Americans For Racial Injustice

In spite of declines in violent crime during the past two decades, the United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world, and at any time in its history. Our punitive criminal justice policies have had a grossly disproportionate impact on racial minorities. While African-Americans make up 12% of the population, they are 40% of our criminal inmates. These disparities exist even where evidence suggests there are no racial differences in commission of the offense.

Both President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have argued for reducing the length of prison terms for nonviolent offenses, giving racial disparities in incarceration as one of their reasons. The President commented on this issue when the administration announced new guidelines for public school discipline intended to reduce racial disparities in school suspensions and dropout rates.

I remember thinking at the time that this argument could backfire. In a racist society, stating racial discrimination as a reason to reduce mass incarceration carries the risk of increasing support for punitive crime policies. Ian Haney-Lopez has noted that get-tough crime policies are a "dog whistle" used by politicians to appeal to white prejudice without referring directly to race. These coded racial appeals are used because they are effective. A new article by two Stanford social psychologists, Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt, supports these speculations.

Hetey and Eberhardt note that racial disparities in imprisonment are usually treated as an unintended outcome of punitive policies. They propose instead that knowledge of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is one of the causes of widespread public support for these policies. They conducted two field experiments.

In the first, white registered voters were approached by a white female experimenter at a train station and asked to sign a petition for a ballot initiative to reduce the punitiveness of California's "three-strikes-and-you're-out" law. Before being presented with the petition, participants were shown a 40-sec video about the prison system. The video did not refer to race, but in one version, 25% of the inmates shown were black, while in the other version, 45% were black. As predicted, fewer people (27%) were willing to sign the petition in the More-Black condition than in the Less-Black condition (52%).

The second study was an online survey of white New York City residents conducted by Survey Sampling International. Near the beginning of the survey, participants were given demographic information stating that the prison population was either 40.3% or 60.3% African-American. (Both statements were true. The first referred to the U. S. prison population, while the second referred to New York City.) Later in the survey, participants were shown a petition calling for an end to the New York police's "stop-and-frisk" policy, and asked whether, if they had been approached, they would have signed it. The results confirm those of the first experiment.

A measure of fear of crime was included in the survey. The relationship between racial composition of the prison population and support for less punitive policies was mediated by fear of crime.  That is, the More-Black condition produced greater fear of crime, which led to less willingness to sign the petition.  However, this was not the whole story.  The effect of racial composition on policy acceptance was statistically significant even when fear of crime was statistically eliminated.

The authors admit that their results pose "quite a challenge for those striving to create a more just and equal society."  It appears that presenting people with evidence that a social policy leads to racial injustice has the effect of increasing, rather than reducing, support for the policy.  Maybe the President should emphasize the fact that reducing the prison population would save money.

You may also be interested in reading:

Dog Whistle Politics

Another Dog Whistle

Old-Fashioned Racism

The Matthew Effect

The Matthew effect is a term introduced by sociologist Robert Merton in 1968. It takes its name from Matthew 25:29, the parable of the talents:

For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.

In other words, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Merton suggested that the positive behaviors of high status people are more likely to be recognized and rewarded than those of low status individuals, while high status people's mistakes are more likely to be overlooked. This creates a positive feedback loop in which increased confidence causes their performance to improve and their reputation to increase over time. The opposite happens to low status individuals. Their mistakes are more apparent, leading to negative feedback, stress and disruption of performance.

Merton also coined the term self-fulfilling prophecy, in which predictions result in behaviors that cause the predicted outcome to occur.  The Matthew effect is a type of self-fulfilling prophecy in which the observer's positive (or negative) expectations cause more (or less) successful behavior in the target over time. This has broad implications for people's self-esteem and the inequality of their social and economic outcomes.

Two business school professors, Jerry Kim and Brayden King, looked for evidence of the Matthew effect in major league baseball. They predicted that a pitcher's status would influence calls by the home plate umpire. Pitcher status was defined as the number of times he had previously been chosen to the All-Star team. It was predicted that, as the number of All-Star appearances by a pitcher increased, more of their balls would be called strikes (over-recognition) and fewer of their strikes would be called balls (under-recognition). The study was made possible by the Pitch f/x system, in place in all major league ballparks, in which cameras objectively measure whether each pitch is in the strike zone.

© www.sportvision.com

The data base was all the pitches taken (not swung at) by the batter during every game of the 2008 and 2009 seasons. These pitches must then be called either a ball or a strike by the umpire, and each call was evaluated for correctness. These data were related to over two dozen pitcher, batter, catcher, umpire and situational characteristics. Some of these variables are of real importance to baseball fans, but they could all be statistically controlled in order to evaluate the status hypothesis.

Baseball fans may be interested in the big picture—the distribution of correct and incorrect calls among the almost 800,000 calls the researchers measured.

