The NYTimes reports that in Queens the median income for blacks is above the median income for whites, the only large county in the nation for which that is true. The median income for blacks in Queens, $51,836, is also well above the national median income ($46,000).
What makes the statistics especially interesting is that many of the blacks in Queens are recent immigrants from the West Indies. Malcolm Gladwell, whose own genealogy traces to the West Indies, recognizes the implication:
The implication of West Indian success is that racism does not really
exist at all–at least, not in the form that we have assumed it does.
The implication is that the key factor in understanding racial
prejudice is not the behavior and attitudes of whites but the behavior
and attitudes of blacks–not white discrimination but black culture. It
implies that when the conservatives in Congress say the responsibility
for ending urban poverty lies not with collective action but with the
poor themselves they are right.
but ultimately he can’t accept the implication and offers instead a strained interpretation. West Indian blacks are successful only because, according to Gladwell, they provide a convenient way for whites to distinguish "good" and "bad" blacks allowing themselves to pat themselves on the back for not being racist while at the same time continuing to practice racism against the majority black class.
Gladwell offers scant evidence for his hypothesis, the most interesting point being his claim that Jamaican blacks are perceived as bad citizens in Toronto where they are dominant but as good in New York where they can define themselves in opposition to American blacks. Gladwell’s argument is weak, however, because West Indian blacks distinguish themselves not just in dress or accent but in just those behaviors that also increase income for whites and other successful minorities: they get married and stay married, pursue education, work hard and are entrepreneurial. Gladwell himself notes:
When the first wave of Caribbean immigrants came to New York and
Boston, in the early nineteen-hundreds, other blacks dubbed them
Jewmaicans, in derisive reference to the emphasis they placed on hard
work and education.
The title of the post refers of course to Thomas Sowell’s classic.
Long ago, teaching in USA, I thought that generally black students from West Indies and African countries seemed to be doing better than American black students. Coming from India with its caste system, I felt that perhaps growing up feeling that one was priviliged or underprivileged made the difference. Moreover, those who leave home for foreign shores are probably more enterprising than the average persons. On recent trips, I was told by mathematicians that black American students are doing much better now. Could it be affirmative action? New Role models? Strangely many Americans did not seem to know about George Washington Carver or Blackwell.
I guess I can forgive it in the New York Times, but how can an economist write about this article without once mentioning either Tiebout or sorting. It seems to me that this statistic tells us nothing at all about race and culture and quite a lot about the relative suburbanization of middle class black and white families. Or at least that suburbanization is an important potentially confounding factor, one that is not dealt with at all here.
“Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children…A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn.” 1954 Brown vs Board of Education
I had not realized that there was ever any doubt that much of the harm done by segregation and discrimination was that it reinforced in blacks a sense inferiority and of not belonging to the larger culture, that had been created by slavery. Most of the attempts to fix things were aimed at this. What else could the attempts at school integration hope to accomplish but to bring Blacks into the majority culture? The same could be said of affirmatve action. Laws aganinst discrimination could never hope to solve the problem, but only to stop actions by whites that made it worse. Although this article provides some statistical evidence for what I thought was obvious, it does not answer the question “is there anything more public policy can do”.
The Malcolm Gladwell article is nonsense-on-stilts: an exercise in the higher ignorance all-too-typical of literary writing on this kind of subject – finely-wrought mush.
The reference to Thomas Sowell is the answer to this kind of bilge – or Shelby Steele. While Gladwell constructs a massively intricate set of auxiliary hypothesese to keep-alive his untenable belief that it is prejudice which lies behind black American’s poor performance, the truth (ie. Sowell, Steele) is quite simple, quite obvious.
Which is why Gladwell requires such a pervasive assertion of his own moral superiority and exquisite empathic sensitivity in order to try and prevent the reader noticing it.
Gladwell is mostly right: That West Indian immigrants distinguish themselves by their attitudes towards work doesnt say much: Dont all immigrants distinguish themselves by their attitudes towards work?
The key factor here is what happens in subsequent generations – and it blows the whole West Indian Culture or African Culture argument sky high (often advanced to explain the successes of African immigrants in the USA).
