American Racism - and the Anti-White Left -

This topic is VERY topical right now - with the main-stream-media fomenting a race war in the USA - to prevent a class war in my estimation - and I wanted to get to the bottom of what is really going on with how blacks and whites are treated in the USA - and if this 'Racism' that the media is screaming about - is actually true -

'In contemporary America, professors openly say things like “All I want for Christmas is white genocide” or “OK, officially, I now hate white people,”. Teaching assistants claim that “some white people may need to die” so that Black people can get what they deserve. Editors at the New York Times assert that “White men are bullshit”, use the hashtag “CancelWhitePeople” and complain about “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants” .

This is the same New York Times which published a piece entitled “Can my Children be Friends with White people?“, a question which the author answers largely in the negative: “As against our gauzy national hopes, I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible. When they ask, I will teach my sons that their beautiful hue is a fault line. Spare me platitudes of how we are all the same on the inside. I first have to keep my boys safe, and so I will teach them before the world shows them this particular brand of rending, violent, often fatal betrayal.”

Sometimes, white people don’t like this sort of stuff. For instance, a few complained about the New York Times editor I mentioned, but writers for NBC News explained that “white people getting mad — or publicly performing anger, at least — about white people jokes is actually white people getting mad about threats to white power.

Threats like a woman of color joining the editorial board of the New York Times after telling smarter and funnier jokes than them on Twitter. Racism is a mechanism of maintaining an imbalance of power — making it literally impossible, by definition, to be racist against white people, or to tell a racist joke about a white person”. Similarly, The Chicago Tribune has stated that “American racism is a uniquely white trait“.

USA Today has made this point too, that only white people can be racist. They’ve also noted that “A majority of white Americans believe discrimination exists against them in the United States” but have explained that this is not to be taken seriously, arguing that “America’s newest class of victims — i.e., white men — is on the warpath again. They complain that they can’t get into college because of affirmative action, can’t get a job because of diversity hiring, and can’t keep a job because of factories closing due to unfair trade deals. Now we can add to the “whine list” the fact that many white men feel they can no longer get ahead or get an advantage because of identity politics.”

CNN has published material explaining that white people who disagree with non-whites about racism are often engaging in “Whitesplaining”. This term was defined as follows: ““Whitesplaining” is an affliction that’s triggered when some white people hear a person of color complain about racism. They will immediately explain in a condescending tone why the person is wrong, “getting too emotional” or “seeing race in everything.”” The article went on to cite telltale signs of whitesplaining, such as when white people say things like “But I’m not a racist”.

Other times, white people agree with these narratives and devote themselves to fighting white supremacy. This can take an emotional toll on white people as a kind of racial self hatred. The New York Times has noted this in an advice column responding to a woman whose sense of white guilt caused them to have a mental breakdown. As they explain, white suffering is ultimately unimportant: “You have to relinquish your privilege. And part of learning how to do that is accepting that feelings of shame, anger and the sense that people are perceiving you in ways that you believe aren’t accurate or fair are part of the process that you and I and all white people must endure in order to dismantle a toxic system that has perpetuated white supremacy for centuries. That, in fact, those painful and uncomfortable feelings are not the problems to be solved or the wounds to be tended to. Racism is.”

NBC has also acknowledged the psychological toll of their ideology, telling white people that “you’re going to have to take a side. And yes, you have to do it now. It’s very likely, and understandable if you feel this is unfair, this is inconvenient, it’s frustrating, it’s difficult, it’s embarrassing, it’s going to alienate you from people you know, love, work with, watch the game with. That’s privilege. Someone once said, “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” This is a taste of equality.”

And Forbes too has said that white people need to stop caring so much about their own suffering: “If you are not Black, your pain and hurt is not the priority right now. This may be an anomaly for you – it is not an anomaly for Black folks who live this life, everyday”.
In the political realm, Joe Biden has talked about how white people becoming a minority is not only not-bad, but in fact a positive good which will improve the country.

These news outlets, CNN, the NYT, USA Today, Forbes, and NBC, are not seen as organizations of the radical left. Like Joe Biden, they are seen as center left or moderate.

If we looked further to the left, we’d find things like Bernie Sanders saying “when you’re white … you don’t know what it’s like to be poor“, Buzz Feed running articles like “37 Things White People Need To Stop Ruining In 2018” (the first of which, apparently, is America), Vice positively covering vacations non-whites take just to get away from white people, and The Root publishing articles with titles like “White people are cowards” which conclude “I thought white people were evil. I was right.”

