White privilege overtakes institutional racism

In the standard MG mold, a comprehensive (and bar none for reference purposes) post mocking the spurious explanations for disparities in outcomes among members of different racial and ethnic groups references the phrase "institutional racism", noting that it seems to have been replaced by the (even more) amorphous "white privilege". Perspicacious writer, that MG. The percentage of English language books published in the US containing the phrases in question from 1950 through 2008 (the latest year for which data are available):

Hunting for institutional racism

M.G., author of Those Who Can See, has yet another tremendously data-packed post, this time on institutional racism (including a fun yeti metaphor). Like the terrifying shambling strider, it wreaks havoc and destruction wherever it treads, yet no one is ever able to pinpoint any hard evidence of its actual existence.

That doesn't stop us from writing about it, though. Using Ngram viewer, the percentage of published books in the US containing the phrase, from the sixties--1962 being the year of its inception--through 2008:

During the high crime crack war years, we began to forget about the renegade ronso, as making excuses for dangerous behavior that was suddenly hitting too close to home presumably fell out of favor. But once that straightened itself out, we set our sights back on the sasquatch, and we haven't taken them off him since.

' is not a valid character

Steve Sailer writes:

This would make a pretty good sketch comedy running joke -- L'qisjha Jones, Affirmative Action Arbiter -- as various people try to bluff their way past L'qisjha, each rejected with the same punchline.

That doesn't actually appear to be a given black name (at least not yet), but it reminds me of a funny thing that happened a couple of years ago. At the company I work for, we were using a new in-house program that had been working fine, without incident, for a couple of months, but then ended up having to send it back to our programmers for a rework when we discovered, thanks to a new client named L'Tisha, that it wouldn't recognize an apostrophe in the Name: field. Even though we're a privately held company, we of course did the prudent thing and incurred the expense of making the program change rather than running the risk of someone--perhaps L'Tisha!--accusing us of being racists.

White, Caucasian, or Anglo?

Take lessons in class and character from Steve Sailer. He graciously praises Andrew Sullivan, who has shown no compunction in the past for nailing people to the wall for political incorrectness in the past, for a qualified public defense of HBD realities with regards to average IQ differences between different groups. That's laudable intellectual leadership on Steve's part.

Facetiously, Steve finishes that post with the following:

In 1972, it looked like the rank order of average intelligence was Oriental, Caucasian, Chicano, and black. But, in 2011, of course, we now see from endless studies and real world examples that the actual rank ordering appears to be Asian, non-Hispanic white, Latino, and African-American. So, everything has changed!

"Asian" has been preferred over "Oriental" since the late 1930s, but the gap was narrower in 1973 than it is today. "Black" has always been and is still today more common than "African-American", though the gap has been closing over the last two decades. I've not traced the usage history of "Chicano", so I can't comment there.

What about "White" versus "Caucasian"? As far as I'm aware, the latter has never been the preferred term for referring to people of European descent in casual conversation--"white" always has been. Of course, always extends back to around 2000 or so for me, and though it may slip my mind from time to time, history in fact began before then.

To gauge the popularity of each term, in addition to "Anglo", the other recognizable descriptor for those of European descent (well, those who speak English, anyway), the percentage of total articles in The New York Times containing the terms "Whites", "Caucasians", and "Anglos" (capitalization doesn't matter), is graphed below (via NYT's handy archival site), by decade from 1851 to 1959, and by year after that:


The "Caucasians" and "Anglos" lines are not missing--they both run flat along the bottom of the graph for the entire 160 year period being considered. "Whites" is orders of magnitude more common than either of the others and has been since at least Lincoln's presidency. I could remove "Whites" from the graph and just contrast "Caucasians" and "Anglos" to bring them into better focus, but both consistently get only a handful of articles each year (around 11 and 7, respectively) compared to "Whites", which gets anywhere from several hundreds to thousands, so there's little point in doing so.

"White" is such a bland adjective or noun to use for a person, nearly as bland as the people it represents. This is, of course, in contrast to the various terms used to describe non-whites that have come in and gone over the years, a diversity in descriptors that parallels the vibrancy of non-white cultures, compared to the predictability of white 'culture', if we can even call it that!

Parenthetically, "Caucasian" tends to appear in articles mentioning Asians, while "Anglos" travels alongside Hispanics/Latinos, especially those involving Texas in some way. The latter is not surprising, since Anglo is (at least partially), like Hispanic, a linguistic characterization. It seems unnecessarily confusing to use "Caucasian" and "Asian" repeatedly in the same article though, when "White" and "Asian" would make distinctions easier, but alas, it is what it is.

