Apples and oranges

I watched a good chunk of that new CNN mini-series: Black in America. It was intriguing. It was also not very contextual. It's been said that statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. This is true in sports, politics, and in our society at large.

Last year, Time magazine chose a statistician as one of its 100 most influential people of the year. What is his area of expertise? Baseball. That’s right. Why would he be chosen for a top 100 list of most influential folk? Certainly there are people making a bigger splash. His contributions in baseball have not only revolutionized how the sport is analyzed and who is recruited, and ultimately who wins more, but how we think about collecting relevant data.

Most people are well aware that a batting average has something to do with how often you hit the ball when it’s pitched to you. People who have never held a bat will refer to “batting a thousand.” However, this statistic is not meaningful all by itself. All sorts of other factors come in to play. How often does he get up to bat? The more often a batter is up, the better he gets. Who were the pitchers he faced? If he faced a string of good pitchers every game he batted, and another batter faced a bunch of weak pitchers, is his lower average indicative of his lesser skill or of chance? How do you measure that? Those are the kinds of questions Bill James began asking.

Now what if that’s applied to census statistics, both those collected by the US Government and CNN? Is it wise to compare all of the whites in America to all of the blacks and on no other basis? Is that even possible? The percentage of people claiming “other” on the US census as their race or ethnicity has climbed in recent decades. Even more people who identify themselves as one race or ethnicity are 1/16th or 1/4th or even half another race or ethnicity. Polls and census forms don’t dig into that. If you claim to be white, you get to be white. If you claim to be Hispanic, congratulations, you are!

This brings me to my next point. This program had lots of statistics comparing blacks to whites. Absent were any statistics that compared blacks to other minorities. If your goal is to investigate gaps in income and opportunities, as well as differences in cultural norms, might it be of benefit to examine the same categories for other minorities? This seems like a logical step to me.

Why not compare blacks to Japanese or Indians (immigrants from India) or Hispanics and Latinos? Blacks were not entirely liberated from slavery until 1865, and Jim Crow laws and civil rights were a slow process. But is it not helpful to acknowledge that as recently as the 1940’s, the US Government was placing Japanese American citizens in internment camps? Perhaps a look at the struggles faced by the Japanese in America over the last 60 years could be at least as beneficial as comparing blacks to whites over the last 60 years. What is the rate of unwed mothers in the Japanese community? At what rate do Japanese men and women attend college? What is the life expectancy of Japanese in America? What percentage of Japanese men are incarcerated? These questions may reveal just as much about racial disparity, but more importantly, may reveal how best to overcome it or move forward.

This brings me to my next point. Statistics do not speak for themselves. That’s why we employ people and not just calculators to determine their meaning. If I told you that 87% of the people that graduate from my Presbyterian seminary leave and work for Presbyterian churches, would you assume this school turns people into Presbyterians or would you assume most of them were Presbyterian before they came here?

Take a statistic like the one offered in Black in America last night: there are nearly twice as many black women in college as black men. Wow. That says a lot about black men in America, right? Maybe not. At the college I attended, and most [co-ed] colleges in America are following this trend more and more, there were almost twice as many females (of all races) as males. This statistic is far less indicative of a problem with black males than with the education and culture of all males in America. Some statistics are helpful, and some can be dismissed almost out of hand with a simple phrase I learned in middle school… duh.

One of the Harvard professors on the program last night, a young black man, offered his own theory that many scientists and academics ascribe to currently. Studies show that blacks have a lower life expectancy than whites in America. One of the possible contributing factors is due to salt retention. Those men that searched for and captured Africans to bring them over on rat-infested slave ships didn’t want human cargo that would use up all their water. The saltiness of your skin can tell you how well you retain water. If you retain water well, you’re more likely to need less of it and survive the ocean voyage. This is good news for your chances of living longer on a ship without water. However, this same genetic trait makes you more likely to develop hypertensive problems, heart-related health problems, which blacks die of more frequently than whites in America. The same trait that was essential to survival may well be one of the many reasons blacks do not live as long now.

Other traits that were valued in slaves may also have contributed to problems later on. In any species, including humans, if you mate for any other reason than scent, you lose advantages in resistance to disease and immunity. If you mate for one reason only (i.e. royal blood, money, fast cars, strength, large biceps or butt), you run even greater risk of health problems. This has to be taken into consideration.

This brings me to my final point. It’s been suggested that many genetic health problems would diminish if interracial dating and marriage were more widely practiced. This is, of course, yet unproven. However, the segment last night ended with discussion on the difficulty that black women face in finding black men to date. It was pointed out that 1 million more black women are employed than black men. Any woman who wants to date a man with a job is automatically at a disadvantage. There are also a dramatically high number of black men in incarceration or who were. The stigma of dating outside the racial or ethnic community is certainly strong. It remains strong particularly in Asian culture, religious Jewish culture, and is certainly not gone from white culture, although more prevalent in some communities.

However, maybe one of the first steps towards narrowing the “gaps” between races in test scores, incarceration rates, mortality, housing, and so forth may be to embrace interracial dialog and dating.

In 1967 Sydney Poitier starred in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. In 2005 Ashton Kutcher starred in a remake. The exact same tension and problems exist 38 years later. That’s not a statistic, but maybe it’s just as telling…