connecticut councilman, Alvin O’Neal, recently proposed a similar law. Wisely, the town council rejected the legislation.

These laws do not make sense. They are not what they claim to be about. If one is offended by the public display of people in underwear then shouldn’t Victoria’s Secret and Calvin Klein underwear ads be high on one’s hit list. Of course, Victoria’s Secret and Calvin Klein are just the most prominent among the underwear advertisers. Even this newspaper distributes advertising with pictures of people in underwear. As pervasive as underwear advertising is, one hears no mention of calls to ban this advertising among those who claim to be offended by the sight of underwear.

Of course, one should not stop at advertising. Swimming suits look remarkably like underwear. Revealing those would have to be outlawed too. So, maybe the anti-underwear lawmakers will propose banning swimming next.

Nicole Kidman and the editors of Vanity Fair who have Kidman showing her bra on the cover of this month’s issue should be fined or jailed also. And all of the other magazines showing bras or bikinis on their covers, from Sports Illustrated for the Swimsuit Issue to Shape magazine, would have to be punished also.

It is not unusual for people to be offended by new fashion styles. In the 1960s, adults were scandalized by men’s long hair, big afros, and mini-skirts. In the 1970s, the spiked and neon dyed hair and torn clothes of punks shocked many. In the 1980s, Madonna made bras and bustiers outerwear causing some outrage. In the 1990s, droopy pants arrived. The shock, anger, and outrage that followed were not surprising. The idea to put people in jail for their sagging pants is.

How did we get here? Why is it that at this point in time criminalizing fashion seems like a good idea to some lawmakers? How did people become so cavalier about restricting American’s rights to freedom of expression? These laws seem to be symptoms of a deeper problem.

The fact of the matter is that these laws are not about decency in the sense that they have been crafted. Councilman Alvin O’Neal revealed as much when he stated, “We’re not out to get plumbers whose pants creep down while working on your pipes.” But why not? Why is the top of a plumber’s butt okay but boxer shorts are not? Boxer shorts are in fact clothing, which should be preferable to an actual butt partially exposed by a plumber. O’Neal’s preference for actual partial nudity over boxer shorts, shows that this has nothing to do with protecting our eyes.

The idea that the problem is that this style may have arisen in prisons is not very convincing. Many of the most violent criminal gang members have tattoos, but I haven’t heard of anyone trying to outlaw tattoos. At least, not yet.

What are these laws really about, then? These laws seem crafted to hurt a despised population, not to protect the public from the “harm” of seeing people’s underwear. The lawmakers seem to have little respect for the rights of the type of people who they believe expose their boxer shorts, but they still do have respect for the rights and needs of the type of people they think become plumbers.

Maybe I am wrong about this issue. Maybe it is simply that fewer Americans value our freedoms today. After all, Congress recently expanded the government’s powers to spy on Americans without a warrant, weakening our Fourth Amendment rights. Maybe we simply value our freedoms less today than in the past.

My parents often were not happy with my choice of clothing and grooming. Since they have passed, my older brother has taken over their role. Every time I see him, he tells me I need to get a haircut. Every time! This is his right. This is a legitimate type of pressure for him to exert to get me to meet his standards. I, however, still don’t conform enough for his tastes. As recalcitrant as my brother thinks I am, he has never considered it a criminal offense.

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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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9/03/2007

The Myth of the Black Teen Suicide Epidemic

from the files of Mike Males

[The assertion of a black teen suicide epidemic has never been very well supported by the official statistics. In the 2001 article below, Mike Males goes even further and argues that the official statistics were distorted. Please note that this 2001 article does not address the recent report of an increase in the suicide rate in 2004. MSNBC has a discussion of the recent trend. Note the graph in the middle of the MSNBC article “Official Suicide Rate Down.”]

Recent alarms that suicide is skyrocketing among teenagers, especially African Americans, demonstrate that the only way to present youth issues fairly today is to avoid repeating secondhand statistics, no matter how apparently trustworthy the source. Authorities, from the US Centers for Disease Control to African-American physician Alvin Poussaint to media reports, assert that teenagers (particularly black males) are blowing themselves away in record numbers. From these chilling statistics, theories abound: modern youths are causing, and suffering, unprecedented, horrific dangers. More programs, more psychiatric interventions, more forced institutionalizations, and more abrogation of teenagers’ rights are advanced in the name of protecting them from their rising urge to self-destruct.

