There is significant discrimination in Western countries
There is much less racism.
The human sciences suffer from a problem with under-powered studies, as assembling data can be fraught with difficulties and expense. This is particularly so with field experiments, which provide the best basis for teasing out causal factors.
A solution to this is to engage in meta-analysis: to combine together the results from lots of studies. A 2019 study by Quillian et al, ‘Do Some Countries Discriminate More than Others? Evidence from 97 Field Experiments of Racial Discrimination in Hiring,’ does precisely this, conducting:
a formal meta-analysis of 97 field experiments of discrimination incorporating more than 200,000 job applications in nine countries in Europe and North America.
The authors restricted their analysis to countries with at least three field experiments, so as to reduce standard errors to useful levels. Differences in the rate at which otherwise equal applicants are excluded from consideration are used as the measure of discrimination.
The results are fascinating and provide clear evidence that (1) discrimination in hiring is a significant factor in many Western countries and (2) such discrimination has explanatory power in explaining employment/unemployment gaps across various groups in Western societies.
Unfortunately, the authors’ analysis also displays other recurring problems with the human, especially the social, sciences. One is letting one’s theoretical framework get in the way of reading the data accurately. The other is the class-cultural condescension such research often displays.
Cultural distance
The patterns of discrimination identified in the field experiments are taken by the authors to be patterns of racism. Yet, when one looks at the data, it is very clear that what it primarily shows is patterns of cultural distance.
Of the nine countries incorporated in the study, the country which showed the least discrimination in hiring was Germany. A straightforward explanatory hypothesis is offered by the authors:
Our discrimination measures are specific to hiring, and some evidence suggests national levels in discrimination in other outcomes may be different. For instance, we find low hiring discrimination in Germany, but Germany has not been found to be low on housing discrimination, suggesting weak antiminority prejudice may not account for this result. More likely, low discrimination in Germany could be a result of distinctive hiring practices in Germany: Employees typically submit far more extensive background information at initial application than in most other countries—including, for instance, high school transcripts and reports from apprenticeships. This may reduce the tendency of employers to assume lower skills and qualifications among nonwhite applicants, which is one potential source of discrimination. If so, this suggests the importance of high levels of individual information about applicants as a method to mitigate discrimination.
Why would more information about an individual reduce racism? One can offer some story about more information makes them more a specific individual and less a member of a group. That still raises the question of why that would reduce racism, unless racism is a fairly weak background effect.
As a feature of various immigrant groups in Europe is that they do have lower skills on average than non-immigrants, it is not racist to have that expectation in the absence of other information.
With cultural distance, one would expect more information to reduce the effect. Cultural distance implies problems in generating expectations about folk’s behaviour and/or having significantly different expectations about behaviour. (The latter then interacts with that awkward reality, stereotype accuracy.)
The more information employers have about an individual, the more basis they have for generating more robust expectations about their behaviour. Especially if the information suggests a significant level of acculturation.
Housing may generate rather more significant problems of cultural distance than hiring, as there are a much wider range of potential effects — including family and kin effects — with much less capacity to control them, than an employment relationship offers.
The study provides other evidence for cultural distance, rather than racism, to be the main factor. The patterns of discrimination map cultural distance quite strongly. Thus, immigrants from European countries, or Latin America, face much lower levels of discrimination than do immigrants from MENA (Middle East North Africa), Sub-Saharan African or Asian countries. As one would expect if the issue is cultural distance.
Moreover, when one looks at a more fine-tuned pattern of discrimination shown in Figure 4 above, it is very clear that skin colour (how “dark” one typically is) explains remarkably little. Patterns of the salience of cultural differences explain far more.
Discrimination against African-Americans can also reflect cultural distance. As mixed race writer John Wood Jr discovered, how you speak and even what hair style you adopt, can generate very different expectations in others.
African-Americans generally do not have the same culture as Euro-Americans. Their cultures overlap to a large degree, due to local cohabitation and mutual influence, but are not identical. The existence of Black English speaks to the reality of cultural difference (and distance). Indeed, one can reasonably argue there is no single American culture, but rather a constellation of related cultures.
Anywhere condescension
That what is being uncovered is much more plausibly reactions to the salience of cultural distance, rather than racism, points to a third problem with the human, and especially the social, sciences: class-cultural gaps within Western societies. That is, cultural differences driven by class, and particularly level of education.
The academics and researchers conducting studies allegedly demonstrating racism are overwhelmingly Anywheres: highly educated folk whose networks are not locality-based and may well be international. Most of the folk they are studying (and ascribing racism to) are Somewheres: less educated folk whose networks tend to be overwhelmingly based in a specific locality.
Racism is a pattern of irrational animus. Cultural distance is about either having different expectations about groups, or lacking information to form robust expectations.
Ascribing racism to Somewheres both expresses, and magnifies, the moral-cultural gap between Anywheres and Somewheres. Cultural distance is a much less patronising hypothesis than racism, as expectations about other folk do matter: particularly in matters such as employment.
It is very clear that Anywheres are often all too ready to “explain” Somewhere behaviour on the basis of racism. That is, deplorable Somewheres being moral pygmies compared to their tolerant and cosmopolitan betters. Which feeds into demands for control of public discourse.
