View source for Bias Narratives vs Development Narratives on Identity and Discrimination


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Excerpted by Glenn Loury:

"I want to preface my argument about persistent racial inequality by invoking the notion of “narrative,” by at least gesturing toward an appreciation for the power of the story, and by noting that historical evidence does not pin down the stories we tell ourselves about our experience. Indeed, multiple accounts can be consistent with the same facts. So, there is an inescapable element of choice about how we “narrate” those facts.

Recently, some prominent economists—UC Berkeley’s George Akerlof and Robert Shiller of Yale, for example—have also stressed the importance of narratives for understanding social outcomes. It is this viewpoint that I invoke when I juxtapose conflicting narratives about the persistence of racial inequality: the bias narrative versus the development narrative. I will be advocating for the latter. We have a choice about how to look at this problem. And we have consistently been making the wrong choice.

“Hands up, don’t shoot.” That narrative was heard frequently after Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, abetting the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. This was a singular event in the history of racial conflict in America. It would appear that, actually, there was no validity to the “hands up, don’t shoot” story. Rather, Brown attacked the police officer who, fearing for his life, then shot him. Independent investigations by local authorities and the US Justice Department concluded as much. Eyewitnesses have testified to this effect. The fact of the matter is that “hands up, don’t shoot” never happened.

But it did happen virtually. It happened in effect. It happened because of the force of the narrative: a black man brutalized by overbearing, vicious, and racist state power. For many, that story overwhelmed all the facts in the case. There is a documentary by filmmaker Eli Steele, narrated by his father, Shelby, called What Killed Michael Brown? The film reviews the Michael Brown case and concludes that “hands up, don’t shoot” is what Shelby Steele calls a “poetic truth”—an account so powerfully resonant with a narrative paradigm that it may as well be true. Once it gets out there, many will have a hard time believing that it is not true because the power of the narrative is so great. For many, stories about bias against African Americans have this allure. This has become a problem.

Likewise, “systemic racism” is a kind of narrative. What, after all, do people mean when they invoke “systemic racism”? They mean that racially disparate outcomes today are due to complex systems of social interaction embodying morally suspect historical practices, the consequences of which persist. “Mass incarceration” on this view is “systemic racism” because of the way that urban areas are organized, because of decisions society has made about prohibiting traffic in addictive substances, due to poor education and inadequate economic opportunity for certain sectors of society, all of which leave black youngsters with no alternative other than to engage in the illicit activities for which they are being punished.

I am not a big fan of this systemic racism narrative. It is imprecise and those invoking it are begging the question. I want to know exactly what structures, what dynamic processes, they mean, and I want to know exactly how race figures into that story. The people employing that narrative do not tell me this. History, I would argue, is complicated. Racial disparities have multiple causes that interact with one another, ranging from culture, politics, and economic incentives to historical accident, environmental factors and, yes, the acts of some individuals who may be racists, as well as systems of law and policy that are disadvantaging to some racial groups without having so been intended.

So, I am left wanting to know just what they are talking about when they say, “systemic racism.” Use of that phrase expresses a disposition. It calls me to solidarity while asking for fealty, for my affirmation of a system of belief. It frames the issue primarily in terms of anti-black bias. It is only one among many possible narratives about racial disparities, and often not the most compelling one.

I wish to offer here an alternative way of telling the story of persistent racial inequality which I call the “development narrative.” This account stresses patterns of behavior within the disadvantaged population that need to be considered. I speak now about African Americans, some 40 million people in the United States. This, of course, is a variegated, differentiated, and heterogeneous population. One size does not fit all. Nevertheless, I am willing to ask: do some behaviors observable in certain communities of color have the consequence of inhibiting the development of human potential among their members? And should such behavioral disparities be borne in mind when confronting and acting against the fact of racial inequality?

Here is an illustration of why the distinction between these narratives might be important. Consider school discipline. I call your attention to the Department of Education policy under the Obama administration of admonishing school districts that reported racial disparity in the frequency with which students were suspended from school for disruptive behavior. The statistics reveal that black students are suspended more often relative to their numbers. Looking at the average frequency of suspension for black and white students in a school district, that is, one sees a disparate incidence of suspension by race.