Mainstream right wing media does not have material like this about minorities. That is because the American right is, for the most part, not racist. The American left, however, is significantly based on anti-white sentiment and behavior.

The Anti-White Left

This statement is backed up by various studies which consistently show that liberals value white people less than non-white people. Most of this research also finds that conservatives exhibit no significant racial bias.

Citation
Finding

Ulhamm et al. (2009)
Liberals are more willing to murder someone for the greater good if that person has a white sounding name rather than a black sounding one.

Winegard et al. (2019)
Liberals think black people being genetically superior to white people with respect to intelligence is more plausible than the reverse.

Cooley et al. (2019)
Hearing about white privilege caused liberals to feel less sympathy for poor white people.

Tetlock et al. (2000)
Liberals feel non-whites should not pay more for home insurance due to living in a high-risk area but as neutral about whether white people should.

Winegard et al. (2019)
Liberals would support censoring research showing white genetic superiority with respect to intelligence more than they would support censoring evidence of black superiority.

Goldberg (2019)
White liberals are the only group who on net prefer other racial groups to their own.

It’s worth noting that by accusing the left of being anti-white I am not accusing them of being genuinely pro-black. There is some reason to think that liberals, especially white ones, are often more concerned with being anti-white than they are with helping minorities.

For instance, Cooley et al. (2019). found that exposing people to left wing messages about white privilege caused their sympathy for poor whites to decrease while their sympathy for poor blacks remained the same.



Similarly, Dupree et al. (2019) found that: “Across five experiments (total N = 2,157), White participants responded to a Black or White interaction partner… liberals—but not conservatives—presented less competence to Black interaction partners than to White ones… This possibly unintentional but ultimately patronizing competence downshift suggests that well-intentioned liberal Whites may draw on low-status/competence stereotypes to affiliate with minorities”. In other words, white liberals talk to black people like they’re children.

This may also explain why it is that leftists spend a great deal more time talking about white on black murder than they do on black on black murder even though the later is far more common.

Some people have trouble accepting that the left is anti-white because so many white people are leftists. This should not be that confusing. We all know that people can internalize the narratives that justify discrimination against them. Leftists talk about this happening to racial minorities and women. There is no reason why this could not also happen to whites.

We also know that people can have a bias against themselves at the individual level. We normally call this low self-esteem and we know that liberals, on average, have lower self esteem than conservatives (Schlenker et al., 2012). Research has even suggested that people’s political opinions shift to the right if you boost their self esteem prior to having them take a political quiz (Belmi and Neal, 2014). Since we know that leftism has something to do with disliking yourself as an individual, it should be even less surprising that white liberals exhibit a dislike of their own ethnic group which is not typical of the members of any other group.

Intuitively, we might suspect that this kind of thing, what is often called “white guilt”, may be psychologically damaging. This intuition is supported by Fujushiro (2009) who found that thinking your race is given an unfair advantage doubled a person’s risk of poor mental health even after controlling for age, sex, education, income, and marital status.



There’s also research showing that white guilt has increased with time, and that leftist ideology has a causal impact on white guilt.

So far as I can tell, research estimating the average degree of racial guilt among white college kids began in the 1970s (Bardis, 1973). Guilt was measured with questions like “Do you feel personally guilty about the American Negro’s present social inequality?”.

This has become very apparent to me in the past several months and as a White Liberal I find it very disturbing, so disturbing in fact that I can hardly watch CNN/MSNBC and find myself peeking at Fox News and agreeing with what they're saying.

Looking back, I can see how I've been 'groomed' to want and accept the BLM political movement they're trying to shove down our throats as the new PC while the country is desperate for real political leadership.

Gypsy Nirvana said:

This topic is VERY topical right now - with the main-stream-media fomenting a race war in the USA - to prevent a class war in my estimation - and I wanted to get to the bottom of what is really going on with how blacks and whites are treated in the USA - and if this 'Racism' that the media is screaming about - is actually true -

Click to expand...

“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses. The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he’s a the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”


Malcom X

Back then, on a 5-point scale ranging from completely disagree to completely agree, whites averaged a score of less than 2 on most questions.