In fact, the entire premise of a teen suicide epidemic, especially among blacks, is a textbook lesson in statistical malpractice. The same references interest groups miscite actually show that modern teens, especially African Americans, are less likely to die by their own hand than at any time in at least half a century, and probably ever. How, then, have authorities manufactured the frightening image of rising adolescent self-destruction? By omitting massive changes in how deaths are classified. Consider the following vital statistics compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics:

In 1970, 1,352 black teens (age 10-19) died from self-inflicted causes (drug overdoses, poisonings, falls, drownings, gunshots, hangings, suffocations, sharp instruments, and individual traffic crashes). Of these, 103 deaths were ruled suicides, 1,080 were ruled “accidents,” and 169 were ruled “undetermined” as to intent (that is, the coroner couldn’t figure out whether the person died accidentally or purposely).

In 1980, 767 black teenagers died from these same self-inflicted causes. Of these, 117 were ruled suicides, 596 were ruled “accidents,” and 54 were ruled “undetermined.”

In 1998, just 639 black teenagers died from these self-inflicted causes. Of these, 222 were ruled suicides, 375 were ruled “accidents,” and 42 were ruled “undetermined.”

Can you see what is happening here? On one hand, the total number of black teenage self-destructive deaths plummeted (1,352 in 1970, 639 in 1998). On the other, the number of black teenage deaths ruled as suicides leaped (103 in 1970, 222 in 1998). So, how can black teen suicide have “doubled” at the same time only half as many black teens are killing themselves? Let us consider a powerful possibility the experts overlooked.

In order to certify a death as a “suicide,” a coroner must provide solid evidence (by a note, or investigation) that the death was intentionally caused. For lack of expertise or interest, pressure from families, religious concerns, insurance considerations, and other reasons, coroners are reluctant to rule a death (particularly a youthful death) as a suicide. A number of scientific studies have found that coroners of past decades ruled hundreds of self-inflicted teenage deaths as “accidents” (or as “undetermined” as to intent) that, given today’s more sophisticated diagnostic techniques, would be ruled suicides. Especially in southern and rural areas, expending coroner time and money to investigate whether a black teen death was an accident or a suicide wasn’t a priority. So, as Poussaint correctly suggests (in a point that refutes his claim of a modern "crisis"), black suicide has been “historically underreported.”

A startling example: in 1970, coroners ruled 169 black teenage deaths as “undetermined” because they couldn’t (or didn’t bother to) ascertain whether a suspicious, self-inflicted gunshot wound or drug overdose was accidental or intentional. In 1998, the number of black teenage deaths ruled as “undetermined” had fallen to just 42. Note that the supposed “increase” in black teen suicides (up 119 since 1970) almost perfectly matches the “decline” in black teenage “undetermined” deaths (down 127) -- even without allowing for the bigger decline in self-inflicted deaths ruled as “accidents” (down 705)!

More evidence: in California, where coroners traditionally called in suicide experts to accurately certify questionable deaths, black teenage suicide DECLINED by 40 percent over the last three decades. Meanwhile, in southern states, black teen suicides skyrocketed” from a scattering in 1970 to scores today. If some new, generational stressors are raising teen suicide, why is it falling sharply in California? These are the kinds of complications officials and experts are duty-bound to resolve before issuing alarming statements on emotional topics such as teen suicide -- yet they did not.

Whatever the politics, the bottom line is straightforward. In 1998, there were 800,000 more black teenagers in the population than in 1970. Yet, among black teen males, suicidal deaths fell sharply, from 1,093 in 1970 to 549 in 1998. Among black teenage girls, the drop in self-demise was even larger: 259 deaths in 1970, just 78 in 1998.

By rate, then, today’s average black teen male is 57 percent, and today’s average black teen female is 73 percent, less like to take his/her own life than their counterparts of 30 years ago. In fact, fewer black teens died by self-destructive means in 1998 than in 1950, when the black youth population was only one-third as large!

Two conclusions are evident. First, the teenage suicide “epidemic” is an artifact of changes in death classification, not an increase in youthful demise. Second, the reality is that teens display spectacular declines in self-inflicted hazard. Rarely do epidemiologists record such rapid decreases in fatalities over such a short period. Yet, the media and experts blare an incessant dirge that this increasingly healthy, resilient generation is killing itself at unheard-of rates.

