The legacy of racism pervades the financial system to this day — African-Americans are still discriminated against on the basis of a long-disproven methodology.
Aug 31, 2020 (Medium.com)
In May 1896, Frederick L. Hoffman, a statistician at the Prudential Life Insurance Company, published a 330-page article in the prestigious Publications of the American Economic Association intended to prove — with statistical reliability — that the American Negro was uninsurable. Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro was a compilation of statistics, eugenic theory, observation, and speculation, solicited by the Prudential in response to a wave of state legislation banning discrimination against African Americans. In the report, Hoffman wrote, “Given the same conditions of life for two races, the one of Aryan descent will prove the superior, solely on account of its ancient inheritance of virtue and transmitted qualities which are determining factors in the struggle for race supremacy.” He also presented statistics about prisoners’ races with the crimes they were convicted of, writing, “The colored male…only too often leads the life of a vagrant,” and that the Black race had a “greater tendency to crime and pauperism than the whites.” This pivotal text — which was presented as a scientific study — used the language of white supremacy and explicitly stated that violence and crime are within the nature of Black people.
The reception fulfilled Hoffman’s hopes for the piece and the positive reviews confirmed that he had achieved exactly what he set out to do. “Only by means of a thorough analysis of all the data that make up the history of the colored race in this country can the true nature of the so-called ‘Negro problem’ be understood,” pronounced Hoffman in the early pages of Race Traits. “Being of foreign birth, a German, I was fortunately free from a personal bias which might have made an impartial treatment on this subject difficult.” Yet despite its glowing reception, the statistician’s work would prove to be neither as fact-based nor as neutral as its author claimed.
“The central fact deducible from the results of this investigation into the traits and tendencies of the colored population of this country,” surmised Hoffman, “is plainly and emphatically the powerful influence of race in the struggle for life.” For him, as for many authors, the race question collapsed into a simple tautology: Negroes died because they were inferior, and they were inferior because they died. “It is not in the conditions of life, but in the race traits and tendencies that we find the causes of excessive mortality,” he resolved, a statement that summarizes both the central tenet of his text and the piece’s most glaring logical fallacy.
That language and Hoffman’s findings did not go unchallenged. In an 1897 review of the text, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “Criminal statistics raise the whole question as to how far black and white malefactors are subjected to different standards of justice.” He also wrote, “When the younger generation came on the stage with exaggerated but laudable hopes of ‘rising,’ and found that a dogged Anglo-Saxon prejudice had shut nearly every avenue of advancement in their faces, the energies of many undoubtedly found an outlet in crime.” Du Bois made two points that we’re still grappling with more than 120 years later: the different ways in which Black and white Americans are treated by our justice system, and the relationship between crime and the threat of poverty due to systemic racism.
Howard University mathematician Kelly Miller joined Du Bois in critiquing Hoffman’s mishandling and misapplication of data. Perhaps no charge was more critical than Du Bois’ observation that Hoffman had failed to stratify his findings. “The careful statistician will immediately see that, while all these different sets of figures give data interesting in themselves, they must be used with great care in comparison, because they relate to different classes of people and to widely different conditions of life,” Du Bois warned. Stratifying by social or economic status would have shown that black mortality rates differed enormously based on environmental factors. Du Bois pointed out that the health outcomes of African Americans were entirely comparable to those of immigrant groups with similar economic resources. (In his review of Race Traits, Du Bois pointed out that at 32.61, the death rate of blacks in the United States was slightly lower than that of white citizens in Munich, Germany.)
Hoffman received the distinct social, philosophical, and political mores of the society in which he lived; that he could and did transmit them in the writing of Race Traits goes without saying. Whether he was consciously racist when he authored his first major work is a matter for debate, but it is clear that he did not break from the predominant racial ideology of his time.
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