The Living Consequences

Inspired by a recent exchange of views on another post on this blog, I’d like to offer a few statistics about race and criminal behavior in the U.S.

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The United Nations has issued a comprehensive new report on global human trafficking, focused on efforts at enforcement.

Highlights include the fact that reported cases of human trafficking, including forced labor and sexual exploitation, have been on the rise, and that women play a significant role in perpetrating human trafficking.

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Apparently, historically black colleges and universities are being disproportionately affected by the current economic recession, because they tend to have smaller endowments and a higher proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Some of these hard-hit institutions include Morris Brown College, Clark Atlanta University, and Spelman College in Atlanta; Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Ala.; and Tennessee State University in Nashville. Howard University, in Washington, D.C, is the wealthiest of these institutions, but even Howard has recently been forced to devote more funds to scholarships for its students.

It seems to me that two very different conclusions could be drawn from this development.

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U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, in a speech recognizing Black History Month, has told employees at the Justice Department that the U.S. is “a nation of cowards” when it comes to race relations.

Holder, the first black attorney general in the nation’s history, explained that “this nation has still not come to grips with its racial past” and that, if we are to make progress in race relations, “we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”

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The New York Post, in its infinite wisdom, ran the cartoon shown here in today’s edition.

The illustration refers to yesterday’s shooting by police in Connecticut of an out-of-control chimpanzee, while the dialogue refers to President Obama’s signature legislative item, the stimulus bill which he signed on the same day.

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The latest animal-rights campaign by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) involves PETA members dressed as the Ku Klux Klan to dramatize the abuse of animals through breeding for profit.

PETA was demonstrating outside the Westminster Kennel Club’s dog show in Madison Square Garden, in a protest against the American Kennel Club (AKC), which PETA accuses of promoting the pure-breeding of dogs to the detriment of their health.

PETA has a long history of sensational and controversial publicity campaigns to draw attention to the plight of animals, which frequently bring charges of sexism, racism, or poor taste. In a 2005 campaign, for instance, PETA contrasted images of lynched black men with pictures of dead cows and asked, “Are Animals the New Slaves?”

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Columnist Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times writes today about the overwhelming domination of Wall Street by male executives.

I’m not sure that I agree with Kristof’s conclusion that what the global banking industry needed in order to avoid its current woes was “women, women and women.” However, he devotes most of the column to highlighting important research showing that in areas such as race, gender, and class, diversity improves the quality of group decision-making.

This research offers a distinct rationale for diversity in education and in the workplace, beyond questions of fairness to the individuals involved or other arguments about diversity which may not garner universal agreement.

This particular justification for diversity is also more palatable to many of those who are skeptical of affirmative action or multiculturalism, being focused on generating measurably superior outcomes for the entire institution or for society as a whole. Moreover, this approach defines diversity in a subversive manner: it assumes that diversity today means having different experiences and perspectives, while giving no credence to beliefs that there are fundamental differences between people on account of race, ethnicity, gender, or other superficial traits.

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Will Moredock, in an opinion piece in the Charleston City Paper this week, revisits the effort of the South Carolina State Ports Authority to systematically remove all references to slavery and blacks from its maritime history of Charleston and South Carolina.

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A new study suggests that even in the aftermath of the welfare reform of the 1990s and the resulting disappearance of welfare as a hot-button political issue tied to race, attitudes of white Americans towards welfare are still heavily influenced by negative stereotypes about blacks.

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There is a new working paper in economics available from the Institute for the Study of Labor which finds that when there is little outside scrutiny, umpires in major league baseball give preferential treatment to pitchers who share their race or ethnicity.

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