I’d be interested to hear the context.
Do you have a cite? I was under the impression that military integration had been immensely successful and I assumed that outreach was an aspect.
DMC – we have previously debated discrimination in lending on this board. It’s not as simple as that article claims.
The fundamental purpose of evaluating lenders is for the bank to get their money paid back. Income level is just one part of the information. In a sense, banks discriminate in favor of blacks, because a higher percentage of blacks than whites default on their home loans.
However, there are subleties regarding federal loan guaranties, that do point toward anti-black discrimination.
The bottom line is that the situation if far from black and white (so to speak).
DMC: as december points out, there is more to a lending decision than just income. Off the top of my head, I’d bet a lender would want to know:
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Income
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Value of Collateral
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Location of Collateral (High-crime area? The collateral may be vandalized, reducing its value. Flood plain? Same issue.)
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Applicant credit history (e.g., do they repay on time)
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Existing liabilities of the applicant (e.g., what obligations do they already have? Are those obligations secured or unsecured?)
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Assets of applicant (e.g., if the collateral is insufficient to cover the balance of the loan, are there other assets we could pursue on an unsecured basis?)
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Applicant’s job history (e.g., can she hold down a job?)
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Applicant’s type of employment (e.g., is it a volatile field? Is her income stream steady or does it vary? Is it likely to require the applicant to move in the short-term?)
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Applicant’s criminal history, if any.
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Are there any pending lawsuits against the applicant?
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How big of a down payment is the applicant putting down?
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Does the applicant have long-time roots in the community? (long-time residents may care for the property better, thus preserving the value of the collateral).
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How volatile are housing prices in the area where the home is located? (more volatile prices means more risk for the bank, since the value of their collateral could go down).
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How is the loan structured? Is there a prepayment option? Is the interest rate adjustable?
And that’s just me working off the top of my head. There’s are plenty more variables than just income that can be legitimately considered by lenders in making lending decisions.
The Fed study I cited earlier controls for many of these variables. I propose that controlling for these factors makes that study more credible than studies that do not.
And how does one aspect of overall military recruiting (which tends to target poorer areas, regardless), turn government outreach into a lot of outreach. What other government outreach programs can you name. (There are a few–it is not a substantial number.)
I’m sorry. The context for what?
Opposition on “philosophical” discussions? Search back on AA in this Forum.
Opposition in private industry? I can provide two examples; I don’t know that thet are what you are asking.
In 1954, Gm built their Tech Center in Warren, MI. At the time, most of the engineering facilities that were combined, there, had been scattered around in odd corners of various factories. Manufacturing Development (my Dad’s group) was tucked away in a corner of the Cadillac plant. When the Tech Center was announced in 1953, the word was passed around that there would be no coloreds there–and, barring a very few janitorial positions, that word was kept. Around the Spring of 1972, Gerstenberg announced an affirmative action program that required anyone hiring above a certain grade level (that happened to include all engineeres) to actively recruit among minority colleges, documenting their efforts. At the meeting where the new policy was announced, my Dad said that over half the managers began complaining that the policy was discriminatory against whites.
In the 1980s and 1990s, my client company had an active and effective recruitment program (mentioned above). Several of the managers discussed ways to sabotage the effort, and when they were challenged as to why they would bother, they replied that it was discriminatory to give “special treatment” to blacks by focusing on schools where they attended.
Do you have an example of any such program?
Depending on how the policies were implemented, I can understand the complaints. If compliance with the outreach program is measured by the number of minorities actually hired, that would put pressure on managers to hire more minority applicants, even if those applicants were less qualified than the remaining applicant pool. This could act as a de facto quota system, in much the same way as some police departments subtley encourage a certain quantity of ticket writing without using an explicit per-month ticket quota. But that’s a highly fact-sensitive point that will vary from company to company.
I can also see resistance arising for pure budgetary reasons: if we’ve always hired principally from schools X, Y and Z, and now we’re going to be required to expend recruitment efforts at schools A and B, well, you’ve just stretched our recruitment budget. That, or we’ll have to cut back on our efforts at X, Y, and/or Z, which we know to be reliable sources of candidates based on our years of experience in recruiting there.
Or maybe the managers are just racist assholes.
