Wednesday, June 02, 2010

The need for more discrimination

The MIDUS Study asked participants a series of questions about different types of discrimination that they been victims of over their lifetimes. These were summed to create a liftetime index.

We should expect black folks who experienced more discrimination to have suffered in terms of how much school they completed and what economic level they reached, right?

I correlated that index with completed years of education and a measure of current socioeconomic status for black respondents (N = 136). Recall that this is a sample of middle-aged people.


Correlations wth lifetime discrimination index

Education .17*
Socioeconomic Status .09 

Those who were more often victims of discriminatory acts tended to go further in school. The correlation with the socioeconomic level of one's job is also associated with more discrimination, but the relationship is not statistically significant. 

Moral of the story: if we want to help blacks move up, we need to discriminate against them more often.

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