So far as I know, another paper quantifying white guilt wasn’t published until 1999 (Swim and Miller., 1999). Agreement with the same sorts of statements as before was rated on a 5 point scale, and the average response was 2.12, implying only slight guilt and that the mean level of guilt had not changed much since the 1970s. However, this slight guilt was pervasive with only 6% of the sample saying that they strongly disagreed with all five statements of guilt.

In 2007, this same scale was administered to another sample of white college kids (Case, 2007). This time, the mean response was 3.64. After these students took a diversity course, the mean score increased to 3.94, implying a good deal of guilt, and implying that leftism causes such guilt.



Similarly, Powell et al. (2005) reported the following: “In Experiment 1 (N = 110), White American participants assessed 24 statements about racial inequality framed as either White privileges or Black disadvantages. In Experiment 2 (N = 122), White participants generated examples of White privileges or Black disadvantages. In both experiments, a White privilege framing resulted in greater collective guilt”.

Thus, over time white guilt is becoming more common and such guilt is caused by leftist rhetoric. We we’ve seen, this is potentially damaging to the mental health of the white people who internalize left wing narratives.

Such narratives are probably not only damaging to those who feel an active sense of white guilt. It is likely that they’ve also harmed white people who have responded to the modern political climate by simply de-identifying with their race or ethnic group. We have some reason to think that this is damaging, because, as can be seen below, identifying with one’s race is generally correlated with higher self-esteem and this is especially true of white people.

Citation - N Whites Blacks Hispanics -

Phinney et al 669 .44 .17 .27
(1997)
Phinney et al 5,423 .24 .14 .14
(1999)
Carlson et al 896 .27 .39 .27
(2000)
Average
(N-Weighted) 6,990 .26 .18 .17

Despite this, white people have the lowest level of racial identification of any ethnic group in America:

Finding
Pew (2019)
One in seven (15%) of whites, 56% of Asians, 59% of Hispanics, and 74% of Blacks say that their race/ethnicity is central to their identity

Phinney et al. (1997)
On a measure of ethnic identity, African Americans scored higher than Latinos who scored higher than whites.

Roberts et al. (1999)
Across ten ethnic groups, African Americans had the highest score on a measure of ethnic identity while white Americans had the lowest.

Phinney (1992)
Across five ethnic groups, Black Americans had the highest score on an ethnic identity measure while white Americans had the lowest.

Carlson et al. (2000)
On a measure of ethnic identity, African Americans scored the highest followed by Hispanic Americans who scored higher than white Americans.

White Americans Aren’t Racist

This observation naturally leads us into countering the most fundamental anti-white lie spread by the left: that racism on the part of white people is the primary explanation of racial inequality in the United States.

This idea is supported by many people in part because they feel that any other sort of explanation is inevitably racist. The implicit logic here, that it is morally problematic to accuse a non-white group of behaviour which explains their life outcomes but it is not morally problematic to blame inequality on the racist behaviour of white people, is itself obviously racist and anti-white.

A useful first observation towards dispelling this idea is to note that, unlike black Americans, white Americans generally don’t exhibit any racial bias in formal experiments measuring racism.


Zigerell (2018)

This data suggests that on average white people exhibit no racial bias. Of course, this does not mean that there are no racist white people. But the impact of such people is made up for by an equal effect from white people who are biased in favour of non-whites so that the net mean level of discrimination is zero.

Leftists sometimes deny this based on the results of implicit association tests which are supposed to measure subconscious biases which people may be totally unaware. However, IAT scores don’t predict actual racist behavior and so are not a valid measure of racial bias.


Carlsson and Agerstrom (2016)

This data should inform our priors about racist behaviour such that we should think that any particular group of white people is on net unbiased with respect to race unless we have some evidence about this particular group of white people which suggests otherwise.

Differences in Income and Education.

Some think racism is necessary to explain group differences in income. But blacks actually make more money than whites when education, cognitive skill, marital status and the region someone lives in are controlled for.


Neal and Johnson (1996)

Of course, racism may explain a group difference in one of these variables, such as educational attainment, but it is important to note that group differences in income flip direction without directly controlling for any measure of racism.

