Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys (NYT article)

[nelliebly]

First, let’s dispose of the myth of the absentee Black father. While it’s true that Black fathers are statistically more likely to live apart from their children, the CDC says these dads spend MORE time with their children than do their white or Asian counterparts.

A CDC study surveyed over 3,900 fathers between 2006 and 2010 and found that Black fathers were more likely to bathe, dress, play and dine with their children as compared to their White and Hispanic counterparts.

But it turns out the number of parents in the household isn’t the answer anyway, according to the study, itself. Bolding mine:

But, when we compare the outcomes of black and white men who grow up in two-parent families with similar levels of income, wealth, and education, we continue to find that the black men still have substantially lower incomes in adulthood.** Hence,differences in these family characteristics play a limited role in explaining the gap**.

And finally, and most important, there’s this from the study:

Black men who move to better areas – such as those with low poverty rates, low racial bias, and higher father presence – earlier in their childhood have higher incomes and lower rates of incarceration as adults. These findings show that environmental conditions during childhood have causal effects on racial disparities, demonstrating that the black-white income gap is not immutable.

The article is great. The original study is even better.

[Jennshark]

I’ve been dealing with utter stupid stupidity on my campus (see below) and just want to get this off my chest. It’s a bit off-thread, so read at your own risk.

My dearest friends are a black family. When I see young black men I see my godkids Ryan, Nathan, and Blake. People who don’t know them might see a kid dressed like a rapper (Ryan, a producer for folks like Beyonce); a giant hulk of a guy (Nathan, a semi-pro football player); and a kid with a high fade and gold chains (Blake, who is on a full scholarship at Stanford). Going against the grain, this family adopted two white girls from an abusive home.

I think it’s accurate to say that many white people haven’t had or taken the opportunity to get to know a black kid. Society tells us that Af-Am men are violent thugs; in the absence of actually knowing one of these kids, the negative narrative isn’t challenged.

I was involved as a professor in a college recruitment project in Appalachian Ohio and West Virginia that reached out to young black men through area Af-Am church ministers. I got put in charge of diversity because I was the (white, Californian) lesbian on our small campus, so I was, of course, the best person to run this project.

The ministers identified young working class/impoverished men for whom they thought college would be of benefit. The young men were required to meet with the minister who was their assigned mentor and with me once a week for academic help. In return, they had tuition and books paid for by the college.*

I wasn’t there long enough to see the ultimate outcome but it was going really well when I left; eight of the ten Af- Am students were still in the program.

My current college is wringing their hands about our lack of Af-Am students. I suggested piloting a similar outreach project, but they’d rather hire yet another “diversity expert” and pay him $30k to produce a stupid-ads report that will end up in a loose leaf binder on a dusty shelf (yet again). Oh well, there aren’t many young black men in our Trenton/Philly service region anyway (searing sarcasm).

*One night I went to dinner with five uber-conservative Af-Am Baptist ministers. It was a bit surreal to find my white, butch, lesbian self eating dinner in Appalachia with some very nice black preachers. It was a powerful experience.

[Kimstu]

@Jennshark

My current college is wringing their hands about our lack of Af-Am students. I suggested piloting a similar outreach project, but they’d rather hire yet another “diversity expert” and pay him $30k to produce a stupid-ads report that will end up in a loose leaf binder on a dusty shelf (yet again).

Could you suggest, say, partnering with the Posse Foundation? It’s not officially about any particular racial or socioeconomic category, but Posse Scholars are statistically quite a bit more low-income and/or nonwhite than the college student average.

[Aspidistra]

@iiandyiiii

Do they explain why Asian boys make more than white boys?

No? Hmmph. Maybe it isn’t due to racism? Or is their racism against white folks in regard to Asian boys?

I’m not saying it doesn’t or hasn’t played a part but your article leaves a lot out.

Actually the article does talk about Asian Americans. According to the chart about 2/3rds down the page, Asians with US-born mothers have income distributions/attainments as compared to their parents roughly close to white Americans. But Asians with foreign-born mothers have income distribution/attainments much, much higher, on average.