	Called Ball	Called Strike
Actual Ball	87.10%	12.90%
Actual Strike	18.80%	81.20%

The umpires were correct about 85% of the time. (There were more actual balls than actual strikes.) Umpire bias favored the batter, since more strikes were called balls than balls were called strikes. The count (the number of balls and strikes to that point) had a big effect. For example, the likelihood that the umpire mistakenly called a strike was 62% lower when the count was 0-2 and 49% higher when the count was 3-0. Apparently, umpires don't like their call to end an at-bat. Umpire calls also tended to favor the home team. Errors of both over- and under-recognition increased with the situational importance of the at-bat.

The hypothesis was strongly confirmed. Look first at over-recognition: Holding all other variables constant, the more trips a pitcher had made to the All-Star game, the more likely a ball was to be called a strike. The probability of a mistaken strike call increased from 12.8% among pitchers who had no All-Star appearances to 14.9% among pitchers with five or more appearances. Each additional trip to the All-Star game increased the likelihood of over-recognition by 4.9%.

The situation was reversed for under-recognition, also confirming the hypothesis. A strike thrown by a pitcher with no All-Star appearances was mistakenly called a ball 18.9% of the time, but only 17.2% of the time if the pitcher had five or more appearances. Each trip to the All-Star game decreased the likelihood of under-recognition by 2.7%.

In further analyses, the authors were able to show that, with this large data set, pitcher status also had statistically significant effects on the outcome of the at-bat (the total bases reached by the batter) and the game (whether the pitcher's team won). In an analysis that made some admittedly questionable assumptions, they calculated that umpire errors alone were worth approximately $575,000 in salary to a high status pitcher over the course of his career.

© totallycoolpix.com

Of course, Matthew effects can occur any time one person evaluates another—a teacher grading a student, a boss rating a worker, a reviewer reading a manuscript, etc. As a demonstration of how quickly performance expectations can occur, consider a study by Ned Jones and others. Participants watched a videotape of a college student answering 30 difficult questions, with feedback after each item indicating he had answered 15 of them correctly. In the ascending condition, the student gradually improved. He got three of the first ten right, five of the second ten, and seven of the last ten. In the descending condition, the pattern was reversed. (The difficulty of the questions was held constant by asking exactly the same questions in the opposite order.) First impressions mattered a great deal. The student was rated as more intelligent in the descending than in the ascending condition. The authors had hoped the ascending student would get some credit for improvement, but it didn't happen.

In this experiment, as in baseball, the expectations were based on the target's actual past performance. However, expectations can be based on gender, race, class or other social categories. In other words, stereotypes based on group membership can create self-fulfilling prophecies leading to discrimination.

There is no reason to think that umpires and ballplayers are consciously aware of the systematic nature of these errors. A New York Times article about the Kim and King study included the usual quotes from baseball people expressing their surprise at or disbelief in the results. Most teachers, bosses and reviewers probably think they're being objective, too.

In major league baseball, the technology is already in place to have balls and strikes called automatically using the Pitch f/x system. Why would anyone (except maybe Clayton Kershaw) not think that's a good idea?

You may also be interested in reading:

Is Democracy Possible? Part 1 (see also Parts 2 and 3)

Deja Vu

Does Money Make You Mean?

A Question of "Money"

It's no secret that '50s and '60s rhythm and blues artists were often ripped off by white record company owners, as well as by club owners, deejays, managers, and various other non-musicians making a profit from the music business. Unfortunately, black ownership of the means of production was not always a remedy for these abuses. Berry Gordy, Jr., was the owner of Motown, the most successful of the black-owned labels. From all that we know about how Gordy treated his artists, he is deserving of the title of “honorary white man.”

One way to cheat musicians was through manipulation of song copyrights. While musicians often wrote their songs, record executives sometimes required musicians to sign over part or all of the copyright to the songs to them or their cronies as a condition of allowing them to record. Barrett Strong, who recorded the 1959 R&B classic “Money (That's What I Want),”—ironically, a musical endorsement of materialism—is suing to have his name reinstated as one of the authors of the song. Mr. Gordy disputes his claims of authorship.

Barrett Strong claims that while working as a session musician for Motown, he developed the tune—a spinoff of one of the riffs in Ray Charles' “What'd I Say?”—and the lyric hook. A studio musician and a recording engineer confirm Strong's claim of authorship. Gordy liked the song and assigned staff writer Janie Bradford to help him with the lyrics. The copyright registration, filed in 1959, lists Strong, Bradford and Gordy as co-authors. The song was released went to #2 on the R&B charts in 1960 and also crossed over to the pop charts. It was one of Motown's first hits.

In 1962, Motown instructed the copyright office to remove Strong's name from the song, claiming that he was “erroneously listed” as a co-author. Under the law, he had three years to contest the change, but there was an important Catch-22. The copyright office has no obligation to inform authors of such changes, and he did not know about it.

There are some additional twists and turns to the story. For example, when the copyright was renewed in 1987, Strong's name was restored, but then removed the following year. (He didn't know about those changes either.)