Obama’s Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education sent a letter to local school districts warning them that they should be aware of, and take efforts to reduce, this disparity, or they might find themselves subject to being investigated for racial discrimination. Now, the racial disparity in this area is, indeed, nontrivial. If it reflected the racially discriminatory behavior of the school districts—principals, teachers, and security officers who are biased in how they treated disruptive behavior, such that the same acts by a white student are met with a less punitive response—then that would, indeed, be alarming, and would warrant the attention of the authorities.

Another possibility, however, is that the disruptive behavior being punished occurs more frequently among black students for reasons lying outside the school. If that is the case then interpreting disparate suspension rates as evidence of racial bias and responding to that by disciplining the school districts—cutting off their funding, perhaps hauling them into court—would be a terrible mistake. Rather, one would want to address the sources of this behavioral disparity. One would certainly not dismiss the racial inequality, but one would address it by attempting to enhance the opportunities and experiences of the affected young people, which shape their behavior patterns, to make those students less subject to disciplinary measures. That is, one would try to enhance their development.

(There are other possibilities. For example, one might become more tolerant of disruptive behavior across the board because a punitive reaction to disruption could be predicted to generate an unacceptable racial disparity. One can go many places with this example. I use it here merely to illustrate the differences between the bias and the development narratives when responding to the fact of a racial disparity.)

Let us talk more specifically now about the development problem. I am willing to invoke the demographic observation of a high rate of single-parenthood in African American families, where a mother is raising kids on her own. Three-in-four black kids—something like 70 percent—are today born to women without husbands. Common sense suggests that this reality cannot be unrelated to some of the outcomes, like disruptive behavior, that concern us. Perhaps it is not the main factor but it should be part of the story when discussing persistent racial inequality.

That I am willing to take it onboard does not, however, answer the question: What is the causal mechanism? A historical sociologist, historian, or demographer might well argue that we do see these different organizational patterns within families, but they are explicable given the historical experience of the respective groups. For Orlando Patterson, a sociologist at Harvard, they are a result of slavery—of the fact that families were disrupted at their core by the intercession of a master’s property claim over and against the filial connections of natal bonding. It is impossible, on his view, that you could have had as intrusive an intervention into intimate social relations among African-descended people as was slavery and not see present-day familial consequences.

Family organization matters for human development. There is a large racial disparity in family organization. Therefore, part of the story that you need to tell to account for persisting racial inequality involves family organization. In saying that, I would not have precluded a historical argument about the sources of the family organizational patterns. I would simply have been willing to consider the full range of relevant factors as I try to explain persistent racial inequality. This narrative is, of course, fiercely resisted by many. Nonetheless, I urge here that we consider it.

Violence, murder, homicide—huge racial disparities exist in this area. As anyone reading the newspapers knows, this is a reality of contemporary urban America. And there is a tightly networked set of social connections among the people who are committing and who are victimized by much of this criminal violence. Is that phenomenon, in any straightforward way, a manifestation of bias—of racism? Could it really be about white supremacy? Or is it about the failure of some part of a population to be socialized with the restraint, self-discipline, and commitment to civil behavior that, when widely embraced, make ordinary life and commerce in a community possible? Does it matter what story we tell here?

A willingness to ask about the behavior of the violent criminals preying on their neighbors, and the sources within a community of such behavior, is part of what it means to take the development narrative seriously. Again, I am not saying that we should forego trying to do anything about it, that policy has nowhere to go if the problem is mostly on the development side. Policy obviously has a lot to do with the development side, from better education to subsidizing child development to improving parenting skills to helping families move to safer neighborhoods. Nor am I assigning blame since sources outside of the community may be ultimately at fault for developmental deficits. But I am asserting that behavioral patterns such as these, and their cultural antecedents, need to be taken seriously.

