The Catalyst

Too many trees have been sacrificed on commentary in the wake of the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin verdict. It seems clear that an unconscious racial bias—shared by the perpetrator, the police, the prosecution and the jury—that unfairly associates young black men with violence was partially responsible for this miscarriage of justice. But Florida's Stand Your Ground (SYG) law, which tips the scales of justice in favor of the defendant, especially if there are no credible witnesses, also played a role. If a person is justified in using deadly force “if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another,” this law comes perilously close to suggesting that a racial stereotype shared by the culture can be a legitimate defense against a murder charge. Who would have thought that an armed man could attack an unarmed man, and when he starts to lose the fight, shoot him, and successfully claim self-defense? Would a black shooter with a white victim have been acquitted with the same defense?

An interaction (in statistics) occurs when two variables have an effect in combination that is not predictable on the basis of the effects of both of them alone. One type is a catalytic interaction. It occurs when two variables both have the same effect, but their combined influence is much greater than the sum of their individual effects. For example, both alcohol and barbiturates are depressants, but taken together their physiological effect is extremely severe and has resulted in accidental suicides. The one acts as a catalyst for the other.

John Roman of the Urban Institute gathered FBI homicide data from 2005 to 2010 (the last year available), a total of 82,986 cases. The primary variables of interest were the race of the perpetrator and the race of the victim, so unsolved crimes were excluded. The outcome of interest was whether the homicide was ruled justified. Cases involving law enforcement—usually an automatic acquittal—were omitted. Roman also examined whether the case occurred in one of the 23 states having SYG laws. Other control variables available in the data base were the number of perpetrators and victims, whether they were strangers, the weapon used, the year, the region, and the age and gender of the parties. Here are the data:

If we look at all cases, it is clear that both the race of the perpetrator and the race of the victim have significant effects. A homicide is more likely to be declared justified if the shooter is white and if the victim is black. However, the most important effect is a catalytic interaction between these two variables. The shooter is much more likely to be exonerated when a white perpetrator kills a black victim than with the other three combinations, which don't differ very much.

SYG laws also increase the likelihood that homicides will be ruled justified. However, the evidence that they act as a catalyst of racial bias is mixed, since SYG laws increase the number of exonerations in three of the four racial combinations—all but the case when the shooter is black and the victim white.

Would a critic be persuaded by these data? Probably not. It's possible that other variables not recorded in the FBI data base are influencing the outcome, variables such as the location of the incident or the immediately preceding events. A critic might claim, for example, that the white shooter-black victim category includes more home (or business) invasions where standing one's ground is justified. In such cases, we would expect the shooter and the victim to be strangers. As you can see, homicides are more likely to be ruled justified when the perpetrator and the victim are strangers, but lack of acquaintance seems to increase perceived justification in all four racial combinations, not just the white perpetrator-black victim case, as this explanation would suggest. (I drew this conclusion by eyeballing the charts; Roman does not present an analysis of these data.)

Laboratory experiments might help to eliminate some of the ambiguity inherent in the FBI data by creating scenarios which vary the races of the perpetrator and victim and hold other characteristics constant. For example, Birt Duncan showed subjects an ambiguous incident in which one man may or may not have shoved another and asked subjects whether an act of violence occurred. The results were similar to Roman's data; the incident was most likely to be judged violent with a black perpetrator and a white victim. If we are only interested in homicide, we might present participants with written descriptions of killings which vary the races of the shooters and victims and ask them to play the role of jurors. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if social psychologists around the country are doing that very thing right now.

You may also be interested in reading:

Blaming the Victim

Breathing While Black

Open Carry

Obama on the Employer Mandate: ". . . never mind"

The Obama administration quietly announced on Tuesday that there will be a one-year delay—until after the 2014 midterm elections—in the implementation of the employer mandate, the provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that requires employers with 50 or more employees to provide them with health care coverage or pay a fine. The decision leaves intact the individual mandate, which requires most Americans to have health care in 2014 or pay a tax penalty. Employers get a reprieve, but not workers.

The New York Times quotes Sara Rosenbaum, professor of health policy at George Washington University, as follows: “I am utterly astounded. . . . This step could significantly reduce the number of uninsured people who will gain coverage in 2014.” It's hard to say at this point how many people will lose coverage. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that there are 230,000 firms with 50 or more employees who do not offer health insurance, employing about 1.4 million workers. It's unlikely that many of them will voluntarily offer coverage with the penalty for noncompliance removed. It's even possible that some companies that currently offer health care will drop it in 2014.