In subsequent generations, these outcomes drop significantly:
http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0610/investigations/problem.shtml
I think it is fairly obvious that what characterizes the successes of West Indians is not unique to West Indians but is pretty much true of every immigrant group.
Studies that track immigrant groups over generations do little to dispel the fact that racism, ostracization and marginalization are responsible for poor outcomes – even if we claim the cultural influences position – it is absurd not to realize just how much racism contributes to a self sabotaging culture (something that McWhorter alludes to in both Losing The Race and Winning The Race).
In Race and Culture – Sowell overreaches with his interpretation: How come the cultural ethic of Carribeans is doing so little to advance prosperity for said group in the United Kingdom?
Ill buy all this nonsense about Carribean and African work culture or ethic when I see these gains being sustained across generations which currently I dont.
I’ve always wondered if poor, native blacks AND whites suffer from a lack of familial support structure. US immigration policy supports the kind of migration where a family loans money to one member, who comes to the US, works hard, becomes successful enough to apply to bring another member of the family over, and now they both work hard to become successful enough to bring another member over, repeating this pattern over and over.
It is the initial cash loan and the promise of hardworking relatives coming in the future that gives immigrants from poor countries a big push towards success. The native poor don’t have this sort of underlying support structure.
Another problem may be that native poor people my have a world-view (internal paradigm?) that can only see the barriers and pitfalls that keep them trapped in a permanent underclass. Immigrants, particularly from poor countries, may view being poor in the US just the first step on the road to being rich in the US. They see the same barriers and pitfalls as nothing compared to what they’ve left behind.
xmas,
That’s an interesting idea. I had always assumed that Hispanic’s culture led them to be so family-oriented. It never occurred to me that such orientation was born out of economic necessity.
Wasn’t this economic form of family-orietation present for most ethnic groups who arrived here from Europe?
Having several poor white folks in my extended family, I can note a few things that they have in common with many poor blacks:
1) Out-of-wedlock births, and these before age 20
2) Drop out of high school
3) Extended periods where they don’t seek work
Item #1 is big for the poor women in my family, and items #2 & 3 are big for the poor men in my family. Yes, they may lack a certain amount of capital, and live in crappy dwellings, but it’s not like they can blame their problems on racism. If they could hold down a steady job at Walmart, they’d be doing much better.
Perhaps if people looked at poor non-blacks (who are stuck in poverty, as opposed to temporarily poor such as when I was a grad student), and saw what kept them from doing well materially, people might see that the same factors are going on between the two. It’s not due to racism that poor white people have high illegitimacy, after all.
[...people might see that the same factors are going on between the two...]
Its not about being poor, its about remaining poor. Whites have an easier road out of poverty than blacks. A two legged person and a double amputee can fall into the same ditch but its easier for the two legged person to get out.
The problem with people (many African American social conservatives included) who play the culture card over and over again is that they think there is something unique and unAmerican about black culture that informs poor outcomes. There isnt. Americas caste system makes it easier for some folks to move out of the general underclass and more difficult for others. Thats why underclass whites can move out to larger extents than underclass blacks.
This phenomenon is repeated at basically every stratum of society – blacks have a harder road: we see this with the penalty on black names in hiring and housing; even when all other indicators are on par or above par.
Immigrants generally tend to have the same characteristics – be they Asian, West Indian or African. They work hard, study hard etc.
I find that difficult to believe, in part because immigrants do not all have the same performance profile. As far as I can see, Indian (subcontinental) immigrants outperform not only natives, but all other immigrant groups. East Asian immigrants also outperform most other immigrant groups, as well as natives. You get first generation East Asian or Indian immigrants with scores in the top percentiles on exams, and entering the top universities and so on. You do get some of that from Hispanic or West Indian immigrants, to be sure, but not in the same numbers.
It is also not clear to me why immigrants, as a class, would have these superior characteristics. I know there’s the pat explanation about how we get the most “entrepreneurial” people from other countries — and for some countries this is probably true — but in many cases, the salient characteristic of immigrants is that they couldn’t get a job back home, so they came here instead. In other cases, they’ve come as refugees (e.g. many Vietnamese immigrants a generation ago, Irish and Scottish immigrants a century and a half ago, etc.). In yet others, they only came because their parents did. So I don’t think there’s actually been much of a systematic selection effect for “pluck,” as you put it. There might be something about the experience of working in a culture not your own that helps boost your performance (not entirely implausible), but I am dubious, as I am at a loss to see what it might be.