The song has made a pile of what Mr. Strong wanted. It was covered by other artists, including the Beatles; it appeared on film soundtracks, in a Broadway play, and in television commercials. Strong was a one-hit wonder, retired from the music business, and spent most of his life working in an auto plant. In 2009, he suffered a stroke. Now 72, he lives in a retirement home and is unable to pay his rent or medical bills. He says he also wants to set the record straight and receive proper credit for his composition.

Legal experts say he has little chance of success due to the statute of limitations. If this story were to receive more publicity, I suppose there's always a chance that the multimillionaire Berry Gordy, Jr., could be publicly embarrassed into doing the right thing.

This article is cross-posted from my music blog, The Blues and the Abstract Truth.

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The Whitest Kids in Town

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

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.

Do We Still Need the Voting Rights Act? (Does a Bear Shit in the Woods?)

Last week, at the very moment President Obama was unveiling a statue of Rosa Parks at the Capitol, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court was expressing its determination to undo one of the signature achievements of the civil rights era—the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965, which prohibits “denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”

Dick Gregory at a Voting Rights Act rally on February 27
Photo by SEIU International

The challenge, Shelby County v. Holder, is to Section 5 of the VRA, which requires all or part of 16 states with a history of racial discrimination to clear in advance with the Justice Department any changes in their election laws that might affect the right of racial minorities to vote. Localities that have not had a VRA challenge to their laws for ten years can “bail out” from Section 5—that is, they are no longer required to obtain preclearance. Like the rest of the country, they come under the default option, Section 2.

The good news about Section 2 is that it only requires the plaintiff to prove a discriminatory effect, rather than discriminatory intent. Discriminatory intent is almost impossible to prove, since elected officials seldom publicly admit an intention to violate the law. But the bad news about Section 2 is that you can only challenge voting discrimination after the fact, when the damage has already been done. It is the preclearance provision in Section 5 which gives the VRA its real power by shifting the burden of proof onto those who would change the law to demonstrate that the change does not have discriminatory impact.

Shelby County v. Holder was brought forward by the Project on Fair Representation, a conservative legal organization that is funded exclusively by Donors Trust, which also contributes to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity, and Americans for Tax Reform. While contributions to Donors Trust are anonymous, its supporters are suspected to be a who's who of wealthy conservatives, including the Koch brothers. Project on Fair Representation received $1.2 million from the Donors Trust between 2006 and 2011.

Shelby County, Alabama, is challenging Section 5 on two somewhat inconsistent grounds. First, they are saying that voting discrimination against African-Americans is no longer a problem in the South. It seldom happens. Secondly, they are saying that this thing that seldom happens also happens in the rest of the country as well, and therefore, Section 5 discriminates against the states that are subject to its provisions.

Both of these claims are empirical questions. How many cases have been brought against states and communities under the VRA from 1965 to the present? Has this number changed over time? How does the number of cases among the regions subject to Section 5 compare to the number of cases in the rest of the country? The only non-empirical question raised by the case is how many cases of racial discrimination would be few enough to justify abandoning Section 5.

The VRA has been reauthorized by Congress four times, most recently in 2006, when it was renewed for 25 years. At that time, Congress held 21 hearing over 10 months, compiling 21,000 pages of testimony on voting discrimination. The VRA renewal passed by a vote of 98-0 in the Senate and 390-33 in the House, suggesting that Congress at least was persuaded that will still need the VRA.

The best source of data on violations of the VRA is the research of Morgan Kousser, who has compiled an exhaustive list of 4,141 voting rights cases. Of these, 90%, and 93.4% of successful challenges (those which resulted in a judgment of discrimination), occurred in jurisdictions covered by Section 5. This is not surprising, since you can only bring a Section 5 challenge in those localities. More persuasive, however, is the fact that 83.3% of the successful Section 2 cases, which can be filed anywhere in the country, came from jurisdictions subject to Section 5 oversight. (By the way, there have been 20 violations of the VRA in Shelby County since 1975, the most recent having occurred in 2008.)

Chief Justice Roberts turned the relatively clear question before the Court into a confusing abstraction by asking the Justice Department lawyer whether he thought “the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North.” (Roberts was referring to individual racism, or racial prejudice, rather than institutional racism.) There are a number of reasons why this is the wrong question.

• Individual racism is difficult to measure. It can be measured in several different ways which vary in their subtlety. In general, the more transparent the question and the more consciously controllable the answer, the less prejudice there will appear to be.
• Prejudice is an attitude while discrimination is a behavior. For a variety of reasons, social psychologists have found the correlation between attitudes and behavior to be fairly weak. In other words, people say one thing and do another.
• It is not the behavior of all citizens of the South or North that is at issue. It is the behavior of their elected representatives. Citizens influence their representatives indirectly, and often only after the fact.
• Voting discrimination can be motivated by many other goals in addition to personal prejudice, i.e., a desire to obtain a partisan advantage for one's political party.

