Source: The Bakken Museum on Flickr.

1,325 words

Statistics communicating racial gaps in earnings convey nothing about the depth of racial discrimination in society. Invariably, inequalities in socioeconomic outcomes are an ineluctable consequence of group differences in ability and aptitude. For example, the observation that white Americans out-earn blacks is an indication that one group has capitalized on its human capital advantages. Gaps in human capital promote income divergence because the more competent group will be employed in high-productivity sectors. According to economists, a non-trivial portion of the black-white wage gap is attributable to occupational segregation.

Further, recent analyses addressing the black-white wage gap contend that due to lower levels of pre-employment human capital, black men fare worse in the labor market. Pre-market human capital is significant because it predicts one’s propensity to acquire new skills. These findings also show that whites worked more than blacks and scored higher on the Armed Services Qualification Test (AFQT). A key insight of this research is that performance on the AFQT correlates with earnings irrespective of race.

Cognitive ability has greater explanatory power than racism as a mechanism for explaining income variations. Black earnings would have been higher had they graduated at similar rates as whites and majored in subjects that command high wages. If the scholastic performance of African-Americans and other minorities had exceeded Asians and whites, then they would not be overrepresented in the lowest-paying occupations. However, noticing the lower status of underachieving minorities leads some to assume that their condition stems from racism. But this argument has been diminished by the resilience of Asian-Americans, who are more likely to be college-educated graduates than white Americans and less likely to live in poverty. The status of black Americans and other low-performing groups is consistent with measured cognitive ability levels.

Despite the propaganda, America is a cognitive meritocracy where ability tracks income. Asians surpass the earnings of whites, and the latter out-earning blacks is what we should expect based on the academic qualifications of the respective groups. We must also wonder why activists who are obsessed with advertising interracial disparities seem unperturbed by intra-racial inequalities. Among black and Hispanic households, the richer 25% of households accounted for 90% and 85%, respectively, of total wealth in 2021. So, what explains the tacit acceptance of such glaring levels of inequality?

Acknowledging intra-racial gaps would expose the cognitive dissonance of people who, despite clinging to egalitarian pieties, are aware that ability matters, and it is unequally distributed. Highlighting the progress of minorities endangers the project of Left-leaning identitarians by forcing them to confront the contradictory impulses of an incoherent worldview. Although they would consider the rise of minority wealth as a positive, it must be noted that within a group, incomes will not increase at the same rate. Therefore, identitarians cannot appreciate the prosperity of minorities without conceding to the Right that discrimination is an inconsequential variable for explaining socio-economic inequalities.

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An objective approach to discussing socioeconomic disparities would dismantle the narrative of identitarians. They would have to elaborate on why the share of low-income black households plunged by 32.7% during the period from 1967 to 2021, while the share of high-income households surged by 436.5%. Any serious evaluation of this data will naturally entail a rejection of blank-slatism, so to preserve the credibility of their worldview identitarians summon racism as an explanandum for racial inequalities. These activities are unfortunately taken seriously, even though racism’s predictive power was retired by research long ago.

Compared to whites and Asians, blacks are not as accomplished; however, the argument that racism is driving the relative underachievement of blacks has been discredited by empirical research. There is a long-standing assumption that blacks do worse academically due to the villainy of colorism. Yet, this thesis was disconfirmed by researchers who propounded that the link between skin color and academic performance is explainable by the genetic advantages of ancestry. After a thorough assessment of discrimination theories, the authors reported that such arguments were untenable, and the genetic model offered greater predictive power.

Complementing this research is a project that tested the veracity of systemic racism in education and concluded that the idea has no explanatory power. The study found that race gaps in academic performance in counties with more whites and Republicans are smaller. Shockingly, even higher implicit anti-black racism scores are associated with shrinking cognitive race gaps. Furthermore, the economic residues of racism in the South are fading since the earnings of blacks have been growing more rapidly in this region rather than in the historically liberal North. Another positive is that the racial-earnings gap subsided for black men in the Southern part of the country.

An equally obscure fact is that black wealth is increasing in the United States, although some are pointing out that the racial wealth has grown in order to emphasize the myth of systemic racism. A growing racial wealth gap is unsurprising, because the risk aversion of blacks precludes participation in financial markets. Measured against their white counterparts, wealthier blacks are still less likely to invest in stocks. Apart from risk tolerance, research on finance demonstrates that black samples register low levels of financial literacy

Like black Americans, Hispanics score worse than whites on financial literacy tests and are unlikely to own stocks. Some think that intergenerational wealth constrains the involvement of minorities in the financial system, yet this is untrue. Intergenerational transfers are too insubstantial to justify the wealth gap. Factors such as lifetime earnings, pension assets, and education levels are responsible for 80% of the black-white wealth gap. Similarities in financial literacy abound across the black diaspora.

In predominantly black Jamaica, only 33% of adults are financially literate, and cross-cultural research implicates Africa as a region where patience is not a popular trait. The relevance of patience cannot be underestimated, because it indirectly affects development by promoting stock participation and financial development. In contrast to low-performing minority groups, East Asians are higher in long-term orientation, as indicated by their rates of saving.

Expecting groups to achieve more than what their culture and IQ would predict is lunacy of the highest order. History illustrates that some groups excel everywhere despite the sociopolitical context. The Chinese, for instance, migrated to Jamaica as indentured immigrants, and within a few generations became distinguished citizens. David Lowenthal chronicles the impressive rise of the Chinese throughout the West Indies by the 1960s:

Entrepreneurial success puts the Chinese among the richest and the best educated of West Indian ethnic groups. The average Chinese income was almost five times that of blacks and thrice that of coloured Jamaicans in 1960, and the  Chinese of Trinidad and Surinam prosper similarly.

Following in the footsteps of the Chinese are upper-caste Indians, who boast a record of accomplishment of success. Most Indian-Americans are the descendants of upper-caste people who transmitted cultural and human capital advantages. In Trinidad, Indians are more entrepreneurial than blacks and inclined to be homeowners, but they trail blacks in incomes — although not by a substantial margin. A difference between the United States and Trinidad is that the Indians who were recruited to work as indentured laborers were not from the upper castes. Nevertheless, the few high-caste Indians who went to Trinidad replicated their success by becoming members of the professional elite.

The sacred beliefs of race hustlers about income disparities are unsupported by evidence, and their explanations for differentials in sentencing are equally flawed. Studies consistently indicate that the perceived prevalence of anti-black bias in the criminal justice system is akin to a fairy tale. A 2023 paper by Christopher Ferguson and colleagues smashed the propagandistic notion that the criminal justice system is replete with racial bias. The issue is that blacks commit crimes at disproportionately high rates. That people are increasingly stereotyping individuals as anti-social based on class rather than race casts doubt on its salience.

Contrary to the sermons of identitarians, blacks and other minority groups are not disadvantaged. Their socioeconomic outcomes are determined by average group intelligence and non-cognitive traits that influence achievement.