With respect to educational opportunity, Murray and Rueben (2008) calculated spending per pupil for US schools between the years 1972 and 2002. They found the following: “In 1972, the ratio of nonwhite to white spending was .98; this trend had reversed by 1982, as spending per pupil for nonwhite students was slightly higher than for white students in most states and in the United States as a whole and has been for the past 20 years”. Thus, since 1982, spending on non-white students has been greater than spending on white students.

This issue was revisited by Richwine (2011) who found that spending on black students was 1% greater than spending on white students, while spending on Asian and Hispanic students was a few percentage points lower.

What about the real americans oppressed by black and whites alike?

These difference in spending are reflected in school characteristics: on average, blacker schools have smaller classes more experienced teachers who have more formal education and who receive more pay (Cocoran et al., 2003).

This information may surprise some people as leftists often cite data showing that blacker school districts receive less funding than average. This is true but within school districts blacker schools receive more money and thus black students go to better funded schools than white students despite the headlines people sometimes see concerning district level disparities (Ejdemyr et al., 2017).

Once high-school is complete, students apply to college. Based on aggregated data from 20 previous studies, we can estimate that when comparing people of equal qualifications, Black applicants are roughly 21 times more likely than white applicants to be admitted, while Hispanics are 3 times as likely, and Asians are 6% less likely or 59% more likely depending on whether we use the mean or median estimate.

(The race columns show the odds of admission compared to those of white applicants when qualifications are held constant.)

Citation School Type Black OR Hispanic OR Asian OR

Nagai (2008) Arizona State Law 1115.43 84.95 2.18
Lerner (2002)University of Virginia Law 730.8 1.1 1.86
Nagai (2008)University of Nebraska Law 442.39 89.63 5.78
Armor (2004) William and Mary Law 267 0.66 0.66
Nagai (2008)University of Arizona Law 250.03 18.15 2.54
Danielson
and Sander Berkeley Law 121.6 18.2 1.6
(2014)
Armor University of Virginia Undergrad 106 2.81 0.94
(2004)
Nagai University of Michigan Undergrad 62.79 47.82 0.81
(2006)
Lerner&Nagai University of Maryland Medical 20.63 2.51 0.68
(2002)
Armor North Carolina State Undergrad 13 1.93 0.64
(2004)
Lerner&Nagai SUNY Medical 9.44 4.08 0.76
(2001)
Nagai (2011) Miami University Undergrad 7.99 2.16 2.14
Danielson&Sander UCLA Undergrad 5.15 1.92 0.85
(2014)
Lerner&Nagai US Naval Academy Military 4.44 3.32 0.67
(2006)
Lerner&Nagai University of Washington Medical 4.01 4.86 0.9
(2001)
Nagai (2011) Ohio State Undergrad 3.33 4.3 1.47
Lerner&Nagai US Military Academy Military 1.94 1.2 0.68
(2006)
Lerner&Nagai George Mason Law 1.13 1.09 1.74
(2002)

Median All All 20.63 2.81 0.94

Mean All All 175.51 15.43 1.59

Similarly, it’s been estimated that the proportion of students attending selective colleges who are white would increase from 66% to 75% if admissions were based solely on test scores.

Carnevale et al. (2019)

And once in college non-white students are more likely to receive grants and scholarships despite the fact that white students are no more likely to have their parents pay for their school (Kantrowitz, 2011; Brown, 2019)


Kantrowitz (2011)

As a whole then, resource allocation within the education system favours non-whites students over white ones. Obviously then, white racists have not inhibited black economic success by depriving them of the resources needed for educational success.

Gypsy Nirvana said:

That is because the American right is, for the most part, not racist.

Click to expand...

is this deliberate dishonesty, or short-sightedness?

how many klansmen u think are currently registered democrats?

go to any fox news or oan comments section and you are guaranteed to find some racist shit.

i guess they're all lefists, right?

i wonder who put the noose in nascar dude's garage, maybe it was hilary clinton herself.

amaud arbery's murderers? biden campaign financiers, clearly.

i bet the dude that threw a banana peel.at dave chappelle was paid by george soros and trained by bernie sanders.

post your source gypsy



I can go through the effort of reverse engineering it if need be

Difference in Unemployment

Previously, I noted that racial income differences can easily be flipped by controlling for obvious determinants of income. Of course, to have an income at all you first have to be employed and many people think companies avoid hiring minorities for racist reasons.