What will happen to those workers? They will be required to find coverage on their own or pay a fine. Those who do will most likely pay more for comparable insurance. One of the arguments in favor of the employer mandate is that businesses can negotiate a cheaper group rate than workers can obtain on their own. Those workers with lower incomes—$88,000 or less for a family of four—may be eligible for government subsidies, which is why some critics are complaining that this decision will cost the government money. However, the whole issue of subsidies quickly becomes very complicated. For example, people who would have been eligible for Medicaid under the ACA, but whose states—like Pennsylvania—rejected Medicaid expansion, will not be eligible for any subsidy, even though others in their states with higher incomes will be. We won't know until after the fact how many Americans will lose coverage, and therefore, how many will die, as a result of this action.

Photo by seiuhealthcare775nw

It seems likely that this decision will help to reinforce a central part of Obama's legacy: his reputation as a wimp who caves in easily to political pressure. Of course, in this case, the pressure came from a powerful source—U. S. corporations with 50 or more employees. These are the “corporate persons” who control both mainstream political parties—who, in effect, run the country.

Newspaper accounts attribute the postponement in part to threats from companies hovering around the 50 employee mark to lay off full-time workers or not hire new ones in order to avoid the employer mandate. But that threat is unlikely to go away next year, especially since Obama has caved in several times on various provisions of the law. Republicans, sensing weakness, are again calling for repeal of the ACA. It's certain to be an issue in the 2014 Congressional elections. Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers' advocacy group, is rolling out an aggressive new advertising campaign next week attacking Obamacare. “We think that once we incorporate the new bullet points about how the president is already delaying key aspects of the law, it will be even more effective,” said Tim Phillips, the group's president.

Of course, it was a huge mistake to ever merge health insurance with employment. Dave Steil, President of Health Care for All PA, has written about how inconvenient the employer mandate is for businesses. It may discourage the creation of small companies. It introduces needless and expensive complexity into the system—which is one of the things businesses are now complaining about. It distorts labor markets, for example, by giving employers reasons to discriminate on the basis of age, income and health status. It reduces individual choice, since your employer determines your coverage. It encourages employers to meddle in their employees health decisions, for example, by refusing to cover abortion. It reduces tax revenue, since the cost of coverage is tax-exempt. This in turn encourages overly generous coverage for highly paid employees—the kind that pays $100 a month for gym memberships. All of these problems could have been avoided with a single payer system that provides uniform coverage for everyone.

Update (7/12/13):

Not surprisingly, Republicans are trying to exploit the obvious unfairness of postponing the employer mandate but not the individual mandate. House Speaker John Boehner asked, "Is it fair for the president of the United States to give American businesses an exemption from this health care law's mandates without giving the same exemption to the rest of America?  Hell no, it's not fair." Republicans are calling for cancellation of the individual mandate as well, knowing full well that this will bring down the entire ACA. You can't have guaranteed issue—health insurance available to all regardless of preexisting conditions—without the individual mandate.

This latest Republican gambit is outrageously hypocritical. They bend over even further for corporate America than the Democrats. And just yesterday, Boehner and his gang once again ground their heels into the faces of the poor by refusing to fund the food stamp program.

You may also be interested in reading:

New Op Ed from State President Dave Steil

Tom Corbett to PA's Working Poor:  "Drop Dead!"  Part 3.  What Medicaid Expansion Would Mean to Pennsylvania

The Whitest Kids in Town

Book Review: Matthew Delmont, The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock and Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia.

There was one important change that [producer] Tony [Mammarella] and I made in 1957. Up until that time, the dancers on Bandstand had one thing in common—they were all white. . . . So in 1957, we were charting new territory. I don't think of myself as a hero or a civil rights activist for integrating the show; it was simply the right thing to do.

                              Dick Clark, Dick Clark's American Bandstand (1997)

Dick Clark's daily television show, American Bandstand, was a major influence on American popular music from 1957 to 1963. Clark presided over rock and roll at a time when the pendulum swung back toward conformity. The music establishment regained control over the business, white performers reestablished dominance on the pop charts, and fans suffered through what most critics regard as a dark period lacking in creativity.

