All posts filed under: Identity

American Women of Different Racial Backgrounds Are Marrying Less—Why?

Published by Robert Cherry

Even before the current crisis, many unmarried mothers struggled to support their families and provide a nurturing and stable environment for children. As the marriage rate continues to decline, this is a growing issue. If policy-makers are going to address this problem, we need to debunk some unhelpful myths and develop a better understanding of why women of all races are marrying less. What’s at stake is the future of the children who live in these families. There has been a steady decline in US marriage rates, from 65.9 percent of adult women in 1960 to 51.1 percent in 2018. Despite this overall trend, many commentators continue to focus on the low marriage rate among black women—32 percent compared to the white rate of 53.7 percent—because of the high share of black children born to unmarried women: 69.4 percent compared to the white rate of 28.9 percent. They point to the difficulties these children face. They preach the success sequence: education, employment, marriage, and then childbearing. They ignore, however, how low employment and educational attainment …

Do COVID-19 Racial Disparities Matter?

Published by Coleman Hughes

There is now a racial justice angle on the coronavirus pandemic. Ibram X. Kendi, Director of Antiracist Research at American University, led the charge in the Atlantic a week ago, calling for data on COVID-19 deaths broken down by race. Nikole Hannah-Jones (whose work Wilfred Reilly mentioned in this space back in February) followed up with a Twitter thread documenting the disparate impact the virus has had on black Americans. Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s top immunologist, hit a similar theme in a recent press conference. To sum up the argument: Black people make up roughly 14 percent of the American population, but far more than 14 percent of Americans killed thus far by COVID-19. According to one view, this racial disparity amounts to evidence of systemic racism. But the argument rests on the false presumption that, in the absence of racism, we would see equal health outcomes by race. The data suggest otherwise. In fact, blacks are more likely than whites to die of many diseases—not just this one. In other cases, the reverse is …

Immigration and Inequality

Published by Christopher Caldwell

A big problem with the mass immigration that began in the United States in the 1970s was that it bred inequality. Its role in creating the highly stratified American social structure of the twenty-first century was as significant as that of other factors more commonly blamed: information technology, world trade, tax cuts. In 1995, the economist George Borjas, writing in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, modeled the actual effects of immigration on Americans. He found that while immigration might have caused an increase in economic activity of $2.1 trillion, virtually all of those gains—98 percent—went to the immigrants themselves. When economists talk about “gains” from immigration to the receiving country, they are talking about the remaining 2 percent—about $50 billion. This $50 billion “surplus” disguises an extraordinary transfer of income and wealth: Native capitalists gain $566 billion. Native workers lose $516 billion. One way of describing mass immigration is as a verdict on the pay structure that had arisen in the West by the 1970s: on trade unions, prevailing-wage laws, defined-benefit pension plans, long vacations, …

Romance, Race, and Retribution

Published by Jamie Palmer

I “This is a crisis of epic proportions,” wrote an alarmed Romance Writers of America (RWA) board member on Christmas Eve as the scenery started to collapse.1 Longstanding tensions within the trade organization had detonated the previous day when novelist Alyssa Cole revealed that RWA’s board of directors had suspended her friend Courtney Milan. The decision provoked a hurricane of condemnation from the membership, mass resignations from the board, and a spectacularly vicious frenzy of internecine bloodletting online. Milan’s suspension has been widely reported as the latest indignity suffered by a woman of color in an ongoing battle between RWA’s old guard and minority authors struggling against marginalization. In this version of events, Milan had exposed and confronted the scourge of racism within RWA and been crucified for it. For a few days, the 40-year old organization looked like it might tear itself to pieces, until what remained of the board agreed to commission an independent review of the events that led to Milan’s suspension. RWA retained multinational law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP …

The Misleading Racial Achievement Gap Statistic

Published by Kenny Xu

Montgomery County, Maryland, is one of the most racially diverse counties in the United States. Four different ethnic groups—white, black, Hispanic, and Asian—all comprise at least 15 percent of the population of the county, not to mention a vast mixed-race population as well.  It is one of the wealthiest counties in the nation by average household income. It also has a high “racial achievement gap.” The Stanford Educational Opportunity metric pegs the black/white achievement gap score at 3.09, and the black-Hispanic/white-Asian gap even higher, which means that the average white or Asian eighth-grader in Montgomery County scores more than three grade-levels higher on standardized performance exams than the average black or Hispanic student. Apparently, by the standards of the Montgomery County Public School (MCPS) system, the racial achievement gap is nothing short of an educational crisis or profligate systemic failure. Current MCPS superintendent Jack R. Smith wrote in the Washington Post, “For 50 years, the achievement gap in Montgomery County has grown in the shadows while many of our county’s schools and students garnered well-deserved …

Christopher Hitchens, Anti-Identitarian

Published by Matt Johnson

The Hitchens Prize is an annual award sponsored by the Dennis & Victoria Ross Foundation, named for the late polemicist and essayist Christopher Hitchens and presented to “an author or journalist whose work reflects a commitment to free expression and inquiry.” George Packer was this year’s recipient, and his acceptance speech examined a strange pathology of our time: “Writers are now expected to identify with a community and to write as its representatives.” While the community “might be a political faction, an ethnicity or a sexuality, a literary clique,” the effect is always the same: to enforce certain dogmas; to loudly declare your virtuous affiliations; to suppress independent thought. Hitchens, like Packer, was a great admirer of George Orwell (the former wrote a book in 2002 called Why Orwell Matters, while the latter edited two volumes of Orwell essays). In his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature,” Orwell observed: “To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.” Hitchens thought fearlessly. As Martin Amis put it, he liked “the …