At any rate, mainstream opposition to AA is predicated on treating people equally in a colorblind fashion. Finding an applicant in that meets or exceeds the ordinary entrance requirements for a school or who is better qualified than other applicants for a job is to be applauded, and efforts to find those candidates in new places are just good business. The critics you describe, to the extent their complaints are not based on (1) notions of a de facto quota system or (2) some other business reason (such as the budgetary issue I noted) are clinging to an untenable position in my view.
See my description of the pre-Hopwood admission system at UT. Also see my description above of outreach programs that use a racial headcount to determine performance.
Without intending to involve myself too deeply in what is (as always) tending to get far too acrimonious, I want to point out that it’s a gross simplification to suggest that the only difference is skin color. You might want to consider things like average quality of education, which was already mentioned earlier and which, I suspect, has a good bit to do with the income gap. Ideally, everyone should be able to get an equally good education, and that this isn’t the case ought to be corrected.
I’m not convinced you’d be able to make the case that the reasons blacks are poorer, on average, than whites is due solely to their being black and not to other factors. Certainly you haven’t done so (or even attempted to do so) yet. Riboflavin is entirely correct to say that the existence of an income gap between any two groups does not by itself show that one of those groups is discriminated against. It shows that members of one of those groups make less money on average, no more and no less; it does not show why this is the case.
As an example to illustrate this, consider two groups of people: white males whose parents were homeless, and white males whose parents were multimillionaires. I strongly suspect that you’ll find that members of the latter group tend to make more money then members of the former group. Given that most people don’t go around asking whether your parents were millionaires or homeless, I think you’d have a hard time proving that the reason for any income gap is prejudice.
Does this clarify the question adequately, or is it hopelessly naive to think that a statistic is susceptible to multiple explanations?
december and Dewey Cheatem Undhow,
Apparently you missed the last quote of mine from the article.
Didn’t miss it at all. Without knowing the composition of that bank’s loan portfolio, nothing of substance can be said of that fact. Perhaps they loan in high-value predominantly black neighborhoods (they DO exist, after all). Perhaps they don’t make many real estate loans, and are thus particularly scrupulous on the loans of that type that they do make. Perhaps because they are black-owned, they attract successful blacks as clients, leaving less successful blacks to pursue loans from other banks. Or maybe all the other banks in Atlanta are run by evil racists. At any rate, we can’t determine any of that from the information you’ve provided.
Are you trying to say that redlining no longer exists? If that’s your stance, seeing as how it obviously existed in the past (or are you challenging that, also?), then wouldn’t the burden of proof that is has disappeared fall on those who make that claim?
For the record, I highly doubt most banks actually draw red lines on a map anymore, but there are all sorts of ways of accomplishing the same thing. Trying to find loopholes in, or overturning the CRA, for instance.
Why do the Republicans have a problem with the CRA?
Why are so many (all?) banks settling in redlining cases?
If blacks with equal income are turned down at a drastically higher rate than whites, why is that? Is someone implying that blacks have a genetic or cultural predisposition for poor credit report management? Or are you suggesting that due to racism, a black is less likely to get another equivalent job than his white counterpart?
If the black community can put lots of money into a bank, why can’t a bank loan the same percentage back to the community that it would in a white neighborhood of equal property values?
That point is one that I had somehow missed. I was and am against affirmative action because it uses reverse racism to attempt to reverse the effects of past racism. This reverse racism most likely makes some whites less sympathetic to the cause of minorities than what they may have otherwise been. This is especially true of those who may have actually lost opportunities to affirmative action. Too often though it seems as if affirmative action is interpreted as equal rights, instead of what it really is. If you are against it, then you are labeled a racist who doesn’t want minorities to have equal rights.
Joe Elliott
http://members.aol.com/joe4jesus/index.htm
DMC: Redlining is an irrational practice. Any bank that practiced it, particularly in today’s competitive lending environment, would put themselves at a competitive disadvantage. While I won’t stake out the absolutist position that it never happens, I have a hard time believing that it happens as a matter of broad industry practice.
Why settle? Because it can be cheaper than trying a case, particularly a class action, and because juries can be unpredictable.
Re the CRA: if you’d care to cite specific loopholes or other issues with the CRA, feel free. I won’t debate a generality, though.
