Disparity Doesn’t Necessarily Imply Racism
Wall Street Journal | Roland Fryer
Harvard professor of economics and MacArthur Genius Fellowship recipient, Roland Fryer, recounts the story of growing up under his grandmother’s influence, ascribing racism to be the root cause of all disparities, only to have his assumptions upended as he sought to disprove a paper’s findings on racial disparities written—”The paper felt like an attack on what I knew. An assault on all those conversations with my grandmother, which taught me that racism—present-tense racism—dictated black-white inequality.”
Fryer writes of how his “double identity—a classically trained economist taught to tease out causal relationships and a black Southern boy taught that discrimination is ubiquitous—had lived seamlessly inside me until that moment…[the paper’s authors] as it turns out, aren’t bigots, and their conclusions have stood the test of time and my attempts to disprove them.”
Fryer admits to the risk of underestimating bias, but also the risk of overstating it—”A black kid who believes he will face daunting societal obstacles is likely to underinvest in trying to climb society’s rungs. Every black student in the country needs to know that his return on investment in education is, if anything, higher than for white students.”
As a scholar committed to truth, Fryer concludes, “The solution isn’t to look away from discrimination. It does exist. But we also can’t point at every gap in outcomes and instantly conclude it’s racism. Prejudice must be measured rigorously. Statistically. Disparity doesn’t necessarily imply racism. It may feel omnipresent, but it isn’t all-powerful. Skills matter most.”
