A provacative piece on racism

 Here is a link to a provocative article on racism by Heather Mac Donald.

HMD is on to something.

Here are some excerpts.

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The United States is being torn apart by an idea: that racism defines America. The death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer in late May 2020 catapulted this claim into national prominence; riots and the desecration of national symbols followed. Now, activists and their media allies are marshaling a more sweeping set of facts to prove the dominance of white supremacy: the absence of a proportional representation of blacks in a range of organizations. That insufficient diversity results from racial bias, claim the activists, and every few days, the press serves up another exposé of this industry or that company’s too-white workforce to drive home the point.

In one short stretch during the summer of 2020, the Wall Street Journal ran stories headlined “Wall Street Knows It’s Too White” and “A Decade-Long Stall for Black Enrollment in M.B.A. Programs.” The Los Angeles Times asked: “Why are Black and Latino people still kept out of the tech industry?” In another article, the Times documented its own “painful reckoning over race.” The New York Times pumped out news features and op-eds alleging racism in food journalism, Hollywood, publishing, and sports management, among other professions. The Chronicle of Higher Education painstakingly reported on protests against alleged racial bias in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, citing, for example, charges that black scientists are constantly “attacked by institutional and systemic racism.” All the articles invoked employment ratios as proof of racism.

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The remedy proposed for this alleged systemic bias is an even greater emphasis on race as a job qualification. Increasing the role of skin color in employment decisions, however, will compromise the caliber of American institutions, if bias does not, in fact, explain workforce disparities. Moreover, the insistence on America’s racism undermines the legitimacy of our polity. It is worth examining in some detail, therefore, the charge of systemic bias and the counterevidence against it—especially since that counterevidence is excluded from public discourse.

Since the George Floyd riots, the following ratios have tumbled out of news pages to buttress the racism charge: 3.7 percent of Google’s employees and contractors are black, compared with about 13 percent black representation in the country at large; at Salesforce, 2.9 percent of employees are black; at Facebook, 3.8 percent; and at Microsoft, 4.5 percent. Black investors make up less than 1 percent of venture capitalists and less than 1 percent of the startup founders whom those venture capitalists underwrite. Some venture-capital firms—among them Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Benchmark, and Greylock—have no black partners at all.

Eight percent of MBA students are black, according to the main business school accreditor. Harvard Business School students are 5 percent black. In 2019, about 4.1 percent of chief executives were black, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Two percent of venture-capital partners in Los Angeles are black or Hispanic. Blacks and Hispanics are 3.7 percent of industry-certified financial planners. Seventy-seven percent of new board members at Fortune 100 companies are white. The newsroom at the Los Angeles Times is 61 percent white, though the white population in Los Angeles County is 26 percent white. Black journalists at the Los Angeles Times are 5.2 percent of staff, though the county is 8 percent black.

At WNYC, the nation’s largest public radio station, 15 of the 157 staff members responsible for content are black; only one of these 15 has direct reports. WNYC’s newsroom leadership is “overwhelmingly white,” according to the New York Times, and most reporters are white.

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But the expectation of proportional representation in every profession is groundless, thanks to the academic skills gap. The unequal distribution of skills, not bias, explains the lack of racial proportionality in employment.

The median black eighth-grader does not possess even basic math skills. “Basic” skills, as defined by the National Assessment of Education Progress exam, means partial mastery of grade-related knowledge. Fifty-three percent of black eighth-graders scored “below basic” on math in 2017. Only 11 percent of black eighth-graders were proficient in math, and 2 percent were advanced. By contrast, 20 percent of white eighth-graders were below basic in 2017, 31 percent were proficient, and 13 percent were advanced. Only 12 percent of Asian eighth-graders were below basic, 32 percent were proficient, and 32 percent were advanced.

The picture was not much better in reading. Forty percent of black eighth-graders were below basic in reading in 2017, 17 percent were proficient readers, and 1 percent were advanced readers. Sixteen percent of white eighth-graders were below basic in reading, 39 percent of white eighth-graders were proficient readers, and 6 percent were advanced readers. Thirteen percent of Asian eighth-graders were below basic, 45 percent were proficient, and 12 percent were advanced readers.

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Black students never catch up to their white and Asian peers. There aren’t many white-collar professions where possessing partial mastery of basic reading and math will qualify one for employment. The SAT measures a more selective group of students than the NAEP, but even within that smaller pool of college-intending high school students, the gaps remain wide. On the math SAT, the average score of blacks in 2015 was 428 (on an 800-point scale); for whites, it was 534, and for Asians it was 598—a difference of nearly a standard deviation between blacks and whites, and well over a standard deviation between blacks and Asians. The tails of the distribution were even more imbalanced, according to the Brookings Institution. Blacks made up 2 percent of all test takers with a math SAT between 750 and 800. Sixty percent of those high scorers were Asian, and 33 percent were white. Blacks were 35 percent of all test takers with scores between 300 and 350. Whites were 21 percent of such low scorers, and Asians 6 percent.

In 2005, the Journal of Blacks in Education estimated that there were only 244 black students in the U.S. with a math SAT above 750. Brookings used an estimation procedure that maximized the number of high-scoring black students and came up with, at most, 1,000 blacks nationwide with scores of 750 and above. Whether the number is 250 or 1,000, it means that the STEM fields, medical research, and the ever-more mathematical world of finance cannot all have a 13 percent black participation rate, at least if meritocratic standards remain in place.

The SAT gap is replicated in graduate-level standardized tests. Between 2014 and 2017, the average score on the quantitative section of the Graduate Record Exams (GRE) was 150.05 out of 170. The Asian average was 154.1; the white average, 151; and the black average, 144. MIT’s entering engineering class in fall 2017 had an average GRE quantitative score of 167; students in the University of California, Berkeley, civil and environmental engineering program averaged 160, as did graduate students in USC’s engineering program. Even if the curve for blacks on the quantitative GRE is normally distributed in a bell curve, unlike for the math SATs, there will still be fewer blacks with higher-end scores than whites and Asians, given that the average black quantitative score is so much lower.