Many groups justify their political tactic of “creating a crisis” as necessary to preserving support for the unquestionably fine, underfunded suicide prevention and mental health programs some youths need. But in the end, the myth of a teen suicide epidemic is not benign, no matter how humanely couched. It frightens the public that all young people are lethally out of control. It activates psychiatric industries lathering to profit, programs gearing up to manage, moralists eager to censor, police girding to suppress. Perhaps most disturbing, the “teen suicide” hype exposes the alarming extent to which major interests freely reduce young people to mere commodities to advance pet agendas when we should be pondering why--despite overcrowded schools, defunded services, dead-end jobs, and incessant denigration by their elders--today's younger generation is NOT descending into self-hatred and suicide.

More details can be found at Mike Males’ website http://home.earthlink.net/~mmales/.

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8/27/2007

Can We Become “Smart on Crime”?

Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, rev. and updated (New York: The New Press, 2006).

Everything one would want to know about the “war on drugs” and the “tough on crime” movement is presented in Marc Mauer’s Race to Incarcerate. The book is decidedly against our criminal justice policies of the last 35 years, but it is based on a very careful and balanced examination of the data and research.

The United States has an incarceration rate about seven times higher than other Western developed nations. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the developed world—and it is still rising. In 2004, the U.S. incarceration rate was eight times France’s, seven and a half times Germany’s and six and a quarter times Canada’s. Mauer argues that this does not have to be the case.

Prior to the 1970s, the U.S. incarceration rate was on par with other Western developed nations. But since the initiation of the “war on drugs” and the “tough on crime” mentality we have had a strong and steady increase in America’s incarceration rate.

Some might argue that it is incarceration that prevents the U.S. from having a higher crime rate. Over the 1990s, there was a very strong decline in crime rates across the country. Today, crime rates are still at a relatively low level in spite of a slight rise in some areas. Is the high U.S. incarceration rate keeping the crime rate low?

Since the early 1970s, the incarceration rate has only gone up yet the crime rate has both increased and decreased. From 1970 to 1980, the crime rate and the incarceration rate both increased. From 1984 to 1991, again, both rates increased. The U.S. has seen long periods where the crime rate increased and the incarceration rate increased. If incarceration had a powerful negative effect on the crime rate, the crime rate would decrease with large increases in the incarceration rate. This has not been the case.

Mauer’s argument is not that there should be no incarceration, but rather that we should be, as others have called it, “smart on crime” rather than “tough on crime.” “Tough on crime” policies have been largely counterproductive. High incarceration rates and other “tough on crime” policies may actually increase the crime rate in the long term.

A large part of the increase in the number of prisoners has been of low-level, non-violent drug offenders. For individuals with substance abuse problems, drug-treatment is far better than incarceration. Mauer states:

A 1994 study conducted by the California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs . . . found that every dollar invested in substance abuse treatment generated seven dollars in savings, primarily through reductions in crime and reduced hospitalizations. (175)

Other studies have concurred that increasing drug treatment is a far “smarter” strategy for dealing with drug addicts that incarceration. For nonviolent property crime offenses, community service and other types of alternatives to incarceration are “smarter” responses.

One way that our criminal justice polices may increase crime is that in our “tough on crime” mentality, we actually make it difficult for ex-offenders to desist from criminal behavior. Rather than providing opportunities for ex-offenders to become employed, we make it more difficult for them and thus increase the likelihood that they return to crime. “In 1994, Congress prohibited inmates from receiving Pell grants for higher-education courses” (200). The more educated ex-offenders are the more likely they will be able to find a job. Many states also prohibit ex-offenders from obtaining a license for many jobs such as becoming a barber or doing asbestos removal (199). Jobs like becoming a barber or an asbestos remover are among the few jobs that the average ex-offender actually has a decent chance of obtaining. Preventing ex-offenders from becoming socially-integrated, employed individuals amounts to begging them to return to criminal behavior. These policies are certifiably “stupid on crime.”

Our “stupid on crime” mentality leads us to over-fund pro-incarceration policies and under-fund crime-reduction policies. For example, early in the Clinton Administration, Congress decided against a $60 billion economic program to create jobs in Los Angeles after the Los Angeles riots. More jobs would have likely reduced Los Angeles crime rates. That program, however, was deemed too expensive. A year later,

Congress . . . determined that they could in fact allocate $30 billion to these communities. This time, though, the appropriation took the form of a massive crime bill loaded with sixty new death penalty offenses, $8 billion in prison construction, “three strikes” sentencing, and other provisions certain to escalate the prison population (185).