That graph is actually a great example of why picking the right control group is such a crucial matter in doing social science. A lot of handwringing gets done in discussions about different ethnic groups about the “smart Asian” stereotype and it completely ignores that if you’re looking at any* predominantly recent migrant* group, this is not a random sample! Non-refugee legal migrants are cherry-picked to select the smartest, wealthiest, most hard-working and most adventurous of the core group.

Unsurprisingly, if you select a million or so of the smartest, wealthiest, most-hard-working, most adventurous people out of a population of multiple billions you end up with some pretty successful individuals, capable of giving their kids a great head start in life. That “second gen” graph shows regression to the mean in all its glory - the longer your group stays where it is, the more it starts to resemble a “normal” population group, with an ordinary number of high- and low-achievers. I rarely see anyone doing the work of controlling for the migrant effect, so props to the article writers.

Back to the article … I would have loved to have seen those separated-out male/female graphs put onto the one graph together. Because just looking at them side by side, it does seem to tell a different story to the thrust of the article. What I see is - black men/black women/white women - all in more-or-less the one place (black men trailing a bit, but still with the core group). White men waaaay out in front. So just on the face of it, I’m wondering if they picked the right group to function as their “outlier”

[Mijin]

@MaxTheVool

I suppose that if you’re willing to argue that blacks are genetically intellectually inferior, you might also be willing to argue that black MEN are genetically intellectually inferior. I mean, maybe whatever genes are causing black intellectual inferiority are on the Y chromosome. [sarcasm]Because, that’s how it works, right?[/sarcasm] (I’m curious to see whether anyone actually puts this argument forward…)

A few problems with this:

1. The y chromosome doesn’t code for much of anything

2. We’d have to see the same phenomenon among other groups. If it’s something about the male gender, why are we fine with assuming white males are immune?

3. It makes the “god of the gaps” nature of this clear to see.
   “Ok, all the other groups we said were dumb like Irish, women, Asians, Latinos etc we were wrong about. And black * women * seem fine. Ok and among black men we can find lots of examples of very bright and successful men. But still we can assert the proportion of intelligent genes among black men specifically is lower so I can go on feeling superior and be comfortable with how society treats them.”

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

I had a long conversation with a wonderful black boy in my class once, clever and goodhearted but let’s just say not the best at impulse control. He doesn’t know his dad but has inferred that dad’s in prison; the main male he spends time around at home is an uncle who’s in and out of prison (and once the police woke the boy up in a predawn raid on their house, looking for the uncle, guns drawn).

The boy asked me, “Why don’t we have more police at our school?”

I asked him, “You’ve gotten in trouble, right? [yeah] Have you ever talked to a cop when you got in trouble? [yeah, once!] How did you feel after that?”

He shrugged lopheadedly, said, “Made me feel like I was gonna grow up like my dad.”

Things can be family/culture and ALSO institutional racism. Kid like this, growing up in a neighborhood devastated by the prison industrial complex, by age eight he sees the default for himself being a life of crime. You think I’ve had a lot of white boys in my class with that same outlook for themselves? Don’t think I’ve ever had one. Even the white boys who have a dad in prison don’t see that as the default for themselves, they see plenty of white men (including me!) who aren’t in prison, they see other paths for themselves.

I teach at a school with 30 teachers (I think, including the specialists, librarians, etc.). Of those 30 teachers, one is Latino. One is African American. All the rest are white. There are about 6 of us who are male. The rest are female.

There are not only no black male teachers, there are no black men who work at the school at all. We’ve got about 30-40% of our students are black. That’s a lot of kids who don’t spend their days around adults who look like them.

I think it’s a vicious cycle of institutional racism feeding child cultural beliefs. We need to interrupt the cycle, and doing so is WAY, WAY bigger than schools. (A black guy in our community recently got the shit beat out of him by some white cops, and the bodycam footage was leaked. The victim of the attack is a relative of another of my students. Not solving this within the classroom.)

