Repeal of race preferenceprograms:EffectsonAsiansandpublicreactions

Mon Nov 27 21:56:19 PST 2006

I agree that slavery and Jim Crow were, among other things, a net drag
on society.  But unless we have a basis for positing that slavery and
Jim Crow helped the position of African-Americans relative to whites,
then any loss for whites still leaves the phenomenon of white privilege
intact; we're just inequitably carving up diminished spoils.  Of course,
an argument that slavery and Jim Crow actually helped African-Americans
would push the needle of the "just deserts" argument way into the red.

Gregory P. Magarian
Professor of Law
Villanova University School of Law
299 N. Spring Mill Road
Villanova, PA 19085
(610) 519-7652
>>> Ilya Somin <isomin at gmu.edu> 11/28/06 12:38 AM >>>
Greg Magarian writes: 

But categorically denying the significance of white
> privilege leaves "just deserts" as the only logical explanation for
> racial disparities in socio-economic well-being, and that's a pretty
> hard story to swallow.

Not so. It is perfectly plausible (and in my view highly likely) that
the impact of slavery and later discriminatory policies both left blacks
on average worse off relative to whites than they otherwise would have
been, and also left whites, on average, worse off than THEY would have
been in the absence of these policies in an absolute sense. For example,
let us assume that absent slavery, Jim Crow, etc., the average
African-American and the average white would today have an income of
$5X. The historical reality of these policies, however, might leave
whites with an average income of 4X and blacks with an average income
of, say, 2X. Both groups are, on average, left worse off and the only
white "privilege" takes the form of a higher relative income (combined
with a lower absolute one).

Obviously, these are made-up numbers that I created for a hypothetical
example. However, given that the costs of slavery included 1) numerous
economic inefficiencies and security costs paid for (in considerable
part) by nonslaveowning whites, and 2) the loss of 700,000 lives
(probably at least 80-90% white) and massive property losses in the
Civil War, and that the costs of Jim Crow included an enormous setback
to the economic development of the South (and even parts of the North),
the story of net losses to both racial groups (but with a larger
relative and absolute loss for blacks) is at the very least a highly
plausible one. Obviously, some white political and economic elites did
extract net benefits from slavery and Jim Crow, and widespread economic
illiteracy (evident in public opinion data even in our much
better-educated era) probably enabled these elites to persuade many
nonelite whites that they benefited too. But we should not confuse the
bill of goods sold by some
 self-interested antebellum and Jim Crow-era white elites with reality.

Ilya Somin
Assistant Professor of Law
George Mason University School of Law
3301 Fairfax Dr.
Arlington, VA 22201
ph: 703-993-8069
fax: 703-993-8202
e-mail: isomin at gmu.edu
Website: http://mason.gmu.edu/~isomin/
SSRN Page: http://ssrn.com/author=333339

----- Original Message -----
From: Greg Magarian <magarian at law.villanova.edu>
Date: Tuesday, November 28, 2006 0:13 am
Subject: RE: Repeal of race preference programs:
EffectsonAsiansandpublicreactions

> The continuous, statistically significant deficit that African-
> Americansexperience, relative to whites, in virtually all measures of
> socio-economic well-being -- the most salient, for purposes of this
> discussion, being representation (discounting the effects of 
> affirmativeaction) in student populations and the professions -- 
> provides strong
> evidence that historically rooted white privilege continues to 
> have a
> great influence on how we all live.  White privilege alone doesn't
> necessarily justify affirmative action; one might still oppose the
> practice based on stigma concerns, the conceptual difficulty of
> identifying proper beneficiaries, or the distasteful nature of racial
> distinctions (although, to be candid, those arguments don't 
> persuade me,
> and the last one always seems to come awkwardly packaged with 
> calls to
> ignore the effects of the history that makes racial distinctions so
> distasteful).  But categorically denying the significance of white
> privilege leaves "just deserts" as the only logical explanation for
> racial disparities in socio-economic well-being, and that's a pretty
> hard story to swallow.
> 
> Gregory P. Magarian
> Professor of Law
> Villanova University School of Law
> 299 N. Spring Mill Road
> Villanova, PA 19085
> (610) 519-7652
> >>> "Volokh, Eugene" <VOLOKH at law.ucla.edu> 11/27/06 11:36 PM >>>
> Yvette Barksdale asks Rick:
> 
>         "Are you saying that you have not inherited any benefits from
> the discrimination of the past?  Question - did your parents and
> grandparents receive benefits? And, if so, did they transfer any 
> of them
> to you?   If the answer is yes - is it fair that you get to not only
> keep it all, but leverage it into greater gains...."
> 
> 	Well, I can't speak for Rick.  Perhaps one or more of his
> distant ancestors died on the Union side in the Civil War, leaving 
> theirinfant children rather poor.  (That's probably true of 
> millions of
> Americans alive today.)  Did the effects of this dissipate enough over
> the generations since the Civil War?  Did the effects of pre-War 
> slavery(as opposed to more recent Jim Crow) dissipate for blacks?  
> How exactly
> are we to calculate that?
> 
> 	Or perhaps, as I've heard many opponents of race discrimination
> argue, race discrimination against blacks was economically bad for 
> mostwhites as well as for most blacks:  It yielded less of a pie 
> to be split
> up, so that even if whites got a larger share of the pie than was fair
> -- which is to say they were hurt much less by race discrimination
> against blacks than blacks were -- they got a lesser amount than they
> would have but for race discrimination against blacks.  If Rick's
> parents or grandparents suffered from the consequences of this effect,
> then Rick actually derived net *costs* from the discrimination of the
> past rather than benefits.  It's a common (and in my view quite
> plausible) argument, after all:  Ending racism is good for all of us
> (with a very few exceptions), including economically good; if 
> that's so,
> then it suggests that past racism was economically bad for all of us.
> 
> 	I, on the other hand, did not inherit any benefits from the
> discrimination against blacks in the U.S.  It's conceivable that I got
> some benefits from 1975 on, if my parents somehow benefited from
> post-1975 race discrimination in favor of whites.  But for reasons 
> muchlike the ones noted above, I could have suffered costs as 
> well.  Plus I
> suffered unknown costs from discrimination against whites (whether my
> parents or me) past 1975.  Should I too be included as part of the
> debtor race?
> 
> 	My parents also suffered a considerable amount in the Soviet
> Union because they were Jewish.  On the other hand, they also 
> managed to
> get out from the Soviet Union because they were Jewish, when non-Jews
> (with few exceptions) weren't allowed to get out at all.  If we went
> back to Russia today, should we be entitled to preferences on 
> account of
> our Jewishness?  Should we be discriminated against to compensate for
> the unfair benefit that we got (and that we happily took advantage 
> of)?
> 	Perhaps it's questions like this that lead many people to
> conclude that either notions of racial guilt or entitlement, or 
> notionsof individual entitlement or duty to disgorge ill-gotten 
> benefits that
> supposedly stem from one's race, should not legitimately be part 
> of the
> analysis.
> 
> 	Eugene
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