When researchers sent young whites and blacks out to interview for low-wage jobs in New York City armed with equivalent résumés, the result was:
A) Whites and blacks were hired at similar rates.
B) Blacks had a modest edge because of affirmative action.
C) Whites were twice as likely to get callbacks.
The answer is C, and a black applicant with a clean criminal record did no better than a white applicant who was said to have just been released from 18 months in prison.
.. In a CNN poll, 86 percent of blacks said family breakdown was a reason for difficulties of African-Americans today, and 77 percent cited “lack of motivation and unwillingness to work hard.”
.. the median black household in America still has only 8 percent of the wealth of the median white household.
.. The average white or Asian-American student attends a school in at least the 60th percentile in test performance; the average black student is at a school at the 37th percentile.
.. In one study, researchers sent thousands of résumés to employers with openings, randomly using some stereotypically black names (like Jamal) and others that were more likely to belong to whites (like Brendan). A white name increased the likelihood of a callback by 50 percent.
.. white state legislators, Democrats and Republicans alike, were less likely to respond to a constituent letter signed with a stereotypically black name. Even at universities, emails sent to professors from stereotypically black names asking for a chance to discuss research possibilities received fewer responses.
.. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, an eminent sociologist, calls this unconscious bias “racism without racists,” and we whites should be less defensive about it.
.. The N.B.A. study caused a furor (the league denied the bias), and a few years later there was a follow-up by the same economists, and the bias had disappeared. It seems that when we humans realize our biases, we can adjust and act in ways that are more fair. As the study’s authors put it, “Awareness reduces racial bias.”
Richard Rohr: Blinded by Privilege
In country after country that I’ve spoken in over the years, the laity have come to accept that the bishops and priests look out at reality from the side of management and seldom from the side of the laboring class, where Jesus unquestionably resided. When and where we did have servant leadership, the church flourished; where they didn’t, we often experience, to this day and with good reason, a virulent anti-clericalism.
.. Since we do not consciously have racist attitudes or overt racist behavior, we kindly judge ourselves to be open minded, egalitarian, and therefore surely not racist. Because we have never been on the other side, we largely do not recognize the structural access we enjoy, the trust we think we deserve, the assumption that we always belong and do not have to earn our belonging. All this we take for granted and normal. Only the outsider can spot these attitudes in us.
.. “States of sin” are always incapable of critiquing themselves, which is largely why they are sin to begin with. Evil depends upon disguise and tries to look like virtue to survive.
A Few Trump Fans Suddenly See the Man They’ve Been Defending
Technically we’re supposed to welcome previous Trump fans-turned-foes with open arms. But barring some miraculous comeback by Ted Cruz, the Trump campaign will have cost the Republican party the presidency after eight years of Obama, and perhaps the Senate and even the House — not to mention Scalia’s replacement on the Supreme Court. Years of effort spent attempting to dispel the accusations of inherent Republican misogyny, xenophobia, hypocrisy, ignorance, and blind rage have been undone by Trump’s campaign. And every Trump advocate in front of a camera had a hand in this.
.. To be fair, I must admit that the government of Canada (and the province of Ontario) invested $13 billion to help save GM, a small fraction of the tab paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Canada lost about $3 billion as a result of its investment.
.. Against the odds, Trump has won widespread support in some of the most liberal Democratic areas of the country. He carried 40 percent of Cook County’s Republican vote, which includes the city of Chicago and its inner suburbs, allowing him to take most of Illinois’s delegates.
.. What explains this dynamic? A major reason is that Trump’s (mainly white) supporters are disproportionately concentrated near areas with many minorities, suggesting that strained race relations may have played a role in their backing of Trump. He has won over white Republican voters in rural Southern counties where African-Americans make up a majority of the vote, and he has performed well in urban neighborhoods where the racial composition of surrounding areas has changed over the years.
Donald Trump’s Secret Weapon: Blue-State Voters
There’s a remarkably strong correlation, for example, between Mr. Trump’s support and the number of racist Web searches by state. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight said that the measure was the single strongest correlation of support for Mr. Trump that he could find.
Survey data point toward the same finding. For instance, support for Mr. Trump was strongly correlated with higher levels of resentment about racial issues — like the belief that black people don’t work hard enough and yet receive special favors — in an analysis of the American National Election 2016 Pilot Study.
.. But Nixon’s “Southern strategy” had a Northeastern component, and it drew plenty of old Democrats into the Republican Party. In his influential book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” the Nixon adviser Kevin Phillips noted the declining Democratic strength among Northeastern Catholics in the 1960s, in part because of the view that “Negroes or other minority groups are taking over the Democratic Party.” His prediction that the Republican Party would become more Catholic and populist has been borne out.
.. It is in the Midwest and West where Mr. Trump has struggled. There, the traditional Republicans — white Protestants — still reign. They have bled support to the Democrats in many places, like Iowa or Oregon, but the Republicans have not replaced them with an influx of new voters as they have in the South or the industrial North.