And as for this:
See my list of factors above. Income is only one part of the puzzle in making a loan decision.
Actually, I should define something in my post above: Redlining, defined as providing less favorable loan conditions solely due to an applicant’s race is irrational. Clearly, a house in a poor, high-crime neighborhood will have less favorable loan conditions than a house in a safe, wealthy neighborhood because of the risk to the value of the loan’s collateral. Thus, differing loan conditions based on the location of collateral may be rational, depending on the circumstances.
The only measurement was evidence that they had looked; no numbers were set for how many non-whites or women were hired.
As evidence for their basic attitudes: As the meeting got hot, my Dad looked around the room at all his fellow managers who had been junior engiineers with him eighteen years earlier and noted that everyone who had protested the declaration that the Tech Center would have no coloreds were now free to protest the new policy. The subject was immdeiately changed from one of opposition to one of determining the procedures.
Look I know on the service that using race as criteria for employment or college admission is wrong, but you must understand that certain ethnic and racial groups do not emphasize education, mathematics or computers IMHO. I was shocked when my sociology professor told me that ten years ago in college however sadly, after ten years as a social worker I now believe it. 
Okay, take any of your factors. Same question. Is there a genetic or cultural propensity for blacks to be less favorable in any of those areas to whites. If so, why do you think that is?
As for redlining being an irrational practice, there are papers which claim that that is correct, if racism didn’t exist in other sectors. Is that a claim you’re willing to make?
I think all your points are valid. When I said that the only differentiation between the groups in the survey was race, I should have more clearly said that it was the only stated difference. That’s why earlier in this thread I said, “I’m sure there are different ways to slice the data to take out things like geographical biases.”
I agree that education and other factors contribute to the very complex formula that determine one’s economic status. I would also more emphatically state that AA ought not to be our only remedy, not when we understand root causes and can attack them directly.
But what do we do when skin color so closely correlates with education and income levels and poverty and crime? That’s my point. I understand that correlation does not equal causality. But, for me, it simply becomes tiresome when census after census (believe me, this is not the first time this has come up) I hear variations on, “Well maybe it’s not really skin color that drives this disparity; maybe it’s something else.”
Of course it’s most often something else (education, etc.), as opposed to some closet KKK member plotting to deny job opportunities. But the “something elses” still seem to be strongly influenced by a person’s race. The counter arguments for me are just as valid as the tobacco company executives who argued, correctly at that point, that despite the undeniable statistical correlation that could be shown, no one had proven a causal link between smoking and lung cancer. I find the anti-AA arguments just as satisfying. You may feel differently.
Again, I’ll ask. What do you make of the economic gap that exists between whites and minorities? What should we do about it? Nothing?
AA= discrimination based on race, directed against whites, such as preferential hiring and firing, and school admission. None of you open racists have disputed it, you’ve simply come up with justifications for institutionalized racial discrimination and complained that I call AA what it really is.
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Reasonable people wouldn’t support institutionalized racism. If you define your terms properly, I suppose one could say that you’re being honest, but “The average income of all whites is greater than the average income of all blacks” doesn’t translate into “being white offers someone an advantage (such as preferntial hiring, greater pay, or being 'last fired) in the job market”, which is what is clearly implied by ‘economic advantage’.
Whether or not I have an alternate theory is irrelevant to whether or not you have supported your theory with evidence, which you have not. One can pick specific groups and apply your ‘logic’ to the numbers to come to conclusions contrary to your assertions. For example, take a look at gay vs straight income or male vs female wealth.
The most obvious explanation is that there are some white people who have a lot of money and use that money to benefit their offspring. This results in a small group of white-skinned people with a lot of money without any general bias for or against people of any particular skin color. I know that your theory that whites get an advantage by being white is very dear to you, but the above is better supported by the evidence.
You support “Affirmative Action”, which is institutionalized racism, and any reasonable person would regard one who supports institutionalized racism as a racist.
Ahh, irony. When you and your pals can support your allegations of widespread discrimination with facts, engage in one AA debate without accusing people opposed to it of racism, and honestly answer basic questions about your position, I’ll treat the lot of you more reasonably. As it is, I see no reason to be polite to open racists who have been insulting to me from the beginning of this thread.