Anti-Black Bias in the USA Today
Discussion
Charles McKelvey:
"There is no question that, with a history of slavery, Jim Crow, and discriminatory practices taking a variety of forms, anti-black bias was once widespread in U.S. society, particularly prior to the civil rights reforms of the period 1954 to 1965 and prior to the emergence of the civil rights and black power movements of 1953 to 1972, which had a profound effect on U.S. political culture. But how much anti-black bias exists in the United States today?
In a review of recent empirical studies published in Free Black Thought on August 17, 2026, Lee Jussim maintains that there is little or no anti-black bias or anti-black discrimination in the United States today, and there is a low level of pro-black bias.
Jussim maintains that “recent social science does not show any clear pattern of racial discrimination. To be sure, some research has found anti-black discrimination, albeit infrequently. Yet other research finds no anti-black discrimination. And yet other research has found pro-Black discrimination” (emphasis in original). He reviews a number of experimental studies in explaining this conclusion.
Among the analyses that Jussim reviewed is a 2024 meta-analysis of thirty-one studies that assessed race bias in sentencing and imprisonment, which found little or no race bias, suggesting that racial bias in adjudication is a thing of the past. He maintains that “the results clearly disconfirmed wild claims about race bias in adjudication that are common in both the academic literature and wider culture.”
In addition, Jussim reviewed recent research which has found pro-black discrimination in student admissions at Harvard and at the universities of North Carolina, Michigan, and Nebraska as well as many private colleges. The research found that black students were admitted with substantially lower SAT scores than were required for all other students.
Jussim addresses the issue of “systemic racism.” He maintains that it is not empirically justifiable to attribute inequality to racism, without providing evidence which shows the causal relation between specific policies or practices and unequal advantages or harms to particular groups. “One cannot simply invoke ‘the system’ in some quasi-supernatural manner to explain a phenomenon without identifying a particular system and showing empirically that it has some causal effects.”
With attention to empirical evidence with respect to systemic racism, Jussim maintains that the clearest example of systemic racism is in college admissions. Many colleges systematically discriminate in favor of black applicants.
Jussin concludes that if social scientists had been paying more attention to social scientific data, and if social scientists had had the courage to risk some sort of cancellation attack, the moral panic over racism in recent years might have been tempered."
(https://charlesmckelvey.substack.com/p/anti-black-bias-in-the-usa-today?)