Commentary on the UK’s 2016 Brexit vote analysing it as being a manifestation of racism and xenophobia is an example of such class-cultural condescension.
The clear — though of course not acknowledged — implication of such commentary is that 40 years in the EEC-cum-EU somehow made the British public much more racist and xenophobic, given that in 1975 two-thirds voted in favour of joining the EEC and in 2016 a majority voted to leave. With older voters — so those with most experience of EU membership — being the most likely to vote Leave.
Ironically, Brexit has deprived organised British populism of its key rallying cause, while the technocratic elitism of the EU is seeing national populism sweep across the continent.
Analysis of Trump’s 2016 Electoral College victory as being a result of racism and xenophobia, even though he won a slew of counties that had twice voted for Obama, or as due to Russian online bots, manifest the same evidence-be-damned class-cultural condescension. As the excellent study Trump’s Democrats makes clear, Trump had far more cultural affinity with voters in those counties than Hillary Clinton did (or perhaps any major Party Presidential nominee in living memory), and that mattered.
As I have previously noted, a paper (pdf), co-authored by a subsequent Nobel memorial laureate no less, ascribes to “compositional amenity” what is much better explained as concern for the loss of social capital — a term that appears nowhere in the paper — via displacement of local connections. So much of the Russiagate debacle was driven by cultural incomprehension and contempt.
Ascribing to racism what is better explained by cultural distance and/or displacement of local connections represents an ongoing, and deeply entrenched, pattern of class-cultural condescension. One that has corrupted much of the humanities and social sciences.
So, yes there is clear evidence of discrimination in employment in various Western countries, and this matters for social outcomes. But the patterns of discrimination map the salience of cultural distances far more than alleged racism. While the excess readiness to ascribe racism as an explanation speaks to class-cultural distances within Western societies that are creating increasing disconnects between institutions and the rest of society.
References
Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Pelican, 2018.
David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics, Penguin, 2017.
Stephanie Muravchik, Jon A. Shields, Trump’s Democrats, Brookings Institution Press, 2020.
Lincoln Quillian, Anthony Heath, Devah Pager, Arnfinn H. Midtbøen, Fenella Fleischmann, and Ole Hexel, ‘Do Some Countries Discriminate More than Others? Evidence from 97 Field Experiments of Racial Discrimination in Hiring,’ Sociological Science, 2019, 6, 467-496.
John Wood Jr, ‘Race, Culture and the Dynamics of Prejudice,’ Areo Magazine, 24/09/2018, https://areomagazine.com/2018/09/24/race-culture-and-the-dynamics-of-prejudice/.
"Ascribing to racism what is better explained by cultural distance and/or displacement of local connections represents an ongoing, and deeply entrenched, pattern of class-cultural condescension. One that has corrupted the much of the humanities and social sciences."
This nails a large aspect of the zeitgeist.
The Bigotry Accusation is the foundation of so much of modern discourse because it was the superweapon the Left used in their conquest of first the humanities, then the rest of academia and culture, and they will keep on using it as it still retains so much social and moral power.
For the modern leftish liberal the Bigotry Accusation is like a Swiss Army knife for sociopolitical discourse: first it works as a way to clear out enemies and control new territory; then of course it works as a cheap form of virtue for upscale whites to preen about how much they love poor oppressed black people, certainly much more than those evil Other Bad Whites; it also works as a new form of social control, because if we live in a permanent state of social emergency, we of course need powerful bureaucrats and overseers to police our words and thoughts to prevent a race war; and lastly it works as a way for the global corporate state and its media arm to gain money and power by selling religious indulgences to guilty white liberals.
As long as being branded a bigot in modern Western societies is the equivalent of being branded a witch in 17th-century Salem, the Bigotry Accusation will remain our No. 1 way to clear out a rival, to dispose of opponents and heretics, to win an argument or to make a name for yourself.
The Bigotry Accusation is to our time what Elvis and the Hula Hoop were to the 1950s or what disco and polyester were to the 1970s—the definitive trend/idea/cultural phenomenon that can serve as a condensed symbol of a zeitgeist. But notice the differences: all the prior examples were joyous, mostly creative, and brought people together in various ways; our endless moment of virtual moralism is in all ways opposite: punitive, ugly, designed to paint us all as either Oppressed or Oppressor and to hopefully let the hatred flow from that.
Everyone should return to their own lands, the new anti colonial movements are in the West.
As for “racism” It’s Grift.
No one believes this 💩 except childless middle aged white women, at one time they’d be camped out in Church, now politics is their Stations of The Cross.
Prayers are now online posting.
If you’re trying to speak to the people of good will, that rules out everyone in on the scam. They justify their relentless nepotism with the same logic the Europeans colonized the world, in fairness many Asian armies marched in Europe and over Christendom prior. It may be noted that they haven’t bought an army with them , which leaves us an option.
Mr Warby the Enlightenment is over, but for the people you may be trying to reach it never happened. Racism outside of the American Imperium is so taken for granted they don’t notice it, as is caste and many other neurotic indulgences of the West.
Everyone should return to their own lands, the new anti colonial movements are in the West.