Why Does Racial Inequality Persist?

>> Glenn Loury: Why the success of the civil rights movement notwithstanding, has the unequal status of black Americans persisted into the 21st century, that's the question of the hour. Clear thinking about this problem requires, in my view, that we distinguish between the role played by anti-black discrimination past and present.

And, as I have just suggested, the role of behavioral patterns to be found amongst some blacks. I admit that this puts what is a very sensitive issue starkly, I acknowledge that anti-black biases exist and that they should be remedied. But I am also urging that we blacks identify and seek to reverse the behavioral patterns that prevent some of our people from seizing newly opened opportunities.

Recently in my writings, I have recast these two positions as causal narratives, what I call the bias narrative, where one argues that the cause of persistent disparity is anti black racism. And that we must continue to reform American society toward achieving a level playing field, the focus being on the demand side of the labor market, for example.

And I hope that such reforms, now well advanced, are necessary but by themselves not sufficient. By contrast, I advance the development narrative, which emphasizes the need to consider how people acquire the skills, traits, habits, and orientations that foster their successful participation in American society. People are not born with these skills, traits, habits, and orientation, they must be acquired through the processes of maturation and human development.

Here the focus would be, for example, on the supply side of the labor market. Youngsters without the experience, who are not exposed to the influences, who lack access to the resources that foster and facilitate their human development. Those youngsters will fail to achieve their full potential. Now, of course, these two narratives are not mutually exclusive, but in terms of prescribing, intervention and remedy, they point in very different directions.

This tension between a focus on demand side versus supply side factors and accounting for persistent racial disparities is a very old theme for me. It dates all the way back to my doctoral thesis at MIT, where I contrasted the concept social capital, which I introduced in that thesis, with the more familiar idea of human capital.

Familiar to economists, anyway. My fundamental point was to distinguish the logic of economic transactions from the logic of human relations, especially when trying to explain persistent racial disparity. Business investments are transactional, but human investments are essentially relational. As I saw it, the conventional economic theory was incomplete when it comes to explaining racial disparities.

And there were two aspects of this incompleteness, one that had to do with human development, as I've suggested, and the other with racial identity. And so, first, I observed that all human development is socially situated and mediated, that is, the development of human beings occurs inside of social institutions.

It takes place as between people by way of human interactions, it is dialogic. The family, community, school, peer group, these cultural institutions of human association are where development is achieved, and therefore resources that are essential to human development. For example, the attention a parent gives to her child, are not alienable, most developmental resources are not commodities.

The development of human beings largely is not up for sale. Rather, structured connections between individuals create the context within which developmental resources come to be allocated to individual persons. Opportunity travels along the synapses of these social networks. Because people are not machines, their productivities, which is to say, the behavioral and cognitive capacities that bear on their social and economic functioning.

Are not merely the consequence of a mechanical infusion of material resources. Rather, these capacities are also the byproducts of social processes that are mediated by networks of human affiliation and connectivity. This was fundamentally important, I thought, and I still think, for understanding persistent racial disparities in America. That was the first point I wanted to make all those years ago about the incompleteness of human capital theory.

But my second observation was even more critical, and it was that what we call race in America is mainly a social, and only indirectly a biological phenomenon. Persisting racial differentiation across generations between large groups of people in an open society where people are living cheek by Gile. Cheek by Gile, is irrefutable, indirect evidence of a profound separation between the racially defined networks of social affiliation within that society.

Over time, that is, race would cease to exist unless people chose to act in a manner so as biologically to reproduce the varieties of phenotypic expression that constitute the substance of racial distinction. I cannot overemphasize this point because we speak so casually nowadays about racial equality and racial justice, and yet this thing that we're talking about, race, is not simply given in nature.

It is socially produced, it is an equilibrium outcome, we economists would say it's something we're making and remaking generation to generation. It is endogenous, it follows that if one is to understand the roots of durable racial inequality in any society, then one will need to attend in some detail to the processes that cause race to persist as a fact in that society.

Because almost surely those processes will not be unrelated to the allocation of developmental resources in that society. I conclude from these two observations that human development is socially configured and that race is a construct that we are making and remaking generation to generation. That we economists should recognize the limits of our tools to explain persistent disparities by race.

Because the creation and reproduction of racial inequality also rest on cultural conceptions about the identity that people embrace, black and white and brown and yellow alike. These are the convictions that people affirm about the legitimacy of conducting intimate social relations with racially distinct others. And here I do not only mean sexual relations, although I do mean that, too.

Racial inequality is, inescapably I'm claiming here as an economist, a cultural phenomenon implicating not only the transfer of resources. But, more fundamentally, the decisions that we make daily about with whom to associate and with whom to identify. My contrast between human and social capital reflected my conviction that beliefs of this kind ultimately determine the access that people enjoy to those informal and non-fungible resources that are needed to develop their human potential.

What I called social capital when I coined that term in 1976, is, on this view, a critical prerequisite for the production of human capital, which, as we economists know all too well, is the skills, education, work experience. And social aptitudes that people possess and which determine a person's earnings and his or her capacity to generate and to accumulate wealth.

>> Glenn Loury: We black Americans face a crucial choice of narratives, as I have suggested, whether to emphasize bias or development, whether to look to their politics or to our culture. Whether to combat anti black racism or to rebuild the black family, whether to embrace victimization or to accept responsibility.

