This is the sixth of a nine-part series exploring conversations I’ve had with my cousin about racism. Ben and I are both white; I’m progressive and he’s conservative. We’re trying to listen to each other with respect, even as we try to change each other’s minds.
What if we’re chasing a phantom?
One of Ben’s concerns about antiracism is that it looks like a huge effort to fix a small problem. Not that racial disparities are a small problem. Ben agrees that racial disparities are significant and need to be fixed. But as I wrote in a previous post, he thinks racism isn’t the main reason for the disparities, so we’re going about things all wrong as we try to fix things.
What if the antiracism movement is chasing a phantom? What if we’re fixating on the memory of racism that existed in the past, but that racism has faded in the present? What if our fixation is obscuring new and different problems that are causing racial disparities today?
This question makes sense to me. This post is my attempt to answer it by delving into the research.
Untangling the effects of poverty and racism
Researchers have tried to answer Ben’s question, and it’s complex to answer. One confounding factor is that Black communities are poorer on average than white ones. American systems strongly favor the rich over the poor—our social safety net has a lot of holes. That makes it hard to figure out whether a given disparity between white and Black people is really due to racial inequality or is due instead to class inequality.
For example, it’s widely known that Black people often have worse health outcomes than white people. On average, Black Americans have shorter lifespans and an increased risk of dying from diseases such as COVID-19. How much of that discrepancy is because of racism—doctors treating patients differently, for instance—and how much is due to the fact that the average Black American is poorer than the average white American?
Poverty makes a person less likely to have health insurance, money for copays, and the ability to travel to appointments. It makes them more likely to work in industries where the work can’t be done remotely during a pandemic. It burdens them with extra stressors, like the need to care for ailing relatives, that might distract them from their own illness. All of this will be true regardless of race.
So researchers must carefully parse out whether Black people’s worse outcomes are shared by white Americans in the same economic class as themselves—i.e., whether the problem is due to racism, poverty, or some combination of the two.
And with careful analysis, they have been able to parse this out. It turns out that along with the obstacles presented by poverty, Black people with low incomes face racial discrimination that creates additional barriers to their success. Black and white people with the same income and circumstances do often receive different treatment.
In other words, poor white Americans have one disadvantage: being poor. And poor Black Americans have two disadvantages: being poor, and being Black.
Even without reading any of the articles I cite in this post, this makes intuitive sense if you understand that many Americans have at least a slight unconscious bias against Black people. Our systems are made up of human beings, not robots—so of course our bias seeps into how we treat others. This is true whether we’re doctors, teachers, bankers, police officers, or anyone else. It makes sense that, even though racism isn’t as blatant as it once was, the lingering racism in America—our collective unconscious bias—will create more barriers for Black than white people.
What follows is an overview of the data on this, and how it plays out in several major systems of society: medicine, education, economics, and criminal justice. This post isn’t by any means exhaustive, especially because I’m not an expert on any of the data myself. What I’ve compiled here is my own research, as a blogger and concerned citizen who devoted perhaps a week’s worth of time to reading as much as I could for this post. I’ve undoubtedly gotten some things wrong. But even so, the overall pattern is pretty clear.
I hope the links will be helpful and that curious readers will read more themselves.
Biased doctors treat Black patients worse.
The first and last institution we encounter in our lives is the health care system, which shepherds us into the world and eventually back out of it. This is where racial discrepancies start.
Black Americans face very different health care outcomes from white people, as I mentioned above. The data indicate that those differences relate partly to poverty and partly to differences in how doctors treat patients of different races.
Robert Pearl, M.D., is the CEO of Kaiser’s The Permanente Medical Group. In a 2015 article written for Forbes, he reports that “Latinos and African-Americans experience 30 to 40 percent poorer health outcomes than white Americans.” Wealth inequality is one factor, he says—but doctor bias is another. Kaiser has found that from breast cancer to heart attacks to strokes, Black and brown patients receive worse treatment “even within the same economic stratum.”
Various studies back up Pearl’s claim that physicians treat Black and white patients differently. As the American Bar Association (ABA) says:
In 2005, the [National Academy of Medicine] …found that ‘racial and ethnic minorities receive lower-quality health care than white people—even when insurance status, income, age, and severity of conditions are comparable.’ By ‘lower-quality health care,’ NAM meant the concrete, inferior care that physicians give their black patients. NAM reported that minority persons are less likely than white persons to be given appropriate cardiac care, to receive kidney dialysis or transplants, and to receive the best treatments for stroke, cancer, or AIDS. It concluded by describing an ‘uncomfortable reality’: ‘some people in the United States were more likely to die from cancer, heart disease, and diabetes simply because of their race or ethnicity, not just because they lack access to health care.’