Congress decided that the country could not afford job creation and crime prevention for poor black communities, but it could afford to increase criminal justice expenditures to put more blacks in prison.

Our criminal justice policies are, in part, the product of anti-black attitudes. This might seem like an extreme and unfair characterization until one reads Mauer’s review of racial attitudes and support for “tough on crime” policies. Researchers have found that if crime is perceived as being disproportionately committed by blacks, whites are more supportive of harsher punishment. Anti-black prejudice is also correlated with greater support for the death penalty. Another study finds that the size of a state’s black population better predicts the incarceration rate than the actual violent crime rate. Anti-black bias is a significant factor in our criminal justice policies.

As some have argued, reforming the criminal justice system is the number one black civil rights struggle of this generation. The so-called civil rights leadership, however, did not get the memo.

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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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8/20/2007

America’s Real Criminal Justice “Three Strikes”

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

A multiple murder by two ex-cons in Cheshire, Connecticut and an execution-style shooting of four black youngsters (one survived) in Newark, New Jersey have recently received a great deal of media attention. These very disturbing murders have led some to make renewed calls for the U.S. to again become even “tougher on crime.”

The murder of anyone is a tragedy. There is the horrible loss of life, and there is that painful, empty hole left in the lives of the friends and family of the deceased. We all can empathize with the feelings of despair of the loved ones left behind. Many of us also fear that we could easily have been the victim or that we might be the next victim.

The news media effectively stokes these emotions. The more unusual and the more gruesome a murder, the more likely it will be covered by the news media. If it is bad and shocking enough, the story will be repeated over and over again in the news. We receive the worst possible picture of crime from the daily news.

Although news reports do not encourage clear and big-picture thinking about criminal justice policies, it is important that we do just that. The policies which best satisfies us emotionally may not be the best policies for the long-term health of the society.

In Connecticut, for example, people are calling for new “tougher on crime” three-strikes policies, but these policies would not have prevented the Cheshire murders. These policies will certainly increase the incarceration rate, increase the cost of prisons, but it is doubtful that they will actually reduce the crime rate.

“Tough on crime” is a misnomer. America’s criminal justice policies are tough on criminals but actually easy on crime. This is a crucial distinction that we often fail to make. For example, earlier this year (May 11, 2007) the New York Times reported on a study published in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine that indicated that “the practice of transferring children into adult courts was counterproductive, actually creating more crime than it cured.” We are being tough on criminals when we treat juveniles as adults, but we are also creating conditions for there to be more crime—not less. This is not the only “tough on crime” policy that actually helps to create more crime in the future.

The inaccuracy of the “tough on crime” phrase, from a politician’s perspective, is brilliant. It is relatively easy for politicians to increase the number of people in prison. It is far more difficult for them to reduce the crime rate. The “tough on crime” thinking of the past three decades has greatly reduced the pressure on politicians to find ways of actually reducing crime.

While “tough on crime” is good from the perspective of getting a politician elected, it is bad from all others. “Tough on crime” increases the numbers of people in prison, but it does not necessarily reduce the amount of crime. For many years of America’s thirty-plus-year “tough on crime” wave, we have seen both the incarceration rate increase and the crime rate increase. Only policies that have been proven to reduce the crime rate would actually make us safer.

It is expensive to care for a large and growing prison population as we have been doing for more than three decades. Reducing the crime rate would not only save tax dollars, it would likely generate tax dollars because more people would be productive citizens. The high cost of incarceration can also contribute to increasing crime by draining resources away from schools and other programs that could lower the crime rate.

The public needs to demand that politicians reduce the crime rate. Politicians regularly sidestep the issue by talking about policies that will only increase the incarceration rate. We need to force them to focus on the crime rate. We also have to remember that this is not easy to do. But we should not accept an increased incarceration rate as a substitute.

The sad fact is that everyday people kill people. This has been going on for all of human history. Nonetheless, some societies suffer from less violent crime than others. Americans need to be aware that the countries with the lowest violent crime rates are not the ones that are “toughest on criminals.” In fact, among western industrialized nations, the U.S. has (1) the most severe criminal penalties, (2) the most violent crime, and (3) the highest incarceration rate. This is the real “three strikes” of American criminal justice policy. The only way we will change this sorry state of affairs is by ending our “tough on criminals” mentality and by becoming “smart on crime.”