Now would seem to be a particularly bad time to overturn Section 5. The increasing racialization of politics since the 2008 election has resulted in a greater concentration of the most prejudiced Americans in the Republican party, the majority party in most of the Section 5 jurisdictions. The ability of Republicans to win national elections is threatened by demography—by the greater number of young people and minorities in the voting pool. As a result, they have been attempting more sophisticated voter suppression methods. As Ari Berman reports, six of the nine states fully covered under Section 5 passed new statewide voting restrictions affecting minorities after 2010: voter ID laws (Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia), restrictions on voter registration (Alabama and Texas), and limits on early voting (Georgia).

Only one third of the noncovered jurisdictions have passed voter suppression laws since 2010. Of course, that's still too many, as Pennsylvania residents know all too well. One of the more reliable ways of discouraging voting, creating long waiting lines at the polls, disproportionately affects Black and Latino voters, and to my knowledge has never been challenged by the VRA. If anything, we need to expand the scope of Section 5 of the VRA to include all the states and to include all strategies that have a discriminatory effect on voting.

Post Script

By now, you have probably heard about Justice Scalia's reference to the VRA as “the perpetuation of racial entitlement.” This was initially interpreted to mean that voting is, for Blacks at least, a privilege rather than a right. However, if we look at his remarks in context, a different agenda emerges.

Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political process. I don't think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act. And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity unless—unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution. . . .It's—it's a concern that this is not the kind of a question you can leave to Congress.

Scalia seems to be saying that Congress cannot be trusted not to pander to political correctness. Therefore, it is up to wiser men like himself to overrule their judgment. This is a strange argument coming from someone who has previously argued against judicial activism, or legislating from the bench. But Scalia has never let the Constitution get in the way of his political ideology. In this respect, he has become an even greater embarrassment to the country than Justice Thomas, who at least has the good sense to keep his mouth shut.

On Queue

As I've previously written, one of the most effective ways to suppress voter turnout is to create long waiting lines at the polling place so that many potential voters will leave in frustration. This method has long been used to discourage voting in minority areas and around college campuses. It can be done by not having enough polling places or voting machines in heavily populated areas, or by creating procedural delays, such as requiring I.D. checks, but not having enough poll workers to carry out these operations efficiently.

This method of voter suppression is insidous for a couple of reasons. First, unlike other voter suppression efforts, it leaves no traces. There is no way to accurately count the number of discouraged voters. Secondly, the public often blames the victim and argues that if discouraged voters had only been more patient, there would have been no problem. Needless to say, this ignores the fact that many people have other obligations, such as work and child care, and cannot afford to spend hours in line at the polling place.

This problem is finally receiving some of the attention it deserves. The New York Times reports the results of a survey by political scientist Charles Stewart showing that blacks and Hispanics wait longer in line than whites. The survey was conducted over the internet by YouGov/Polimetrix. They contacted 10,200 people, 200 from each state and the District of Columbia, for a survey on “the quality of the voting experience.” The average self-reported wait time was 14 minutes. Here are the differences by race:

Race	Waiting time
White	12.7 minutes
Hispanic	20.2 minutes
Black	20.2 minutes

They also found significant differences by size of county, with people from larger counties—that is, urban areas—waiting longer. There were large differences by state, with Vermont having the shortest average wait time (2 minutes) and Florida the longest (45 minutes).

Is this a representative sample? YouGov/Polimetrix is a polling organization that is increasingly popular with social scientists. They provide opt-in internet survey panels. People volunteer to participate in internet surveys. They are notified by email when their participation is requested. For each completed survey, they receive points exchangeable for prizes such as movie tickets and gift cards. A recent study suggests that their results are as valid as more expensive telephone surveys, primarily because of recent declines in public willingness to participate in telephone surveys. While you might think that their volunteers would be higher in political interest than the average person, YouGov/Polimetrix actively recruits low interest respondents and can statistically weight its results to correct for this and other types of unrepresentativeness.

Another response to this survey might be, “They are lying.” That is, critics might speculate that African- and Hispanic-Americans deliberately exaggerate their wait times in order to claim the status of victims of discrimination. I doubt whether the wait time issue is sufficiently politicized to produce this type of bias, but if it is, you could claim that whites might also exaggerate their wait times in order to deny that they are beneficiaries of discrimination.

The Stewart study focuses attention of Florida, whose average wait time was 11 minutes longer than the second worst location, D. C. The Orlando Sentinal recently commissioned an engineering professor, Ted Allen, to estimate the number of Floridians who left without voting on Election Day, 2012. Dr. Allen has developed a mathematical model which predicts turnout suppression from parameters such as number of registered voters, number of voting machines, ballot length, etc. It was originally developed to measure voter suppression near the Ohio State campus in 2004. Although the model is too mathematically complex for me to understand, it is published in peer-reviewed journals.

One of Allen's more important discoveries is that you can predict turnout suppression from the number of hours the polls have to stay open after closing time. For each additional hour the polls stay open, turnout is suppressed by about 4.8%. This allows you to estimate the number of discouraged voters in each precinct. If you then assume that the discouraged voters would have voted for the candidates in the same proportion as those who actually voted at that location, you can estimate the number of votes lost by each candidate.

