Darrick Hamilton

From Dark to Light: Skin Color and Wages among African-Americans.

This paper develops and tests a theory, referred to as “preference for whiteness,” which predicts that the interracial (white-black) and intraracial wage gap widens as the skin shade of the black worker darkens. Using data drawn from the Multi City Study of Urban Inequality and the National Survey of Black Americans, we report evidence largely consistent with the theory. Moreover, we decompose the estimated interracial and intraracial wage gaps, and find that favorable treatment of lighter-skinned workers is a major source of interracial and intraracial wage differences as predicted by the theory.

Passing on blackness: Latinos, race, and earnings in the USA

One strategy to address the charge that previous statistical measures overestimate the degree of antiblack discrimination in the US labour market because cultural factors have been omitted, has been to control for culture and vary colour. The procedure is to examine labour market outcomes for all persons self-reporting their ancestry as Hispanic (or Latino) while comparing outcomes among them based upon their self-reported race. The results demonstrate that black Latinos, especially males, suffer substantial discriminatory losses in wages. However, there are two problems: (1) a very small proportion of Latinos self-report themselves as black and (2) controlling for culture by combining all persons with Latino ancestry, regardless of specific national origin, into the gross category of Hispanic is potentially unsatisfactory. In this paper, the Hispanic population is disaggregated by nationality using the 5% Public Use Micro Sample from the 1980 and 1990 censuses to compare outcomes by self-reported race. It is still found that male Latino blacks, regardless of their specific national subgroups, were subjected to significant wage discrimination. The paper also reports on studies that have used the Latino National Political Survey that demonstrates that Hispanics tend to self-identify as black at rates inconsistent with the ascriptive profile of the Latino population. It is explained why this suggests that Latinos who choose to self-report their race as black in the US censuses genuinely are likely to ‘look black’ by American norms.

Can ‘Baby Bonds’ Eliminate the Racial Wealth Gap in Putative Post-Racial America?

Despite an enormous and persistent black-white wealth gap, the ascendant American narrative is one that proclaims that our society has transcended the racial divide. The proclamation often is coupled with the claim that remaining disparities are due primarily to dysfunctional behavior on the part of blacks. In such a climate it appears the only acceptable remedial social policies are those that are facially race neutral. However, even without the capacity to redistribute assets directly on the basis of race, our nation still can do so indirectly by judiciously using wealth as the standard for redistributive measures. We offer a bold progressive child development account type program that could go a long way towards eliminating the racial wealth gap.

Bold Policies for Economic Justice

The U.S. is characterized by a longstanding pattern of large structural racial inequality that deepens further as a result of economic downturn. Although there have been some improvements in the income gap up until around the mid 1970s, the employment gap, and the racial wealth gap - two dramatic indicators of economic security - remains exorbitant and stubbornly persistent. We offer two race-neutral programs that could go a long way towards eliminating racial inequality, while at the same time providing economic security, mobility and sustainability for all Americans. The first program, a federal job guarantee, would provide the economic security of a job and the removal of the threat of unemployment for all Americans. The second program, a substantial child development account that rises progressively based on the familial asset positioning of the child’s parents, would provide a pathways towards asset security for all Americans regardless of their economic position at birth.

Measuring the Wage Costs of Limited English Issues With Using Interviewer Versus Self-Reports in Determining Latino Wages

Scholars have found that poor English proficiency is negatively associated with wages using self-reported measures. However, these estimates may suffer from misclassification bias. Interviewer ratings are likely to more accurately proxy employer assessment of worker language ability. Using self-reported and interviewer ratings from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, the authors estimate the impact of English proficiency on wages for men (n = 267) and women (n = 178) with Mexican ancestry residing in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Use of interviewer proficiency ratings suggests a larger and more gradational language penalty as fluency falls, and women face a stronger penalty than their male counterparts. Moreover, controlling for worker accent and skin shade does little to alter these effects.

A Tour de Force in Understanding Intergroup Inequality: An Introduction to Stratification Economics

This special edition of the Review of Black Political Economics provides a contribution to the growing, vital and intellectually rich field of stratification economics. Stratification economics is an emerging field in economics that seeks to expand the boundaries of the analysis of how economists analyze intergroup differences. It examines the competitive, and sometimes collaborative, interplay between members of social groups animated by their collective self-interest to attain or maintain relative group position in a social hierarchy. The collection of articles in this volume span both quantitative and qualitative approaches, geographical distances (Bangladesh, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Kenya, and the U.S.), types of intergroup disparity (class, race, ethnicity, tribe, gender, and phenotype), and outcomes associated with social stratification (property rights in identity, human capital, financial capital, consumer surplus, health, and labor market outcomes).

Skin Shade Stratification and the Psychological Cost of Unemployment: Is there a Gradient for Black Females?

The purpose of this paper is to formally evaluate whether the deleterious impact of unemployment on mental health increases as skin shade darkens for black women in the U.S. Using data drawn from the National Survey of American Life, we find strong evidence of a gradient on depression between skin shade and unemployment for black women. These findings are consistent with the premises of the emerging field of stratification economics. Moreover, the findings are robust to various definitions of skin shade. Unemployed black women with darker complexions are significantly more likely to suffer their first onset of depression than unemployed black females with lighter skin shade. While in some cases, lighter skinned black women appeared not to suffer adverse effects of unemployment compared to their employed counterparts, persons with dark complexions did not enjoy the same degree of protection from poor mental health.

The Color of Wealth in Boston

The widening wealth gap in the United States is a worrisome sign that millions of families nationwide do not have enough in assets to offer better opportunities for future generations. Wealth allows families to make investments in homes, in education, and in business creation. On the basis of data collected using the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color (NASCC) survey, we report that, when analyzed by race, wealth accumulation is vastly unequal. By means of the NASCC survey, researchers have collected, for the first time, detailed data on assets and debts among subpopulations, according to race, ethnicity, and country of origin — granular detail ordinarily unavailable in public datasets. In this analysis we focus on estimates for U.S. born blacks, Caribbean blacks, Cape Verdeans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans in the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Our analysis shows that with respect to types and size of assets and debt held, the data collected on white households and nonwhite households exhibit large differences. The result is that the net worth of whites as compared with nonwhites is staggeringly divergent.

Does a Foot in the Door Matter? White–Nonwhite Differences in the Wage Return to Tenure and Prior Workplace Experience

The theory of ability misperception posits that employers will offer greater rewards to whites than nonwhites for similar levels of prior experience (Proposition 1) but that racial/ethnic differences in the return to additional tenure or seniority with the current employer will be smaller (Proposition 2). To advance the existing empirical literature, this paper evaluates the validity of these propositions by using data on black, Latino, and white workers drawn from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality. The analysis is conducted separately for women and men and controls for a wider range of workplace setting descriptors than was used in previous studies. Our results offer support for Proposition 1 and for Proposition 2. We find that nonwhites, regardless of job setting, receive relatively poor returns to prior workplace experience (the lone exception is Latinas). Second, nonwhites typically receive greater wage gains for accumulating additional tenure than whites.

From a Tangle of Pathology to a Race-Fair America

When President Lyndon Johnson gave his June 4, 1965 he invoked a symbolic language that would seize the political moment and serve as a foundatino for subsequent policy. The Civil Rights Act had passed only a year earlier and Johnson, nothing that it is not “enough just to open the gates of opportunity,” told the black graduating class that Ameica needed “not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a result.” This call for “results” was a precursor to Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, a mandate for the enforcement of positive anti-discrimination measures in preferred positions of society, or “affirmative ation.”