Race and Inequality

Via Mark Thoma, Daniel Little expounds on a topic I find extremely interesting and relevent to our political debate.  He looks at the work of Douglas Massie, and his 2008 book, Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System. An extremely relevant part is here:

Massey leads off his analysis with a theory of the social psychology of racism and discrimination against poor people. He argues that the stereotyping that is inevitably associated with social cognition leads to a pattern of discrimination against African-Americans, immigrants, women, and poor people that deepens and entrenches their unequal shares in American society. The twin mechanisms of discrimination and opportunity-hoarding both flow on the basis of the categories of discrimination created by these mental constructs – hence "categorical inequality". (Visit a recent posting for a related argument about the social psychology of prejudice.)

In a very real way, stratification begins psychologically with the creation of cognitive boundaries that allocate people to social categories. Before categorical inequality can be implemented socially, categories must be created cognitively to classify people conceptually based on some set of achieved and ascribed characteristics. The roots of social stratification thus lie ultimately in the cognitive construction of boundaries to make social distinctions, a task that comes naturally to human beings, who are mentally hardwired to engage in categorical thought (Fiske 2004). (8)

People use schemas to evaluate themselves and the social roles, social groups, social events, and individuals they encounter, a process known as social cognition (Fiske 2004). The categories into which they divide up the world may change over time and evolve with experience, but among mature human beings they always exist and people always fall back on them when they interpret objects, events, people, and situations (Fiske 2004). (9)

Massey hypothesizes two dimensions of mental categorization, leading to four gross categories of people in one's social category scheme: warm-cold (appealing-unappealing) and competent-incompetent. People who are like us are considered "warm" and "competent". The other three quadrants are categorized as "other": warm but incompetent (pitied), competent but cold (envied), and incompetent and cold (despised). And he asserts that American racism places African-Americans in the final category. This in turn is used to explain the harshly negative tilt that US legislation has shown across lines of race and poverty.

I think this is extremely important to keep in mind, both in terms of what drives political policy, but also in how we look at and categorize others.  I think the competent-incompetent break, in my internal calculations of how people can succeed, breaks two ways, with intelligence and social skills (which is odd, because I'm particularly hit-or-miss in this category).  I see people as either intelligent or not, and either socially skilled or not.  In gross generalization, many very intelligent people aren't very socially skilled, and this holds them out of the "in" group of society, where social acclimation is extremely important.  Whereas, some people can move into the "in" group by being socially skilled and utililizing those skills to earn money, in spite of less than stellar intelligence.  Then there are folks who aren't naturally intelligent and can't charm their way through life.  Clearly, I would like to think of myself as both intelligent and possessing social skills, but I know that isn't completely accurate.  But my root understanding of how people succeed in life is tied to these categorizations, and my policy solutions to income inequality are based on trying to balance out the outcomes resulting from those factors (even though this is obviously a somewhat upotian undertaking).

Nonetheless, in the general scheme of society, I think Massie is right that race is a significant determinant in placing people in the "undesirable" category.  The problem with this, besides its total inaccuracy, is that race can't be changed or hidden.  The other significant problem is with the geographical and social segregation now present in society, this mindset is hard to overcome.  Whereas I run into intelligent and less intelligent people, and socially skilled and unskilled people all the time, and can empathize with people in all of those categories for one reason or another, people in the rural Midwest and Mountain West are extremely unlikely to run into a large number of black or Hispanic people of differing skills and abilities, and are much more prone to stereotype all of them.  I attempt to make up for this by giving all members of those groups the benefit of the doubt by assuming that many of the challenges faced by them are the result of majority racism, which is an easy position to take when one doesn't run into the reality of individual people, and their specific problems.  Unfortunately, I'm in the distinct minority in my region in doing this, whether that is because other people are more familiar with individuals who fit their stereotypes as opposed to mine, or because they more comfortable in their political assumptions by doing this.  I know that my own political assumptions drive my approach, for better or worse.

One chart I found interesting in Little's post was this one, which I don't think needs much explanation:

In other words, policy matters.