Based on the sample of precincts he analyzed, Allen estimated that 201,000 Floridians left in frustration on Election Day, which is 2.3% of the number of votes cast. He predicts that 108,000 of these votes would have gone to Obama and 93,000 to Romney, so Obama's margin of victory would have been 15,000 votes greater had these people voted. Obama carried the state by 74,309 votes.

There are many remedies for long waiting lines, including making Election Day a holiday, expanding early voting times, and ensuring that the number of polling places is proportional to the population. It is outrageous that, in many states, one party controls voting procedures and manipulates them to serve their interests. There is speculation that President Obama will call for voting reform in the State of the Union address. However, as long as Republicans continue to benefit from voter suppression, it is unlikely that reform legislation will get through our gridlocked Congress.

Get the Lead Out, Part 2

Part 1 of this post concerns the relationship between lead in the environment and the rate of violent crime. Please read it before continuing.

The lead hypothesis helps us to understand additional facts about violent crime. For example, the crime rate has been higher in urban areas, probably due to the greater concentration of motor vehicles in large cities. Now that lead has been removed from gasoline, the crime rates in big and small cities have converged. The lead hypothesis also sheds light on black-white differences in crime. Black children have blood lead levels that are on average 50% higher than white children, since African-Americans typically live in inner-city locations where traffic is dense and there is less pressure on slumlords to clean up the lead in their buildings.

Of course, there will be resistance to the lead hypothesis from the criminologists, who think of crime as a sociological rather than an ecological problem. The law enforcement establishment would like to claim that police procedures, such as those that follow from the broken windows hypothesis, or the fact that we are putting more people in jail for longer times are responsible for the change.

Although the amount of lead in the environment has dropped, we are far from rid of this toxic element. Lead paint can still be found around the windows of older homes. Where it is highly concentrated in the soil, it must be removed. Prevention is always superior to remediation, especially when the behavior in question causes significant human suffering. However, lead abatement is worth doing on economic grounds alone. Drum cites estimates that replacing old windows and cleaning up lead saturated soil would cost $20 billion per year for 20 years. He assumes that this would reduce crime an additional 10%, which would save $150 billion per year. He also adds $60 billion per year for the higher income children would have had their intelligence not been reduced by lead. These figures are speculative, but if correct, that's a net savings of almost $200 billion per year. To put that in perspective, President Obama's proposal to increase the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 would save the government $24 billion per year—although it would cost seniors at lot more, since they would have to buy private insurance.

As David Roberts has pointed out, the history of lead abatement is typical of how we deal with many other environmental pollutants. In this country, corporations are permitted to introduce potentially toxic substances into the environment without first proving that they are safe. In other words, we ignore the precautionary principle. Once the substance is in use, it is up to the public to prove that it is harmful in order to have it banned. The university scientists and public interest groups that might do the necessary research are typically underfunded, and the burden of proof that they must meet is extraordinarily high. Corporate polluters generate as much confusion as they can about the scientific evidence in order to forestall regulation, and exaggerate the economic costs of making necessary changes. Meanwhile, people are getting sick and dying. If the corporations are finally forced to remove the pollutant, the costs almost always turn out to be much lower than predicted, and the benefits much greater. As a final step, the corporations responsible for the pollution take out television ads congratulating themselves for making the changes that they so strongly resisted.

Don't Forget Not to Vote

The lack of accurate knowledge of the likely effect of Pennsylvania's voter ID law on election turnout has been frustrating. Estimates of the percentage of citizens lacking ID vary considerably because they are inferred indirectly from large public data bases. It's obvious that the best way to find the answer is to interview a random sample of Pennsylvania voters and ask them directly whether they have the identification required by the law.

Fortunately, a survey was commissioned by the plaintiffs in Applewhite, et al. v. the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, an ongoing legal case brought in Commonwealth Court by a coalition of groups that are challenging the law. It was conducted by Dr. Matt Barreto, a survey researcher from the University of Washington. Dr. Barreto's report is available online, along with appendixes containing the wording of the questions and the tables of results.

The survey was conducted by telephone using random digit dialing, which ensures that all telephone numbers—listed or unlisted—have an equal chance of being chosen. A sample of 1285 people was obtained, 78% of them from landline exchanges and the remainer from cell phones. Since the impact of the law on Black and Hispanic voters was of special interest, they were deliberately oversampled from commercially-available lists, which should improve the accuracy of the estimates for these subgroups. The survey has a margin of error of +/-2.7%. That means that if 50% of the respondents say their favorite color is red, then 95% of the time the true percentage who prefer red will be between 47.3% and 52.7%.

34.6% of those who answered the phone agreed to participate in the survey. Since about 30% of the calls were not answered (in three tries), the response rate—the percentage of those called who completed the survey—was 24.2%. I started doing research when people seldom screened their calls and were more willing to answer research questions, so this response rate seems low to me. However, a response rate of 20-30% is considered acceptable by contemporary standards.