This fundamental choice governs how we view our place within this great republic, the United States of America. This is a choice worth arguing about, is this a good country, one that affords boundless opportunity to all who are fortunate enough to enjoy the privileges and to bear the responsibilities of citizenship?

Or, as latter day historical revisionists would have it, is America a venal, rapacious, bandit society full of plundering racists, founded in hypocrisy, genocide, and slavery, propelled by capitalist greed and unrepentant anti-black antipathy? That's a choice before us. I regret to report that as we speak, this latter narrative is being foisted in our schools and universities on young minds across the land.

And yet I claim that the overwhelming weight of the evidence favors the former interpretation. Because the founding of the United States of America, 1776, 1787, was a world historic event by means of which enlightenment ideals about the rights and the dignity of human persons and the legitimacy of state power.

Came to be instantiated in real institutions which have endured and matured over two and a half centuries. True enough, the founding entailed a compromise with slavery. And yet now, some 40 million strong, we black Americans have become by far the richest and most powerful large population of African descent on this planet.

The question, then, is this are we going to look through the lens of the United States as a racist, genocidal, white supremacist, illegitimate force? Or are we going to see our nation for what it has become fitfully, over the course of at least three over the last three centuries, which is the greatest force for human liberty in the history of the world?

I wish to argue fervently for the latter course. As the Reverend doctor Martin Luther King Junior well understood, that is the surest pathway for us black Americans to both political and economic equality. The civil war.

>> Glenn Loury: 600,000 dead in a country of 30 million. The consequences of that war, together with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments enacted just afterwards, was to make the enslaved Africans and their descendants into citizens.

In the fullness of time, we have become equal citizens, that ladder should not have taken another 100 years, I agree. Nor should any of my ancestors have been enslaved in the first place, I agree. But here's the thing. Slavery was a commonplace human practice dating back to antiquity.

Emancipation, the freeing of 4 million enslaved persons as a result of a mass movement for abolition, that was a new idea, a western idea, an American idea. It was the fruit of enlightenment philosophy and Christian charity, it was an idea brought to fruition over a century and a half ago in our own United States of America.

With the liberation of an enslaved people, that is an achievement, and that achievement would not have been possible without philosophical insights. And moral commitments and political institutions cultivated in the 17th and 18th centuries in the west. Ideals about the essential dignity and the God given rights of all human persons, that is, the American founding at the end of the 18th century brought something new into the world.

Can we recognize and acknowledge that and celebrate it? Slavery was a holocaust, out of which emerged an american accomplishment that advanced the morality and the dignity of all of humankind, namely, emancipation. The ultimate incorporation of African descended people fully into the American body politic has been an unprecedented and monumental achievement for human liberty.

To whom much has been given of him, much shall be required. Here is my message for the American establishment in this time of racial conflict. While we cannot ignore the behavioral problems of this so called underclass, this black underclass, we should discuss and react to them as if we were talking about our own children, neighbors, and friends, because we are.

That is, this persisting black disadvantage is an American tragedy, It's a national, not merely a communal disgrace. Changing the definition of the American we is the only real solution for the racial inequality problem that afflicts our society. And that requires seeing ourselves as all being in the same boat, sharing a common citizenship and a common humanity.

Rather than seeing ourselves as rival racial groups, as between whom must be brokered some kind of quid pro quo, it means fashioning American solutions to American problems. This will require adjusting ways of thinking on all sides. The goal should be to achieve a society where everyone, regardless of race, is thought of as us.

This is the reason that I strenuously, strenuously oppose the growing advocacy of paying reparations for slavery to African-Americans, of setting the country up with black people on one side of a bargaining table. And the rest of America on the other side, and pushing a bunch of chits into the middle to settle a debt.

We blacks ought not to negotiate a separate deal with America, we are America, America is us. Inequality is certainly a problem, it should be addressed forthrightly, but it should be addressed as a part of a broadly conceived political initiative to achieve a decent society for all Americans, not for the parochial pursuit of racial equity.

To borrow a phrase from someone we all know well, here's the deal, the black freedom struggle in America is over, and we Americans have won. I will conclude to my fellow black Americans in closing, I say this freedom is one thing, equality quite another. The former is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the latter.

Here, then, is my final claim. It is both futile and dangerous for us black Americans to rely on others to shoulder our communal responsibilities, to raise our children, to organize our families. To behave in ways that allow for a decent civic life for everybody around us. If we wanna walk with dignity, we blacks to enjoy truly equal standing within this diverse, prosperous, and dynamic society, then we must accept the fact that white America can never give us what we seek.

In response to our protests and remonstrations. The summer of 2020, after the killing of George Floyd, was an absolute disaster for the political project of equal dignity and equal respect and standing for black people in this country, that's my opinion. Rather, we must earn equal status by dint of our own efforts, those are hard ways, I take no pleasure in saying them, but I am obliged to report this reality.

Equal dignity, equality of standing, of honor, of security in one's position within society, the equal ability to command the respect of others, these are things that cannot be simply handed over. They will not be the fruit of insurrection, violent uprising, or rebellion. Equality of this sort for black Americans in the 21st century is something that we must rest with our bare hands from a cruel and indifferent world.

By means of our own effort, inspired by the example of our enslaved and newly freed ancestors, we must make ourselves equal, no one can do that for us. My fear is that until we Americans of all races recognize and accept this inexorable fact about the human condition, until we eschew the rhetoric and embrace the reality of race in our country.

Until then, the disparities that have so troubled our politics and that so threaten our domestic tranquility will continue to persist.