From 1952 to 1957, Bandstand, hosted by Bob Horn, was a local Philadelphia after school program featuring teenagers dancing in the studio to recorded music, with guest musicians lip-syncing their hits. There was an explicit whites-only policy regarding the kids in the studio. When Dick Clark took over as host in 1957, the program obtained a spot on the nationwide ABC network. In 1964, Clark moved the program to Los Angeles. It is agreed that after 1964, the high school dancers were completely integrated.  At issue is the period between 1957 and 1963 in Philadelphia.

When Delmont began his research, he accepted Clark's account, and set out to discover how integration had occurred so smoothly in the racially-contested environment of Philadelphia. Instead, he found that Clark's claim is false. The program remained segregated, for all practical purposes, from 1957 to 1963. He cites several types of evidence.

Delmont interviewed both white and black people who participated in American Bandstand as teenagers. All agreed that there was an unacknowledged whites-only policy and black dancers were few and far between. African-Americans reported that when they tried to gain admission, they were always excluded for some reason: they lacked a membership card, they didn't meet the dress code, the studio was full, etc. One (white) interviewee reported that blacks who tried to get in were “beat up in the parking lot.”

Several times, African-American teenagers tried to integrate the show. In October 1957, a small group of them, accompanied by a reporter from the Philadelphia Tribune (a black newspaper), tested the policy. They were admitted, but the following day it was business as usual. Several articles about Bandstand's segregation policy appeared in the nation's black press, but they lacked leverage to influence the policy.

Of course, whether African-American teenagers appeared on the program is an empirical question. However, Dick Clark Productions, Inc., controls all the existing footage of American Bandstand. Delmont was able to examine 130 video clips from their web archives. He also found several hundred still photos published by Clark and other sources. Among thousands of teens, he only found two black girls sitting in the bleachers in two still photos.

Why did American Bandstand follow a whites-only policy? Delmont attributes it primarily to the commercial aspirations of the local station, WFIL, the network, and the sponsors, who hoped to appeal to a white suburban audience. Clark may have learned an important lesson from observing the fate of New York disc jockey Alan Freed, who was committed to integration. In the Summer of 1957, Freed had a prime time show, The Big Beat, on ABC, the network Clark would join that Fall. During the closing credits of the program, one of his guests, black singer Frankie Lymon, in a moment of spontaneity, danced briefly with a white girl. There was an national uproar. Freed was told that if the show was to continue, he could only have white guests. When he refused the show was cancelled.

Delmont's website contains this link to an interview of the author by Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now in 2012.

Delmont embeds the Bandstand story in a larger narrative about racial conflict in Philadelphia. Housing was rigidly segregated, and white residents formed associations to keep their neighborhoods “safe” from integration. When African-Americans moved into a previously white area, real estate speculators profited from “block busting.” They bought homes cheaply from fleeing whites and sold them at much higher prices to black families, whose real estate options were limited. De facto segregation in the public schools was maintained by carefully drawing district lines to conform to neighborhood racial patterns and by careful choice of the locations of new schools. All of this took place after the school board passed a resolution claiming that the Philadelphia public schools were integrated.

Why does all of this matter? From 1957 to 1963, American Bandstand was an important symbol of a national youth culture built around rock music—a culture that it implicitly defined as all-white. This is ironic given that the music itself was of a genre originated by African-Americans. Although Clark featured some black musicians as guests, he used his show to restore white artists, such as Philadelphia-based “teen idols” Frankie Avalon and Fabian, to a position of prominence on the pop charts. By coincidence, Clark happened to be part owner of some of the record labels and publishing houses whose music he featured.

Delmont takes no position on whether Dick Clark's claims about integration were deliberate lies or a classic example of self-serving memory failure. But his false statements raise a larger issue: How will the civil rights struggle of the '50s and '60s be remembered? Individuals and groups who were once a big part of the problem, such as white Christian churches, now claim to have been part of the solution. As late as 1966, twice as many Americans had an unfavorable view of Martin Luther King as had a favorable one. Those of us who remember the real history of these years are going to have to document the validity of our memories—memories that are increasingly challenged by propaganda from corporations and individuals who would like to rewrite recent history.

This review is cross-posted from my music blog, The Blues and the Abstract Truth.  Thanks to Gayle Morrow for calling this book to my attention.