All of the respondents were asked as many questions as necessary to determine whether they had a valid photo ID under the law in their possession—either a current driver's license or any one of ten other acceptable forms of ID. To be valid, the ID has to have an expiration date and be issued in their current legal name. The major results were:

1. 14.4% of eligible voters (1,364,433 people) lack a valid photo ID under the law. Looking only at registered voters, it is 12.8%, and 12.6% of those who voted in 2008.
2. 37.3% of eligible voters, 34.3% of registered voters, and 34.2% of 2008 voters don't even know that the voter ID law exists.
3. 97.8% of eligible voters, 98.8% of registered voters, and 98.7% of 2008 voters believe they have a valid ID. Comparing these figures to the percentage who actually have a valid ID shows that many people are mistaken and unlikely to do anything about it before election day.
4. If you don't have a valid ID, in order to get one you need proof of citizenship, proof of address, and a social security card. 27.6% of those who do not have a valid ID will be unable to obtain one before election day because they lack one or more of those documents.

The impact of the law on the election depends on the differences among demographic subgroups in eligibility to vote. The following data are for eligible voters, although the differences are quite similar for registered voters or those who voted in 2008.

1. Gender. Women (17.2%) are more likely to lack a valid photo ID than men (11.5%).
2. Age. People over 75 (17.8%) and under 35 (17.9%) are more likely to lack ID than middle-aged people (10.3%).
3. Race. 14% of Whites, 13.2% of Blacks and 18.3% of Hispanics lack a valid ID. The nonsignificant difference between Whites and Blacks was a surprising finding.
4. Education. Voters without a high school diploma (18.5%) were most likely to lack ID. As education increases, lack of ID declines. Only 8.3% with a college degree lack ID.
5. Income. Income is the strongest predictor of lack of ID. 22% of those making less than $20,000/year lack valid ID, compared to only 8.2% of those making more than $80,000/year.
6. Region. Voters living in Allegheny—that is, Pittsburgh and vicinity—(18.7%) and Philadelphia (17.8%) Counties are less likely to have ID than those living in the rest of the state.

In 2008, Barack Obama defeated John McCain by 10.3% in Pennsylvania, which was considered a landslide. Early indications are that this year's election will be much closer. Obviously, disenfranchising 14% of eligible voters can have a considerable impact on the outcome, especially since almost all the subgroups that are more likely to lack ID currently show a preference for the President.

The survey shows that, in passing this voter suppression law, Pennsylvania's Elephants have succeeded beyond their wettest dreams. When House Majority Leader Mike Turzai told his fellow Elephants that the law would “allow” a Romney victory in November, this was no idle boast. A better word might have been “ensure.”

Prior to this month's hearing in Commonwealth Court, the Corbett administration agreed in a court document that it knows of no cases of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania, and does not anticipate any in November. However, they argue that evidence of fraud is unnecessary to justify the law. It is sufficient that legislators can “imagine” the possibility of fraud.

If the court allows this outrageously bad law to stand, it's time for Pennsylvania's citizens to grab their torches and pitchforks and begin the long march to Harrisburg.

Addendum

I'm glad to see that the plaintiffs are thinking about one of the less obvious but more important impacts of the voter ID law—its tendency to slow down lines at the polls. Long waiting lines at the polls are already a problem in many areas of Pennsylvania, especially in low income areas and near college campuses. Unfortunately, if people give up and go home rather than face long queues, there will be no public record of the fact that they have been discouraged from voting by the law.

Protesting Too Much

It's always good for a laugh. Some prominent homophobe, usually from the fields of government or religion, is caught soliciting or having sex with another man. Homophobia is serious, however, sometimes leading to murder and other hate crimes. A new series of four studies by Netta Weistein and five colleagues, conducted in the U. S. and Germany, appears to confirm what gay rights advocates have long suspected—that homophobes and anti-gay activists are secretly attracted to the same sex. This study is gated, but you can get a lot of information about it here.

To present this study, I need to talk about subliminal priming. First of all, priming refers to the process by which a recent experience increases the availability of a concept. For example, if you had recently seen or heard the word “eat” and I asked you to fill in the blank in “S O _ P,” you'd be likely to say the word “soup.” But if you had recently seen the word “wash,” you'd fill in “soap.” Subliminal means below the level of conscious awareness. Priming can occur subliminally as well as consciously. For example, if I showed you a picture on a computer screen for 4/1000 of a second, you'd see a flash of light and be unable to identify the object in the photo. But it might influence your behavior. In one study, researchers subliminally primed photos of smiling or angry faces, followed by a picture of a Chinese ideograph (or letter). Participants were asked how much they liked each ideograph. Those ideographs primed with happy faces were liked more than those with no prime, and those primed with angry faces were liked less.

Priming can have socially important consequences. Priming the concept of money causes people to work harder on difficult tasks, but to be less helpful to other people and donate less to charity. In 2008, when white students from Florida were shown a subliminal prime of a confederate flag, they indicated they were less likely to vote for Barack Obama (but not any other candidates).