Colored people and blacks, Hispanics and Latinos, Asians and Orientals

In putting together a follow-up to the previous post tracking the descriptors for blacks through time, I checked the first few pages of return results to see if "colored" would be used as an adjective to describe something other than race. This article on an anniversary for the "colored home" grabbed my attention as a possible false-positive, but it's genuine. The colored house was apparently a sort of refuge for black street rats.

Yet there are surely a handful of returns having nothing to do with race. Although their significance may be minor, to be on the safe side, I elected to track the phrase "colored people", rather than just "colored". For comparative purposes with other descriptors, the unadultered plural of the noun is optimal, but "coloreds" is rarely used at the expense of "colored people", "colored folks", "colored voters", etc. Consequently, the "colored" adjective to identify those of African descent is relatively underrepresented below.

The following graphs show the percentage of all NYT articles written first by decade (through the 1950s) and then by year (from 1960 on), containing the indicated word or phrase.


Unlike "negroes", which is abruptly swapped out for "blacks" in the late sixties, "colored people" peaks ahead of the civil rights' era but subsequently experiences a gentle but steady decrease in use after that. It appears to stabilize in the eighties, but by that time, many, if not most, articles contained "colored people" as part of the NAACP ("National Association of Colored People"). By the beginning of last decade, the phrase had finally all but fell out of use. As it does not have the same perceived connotations of "negroes", once the popular lexicon gave primacy to "blacks", those who had come of age when describing a black man as colored was perfectly acceptable did not feel compelled to adjust their working vocabularly accordingly. Although they're in the twilight of their lives, there are still people who use "colored" instead of "black" or "African-American". My grandmother, for instance, is one of them.

Going in, I had little sense of the historical patterns in nouns used to describe people from south of the border. "Latino" seems to be favored over "Hispanic" by the 'aggrieved' and their sympathizers--the former is usually delivered with the most emphatic Spanish accent possible, in contrast with the rest of the speaker's words. When I hear an NPR correspondent from Mexico City or Los Angeles articulating Latino as if he's speaking Spanish, I presume he's making it known he's one with the Latino people.


"Hispanic" is still the most common descriptor used, though the commonality of usage of the two may converge in the media over the next several years. While the number of articles devoted to blacks appears to be on the decline, the continued increase in the size of the Hispanic population means an increasing amount of coverage will be devoted to their special interests going forward.

I've never heard someone from the most populous continent described as an oriental except in fun. East Asians, especially, tend to be too well-adjusted and successful to take offense at being referred to in such an antiquated way. A silly antic of mine is to introduce an Asian to someone else by earnestly saying (with emphasis on the word "oriental"), "This is my oriental friend, Kunal. He's from somewhere in Asia."


The reason I've not witnessed it used otherwise is because since the time of the Korean War, "Asian" became the noun of choice. It is in 1949 when "Asians" marginally overtakes "Orientals", but just a year later, the former is used twice as frequently. The gap has never come close to closing since then.


The aggregation of all non-whites is not novel. "Minorities" has been part of the media lexicon since the Great Depression. It predictably hit a growth spurt in the late sixties, but then dips again during the Reagan administration, shoots up again at the end of the decade, drops once more in the mid-nineties, hits another high at the turn of the century, and then sinks back to where it was before the Civil Rights movement got into gear. Hopefully someone more learned than me can offer a cogent explanation for the roller coaster.

The final graph shows the sum of all descriptors used for each of the three major minority (heh) groups--blacks, Hispanics, and Asians--as well as "minorities" as a whole. There is a bit of double-counting as a consequence of newspaper writers' attempts at elegant variation ("blacks" and "African-Americans" being used in the same article), but the relative change over time in attention devoted to the three groups is the graph's purpose.

Compared to the ten years preceding it, the first decade of the 21st century appears to have been mild in the amount of media attention devoted to non-whites. Blacks got a boost during the 2008 Presidential election, but in 2009 the trend of gentle decline resumed. This is, of course, just one way of arriving at a rough estimate of media focus over time, and it still may seem regrettably excessive, but it's a reasonable measure. Only attention to Hispanics seems to be holding firm, as media types continue to wait for the Hispanic tidal wave that is sure to be arriving soon.

Negro? No longer. Black? Bye bye? African-American? Affirmed!

