\doc\web\99\05\sailer.txt
From:           	steveslr@aol.com
To:             	h-bd@egroups.com
Date sent:      	Mon, 15 Mar 1999 22:05:12 -0000
Subject:        	[h-bd] Re: blacks in uk vs usa


Arthur Hu passed around an interesting Economist article on the status of
minorities in Britain. For example, blacks intermarry with whites at about
2-3 times the rate seen in the US (although the preponderance of black
man-white woman couples over white man-black woman couples is similar in
both countries). On the other hand, British blacks have achieved many
fewer high ranking jobs, and seem to do the worst in big corporations,
whereas American blacks tend to do best in big organizations. 




A few thoughts: Britain has done a fairly good job of socially integrating
Carribean black immigrants into the British working class. For example,
English decathalon gold medalist ("World's Greatest Athlete" of 1980 and
1984) Donovan Bailey, who has a black father and an English mother, is a
self-consciously proud pint-swilling, soccer-playing son of the English
working class. However, the working class in Britain is not exactly the
club you want to join if you want to get ahead in life. It inculcates a
host of anti-achievement syndromes seen mostly in the underclass in the
U.S., far more debilitating than the attitudes seen among white blue
collar workers in the U.S.




The high intermarriage/intercohabitation rate of black men (40%) in
England (both in absolute terms and relative to the lower interrmarriage
rate of their black sisters) is indicative of the sexual attractiveness of
black males to white females when there isn't the kind of feverish
opposition to black male-white female relationships so characteristic of
American history. Presumably, black immigrants to Britain came along too
late and in too small numbers to engender the kind of anti-miscegenation
immune reaction that occurred in the American South after the Civil War.




This higher degree of intermarriage and social integration of blacks in
Britain no doubt has hampered the development of black interest group
politics, which has lead to the relative paucity of anti-discrimination
and racial quota policies. That blacks do worst in big companies in the UK
is probably due to the historic power of unions in big British companies.
Unions exist to blunt competition for jobs, which certainly in the U.S. at
least has had a sizable negative impact on black jobseekers. For example,
the Economist cites a hilarious case of flagrant discrimination against
blacks in the hiring of truckdrivers at a Ford plant. Why did this occur?
Ford had let the immediate supervisors hire whomever they felt like with
no management supervision. When top management won't or (more typically,
due to union power) can't force employees to always try to maximize
stockholder wealth, then employees rape the company by hiring their own
friends, relatives, and other "people like us."!
 In general, the British economy has been less competitive than the US,
 with less emphasis on profit-maximization. That works against newcomers.




As we've discussed before, West Indian immigrants in the U.S. have
traditionally achieved more than African-Americans, so the relatively weak
accomplishments of West Indians in England has been something of a
puzzlement. Further, African levels of achievement in the West Indies vary
from island to island, with Barbados at the top and Jamaica and a few
small islands toward the bottom. While it's certainly important to
consider these kind of differences between the destination countries of UK
and USA, it would also be worth exploring exactly which West Indians
immigrated from the Carribean to the UK, which immigrated to the US, and
which stayed home on the islands. Immigrants are not necessarily
representative of a people. (For example, Mexican-Americans are
overwhelmingly mestizo and from Mexico's farmer/working class. Mexico's
pure white elite finds life in Mexico far too comfortable to consider
emigrating, while the pure Indians of the deep south are too downtrodden
to posses! s the self-confidence to try to start over in East L.A.) It
could be that more middle class West Indians emigrated to the US than to
the UK. It would also be worth exploring differences, if any, in degree of
white admixture. For example, Thomas Sowell claims that West Indian
immigrants to the US are darker on average than African-Americans, but
Gen. Powell, to refer to a sample size of one, is significantly lighter.
So, this question of the "mulattoness" of West Indians remains murky.




The references in the article to "Asians" are of course primarily to South
Asians. In the US, Indian immigrants have recently ascended to the top of
the heap. Asian Indians are now the highest income ethnic group in
America, ahead even of "Russians" (the Census Bureau doesn't track income
by religion, so "Russians" are the closest proxy for Ashkenazi Jews). In
the UK, South Asian economic performance has been more erratic. This is
probably due to immigration policies. In America, Asian Indians are
brain-drained from the IQ elite of all of India. In the UK, some South
Asians have been admitted for reasons of post-Imperial obligations rather
than due to the need of corporations for skilled workers. South Asians
came to the UK in dense enough numbers to form close-knit communities,
which enforce cultural norms that aren't all economically effective. In
the US, however, Indians tend to form merely networks far flung across the
leading universities, corporations, hospitals, consult! ing firms, and the
like. Finally, I think there a higher percentage of Moslem South Asians in
the UK than in the US. Hindus seem to be able to make the big leap to
Western modernity better than Moslems. I don't know why this is, but I
sense little among Hindus of the resentment of modernity so characteristic
of Moslems these days. 




Steve Sailer
http://members.aol.com/steveslr


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