Everyone talks about the academic achievement gap. Several groups are suing Harvard University, saying that the school’s affirmative action practices are penalizing Asian Americans. And the special high schools in New York City are being pressured to change their selection criteria to ensure that they do not enroll a class of more than 1,000 first-year students and have only a handful of black kids among that cohort. If you look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress, where a representative sample of American students are regularly tested for their cognitive abilities in mathematics and writing, you can see huge racial disparities in those data.

Am I willing to consider the development side when I talk about that? Am I willing to ask: What is going on in the homes? And: What do peer groups value? Am I willing to measure how much time people spend on homework? How many books there are in the home? Is the large racial disparity in academic achievement better understood when viewed in terms of the bias or the development narrative?

If you are prepared to discuss the supply side—if you are prepared, that is, to talk about the extent to which members of a disadvantaged, marginalized, and oppressed group are implicated in their own disadvantage—then some will charge that you are “blaming the victim.” I reject that charge categorically. It is not assigning blame to simply observe that the labor market has a supply side; that people make choices and engage in behaviors having deleterious consequences for their future economic prospects.

Of course, those behavioral patterns well may be a consequence of structural conditions and historical dynamics. On the other hand, if the reflexive response to seeing any disparity of behavior is to say: “Well, this is simply due to historical exigency,” then that has its own moral and philosophic implications in regards to agency—i.e., the extent to which people can be presumed to control their own fate, and the extent to which their communal norms and ways of living are seen as being within their ability to change.

For instance, is it a necessity that the homicide rate be as high as it is in the black communities where rates of interpersonal violence are so high? Is that really how we want to talk about such matters—to say, “What can they do? Of course, there is a high level of violence in poor black communities. Look at our structures; our gun laws; our hypocrisy about drug consumption and trafficking. Look at our history of racism in this country. Of course, there’s going to be a higher level of violence.” It is, in my view, morally repulsive to impute such a lack of agency to people in this fashion. It infantilizes them, makes them mere puppets at the end of strings being pulled by others. In the extreme, it robs them of their human dignity.

And perhaps worst of all, it robs a community of the ability to make social judgments. It undermines the capacity to clearly delineate right and wrong ways of living and to urge individuals to live rightly. I am not a philosopher, but I have read Immanuel Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals several times, in an attempt to understand what he was talking about. While it is certainly true, he says, that we are all embedded within the flux and the flow of history and under the influence of forces that are beyond our control of environment, psychology, and such, nevertheless, the theorist must assume the capacity of individuals to make free will choices about their moral life, lest there be no possibility for any theory of morals whatsoever.

I am signing on to that argument here when insisting on the need to engage the development narrative alongside talk about bias; the need to call attention to patterns of behavior and values that are internal to a community which limit their success; and when defending myself against the accusation that I give aid and comfort to racists, or that by making these observations I am somehow blaming the victims for their plight.

I am not unmindful of the pitfalls. I can hear the retort: “But, what will the racists say if you talk like that? Whatever the merits of such a narrative, in a society like the one that we live in, where many people are much less sympathetic than are you to the well-being and the aspirations of black people, some will take your words—the words of a black man—as license to entertain their own racist thoughts about why racial inequality persists.”

I cannot prove all this scientifically. But between the two paths—withholding arguments I believe to be true in order to manage political discourse, versus giving voice to such insight as I think that I might have, subject to rebuke, repudiation, and refutation by other critics, so as to enliven and enrich the political and public discourse—I choose the latter course. I am willing to take the risk of telling the truth, as best I can discern it, even though I cannot calculate all the political consequences which may flow from doing so.

Nor should it come as a surprise in a society with our racial history that such behavioral patterns would differ by race. Indeed, I would argue that so long as race is a meaningful part of people’s identity, with those meanings being reproduced via patterns of social affiliation, then there will be racial disparities in the structure of social networks in which people are embedded. Moreover, when network-mediated spillovers in human capital acquisition are important, this means there will be some persisting racial disparities of developmental outcome."
(https://quillette.com/2021/06/27/the-bias-narrative-versus-the-development-narrative-thinking-about-persistent-racial-inequality-in-the-united-states/)

[[Category:Relational]]
[[Category:Identity Politics]]