Intellectuals and Race (17 page)

Racism not only has varying definitions, its role in arguments by intellectuals can vary greatly from its use simply as a descriptive term to its role as a causal explanation. How one chooses to characterize adverse decisions against a particular racial group may be a matter of personal
semantic preferences. But to assert a causal role is to enter the realm of evidence and verification, even if the assertion contains neither. For example, a
New York Times
editorial presented a classic example of the liberal vision of racism:

          Every index of misery continues to show that the devastating effects of racism linger on in America. Blacks make up a disproportionate number of the citizens dependent on public assistance. The unemployment rates among black males and teen-agers remain at least twice as high as among whites. The proportion of blacks dropping out of the labor force altogether has doubled over the last two decades.
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The bare facts cited are undoubtedly true. But two of the three facts— higher unemployment and lower labor force participation among blacks than among whites— are worse today than in earlier times. By the logic of this editorial, that would imply that there was less racism in the past,
which no one believes
.

Black labor force participation rates were higher than that of whites generations ago.
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Black unemployment rates were lower than that of whites in 1890 and, for the last time, in 1930.
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Black 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds had a slightly lower unemployment rate than white youngsters of the same age in 1948 and only slightly higher unemployment rates than their white peers in 1949.
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Moreover, these unemployment rates for black teen-agers were a
fraction
of what they would become in later times. These low unemployment rates existed just before the minimum wage law was amended in 1950 to catch up with the inflation of the 1940s which had, for all practical purposes, repealed the minimum wage law, since inflated wages for even unskilled labor were usually well above the minimum wage level specified when the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938.

The key role of federal minimum wage laws can be seen in the fact that black teenage unemployment, even in the recession year of 1949, was a fraction of what it would become in even prosperous later years, after the series of minimum wage escalations that began in 1950.
³¹

The last year in which black unemployment was lower than white unemployment— 1930— was also the last year in which there was no federal minimum wage law. The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 was openly advocated by
some members of Congress on grounds that it would stop black construction workers from taking jobs from white construction workers by working for less than the union wages of white workers.
³²
Nor was the use of minimum wage laws to deliberately price competing workers out of the labor market unique to the Davis-Bacon Act or to the United States. Similar arguments were made in Canada in the 1920s, where the object was to price Japanese immigrants out of the labor market, and in South Africa in the era of apartheid, to price non-whites out of the labor market.
³³

Any group whose labor is less in demand, whether for lack of skills or for other reasons, is disproportionately priced out of labor markets when there are minimum wage laws, which are usually established in disregard of differences in skills or experience. It has not been uncommon in Western Europe, for example, for young people to have unemployment rates above 20 percent.
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The point here is not to claim that pricing competitors out of the market was the motivation of all or most of the supporters of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The point is that this was its effect, regardless of the intentions. In short, the empirical evidence is far more consistent with the changing patterns of black labor force participation rates and unemployment rates over time being results of minimum wage laws than with changes in the degree of racism in American society. Indeed, these patterns over time are completely inconsistent with the fact that racism was worse in the earlier period. Only the fact that the intelligentsia tend to make racism the default setting for explaining adverse conditions among blacks enables such statements as those in the
New York Times
editorial to pass muster without the slightest demand for either evidence or analysis.

It is much the same story when racism is used as an explanation for the existence of black ghettoes. If racism is simply a characterization, there may be others who prefer different characterizations, but these are matters of subjective preferences. However, if a
causal
proposition is being advanced, then it is subject to empirical verification like other causal propositions.

When racism is offered as a
causal
explanation, as distinguished from a characterization, that makes the predispositions of whites the reason for the residential segregation of blacks, among other forms of racially disparate
treatment. But seeing that as a hypothesis to be tested brings us face to face with inconvenient but inescapable facts of history. For example, most blacks were
not
residentially segregated in such cities as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Washington by the end of the nineteenth century
³⁵
— even though they had been before and would be again in the twentieth century. Do the racial predispositions of white people just come and go unpredictably? That would be an especially strange thing for predispositions to do, even if reasoned opinions change with changing circumstances.

It is a matter of historical record that there were in fact changing circumstances preceding changing racial policies in the United States, both when these were changes for the better and when they were changes for the worse. Moreover, where the circumstances changed at different times from one place to another, racial attitudes and policies also changed correspondingly at different times.

As of the early nineteenth century, residential segregation was just one of a number of restrictions placed on free blacks in both the North and the South. However, by the last decade of the nineteenth century, such residential restrictions had eroded in Northern cities to the point where W.E.B. Du Bois could write in the 1890s of “a growing liberal spirit toward the Negro in Philadelphia,” in which “the community was disposed to throw off the trammels, brush away petty hindrances and to soften the harshness of race prejudice”— leading, among other things, to blacks being able to live in white neighborhoods.
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Nor was Philadelphia unique. There were similar developments in New York, Detroit, Washington and other Northern cities.
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Census data show a lower rate of urban residential segregation of blacks nationwide in 1890–1910 than in later decades of the twentieth century and even as late as the 2010 census.
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Other restrictions had eroded as well. In Detroit, blacks who had been denied the vote in 1850 were voting in the 1880s, and in the 1890s blacks were being elected to public office by a predominantly white electorate in Michigan. The black upper class in Detroit at that time had regular social interactions with whites, and their children attended high schools and colleges with whites. In Illinois during this same era, legal restrictions on access to public accommodations for blacks were removed from the law,
even though there were not enough black voters at the time to influence public policy, so that this represented changes in white public opinion.
³⁹