The studies by Weinstein and her colleagues attempted to measure whether people experienced conflict between their implicit and explicit sexual orientation. The measure of implicit sexual orientation—the tricky part—involved subliminal priming. Subjects were shown slides of four words (“gay,” “straight,” “homosexual” and “heterosexual”) and of same-sexed or opposite-sexed couples. They were asked to classify each word or image as either gay or straight as quickly as possible. Before each trial, they were subliminally primed with either the word “me” or “others.” Those participants who showed more rapid identification of gay stimuli when they were preceded by the word “me” than by “others” (and a slower identification of straight stimuli when preceded by “me” than by “others”) were assumed to have an implicit attraction to the same sex. Participants were also asked their sexual orientation, and the measure of interest was the discrepancy between their implicit and explicit sexual orientation.

If you're troubled by this measure of implicit sexual orientation, one of the studies used a more face valid measure of implicit attraction and obtained the same results. In this measure, subjects were left alone and free to browse same-sex and opposite-sex photos. It was assumed that differences in exposure time would indicate their implicit sexual orientation.

The study looked at both the causes and effects of a conflict between one's implicit and explicit sexual orientation. The effect was predicted to be homophobia. Overt homophobia was measured by questionnaires that looked at such things as participants' self-reported attitudes toward gays, their attitudes toward social policies affecting gay people, and the discriminatory bias of assigning harsher punishments to gay people than straight people for the same offense. Their measure of implicit hostility toward gays also involved subliminal priming. Participants were either primed with the word “gay” or not, and were asked to complete blanks such as “K I _ _.” Filling in more aggressive words such as “kick” after the gay prime was taken as an indicator of covert hostility to gays. Both the overt and covert measures showed greater homophobia among the sexually conflicted participants.

This finding supports one of Sigmund Freud's unconscious defense mechanisms against anxiety, reaction formation. In reaction formation, people experience anxiety caused by an unconscious desire to engage in some behavior that is unacceptable to them, such as having gay sex. They defend against this anxiety by engaging in exaggerated behaviors that imply just the opposite of their unconscious feelings, such as becoming an anti-gay crusader.

These researchers were interested in the child rearing practicies that produced conflicts between implicit and explicit sexual orientation. The studies tested a proposition from Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory which asserts that controlling parents will produce children who are less in touch with their feelings than than parents who encourage autonomy. This is similar to the distinction between authoritarian vs. democratic child-rearing. Participants were asked questions about their family such as “I felt controlled and pressured in certain ways,” or “I felt free to be who I am.” Those participants who reported coming from authoritarian families were more likely to experience conflict in their sexual orientation.

The researchers also asked participants about their parents' homophobia. Homophobic fathers (but not mothers) were most likely to produce young adults with this discrepancy in their sexual orientation. Here's a video explaining the studies by one of the authors, Richard Ryan.

What are we to make of these studies? They are heavily dependent on questionnaire measures, which are subject to distortion when dealing with sensitive subjects. I'm particularly skeptical of college students' reports of their parents' child-rearing practices. I'm more impressed with the subliminal priming measures, both of implicit same-sex attraction and covert hostility to gay people. If subsequent studies find a consistent association between these two measures, we may have to acknowledge that Freud got something right.

There is another study by Henry Adams and others that supports the association of male same-sex attraction with homophobia. The participants were college men who were previously classified as high or low in homophobia by their answers to questions such as “I would feel nervous being in a group of homosexuals.” Subjects then watched three types of hard core pornography: heterosexual, gay male and gay female. Sexual arousal was measured using a plethysmograph, a rubber strain guage which fits tightly around the penis and measures its circumference. (Isn't research fun?) Both the groups high and low in homophobia showed increases in arousal to the heterosexual and lesbian videos, but only the homophobes were also aroused by the gay male videos.

Maybe these folks are on to something.

Breathing While Black

Beginning ten years ago, social psychologists did a series of studies looking at the consequences of our cultural stereotypes about African-American men and violence. A study by Joshua Corell and others called “The Police Officer's Dilemma” is typical. White participants were shown slides of young men standing in public places, such as a park or a city sidewalk. Half of the pictures were of black men and half of white men. Within each racial group, half of the men were holding handguns and the others were holding some innocuous object, such as a cell phone or a soda can. The participants had a half-second to press one of two keys labeled “shoot” or “don't shoot.” The researchers counted the number of errors—either not shooting an armed man or shooting an unarmed man.

The results showed evidence of bias. When the men in the photos were white, the participants made the same number of errors regardless of whether the men were armed or not. However, when the men were black, they made fewer errors when they were holding a gun, and more errors when they were not. In other words, they were more likely to “shoot” a black man than a white man, both when he was armed and when he was not.

This is an example of automatic or fast thinking, which Kahneman calls “a machine for jumping to conclusions.” Subsequent research showed that the results did not vary with personal prejudice. However, the participants showed a greater “shooter bias” when they were more aware of the cultural stereotype, that is, when they gave higher estimates of the percentage of Americans who saw black men as aggressive, dangerous and violent. Exposure to newspaper articles about black criminals also increases the size of the shooter bias.