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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8/13/2007

8/06/2007

Black Immigrants in Elite Colleges

Douglas S. Massey, Margarita Mooney, Kimberly C. Torres and Camille Z. Charles, “Black Immigrants and Black Natives Attending Selective Colleges and Universities in the United States,” American Journal of Education, February 2007, 243-271.

Upon reading my article about the increase in the number and share of blacks receiving college degrees someone responded that I must be talking about black immigrants, not native blacks. It is true that black immigrants are over-represented among blacks attending elite colleges. However, over-represented does not mean that they are a majority. And, furthermore, elite colleges are only a minority of all colleges. The statistics I presented in the “The Truth about Black Students” are for all black students in all colleges, not just black immigrants in elite colleges.

Massey et al. found that in 1999, first- and second-generation immigrants made up 13 percent of black 18-19 year olds, but they represented 27 percent of blacks in elite colleges. Immigrants are found among blacks in elite colleges at twice their rate in the general population, so they are overrepresented. But they are not yet the majority of blacks in elite colleges. The researchers found that more than 70 percent of blacks in selective colleges are “native” blacks.

While the elite college enrollment average for black immigrants is 27 percent of black students, there is variation by the selectivity of the school. Generally, the more elite the college is the higher the share of black immigrants is among the black students. The Massey et al. analysis found that the share is 41 percent for Ivy League institutions but 23 percent for selective public universities.

Massey et al. examined selective colleges. These institutions are elite because most college students do not attend them. My statistics were for the entire nation, not just for elite college attendees. I do not know what share black immigrants make up of all blacks earning degrees. Black immigrant over-representation declines the less elite the school among elite schools. If this relationship were to hold for non-elite schools then nationally immigrants would make up considerably less than 27 percent of black college graduates. Only when someone conducts the analysis on a national sample would we have a good estimate.

Why are black immigrants over-represented at elite colleges? Massey et al. do not provide any clear answers. The socioeconomic and academic profile of native and immigrant blacks in elite colleges are very similar. Once in school, both groups perform equally well or equally poorly. This means that both groups under-perform relative to whites.

There are two hypotheses that can be derived from the Massey et al. analysis about why black immigrants are over-represented. Black immigrants may simply be over-represented among the black students qualified for elite colleges. They may make up approximately 27 percent of qualified blacks and therefore make up 27 percent of blacks in elite colleges. Black immigrants are more likely to be middle class than black natives. Middle-class students tend to have higher achievement than poorer students. So, this might explain why black immigrants are over-represented among the qualified students.

One difference between black natives and immigrants is that black immigrants are more likely to have attended private high schools. Elite colleges probably do have some bias in favor of private high schools in their recruiting and admissions practices. This bias would lead to an over-representation of black immigrants. It is possible for both the qualifications and private school factors to be at play simultaneously.

Researchers need to explore these explanations for the over-representation of black immigrants in elite colleges. If a private-school bias is at work, elite schools should be aware of this and work to correct their recruiting and admission polices.

Rather than have this issue be another one to foment tension between black “natives” and black immigrants, both groups should recognize that they under-perform equally relative to whites. It would make most sense for everyone to work together to improve all black student achievement in elite schools.

Elite schools are important, but we should not ignore the majority of black college students in non-elite schools. I purposely wanted to highlight the growth of blacks attaining associate’s degrees because these students are mostly likely to represent poor and working-class blacks struggling to get ahead. Find out more about average blacks students in “The Truth about Black Students.”

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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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7/30/2007

Are Hispanics and White Private School Students Most Afraid of “Acting White”?

Or The Problems of Roland G. Fryer “Acting White” Study

[This is the third part of a second open letter to John McWhorter, author of Winning the Race.]

If one accepts the findings of the Roland G. Fryer “acting white” study then the group with the most intense fear of being perceived as “white” for having high academic achievement is Hispanics. Whites in private schools have the second strongest fear of “acting white.” Blacks would come in third with the mildest fear of “acting white.” I raise these points because I doubt that white private school students are afraid of “acting white.” The closer one examines the study, the more problems appear.