In New York City, by the 1890s most blacks did not work as unskilled laborers but held modest but respectable jobs as barbers, waiters, caterers, and skilled craftsmen. Distinguished historian Oscar Handlin characterized blacks in New York at that time as being “better off than the mass of recent white immigrants.”
⁴⁰
The visible improvement in the living standards of blacks was noted in Jacob Riis’ 1890 classic,
How the Other Half Lives
.
⁴¹

In Philadelphia, blacks were among the leading caterers in the city, serving a predominantly white clientele.
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In Chicago, there were also successful black businesses serving a predominantly white clientele
⁴³
and, as late as 1910, more than two-thirds of the city’s black residents lived in neighborhoods that were predominantly white.
⁴⁴

To maintain that residential and other racial restrictions on blacks were simply a matter of the predispositions of the white population— racism— immediately raises the question of why such predispositions should have changed so much during the course of the nineteenth century— and then changed back again, drastically, and within a very few years— during the early twentieth century. But this pattern of progress in race relations in Northern urban communities during the nineteenth century, followed by retrogression in the early twentieth century, followed again by progress in the latter part of the twentieth century, is more readily understood in terms of causes other than pure subjective mood swings in the white population. In short, whether or not attitudes within the white population deserve the
characterization
of racism, a
causal
analysis of the major changes that occurred in residential and other restrictions on blacks cannot explain such
changes
by simply saying “racism.”

Turning from the white population to the black population, we find developments that make the changing residential patterns explicable without resorting to inexplicable changes inside the heads of white people. Beginning at the beginning, African slaves were brought into American society at the bottom, and concentrated in the South— a region with its own cultural handicaps that produced marked differences between the
white
populations of the North and South that many observers noted during the
antebellum era.
⁴⁵
This meant that those blacks who came out of the South to live in Northern cities would be very different in many ways from the white populations of those cities. The visible racial differences made blacks easy to identify and restrict.

During the course of the nineteenth century, however, over a period of generations Northern blacks tended to acquire more of the culture of the surrounding white urban population of the North, just as other groups often have when living surrounded by a vastly larger population with a different culture and a higher socioeconomic level. By the end of the nineteenth century, this cultural assimilation had reached the point where racial barriers eased considerably in the Northern cities, where the black populations of these cities were now predominantly native-born residents, rather than migrants from the South.
⁴⁶

This situation changed drastically, however, and within a relatively few years, with the mass migrations of millions of blacks out of the South, beginning in the early twentieth century. This not only greatly multiplied the black populations living in many Northern cities, the newcomers were seen by both the pre-existing black populations and the white populations of these cities as creating greatly increased social problems such as crime, violence and offensive behavior in general.
⁴⁷

If these were mere “prejudices,” “perceptions” or “stereotypes” in the minds of white people, as so many adverse judgments have been automatically characterized, why did the very same views appear among Northern-born blacks at the same time?

Where hard data are available, these data substantiate the pattern of behavioral differences between the pre-existing Northern black populations and the newcomers from the South. In early twentieth-century Pennsylvania, for example, the rate of violent crimes among blacks from the South was nearly five times that among blacks born in Pennsylvania.
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In Washington, D.C., where the influx from the South occurred decades earlier, the effect of the Southerners’ arrival could be seen decades earlier. For example, out of wedlock births were just under 10 percent of all births among blacks in Washington in 1878, but this more than doubled by 1881,
following a large influx of Southern blacks, and remained high for years thereafter.
⁴⁹

The new majorities of Southern blacks in the Northern black urban communities were sufficiently large, and their culture sufficiently reinforced by continuing new arrivals from the South, that their rate of assimilation to the cultural norms of the surrounding white society was neither as rapid nor as complete as that of the much smaller numbers of blacks who had preceded them in these cities in the nineteenth century. Moreover, as late as 1944, Gunnar Myrdal’s
An American Dilemma
pointed out that a majority of blacks living in the North at that time had been born in the South.
⁵⁰

During the early years of mass migration of blacks out of the South, many Northern-born blacks condemned the Southern newcomers, and saw in them a danger that the white population would put up new barriers against all blacks
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— which is in fact what happened. After the massive inflow of Southern blacks into Northern cities in which small black populations had once lived scattered in predominantly white neighborhoods, these now became cities in which blacks were prevented from living in white neighborhoods by methods ranging from legal prohibitions and restrictive covenants to outright violence. All this happened within a very few years of the mass migrations of Southern blacks to Northern cities.

The massive black ghettoes which became common in the twentieth century were just one aspect of a more general retrogression in race relations, in which various public accommodations once open to blacks were now closed to them, and black children who had once gone to schools with white children in Northern cities were now segregated into different schools.
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