On the other hand, I must confess to a major bias here, in that my perception is that looking at my own family, assimilation to American cultural norms has made us lazy and intolerant of sustained focus and hard work, in a way that those who did not come to America are not (yet). So I am extrapolating, in part, from my own concerns about my kin (and myself). This extrapolation may not hold true across other cultural contexts, e.g. West Indians. I don’t see why it wouldn’t, though.
Many of these high performing immigrants were probably not as hardworking in their own countries before coming here.
Why would we believe this? In the case of my relations, because many of them divide their time between the US and their home country (Korea), or because they have come here only recently, e.g. to attend university or for a job, I happen to know they aren’t appreciably more diligent here than they were back home. There’s nothing magical about national boundaries that transforms a lazybones into a worker as soon as he crosses.
Generally, immigrants tend to have better outcomes; regardless of what cultural patrimony they hail from.
Sailer, above, points out that this is not universally true (even of West Indians, evidently), although I don’t know the numbers there.
Which is precisely why I suspect that Fundamental Attribution error is at work here: Is it not possible for all immigrant groups to have the same attributes (at least in the context of which we speak) and yet have different outcomes? You are extrapolating from outcomes to attributes and I’m saying – Hey! Lets not get ahead of ourselves here: Do we know empirically that these attributes are unevenly distributed?
I think there’s a congruent problem in your own approach, in which you’re taking empirically divergent outcomes and constructing a theory under which divergent outcomes are attributable to an identical attribute set. I think the natural assumption, when you see divergent outcomes, is to assume that there is some underlying difference. Certainly it’s possible for all immigrant groups to have the same attributes (on this axis), and have different outcomes. What’s not clear to me is why we would think this is the most natural conclusion to draw.
Empirically, of course, we don’t know that these attributes are unevenly distributed. Because we don’t actually know what they are — we know them only by their effects. Your hypothesis is that they’re evenly distributed, yet somehow manifest unevenly (perhaps via your theory about American racial hierarchies). Why would we leap to this conclusion? We know different individuals have different attitudes towards work, towards education, and towards family, and in our personal experience, we can see these different attitudes result in differing outcomes. We know different cultures, broadly defined, have different attitudes towards work, education, and family — that what is viewed as the “norm” in these different cultures is different. And we are still to believe that these differences mean nothing?
If I’ve got your idea about American caste right, I think there’s even an obvious counterexample. Consider Indian immigrants. Indian immigrants are (generally) rather dark skinned. In the traditional American racial hierarchy, in which skin colour links up to status, we would imagine that therefore, if immigrant outcomes were modulated by racial hierarchy amongst the natives, Indian immigrants would experience outcomes approximating African-American outcomes, as they Americanise, somewhat as West Indian Blacks do. After all, both Indians and West Indians were, in many cases, under the rule of the British Empire, and both populations were called “Blacks” by the British. But, at least as far as we can see at the present, this is not what happens.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there are big differences among English-speaking West Indians in education and income levels, with Barbadians being at the top of the heap and Jamaicans at the bottom. Barbadian blacks explain this by saying that, being farthest east, Barbados slave owners had the pick of the litter from the slave ships, and bought only slaves from tribes known for cooperativeness. They then sent the people from the hard case tribes on to Jamaica and the US.
Besides, note that I never claimed that these attributes are evenly distributed – I have simply claimed that I dont know that they are unevenly distributed – and that I do not believe that this hypothetical uneven distribution is responsible for differences in outcome: There simply is no evidence to purport otherwise.
You don’t have to believe it — it’s just a hypothesis that comports with the data, in the same measure that your hypothesis comports with the data (which is that there’s simply not enough evidence to purport anything yet).