In 2005, Roland G. Fryer, Jr. and Paul Torelli circulated a paper titled “An Empircal Analysis of ‘Acting White’” through the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and Fryer published a version of the paper for more general audiences titled “Acting White” in Education Next. The research received a great deal of media attention and it was treated as conclusive proof that the “acting white” phenomenon is a serious problem among black students. But if one reads the study carefully and especially the more academic version circulated by NBER one comes to very different conclusions.

The “acting white” phenomenon was defined in Fryer and Torelli’s study as when there are racial differences in the relationship between grades and “spectral popularity index scores.” It is important to note that the analysis is based on spectral popularity scores not actual accusations of “acting white.”

If we accept Fryer and Torelli’s assumptions and evidence then it appears that in majority black schools, black students cease to be as popular as white students after a B+ GPA. We can only dream of the day that most black students have B+ GPAs. This has to be seen as a very, very mild case of “acting white.”

The problem for black students appears to be more severe in integrated schools because in integrated schools after a C GPA, black students are not as popular as white students. This still makes the problem fairly modest because the vast majority of black students attend segregated schools. Additionally, although black students in integrated schools have lower popularity index scores than whites, their popularity index scores still increase slightly up to a B+ GPA. (See image below. Click on image for a better view.) So, if popularity affects black student achievement, even in integrated schools they still have an incentive up to a B+.

Grades and “Popularity” in Integrated Schools

But even these very modest claims of the Fryer and Torelli study are suspect since Fryer and Torelli’s spectral popularity scores may not even measure popularity. This question arises when we examine the findings for whites and Hispanics more closely.

Because of the way Fryer and Torelli define “acting white,” they actually end up using white students as the standard even when their findings indicate that the white students do not appear to be valuing education very highly. This makes literal sense for examining a fear of “acting white,” but if one thinks anti-intellectualism is a problem, it should be a problem when whites are anti-intellectual also.

If we put aside Fryer and Torelli’s nonwhite-only definition of the “acting white” phenomenon and simply say that we expect there to be a positive relationship between spectral popularity scores and grades for all groups, popular assumptions about education are turned upside down. With this simple universally-applied definition, Hispanic students are the most anti-intellectual group. Hispanic popularity scores decline dramatically after a C+ GPA in public schools and after a C- GPA in private schools. I am not aware of anyone theorizing that “acting white” is worst among Hispanics compared to other groups.

White students in private schools also appear to be rather anti-intellectual according to Fryer and Torelli’s spectral scores. In private schools, white spectral scores peak at about a C- and then decline. See the figure below. (Click on the image for a better view.) The trend line for white private school students clearly differs from that of white public school students, but Fryer and Torelli's definition requiring racial differences allows them to ignore this fact. If white private school students were black public school students, however, the authors would declare them to have a severe C- case of "acting white."

The Most Popular Whites in Private Schools Have C- Grades!?!

Approximation of white public school scores on private school graph.

So, if we accept Fryer and Torelli’s evidence then anti-intellectualism is most rampant among Hispanics, and the second biggest problem occurs among white students attending private schools. If black leaders and public intellectuals really want to lecture groups based on Fryer and Torelli’s research then they should be lecturing Hispanics and whites in private schools. Because this is where according to the research the most serious “acting white” problems lie.

I do not recommend this course of action, however, since I have serious doubts that Fryer and Torelli’s spectral popularity scores measure what the researchers think they measure.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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7/23/2007

The Educational Proof is in the Achievement Pudding

Ogbu reported that 33 percent of the black households had an income over $50,000 while 58 percent of whites did—a difference of 25 percentage points. If we use the $50,000 as the minimum for defining a middle class household then whites were 76 percent more likely than blacks to be middle class.

Further, in another 1990s study of Shaker Heights, Ronald F. Ferguson found that 90 percent of white parents had at least four years of college, but only 45 percent of black parents could say the same. A quarter of the black households had parents with only a high school diploma or less. Fewer than 5 percent of white parents had this low level of education. Also, Ferguson reported, “a larger percentage of parents have postgraduate degrees among whites than have four-year college degrees among blacks.”

These are, in fact, large socioeconomic differences.

Ogbu also avoided explaining why black students in Shaker Heights out-performed black students in other areas. Again in Black Directions, I state:

[Ogbu] observed, “Black students in Shaker Heights perform considerably better than other Blacks in the rest of the state of Ohio and in the rest of the nation” as measured by standardized tests. Also, more than 70 percent of black Shaker Heights high school graduates went on to college in the late 1990s. Nationally, about 50 percent of black high school graduates went on to college at that time.