[Paranoid_Randroid]

@Aspidistra

What I see is - black men/black women/white women - all in more-or-less the one place (black men trailing a bit, but still with the core group). White men waaaay out in front. So just on the face of it, I’m wondering if they picked the right group to function as their “outlier”

Just eyeballing the graphs in the NYT article I think you’re right; outcomes relative to childhood household wealth look about the same for black men as for black and white women. I’m not sure what the takeaway should be here, though – this being an article about race it’s natural it would focus on the comparison for which racism seems more stark. But as black boys are “only” as well off as white and black women for this particular metric, I can get behind the notion that the combination of race and sex warrants further investigation.

[Ludovic]

@Mijin

1. The y chromosome doesn’t code for much of anything

That’s the beauty of it!

[Chronos]

If you’re going to try to use genetics to explain away a trait that mostly shows up in men, it makes a lot more sense to look on the X chromosome, not the Y. Yes, women have the X chromosome, too, but they have two of them, which means that it’s possible for a recessive trait to be masked. No such luck for the men: Whatever you’ve got on your single X is what you’re stuck with. This is why hemophilia and colorblindness, to use two examples, are much more common in men than in women.

Which is not to say that I actually think that there’s a genetic cause, here. Even if there were some genetics involved, the effect from social structures is far stronger, and we’d need to eliminate or at least vastly decrease those social effects before we’d even have a hope of seeing anything about the genetics.

[puddleglum]

@nelliebly

First, let’s dispose of the myth of the absentee Black father. While it’s true that Black fathers are statistically more likely to live apart from their children, the CDC says these dads spend MORE time with their children than do their white or Asian counterparts.

But it turns out the number of parents in the household isn’t the answer anyway, according to the study, itself. Bolding mine:

And finally, and most important, there’s this from the study:
The article is great. The original study is even better.

The first study you cite says the exact opposite of what you say it does. It says although black fathers who do not live at home and those who do live at home spend slightly more time with their kids, fathers who do not live at home spend less time with their kids by a massive amount. Since black fathers are much more likely to not live in their kid’s homes there is a large difference in the amount of time black fathers and white fathers spend with their kids.

[puddleglum]

@Delayed_Reflex

Doesn’t that seem to be evidence that household culture might be a bigger determiner of success than external racism? I would expect asians born to foreign born mothers and asians born to American mothers to face similar levels of external racism, but their culture and attitudes may be different.

A quote from the reader Q&A from a follow-up article here:

I would say that the same culture can definitely push boys and girls in different directions. Consider many cultures where women are urged to become mothers and take care of the household and family, while men are expected to earn money for the family. It also doesn’t seem implausible to me to suggest that there could be cultural influences that resonate more with black boys, and hence have a disproportionate affect on them compared to other demographics (eg. how likely are rappers to be seen as a role model by black boys vs black girls vs white boys vs white girls?).

Unfortunately I believe there could be a feedback loop at work which causes differences in the average behaviour between these demographics to be magnified through systemic racism. It may be true that black males are more likely to be criminals than other demographics, and it may also be true that they are disproportionately arrested/shot/frisked above and beyond their increased criminality rates. Perhaps 1 out of 5 black males are criminals, vs 1 in 10 for white males, but those 4 out of 5 non-criminal black males will face unfair discrimination because of this disparity. On top of that, if everyone treats you like a criminal, wouldn’t it be easier to succumb to pressure and turn to criminal ways, vs. if it was not expected of you?

Instead of household culture the bigger effect seems to be in neighborhood culture. The study says the only group of black youth who did not have bad outcomes were those raised in neighborhoods where most of the households had fathers present. This culture of marriage and fatherhood could make it more likely for the boys to grow up and do the same thing. Since married men make 61% more than single men that in itself would be a huge economic boost.

[Quartz]

@Paranoid_Randroid

What I think people have picked up on – and rightly – is that the lines for black and white women are just about coincident; all the action is in the differences between males. It’s true that the line for black women is slightly higher, but they’re so close that they would likely have entirely overlapping confidence intervals.

I disagree. The line for black women is consistently higher. If they were roughly the same you would see them cross several times.

[iiandyiiii]

@puddleglum

Instead of household culture the bigger effect seems to be in neighborhood culture. The study says the only group of black youth who did not have bad outcomes were those raised in neighborhoods where most of the households had fathers present. This culture of marriage and fatherhood could make it more likely for the boys to grow up and do the same thing. Since married men make 61% more than single men that in itself would be a huge economic boost.

