Last week, liberals had a good laugh over National Review holding a symposium on black unemployment that didn't actually include any black people. Daniel Foster responded that NRO "doesn't do quotas." He later elaborated:
Admittedly, nobody wins when conservatives feel the need to start name-dropping minorities to prove their diversity bona fides; and trying to convey sarcasm via social media is a rookie mistake. So I'll take ownerhsip of all that. But c'mon, if you're reading this post, you either know who (National Humanities Medal-winning economist and NRO immortal) Thomas Sowell is, or you're Alan Colmes.
I agree with Foster -- there's no point to name-dropping, and there's nothing about being black that makes you particularly qualified to weigh in on the factors affecting the 16.5 percent black unemployment rate. Put another way, the problem with the NRO symposium speakers isn't that none of them are black. It's that none of them are particularly qualified to weigh in on black unemployment.
Roger Clegg is a lawyer whose interest in black unemployment appears to begin and end with fighting affirmative action. His hobbies include urging Congress not to restore voting rights for formerly incarcerated people (he works for the Orwellian named "Center for Equal Opportunity," by the way). Nicole Gelinas is a Manhattan Institute fellow whose work appears to be mostly focused on finance. Amity Shlaes wrote a book that conservatives like because it contradicts the established history about Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Depression.
Samuel Staley and Stephan Thernstrom have written about urban issues, poverty and race but as far as I know neither of them appear to have done much work on income inequality, and Staley's inference that black people lack an "entrepreneurial ethic" makes me think he's never been to a poor black neighborhood in his life. The general sense you get from reading their responses to criticism of the symposium is that this may be the first time they've really asked themselves why the black unemployment rate is so high.
At any rate, the sociology of urban black America is a very specific field of study in which many of the most respected minds -- Sudhir Venkatesh, Elijah Anderson, Glenn Loury, William Julius Wilson -- happen to be people of color. But it's not like there aren't a lot of white people who have done interesting work studying economic inequality and race, like say Katherine Newman or Richard Alba -- NRO just didn't pick any of them, in part because they're a conservative magazine looking for ideological consistency, and the pool of conservatives who have spent lots of time studying these issues is pretty shallow.
That's fine, but it's just amusing to see a magazine opposed to affirmative action exemplifying why such a policy might be needed. Rather than pick the most qualified minds on the subject, it seems like they went with people to whom the magazine has social and ideological ties, and those people happened to all be white. It's certainly good that NRO is treating an issue like black unemployment seriously, but the symposium itself is a pretty good example of something that affects black unemployment in the real world: how black people, even those with impeccable qualifications, get overlooked based on formal and informal social networks rather than simply not being right for the job.
-- A. Serwer