”Academic disengagement” or “acting white” does not do a good job at explaining this higher achievement.

Beyond Shaker Heights, there is encouraging news in black student test scores. While it is true that black students score lower on standardized tests than white students. It is important to examine the trends in black students’ test scores. Probably the best measure of black students’ academic achievement trends is the long-term trend National Assessment of Educational Progress exams. These exams show increasing black student scores in reading and math over time.

Not only have black NAEP scores increased, so have black scores on the National Assessment of Adult Literacy and on IQ tests. These increasing test scores do not fit well with the widespread claims that black students are not interested in school, but it does fit with the idea that black students value education.

The increasing rates of black college completion also fits black students’ statements about valuing education. Again, in Black Directions, I reported that

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.

In fact, in The Black-White Test-Score Gap (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips conduct a very interesting analysis of the likelihood of black and white students to attend college. When they “compare blacks and whites with the same twelfth grade test scores, blacks are more likely than whites to complete college” (p. 7). They add in a footnote that the findings cannot be attributed to affirmative action since they can be found before affirmative action and during affirmative action. Again, this higher college graduation rate controlling for test scores fits the finding that black students highly value education.

The survey evidence indicates that black students highly value education. The test-score evidence indicates that black students highly value education. The college enrollment and graduation rates indicate that black students highly value education. And, yet, one only hears black leaders and the leading black public intellectuals condemning blacks for not valuing education. There is a serious problem here, but it does not lie with black students.

Next Week: What the Pundits and the Media Did Not Tell You about the Roland G. Fryer “Acting White” Study.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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7/16/2007

Do Blacks Value Education More Than Whites?

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

[This is the first part of a second open letter to John McWhorter, author of Winning the Race.]

Dear John:

Thanks for your response to my first letter. As I mentioned, I had three major issues/reactions to Winning the Race. The first letter addresses my first issue. This letter addresses the second.

It’s good to know that we are diametrically opposed on the “acting white” issue. Consistency is comforting. I think the “acting white” discussion has distracted America from far more important policy reforms needed to address the black-white achievement gap.

Blacks Value Education as Much, If Not, More Than Whites: The Attitudinal Survey Evidence

You too quickly dismiss the research of James Ainsworth-Darnell and Douglas Downey (“Assessing the Oppositional Culture Explanation for Racial/Ethnic Differences in School Performance,” American Sociological Review 63, 1998: 536-553). As you state in Winning the Race, “Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey find that on the average, black students report more positive attitudes toward school than whites and that black students who report being popular also tend to do well in school” (p.271).

It’s important to realize that one finds this consistently in survey after survey, year after year. In the 1986, the year Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu study was published, the Monitoring the Future survey found that 74 percent of black high school seniors thought that getting good grades was of “great” or “very great importance.” Only 41 percent of white seniors felt the same. Half of black seniors indicated that “knowing a lot about intellectual matters” was of “great” or “very great importance.” Only one-fifth of white seniors felt the same.

In the 1987, the General Social Survey of adults of all ages finds that 90 percent of blacks believed that education is “very important” or “essential” to getting ahead in life. Eighty-three percent of whites felt the same. Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey showed that in the 1990 National Educational Longitudinal Study black students report more pro-school attitudes than white students.

More recent surveys show similar results. A 2006 survey by Public Agenda (see p. 12 of the report), found that 67 percent of black students believed that more math and science courses would improve high school education. Fifty-four percent of white students felt the same. The 2006 Higher Education Research Institute College Freshman Survey finds that 26 percent of the majority-black students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities aspire to obtain a Ph.D., but only 17 percent of freshmen at colleges generally say the same.

When asked, black students also regularly report having lower grades than white students. And, as you also note, they will also admit to spending less time on homework, if asked.

You believe their statements about having lower grades and doing less homework but disbelieve their statements about their pro-school attitudes. Why would black students be deceptive, consciously or unconsciously, about liking school and valuing education but then be generally accurate and straightforward about having relatively low grades? This does not make sense to me. Low grades should be as, if not more, embarrassing than not feeling positive about school. I find black students’ responses convincing precisely because they readily admit details that could be viewed in a negative light.