After Harry Reid's remarks about Barack Obama's favorable political utility were revealed, my brother told me that he'd heard a local conservative talk radio host predictably sputtering over the majority leader's comments, which served to illustrate leftist racism and hypocrisy. What Reid said of Obama:

[Reid] was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama --
a 'light-skinned' African American 'with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.

After apologizing to the President, he hastily spread his contrition around:

An aide to the senator told CNN that Reid offered apologies to several prominent African-Americans, including House Democrats Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and Barbara Lee of California; the Rev. Al Sharpton; CNN political contributor and Democratic strategist Donna Brazile; NAACP chairman Julian Bond; and the head of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Wade Henderson.

My reaction was similar to Ward Connerly's. The popular right does those who hold freedom of expression in the highest regard no favors by being leftist-lite in their hysterical seizures over such inconsequential remarks. The next Trent Lott episode has now been cued, and the stupid omertas that support the perpetual fear people have of saying the 'wrong thing' are strengthened instead of sustaining welcome cracks in their foundations. A little candidness is refreshing. Everything Reid said is at least plausible, and in my judgment objectively true.

While many whites pay scant attention to the social consequences of differences in black skin tone, it's salient in the black community. But even in popular culture, melanin matters. Caramel-colored black women tend to rise to the top (Beyonce, Rihanna). When the rare jet does so, it's often by way of association (Michelle Obama) or through sheer merit (the Williams' sisters). And there are reasons nearer the ground for why people tend to associate lighter skin with greater competence. The following table shows the estimated mean IQ (converted from wordsum scores, under the assumption that the average black IQ is 85 with a standard deviation of 15) for three subgroups of black respondents as assessed by interviewers in 1982:

Skin tone	IQ
Light	87.2
Medium	86.4
Dark	81.5

As listening to the radio makes clear, black vocal inflections are usually easily detectable. Obama's strong frame and emphatic delivery are obvious political assets. If his public presence was akin to Ron Paul's, he wouldn't be in the White House.

Finally, "negro" is an antiquated but not necessarily derogatory term to use in describing people of African descent. The US Census uses it alongside "black" and "African-American", as older blacks apparently prefer it to the newer labels.

My brother was incredulous about the last point. I explained to him that "negro" used to be favored over "black". I wasn't sure when the swapping of acceptability occured, but guessed it was sometime in the seventies. Fortunately, Agnostic's clever method of tapping the New York Times' archives to gauge the popular presence of ideas, people, and phrases over time offers the chance for greater precision.

The following graph shows the percentage of total articles containing the word "negroes", "blacks", and "African-Americans" by decade from 1851 to 1959, and then by individual year thereafter*. The blue line tracks "negroes", the black line "blacks", and the red line "African-Americans":


There was a spike during the 1860s as the US Civil War was fought. A century later, focus again shifted to blacks as a separate group of Americans, and stayed there up through most of the previous decade. It's difficult to tell whether or not the decline in reference to blacks as a group has settled around 1 of 100 articles, or if it will drop further still. The decrease in usage may be due to the increasing attention given to Hispanics, leading to the substitution of "blacks" or "African-American" with the broader "minorities".

"Negro" was clearly the word of choice until 1969, the year of the 'culmination' of the black civil rights movement and the year following MLK's assassination. By 1972, "negro"--viewed as having an ugly association with slavery--had essentially fallen out of the respectable media's lexicon, thoroughly replaced by "black". The 20 to 30 articles using the word from that time are mostly referencing historical quotes from books or people.

In the late eighties, Teddy Roosevelt's dreaded hyphenated Americanism was given semantic legitimacy. Up to that point, it had never been used to describe American-born blacks. I was in preschool at the time, and given how inchoate politically correct phraseology doesn't seem to benefit from the most meticulous of record-keeping, I am not sure of the impetus for the third-generation descriptor. Please enlighten in the comments if you are able to [Xenophon has kindly done just that]. It looks as though "African-American" will assume primacy over "black" in the next few years.

Reid was thirty when "negro" went over the precipice. He grew up using it just as I use "black" to describe people today. God forbid that, in my seventies, I momentarily forget an update to the most current version of newspeak and say something I would've innocently said as a young adult. I hate political correctness.

GSS variables used: COLOR(1-2)(3)(4-5), WORDSUM

* The plural form of each term is used to avoid the problem of "black" as an adjective describing the color of something (other than human skin!). It seemed too arbitrary and tedious to run a string of phrases like "black man", "black woman", "black student", etc. The important thing is that each descriptor is plural, so the comparisons are not apples-to-oranges. Also, I made sure "African-Americans" would catch "African Americans" as well. It does.