As far as norms go, I don’t know about cross-border studies, but within the US, Laurence Steinberg has done research on what grades parents will accept from their children (i.e. at what point do you get in trouble for your bad grades), and compared different American populations in that respect. And he found about what you’d expect — if you’re Asian, your parents will punish you for anything less than an A, and Asian students respond to incentives like anyone else, and peer group interactions reinforce those incentives, etc. etc. His research is (I think) used in Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom’s book on the racial education gap. It’s social science, so I’m not going to say that it’s “proof,” to a scientific standard. But it is, at the least, strongly suggestive that differing norms with respect to education contribute significantly to the education gap between different racial populations in the US. Whether that extends to immigrants, I don’t know, but it seems commonsensical that norms would affect educational outcomes.
Regarding cross-border comparisons of norms, this devolves into anecdote, of course, but I think anyone who’s lived in more than one country has experienced the existence of meaningfully different norms about education, work, and everything else. It’s difficult to quantise these things sufficiently to study them. You can say: “Koreans work longer hours than Americans, on average.” But then you can turn around and claim that they work longer hours because their employers expect longer hours, so that it’s structural, not a matter of cultural norms. On the other hand, when they come over here, they’re used to working long hours, so putting in the extra effort for extra reward isn’t hard for them (they are used to it) so they do it. So in some sense whether it’s cultural or structural may not matter. But it does make it more difficult to study — as you note, some countries have an incentive structure not particularly conducive to hard work. E.g. they may be socialist or something.
Of course, the problem with these differing norms is also that we don’t know what actually accounts for economic success. E.g. a heavy focus on studying is all well and good, but success doesn’t come solely from good grades, and beyond a certain level (the entry level), it’s possible that other factors come to dominate. But what are they? Hard work? Creativity? I don’t know.
It’s important to remember that most West Indian islands, having once been Spanish or French, typically don’t have the exact same One-Drop-of-Blood definition of who is black as America does. So, like Latin American countries, they tend to have mulatto middle classes that are somewhat distinct from the masses. Many West Indian immigrants to North America come from the mulatto middle class, but are then counted as black here. Colin Powell is a famous example.
For instance, Malcolm Gladwell’s Jamaican mother was part black, but also Scottish and Jewish. His father is white. Gladwell himself has recently grown an Afro in the hopes, I would imagine, of looking more dangerous to girls and interviewers. He claims that after he grew the ‘Fro, he started getting Hassled by The Man, but to my eye it just makes him look like a cross between Napoleon Dynamite and Richard Simmons.
JohnDewey,
My theory comes from observation. I don’t know if it plays out as a general rule.
I’ve observed that the recent wave of Brazilian immigration follows this pattern. Indian immigration certainly follows this pattern. It comes down to the rules for Green Card applications. A person needs to be sponsored for a visa and then a green card. The first few immigrants that come over, get visas and green cards through their employers. Then the rest come over with family visas and green card sponsorships. The process is long, arduous and expensive.
I don’t know if it would follow for earlier European immigration, since the immigration rules were less stringent back then.
It is grossly inaccurate to say that european immigration is in anyway similar to immigration from south america and the carribean. In fact its inaccurate to say that in the late 18th and early 19th Century that immigration was the same for Eastern and Western Europeans. Immigration has always been a policy formed of the intent to exclude racial and cultural undesirables. In particular in that same periods the quotas for people from Anglo-Saxon Europe were higher than those for Eastern Europeans and Immigration from Japan was banned. The procedures for admission to the US from western europe has always been easier than any other place.
This is pure observation bias. Gladwell hasn’t seen (or cared about) the boatloads of Haitian refugees that swarm into Florida, and who occupy the same part of the ecosystem that illegal mexican (and central american immigrants) occupy. The disparity in treatment by immigration when compared to illegal cuban immigrants is obvious to any observer.
I remember while living in south Florida, that one of the federal courts (the one in WPB comes to mind) ruled that Haitians cannot be covered by set-asides or preferences for “African Americans” because “African American” is a political category and not a racial one.
I couldn’t agree more that the reason for the higher median incomes among blacks from West Indies is due to their work ethic, education, marital status and less occurring divorce rate and having children out of wedlock, and their entrepreneurial spirit. These characteristics can be found in many individuals who have an above average income. I am also a firm believer that it is up to the individuals to make their lives more fulfilling and blaming others will get them nowhere. Granted, some are born into better situations than others, but plenty of people have climbed their way out of poverty and made their lives a success. While outsiders can help, it is mostly the poor who have to take matters into their own hands if they want to see any changes.
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