The fact that this response tendency is automatic doesn't mean it can't be controlled. The shooter bias can be reduced through practice and with certain kinds of training, such as instructing participants to ignore the race of the person in the photo and to concentrate on the presence or absence of a gun.

This series of three videos (about 35 minutes total) featuring social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt deals with primarily unconscious racial biases. The study on weapons stereotypes is in the second segment, but I recommend them all. (You Tube will guide you through them.) Some of them are shocking, and will make it clear why social psychologists are unwilling to accept mass media assurances that prejudice is a thing of the past.

I think these studies are relevant to the killing of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin by Florida neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. Zimmerman says he felt threatened by Martin, and so far, the Sanford, FL police have accepted his claim that he acted in self defense. This defense is made possible by Florida's 2005 “stand your ground” law, which was written by the National Rifle Association. Variants of which have been enacted in 20 other states. The relevant section of the law reads as follows:

A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including 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 or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

This law does away with the longstanding legal doctrine that, when outside your home, there is a “duty to retreat” when confronted with a dangerous situation. It creates ambiguity about when a person is acting in self-defense. How can it be objectively determined that a person “reasonably believes” he or she is threatened? The studies of shooter bias suggest that people might sincerely believe themselves to be in danger when confronted with an unarmed black man. Even if the perpetrator is wrong, he or she may escape punishment if the mistake is “reasonable.”

The difficulty is compounded when there are no witnesses or the witnesses are friendly to the perpetrator. Who is able to contradict the shooter's self-report of his or her emotional state? Not the victim. He's dead. As a result, police and prosecutors may assume that they have little chance of obtaining a conviction in a jury trial.

From reading the accounts or this incident and listening to the 911 tape (see below), I doubt whether Zimmerman sincerely felt himself to be threatened. He pursued Martin even after the police told him not to. However, the reference in the law to “prevent(ing) the commission of a forcible felony” seems to encourage this type of vigilantism. When combined with Florida's lax gun laws, the “stand your ground” law allows armed, aggressive, and possibly paranoid people to pursue their fantasies of law enforcement and justify their behavior with after-the-fact claims of self-defense.

Justifiable homicides in Florida have tripled since the law went into effect. In 93 cases in which the defendant claimed self-defense under the new law, charges were dropped in 57 of them, and 7 others were acquitted by a jury. This law is irresponsible and should be repealed. If the shooter bias studies are to be taken seriously, the equal protection claise of the Fourteenth Amendment would seem to provide a basis for overturning them.

Legislative Fraud

When you vote on November 6, there may be an Elephant in the room.

The Pennsylvania Senate yesterday passed a voter ID law that will require voters to show photo identification when the go to the polls in November. It passed 26-23, with three Elephants breaking ranks with their party to vote against it. It is expected to pass in the Elephant-controlled House, and Governor Tom Corbett has said that he supports it. The ACLU of Pennsylvania has stated that the law is unconstitutional since it discriminates against the poor and the elderly. They have promised to challenge the law to prevent it from being implemented.

Here's a case where thinking slowly might help. If the Elephants are sincere, it's hard to find a clearer example of irrationality in the political process. Those who claim that voter fraud is real are usually referring to other types of irregularities that either don't involve actual voters, such as voting machine tampering, or don't involve actual fraud. The Brennan Center for Justice has thoroughly investigated cases of alleged fraud at the polls. Those that are not false rumors usually involve mistaken identity, clerical error, or unintentional violations by people who do not realize they are ineligible to vote. In a brief filed in an 2007 Indiana case, they state, “(N)ot one of the citations offered by Indiana or its allies refers to a proven example of a single vote cast at the polls in someone else's name that could be stopped by a pollsite photo ID rule.”

A bit of slow thought reveals why it is rare for unauthorized people to attempt to vote. It's a ridiculous way to try to affect an election. The perpetrator risks a $10,000 fine and up to five years in prison in order to cast a single extra vote. If ineligible persons had ever attempted to vote in numbers large enough to influence the outcome, it would surely have been detected.

Of course, it's disingenuous to pretend that the Elephants are unaware that voter ID bills are "a solution in search of a problem." Their real purpose is voter suppression. Voter ID laws have been enacted or are are pending in at least 26 states. As many as 5 million legitimate voters could be deterred from voting by these laws. And they discriminate against the elderly, the poor, minorities and young people—groups that typically vote for Jackasses. Nationwide, about 18% of seniors and 25% of African-Americans don't have photo ID. The partisan nature of this "debate" is revealed by the fact that recent votes in state legislatures have been almost completely along party lines.

The latest defense of the indefensible by proponents of the bill is the claim that it will alleviate fears of voter fraud.  But the only reason there are fears of voter fraud is their own disinformation campaign.

In one respect, Pennsylvania's voter ID law is less objectionable than those of most other states. It permits college students to use university ID cards as a valid photo ID for voting purposes. College students are likely to favor Obama by a large majority. How could the Elephants have let this happen?