What we need to realize is, as the song goes, “you can’t always get what you want.” Wanting to do well in school does not guarantee that one has had the necessary preparation and school resources to do well. Current research shows that there is a significant black-white achievement gap way before middle-school when you argue the “acting white” problem begins (Winning the Race, p. 275). We know that black children on average receive less academic preparation, formally and informally, than white students in the pre-kindergarten years. Improving the quantity and quality of black pre-kindergarten education is one of the things that we should be talking about.

The Commission on No Child Left Behind’s report Beyond NCLB: Fulfilling the Promise to Our Nation’s Children states the following about the importance of teacher quality:

teacher quality is the single most important school factor in student success. There is ample research to show just how critical teachers are. For example, studies in Tennessee, Dallas and elsewhere have shown that good teachers can improve student achievement by as much as a grade level more than less effective teachers over the course of a year. (p.30)

They add:

Research also shows that teacher quality is unevenly distributed in schools, and the students with the greatest needs tend to have access to the least qualified and least effective teachers. A study by The Education Trust, an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to making schools and colleges work for all students, examined the distribution of teachers in three states and found that children in high-poverty schools are much more likely than their more advantaged peers to be assigned to novice teachers, to teachers who lack subject matter knowledge and to teachers with lower academic skills (Peske and Haycock 2006). (p.31)

I hope that one day the leading black public intellectuals would show interest in discussing the black-white teacher-quality gap—from pre-kindergarten through high school.

Why We Should Believe Black Students’ Pro-Education Survey Responses

What you skip over in your discussion of Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey is that they showed that black responses had similar statistically-measured correlations among answers as white responses. This is quite powerful evidence. If all black students merely responded randomly there would be no correlation. If all black students simply choose very positive responses to education/school questions, there would be no correlation. It is pretty much impossible for a survey like the National Education Longitudinal Study to yield similar statistical correlations without there being a truly similar relationship among the answers black students give as among the answers white students give. If you think the white students are presenting accurate information then, from a statistical standpoint, you are also endorsing the black student responses.

I can provide a simple example of this idea and test your hypothesis that 1960s black nationalism caused blacks to devalue or detach themselves from the educational endeavor. Since the General Social Survey is a nationally-representative survey of adults, we can do analyses of black adults of different ages on their views on how important education is for success.

If we compare blacks who were 18 years old or younger in 1965—40 years old in 1987—with blacks who were 19 or older in 1965, your hypothesis receives no support. Forty-five percent of the younger blacks, who you argue are disengaged from education, believe that education is “essential”—the extreme positive choice—for success. Only 30 percent of older blacks, who you argue highly value education, felt the same.

Now if we examine whites in these two age categories, we see the same pattern of the younger group valuing education more than the older group. Thirty-nine percent of the younger whites see education as “essential” but only 31 percent of older whites do. The only difference between the results of the blacks and the whites is that younger blacks, once again, may possibly value education a bit more than younger whites. It does not seem reasonable for one to accept the findings among whites and then turn around and declare the similar findings among blacks to be the result of deception by the black respondents.

And Finally, the Homework Issue

You make a big deal about black students doing less homework and Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey’s failure to explain how this finding fits in with valuing education. Ronald Ferguson’s research (see “A Diagnostic Analysis of Black-White GPA Disparities in Shaker Heights, Ohio,” in Brookings Papers on Education Policy, 2001, ed. Diane Ravitch (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2001), 347-414), I think, provides the answer. In Ferguson’s Shaker Heights study (he found no support for John Ogbu’s academic disengagement argument, by the way), he does not find that black students spend less time on homework than white students.

Ferguson’s analysis differs from Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey’s, in that Ferguson controls for or takes into account whether students are taking honors and Advanced Placement (AP) courses or not. So, when Ferguson compares blacks not in honors/AP classes with whites who are also not in honors/AP classes, they spend similar amounts of time on homework. When he compares blacks and whites in honors/AP classes with each other, they spend similar amounts of time on homework.

It is important to control for honors/AP classes, because students in these classes spend more time on homework than other students, most likely because they are assigned more homework. If one does not control for these classes, it will look like blacks students spend less time on homework than white students because blacks are less likely to be in honors/AP classes. So, it appears that black students’ homework responses do not support your argument that they devalue education, but it does support the view that they are providing fairly accurate answers to survey questions. In an indirect fashion, black students are accurately indicating that they are less likely to be in honors/AP courses which we know to be true.

Next week: More Problems for McWhorter: The educational proof is in the achievement pudding.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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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.

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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

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.

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