This suggestion is difficult to reconcile with the overt behaviour of corporations. For instance, a 2017 report on all the companies in the S&P 100 found over 90% of them had engaged in diversity initiatives and 75% of them had gone as far as setting specific hiring targets for minority employment. The same report found that such practices are rapidly gaining in popularity.



The idea that racism explains group differences in employment levels is also hard to square with the fact that there was no unemployment gap between races in the early 20th century when white people were far more likely to be racially biased against black people.


Fairline and Sundstrom (1999)

It’s worth noting that the unemployment gap between races that emerged in the second half of the 20th century seems to be, at least in part, voluntary. As Williams (2011) reports: “During 1979-1980, the National Bureau of Economic Research conducted a survey in the ghettos of Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Only a minority of the respondents were employed, yet almost as many said it was easy or fairly easy to get a job as a laborer as said it was difficult or impossible; and 71 percent said it was fairly easy to get a minimum-wage job.”

If you tell this to a leftist, they are likely to respond by noting that black people are less likely than white people to get called back when they submit a job application that is identical in every way other than the race implied by their name. To be specific, Quillian et al. (2017) meta-analyzed the research on hiring discrimination and found that black applicants received 36% fewer call backs than white applicants. So this effect isn’t very large even if it is explained by racism.

But it’s probably not. These sorts of experiments rely on a basic misunderstanding of how qualifications relate to job performance. Suppose that the distributions of job performance among blacks and whites consist of two overlapping normal distributions, like this:

Now suppose that qualifications on a resume require a certain level of skill and ability to obtain such that those who would be bad employees cannot easily acquire them. As is hopefully evident in the below example, there is no possible threshold for job performance, or any other relevant trait (e.g. job related knowledge, cognitive ability, self discipline, etc.,) where the white mean is above the black mean in general, but not still above the black mean among those who exceed that threshold.



This becomes even more true if we make it easier for black people to acquire a given qualification than it is for a white person. In this scenario, among applicants with any such qualifications, white job performance will exceed black people’s job performance among those with equal qualification even if there is no mean difference in job performance between black and white people in the total population.



This situation is exactly what happens when a society institutes affirmative action and as we’ve seen affirmative action for African Americans is widespread in contemporary America.

These theoretical considerations should be sufficient to show that these experiments are invalid measures of racism, but if you’d like empirical evidence to substantiate this consider the results of a massive study carried out by the federal government to measure people’s work-related cognitive abilities in terms of things like everyday math skills, writing skills, and the ability to efficiently use information taken from a document.

As can be seen, the general trend was such that black respondents were outscored by white respondents who had lower levels of education attainment than the black respondents did.

Similar results are found in Neill (1990), a paper which shows the mean AFQT percentile scores of black and white men aged 19-21 by education level for the years 1953-1958 and 1980. (The AFQT is a test designed by the military to measure cognitive skills relevant to job performance such as reasoning ability, mathematical ability, and reading ability.)



In 1980, Black people who had completed 3-4 years of college came in, on average, at the 49.7th percentile, or slightly below the average score unconditional on education. By contrast, the average percentile scores were 80.2 for whites with 3-4 years of college, 65.8 for whites with 1-2 years of college, and 46.5 for whites with 3-4 years of high school. This was even more extreme in the 50s, when black people with 3-4 years of college completed scored lower than whites with 3-4 years of high school.
Thus, it is clearly rational for employers to prefer the average white applicant over the average black applicant even if they are the same on paper.

The most important evidence on this question comes from Roth et al. (2003) who meta-analyzed data from 19 previous studies and found that black employees scored 0.30 standard deviations lower than white employees on measures of job performance even when they were working the same job at the same organization. This suggests that what is being required of applicants in terms of actual job performance, rather than on paper qualifications, is lesser for minorities.

This is consistent with most firms engaging in affirmative action in hiring and, because they are invalid measures of racial bias, this is also consistent with black applicants receiving 36% fewer call backs on applications.

Some might argue that this explanation is rude, racist even, because it requires that we note the job performance gap between black and white people. Here I would re-iterate that it is no less rude or racist to blame this difference on the supposed immoral behaviour of white people. The only reason I’ve even brought this up is to defend white people against this charge. We can also note that, obviously, a group difference in averages is just that, a difference in averages, and there are individuals of all types in every racial group.