There was one other group – those who grew up in communities with low levels of racial bias among whites:

Finding #6: Within low-poverty areas, black-white gaps are smallest in places with low levels of racial bias among whites and high rates of father presence among blacks.

In low-poverty neighborhoods, two types of factors are most strongly associated with better outcomes for black men and smaller black-white gaps: low levels of racial bias among whites and high rates of father presence among blacks.

Black men who grow up in tracts with less racial bias among whites – measured by testing for implicit bias or explicit racial animus in Google searches— earn more and are less likely to be incarcerated.

[Quartz]

I may have missed it but did they test or control for other types of racial bias? E.g. in blacks against whites, in Asians against whites, blacks, etc?

[Magiver]

@iiandyiiii

Thoughts?

My thought is there is a link between job success and high school graduation rates. Those graduation rates are linked to a value system focused on learning and the social skills needed to earn a living

[Shodan]

@Quartz

I may have missed it but did they test or control for other types of racial bias? E.g. in blacks against whites, in Asians against whites, blacks, etc?

I thought it was just Google searches and implicit bias tests.

I am not aware of any hard data that these correspond with actual behavior, or even if blacks and whites give significantly different results on implicit bias tests, or if such tests have any scientific validity at all.

Regards,
Shodan

[iiandyiiii]

@Shodan

I thought it was just Google searches and implicit bias tests.

I am not aware of any hard data that these correspond with actual behavior, or even if blacks and whites give significantly different results on implicit bias tests, or if such tests have any scientific validity at all.

Regards,
Shodan

For what it’s worth, Nate Silver said the absolute best predictor of whether a certain county/locality voted majority Trump was the frequency of google searches for racial slurs and racist jokes. Not one of the best, but the very best.

[MandaJo]

@Aspidistra

Unsurprisingly, if you select a million or so of the smartest, wealthiest, most-hard-working, most adventurous people out of a population of multiple billions you end up with some pretty successful individuals, capable of giving their kids a great head start in life. That “second gen” graph shows regression to the mean in all its glory - the longer your group stays where it is, the more it starts to resemble a “normal” population group, with an ordinary number of high- and low-achievers. I rarely see anyone doing the work of controlling for the migrant effect, so props to the article writers.

I think there’s more to it than that. The experience of being an immigrant is, itself, a crucible. Children of immigrants take on burdens you’d never put on your kid if you had the choice: by the time they are ten, they are translating bills and talking on the phone to the electric company and figuring out their homework without help and learning how systems such as school work and how to find their place in them. They are explaining to their parents what is going on in dozens of different contexts–which means they are always struggling to figure out what is going on. My kid doesn’t do that: he just assumes I will let him know whatever he needs to know.

[Paranoid_Randroid]

@Quartz

I disagree. The line for black women is consistently higher. If they were roughly the same you would see them cross several times.

Not necessarily; a difference could be highly consistent yet indistinguishable from zero if small enough. But that’s me being a bit of a pedant, and what’s more, I failed to notice that this isn’t just a sample; those figures make use of almost the entire US population. Ipso facto that difference is a real one.

Nevertheless … relative to the difference in outcomes between black and white males at similar levels of parental income, the difference between black and white females is quite small. It’s unsurprising that one or two percentage points appears somewhat insignificant next to a difference an order of magnitude larger across the entire support. Certainly a huge difference is a more obvious policy target than a small one; one or two percentage points is going to be kind of “last mile”.

Further, the authors expend some ink in the paper itself discussing the implications of the low income gap for women relative to parental household income. They note that although black women have slightly (about one percentage point) higher personal income than white women at equal levels of parental household income,

black women continue to have substantially lower levels of household income than white women, both because they are less likely to be married and because black men earn less than white men

and that

the key to closing income disparities for both black and white women is to close intergenerational gaps in income between black and white men

due to impacts on household income over the long run (IIUC). The authors conclude that this justifies a focus on the gap for males, which feels quite reasonable to me.

(I was interested to note Figure VI in the paper, which shows that white women have slightly higher wages than black women; black women seem to make up the difference by working just a bit more. The differences are quite small, however.)