The report goes on to explain that unconscious bias is the most likely reason for the discrepancy. Physicians, just like the rest of the general population, commonly have a bias against Black people. This bias makes them less likely to prescribe necessary treatments to Black patients.
It’s easy to find more studies that say the same thing. In a quick Google search, I found three scientific articles, each a survey of 14 or 15 additional studies (1, 2, 3), that all concluded that physicians’ unconscious bias leads them to prescribe fewer necessary treatments, and more undesirable treatments, to Black patients.
For example, as the ABA reports,
One study showed that physicians whose [unconscious bias] tests revealed them to harbor pro-white implicit biases were more likely to prescribe pain medications to white patients than to black patients.
This pattern of different treatment for different populations adds up. It helps explain the shorter life expectancies and lower overall quality of health for Black Americans. Bias is not the only factor at play, but it is a significant factor—and it can make a life-or-death difference.
Bias makes it harder for Black students to thrive.
Once they enter school, Brookings reports that Black students have unequal access to education in the United States. That’s partly because school budgets are tied to local community wealth, and Black communities are poorer on average. But again, it’s not just about poverty:
Even within urban school districts, schools with high concentrations of low-income and minority students receive fewer instructional resources than others. And tracking systems exacerbate these inequalities by segregating many low-income and minority students within schools.
That is, even within the same district or even the same school, minority students are often funneled into programs that have fewer resources. Meanwhile, when students of color are given equal resources, the racial achievement gap “narrows substantially.”
Bias makes it harder for Black adults to become wealthy.
The education gap means that many Black children are at an early disadvantage, making it harder to graduate from high school, go to college, and earn income later. These discrepancies in education are one factor making it harder for Black people to accumulate wealth.
And bias continues to be a factor beyond school, as well.
A 2015 Brookings paper describes the “success sequence,” three achievements that are widely known to increase Americans’ likelihood of economic success:
- graduating from high school,
- maintaining a full-time job, and
- having children while married and after age 21.
Data show that most Americans who achieve all three of these steps will attain middle-class affluence. White Americans are more likely than Black Americans to achieve all three—but even when Black Americans do achieve all three, they’re significantly less likely to reach the middle class.
The authors conclude that it’s harder for Black people to achieve affluence than white people, even when they diligently follow the “success sequence.”
The debate over individual responsibility and substantive opportunity is too simplistic. Nobody can sensibly deny the need for both. But for policymakers committed to improving opportunity and mobility, the urgent question is: “What are we going to do?” Most Americans of all races aspire to the norms captured in the success sequence. But the hurdles are clearly higher for some groups—especially black Americans—than others. And the pay-offs from following the success sequence clearly differ by race.
A 2019 MarketWatch paper reached the same conclusion:
Social science research indicates that blacks attain more years of schooling and education credentials than whites from families with comparable resources. In other words, blacks place a premium on education as a means of mobility.
Despite this investment… Black families where the head graduated from college have less wealth than white families where the head dropped out of high school.
So it isn’t a lack of gumption that hurts many Black Americans’ ability to accumulate wealth. Given the same resources, Blacks are actually more likely than whites to be ambitious about pursuing more education. There must be other, unseen barriers to success in accumulating wealth.
Here’s one: resumes with Black-sounding names are 33% less likely to get calls from potential employers, as demonstrated by a simple 2003 study. And this more recent article outlines a slew of other statistics on workplace disparities, including discriminatory hiring practices, wage discrepancies, and lack of upward mobility for Black workers.
Brookings reports here on another kind of barrier: discriminatory lending practices. This translates to billions of dollars of lost wealth in Black communities as they endeavor to lift themselves up.
In a BBC article entitled “The frustration of trying to invest in my hometown,” a Black investor named Brian Rice details the seeming impossibility of purchasing and renovating buildings in his neighborhood. Despite having a good credit score and enough capital to purchase eight buildings, he hasn’t been able to get a loan because the buildings he wants to purchase have been appraised at zero dollars, while the land they rest on has been appraised at the same rate as farmland fourteen miles away.
The article also cites Brookings fellow Andre Perry, who has written a book on how to overcome the chronic undervaluing of properties in Black neighborhoods.
Properties in black neighbourhoods are priced 23% lower than their equivalents in white areas, an average of $48,000 per home, [Perry] says. That amounts to about $156bn in lost equity “simply because of the concentration of black people around it, not because of education, crime, housing quality or demand. It’s literally robbing people of the ability to lift themselves up”.