Differences in Loan Acceptance Rates

Another common argument made by the left concerns the fact that black people have a harder time than white people getting a loan. Data from Pew shows that black people are indeed more likely to be denied for a mortgage loan, but even among blacks the rate of denial is only 27%.


Desilver and Bialik (2017)

Turning the interest rates, it is true that Black people are more than twice as likely as whites to get a mortgage interest rate of 8% or more. But this is very rare even among black mortgage holders. The average interest rate seems to be similar among whites, Hispanics, and blacks, though possibly significantly lower for Asians.


Pew (2017)

So these differences are real but fairly small. Leftists are apt to point out that some of these differences exist even after controlling for credit scores. This is true, but the remaining differences are really quite small. For instance, Cheng et al. (2014) analyzed data from the U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances for the years 2001, 2004, and 2006 and found that controlling for measures of consumer behavior and debt risk reduced the black-white average interest rate gap to .29%

More importantly, credit scores don’t predict behavior equally well across races. Consider the following from a report given to congress by the federal reserve on how well loan performance is predicted by credit scores: “Consistently, across all three credit scores and all five performance measures, blacks… show consistently higher incidences of bad performance than would be predicted by the credit scores”. In other words, loans to black people have a higher risk of default even after controlling for credit score.

This report also notes that this is largely just true of black and white people with poor credit scores. Among those with high credit scores, there isn’t much of a difference across race in risk. Relatedly, a study by the Chicago federal reserve found no racial bias in loan approval rates among those with a good credit score but a significant bias in favor of whites among those with a bad credit score. Similarly, Ross et al. (2004) find that black borrowers have a tougher time getting loans but this is only true among those who don’t have mortgage insurance. Thus, lenders are acting exactly as we would expect them to if they were accurately using race as a proxy for investment risk.

The strongest evidence against racial bias in lending comes from Bhutta and Hizmo (2019). They analyzed a data set consisting of all FHA-insured mortgages that originated in 2014 and 2015. After controlling for lender effects, credit score, and income, they found a black-white interest gap of .03% and a Hispanic-white gap of .015%. This result is similar to what we’ve already seen, but, unlike most research in this area, Bhutta and Hizmo also included data on discount points and this revealed a racial difference in favor of non-whites. Combining this data into a single model, they found no racial bias in borrower’s expected pay schedule’s. Even more importantly, it is shown that the expected revenue generated by a loan does not significantly differ by the race of the borrower.

This evidence is very hard to reconcile with racial bias. The fact that, once other differences are held constant, races experience the same expected pay schedules directly suggests that no bias exists. The fact that the expected revenue of loans does not differ by race strongly suggests that the differences in the terms of loans given to blacks and whites reflect lenders accurately forecasting the terms which will maximize profit within each race of borrowers. It is hard to see how this result could come about if people were acting on the basis of racial animus rather than economic rationality.

A related claim made by the left is that certain neighbourhoods have been “red lined” and are discriminated against by banks. These areas historically contain many minorities and so result in racial discrimination. This hypothesis has been tested in various cities and it’s been consistently shown that the racial composition of a neighborhood has no direct impact on the probability of loan approval, meaning this narrative is simply false.

Looks like someone has seen through the bullchit!

Citation City Finding
Ahlbrant Pittsburgh, PA The racial composition of someone’s
(1977) neighbourhood had no direct effect on
their chances of getting a loan -

Hutchison et al. Toledo, Oh The racial composition of someone’s
(1977) neighbourhood had no direct effect on
their chances of getting a loan.

Dingemans Sacramento, CA ''Measures of ethnicity contribute little
(1979) explanation to loan rates''


Avery et al. Cleveland, OH In demographically stable areas, race had no
direct impact on the number of loans given in
(1981) area - Loans were 9% less likely to be accepted
in areas with quickly changing demographics.


Tootell (1996) Boston, MA The racial composition of a neighbourhood had no
direct effect on the rate at which loan requests
were rejected.



Historical Explanations

If we accept what I’ve argued thus far, we still might think that racial inequality is caused by racism of the past even if our current institutions have been made biased in the opposite direction.

The first problem with this view is that the black-white wealth gap among those who have no inheritance is only 28% lesser than the gap among those who do receive inheritance. The white-Hispanic wealth gap is actually largest among those with no inheritance.



