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A person would have to be dead or completely insensitive
not to realize that for the last twenty years race has been
a major focus of public debate and public policy. What is
reducible to racism, bigotry and callousness on the behalf
of whites is most often featured as the cause of the current
condition of many blacks. The assumption is made that since
blacks do not differ biologically from whites in ways that
should affect socioeconomic status, the different status of
blacks in the society reflects racism and mistreatment by
whites. Therefore, the fight to promote equality and opportunity
is portrayed as a struggle between the forces of good
and the forces of evil. To the extent that the problems of
blacks are cast this way, more-effective policies are ignored
and people seeking to help blacks set out to find evil people
and punish them.
The problems with explaining the plight of black people
in terms of good and evil are: (1) that approach does not
yield testable hypotheses, a basic requirement of science and
(2) finding and punishing evil people cannot explain the
economic progress of minorities in the United States or any
place else. For example, Jews in the U.S. and elsewhere did
not have to wait for the end of anti-Semitism in order to
prosper as a group. Japanese-Americans did not have to wait
to become liked in order to be the second highest group in
the U.S. in most measures of well-being. West Indian blacks
did not have to wait for racism to end to earn a median
income, in the U.S., that is just slightly below that for the
nation as a whole. People discriminated against elsewhere
frequently exhibit similar patterns; these are briefly discussed
in chapter 1.
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