Our Kind of Black?

David Friedman on racial discrimination;

"The discussion reminded me of an argument Thomas Sowell offers in Ethnic America. Observing the success of West Indian immigrants to the U.S., he concludes that it provides evidence against both of the popular explanations for the current situation of Afro-Americans. It is evidence against the "official" explanation, which is racial prejudice, since to the eye the immigrants are at least as black as those already here. But it is also evidence against the view, surely widely held if not openly expressed, that the failure of Afro-Americans is due to genetic inferiority, since the West Indians are genetically "blacker," have a higher proportion of sub-saharan African ancestry, as well as visibly blacker. Sowell concludes that the difference is cultural, that the different nature of West African slavery resulted in a culture that produced individuals better able to succeed in our society than those produced by the culture that resulted from plantation slavery in the American south."

Tim Harford on a related issue;

"Senator Joe Biden did himself no favours when he “praised” his fellow presidential hopeful, Barack Obama, as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”. It did not take long for the implication to sink in: does Senator Biden think that previous black candidates such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are inarticulate, dim, dirty or ugly?

Senator Biden has been charging around apologising to everybody, but what nobody really wants to admit is this: one of Senator Obama’s qualities is that he is handsome, and handsome politicians have a habit of getting elected. Economists have found evidence that voters prefer a pretty face in the UK, Australia, Finland, Germany and the US.

Researchers have to be careful when they observe simple correlations between subjective beauty and electoral success. Amy King and Andrew Leigh, who studied Australian elections, wondered whether the findings were driven by ageism or racism: perhaps (mostly white) voters see a black face and believe the face’s owner is both unattractive and unfit to govern. That sounds miserably plausible, but it is not driving the results: restricting analysis only to white politicians, or those in a narrower age band, produces similar estimates of a beauty premium."