Thompson and Suarez (2015)


This finding should make us more pessimistic about the plausibility of racist history being the primary explanation of racial inequality.
This inability of inheritance to explain racial wealth differences is explained in part by the fact that African Americans seem to have a hard time passing on wealth they accrue. Specifically, Toney (2016) finds that a doubling of the wealth of a person’s grandparents predicts an 18% increase in their own wealth if they are white but only a 2% increase in their wealth if they are black.


.

Toney (2016)

Moreover, the effect among black Americans is not statistically significant, meaning that there is a reasonable chance that it is due to sampling error and that the relationship in the general population is actually zero.

On the basis of this data, we can make a prediction about what would happen to black wealth in the future if it were presently set to equal the wealth of white people. So, for instance, if black wealth was increased by a factor of 7.5, three generations later their net wealth would only be 1.5 times greater than it was prior to the 7.5 factor increase and this would leave the vast majority of the initial racial wealth gap. While the above paper only looks at three generations, it makes sense to assume that this initial wealth increase would fall apart even more in future generations until it was effectively zero.

Similar results were found by Chetty et al. (2018) who were given data by the IRS that allowed them to conduct a statistical analysis where the sample was the entire US population that filed taxes between the years 1989 and 2015. Chetty et al replicated in dramatic fashion the finding that parental wealth doesn’t transfer to future generations well in black families. They write: “A black child born to parents in the top quintile is roughly as likely to fall to the bottom family income quintile as he or she is to remain in the top quintile; in contrast, white children are nearly five times as likely to remain in the top quintile as they are to fall to the bottom quintile”.

Obviously, if money is not being transferred across generations that implies that someone is spending the money and research shows that black people have lower saving rates than white people even when they have the same incomes (Dorgo, 2003). Hughes (2018) is worth quoting at some length on this topic:
“No element of culture harms black wealth accrual more directly than spending patterns. Nielsen, one of the world’s leading market research firms, keeps extensive data on

American consumer behaviour, broken down demographically. A 2017 Nielsen report found that, compared to white women, black women were 14 percent more likely to own a luxury vehicle, 16 percent more likely to purchase costume jewellery, and 9 percent more likely to purchase fine jewellery. A similar Nielsen report from 2013 found that, while only 62 percent of all Americans owned a smartphone, 71 percent of blacks owned one.

Moreover, all of these spending differences were unconditional on wealth and income.
To what extent do poor spending habits explain the persistence of the wealth gap?

Economists at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania asked this question after analyzing 16 years of nationally representative data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. Consistent with the Nielsen data, they found that blacks with comparable incomes to whites spent 17 percent less on education, and 32 percent more (an extra $2300 per year in 2005 dollars) on ‘visible goods’—defined as cars, jewelry, and clothes. What’s more, “after controlling for visible spending,” they concluded that the “wealth gap between Blacks and Whites, conditional on permanent income, declines by 50 percent.” To be clear, that 50 percent figure doesn’t pertain to the total wealth gap, but to the proportion of the gap that remains after income is taken into account—which was 40 percent. The upshot: the fact that blacks spent more on cars, jewellery, and clothes explained fully 20 percent of the total racial wealth gap.

To make matters worse, spending patterns are just one part of a larger set of financial skills on which blacks lag behind. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis followed over 40,000 families from 1989 to 2013, tracking their wealth accumulation and financial decisions. They developed a financial health scale, ranging from 0 to 5, that measured the degree to which families made “routine financial health choices that contribute to wealth accumulation”—e.g., saving any amount of money, paying credit card bills on time, having a low debt-to-income ratio, etc. At 3.12, Asian families scored the highest, followed by whites at 3.11, Hispanics at 2.71, and blacks at 2.63.

Next, they asked if education accounted for the differences in financial habits by limiting the comparison to middle-aged families with advanced degrees. Surprisingly, they found that the racial gap in financial health-scores didn’t shrink; it widened. Highly-educated Asian families scored 3.49, comparable whites scored 3.38, comparable Hispanics scored 2.94, and comparable blacks remained far behind at 2.66.”
Thus, differences in these measures of financial behavior explain nearly as much of the racial wealth gap as does inheritance.

The final nail in the coffin for left wing explanations of racial inequality consists of the many studies with designs that control for obvious confounding variables (including studies on American slavery) which have shown that parental income and wealth don’t have a causal impact on offspring outcomes that last more than a couple generations and in most cases such effects are practically trivial within a single generation.