In a highly influential 2014 Atlantic article, Ta-Nehisi Coates also outlined the way discriminatory government policies have made it incredibly hard for wealth to accumulate in Black families. New Deal legislation and the GI Bill, for example, systematically excluded Black families—thus depriving them of benefits that helped so many white families reach the middle class. To Coates and many others, this history is part of a compelling case for financial reparations to Black Americans.
Black children are punished worse for the same misbehaviors.
When it comes to misbehavior, crime, and punishment, there is a pattern of discrimination as well, and again the pattern starts early. In schools, Black students are punished at higher rates than white students for the same offenses.
In one simple study reported by MarketWatch, eighty-five school principals and assistant principals were asked to consider hypothetical misbehavior among students and rate the conduct in terms of severity. They were told that some of the scenarios were first offenses and others were second offenses.
But, critically, the names were randomized to signal different ethnic backgrounds, using names that respondents in previous research had typically deemed “white” or “black,” such as “Greg” and “Darnell.”
It turns out that the principals and their assistants rated students’ misbehavior as more severe if they had Black names.
The black students were more likely to be seen as troublemakers, and were on average given more days’ suspension.
A first offense by black students was on average rated 20% more severely than that by white students, and a second offense 29% more severely. Black students were given more severe discipline than white students for the same offense, and principals and assistant principals were more likely to view them as “troublemakers.”
That is, merely seeing that a student’s name is Black will make many disciplinarians choose harsher punishment for that student. That’s without knowing any other info about the student or their background.
Another study, in 2019 by Yale, confirmed that racial bias is closely linked with severity of punishment in schools. The researchers looked at various school districts’ 1) gaps in punishment between Black and white students, and 2) county-level data on unconscious racial bias from Harvard’s Project Implicit website. School districts that had the biggest gaps in severity of punishment between white and Black students also happened to be located in counties with the most racial bias.
“[B]lack students are more likely to be seen as problematic and more likely to be punished than white students are for the same offense,” the authors write.
Black adults are punished worse for the same crimes.
These discrepancies at school are the first harbingers of similar discrimination Black Americans continue to face as adults.
A 2015 Business Insider article showed that, as the title states, “There’s blatant inequality at nearly every phase of the criminal justice system.” Black Americans are more likely than whites to have their cars searched, even though they’re less likely to receive a citation. They’re arrested for drug crimes twice as often as whites—even though whites use and sell drugs at the same or even higher rates than Blacks.
Black people are more likely to be jailed and to serve long sentences for the exact same crimes as white people. They’re more likely to be excluded from juries. And when convicted, they’re more likely to have their probations revoked—even when controlling for factors like age, crime severity, and criminal history.
The data are robust. These differences are best explained by racial bias.
A 2020 Nature article says that unarmed Black people are killed twice as often by police as unarmed white people. As always, this statistic alone leaves room for debate—what if unarmed Black people are more likely to be past offenders, or to behave aggressively, or to be found in dangerous neighborhoods? A prior Nature article describes the difficulty in parsing out these answers, because federal data collection on police shootings is still a new phenomenon.
But the 2020 article also points out that officers’ behavior, and the problem of “bad apple” officers, makes an enormous difference in how many police shootings occur. This isn’t only about the behavior of civilians when they encounter police; it’s about the behavior of the police themselves. And “white officers dispatched to Black neighbourhoods fired their guns five times as often as Black officers dispatched for similar calls to the same neighbourhoods.” Five times as often.
Statistics like that, and others cited in the article, point to discrepancies in how Black and white people are treated by many police officers.
Systemic racism isn’t the only factor. But it is a significant factor.
These studies paint what I hope is a clear picture. Yes, there are many factors at play in racial disparities. Some of those factors aren’t about bias so much as a legacy of poverty in Black communities—although that legacy, too, relates to racism, which I’ll write about next time. But even after taking poverty out of the equation, bias is a significant part of the problem.
Even so, questions remain. Even if we can all agree that systemic racism exists, there’s still the puzzle of how to solve it. For example, how much does it really help to focus on it? Do all those bias trainings really do anything?
Ben also wonders if there’s a danger in talking about racism too much. He worries that it disempowers people of color, making them feel as though the barriers they face are insurmountable. I’ll talk about this worry in a future post, too.
But my point so far is that we can’t put the entire burden of fixing the disparities on Black people’s shoulders. Telling them they’re just imagining unconscious bias and systemic racism, or that they mostly just need to take more personal responsibility, ignores a real struggle they face. It’s a struggle that’s often invisible to white people.
But we, too, need to shoulder this burden. And although the solutions will be complex, an important step is recognizing the pervasive influence of systemic racism.
