Blacks were blocked from employment in quite a few occupations in the north, even in liberal cities like New York. That's why there were “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” boycott campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s of retailers such as department stores.
Excellent essay....an impressive assembling of nuanced evidence on an aspect of American racial history that has been omerta'd off the table in polite discourse. I would just add some nuanced remarks from an essay I wrote in the wake of the monstrous, racist-anti-racist George Floyd blamefest.
"....wind the clock back seventy years or so and the narrative would have been a substantially correct one. It is probably fair to say that, until the 1960s, a majority of white Europeans and Americans would – and without feeling any need to give it much thought – think of black African ethnicity as inherently inferior..... And within American society in those days, a much, much smaller subset seethed with a racial vitriol that would make of this supposed inferiority a justification for their malignant desire to persecute and subdue. A less often told story though - given the inbuilt conflict dramatising tendencies of media narratives - is the racial harmony and goodwill that also existed in pre-civil rights America alongside - and in contrast to - the Jim Crow mentality. One has only to look at footage of adoring white fans of the Swing bands of the 1930s to get a glimpse of this now air-brushed counter-narrative." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/back-in-the-summer-of-2020
To argue that wage discrimination against Black Americans was rare or negligible during the era of codified segregation and extralegal racial terror is not only historically incorrect—it is morally unserious. The wage gap had causes, yes. But when a system is designed to train, sort, and exclude by race, the market is not a neutral stage—it is part of the script.
Let’s begin with the concession everyone likes to make before they take it back: Yes, Black Americans earned less than White Americans in the period under study. The numbers are not in dispute. In the South in 1880, Black incomes were roughly 53% of White incomes. By 1940, the gap was wider: 42% (Ng & Virts, 1993; Bayer & Charles, 2017). Those who argue there was “not much discrimination” do not deny this. They just want you to believe that something other than racism caused it.
And that something turns out to be… “productivity.” Or “human capital.” Or “market sorting.” Choose your term, but know this: all of them are code for the same slippery assumption—that Black workers, through some tragic but apolitical twist of history, just happened to end up in worse jobs, with worse schooling, fewer skills, and lower pay. No malice. Just market dynamics.
Let’s be clear. Productivity is not an independent variable floating in space. It is shaped. It is trained, tracked, permitted, and denied. And from the moment slavery was replaced with sharecropping and convict leasing, every structure that determined what kind of worker a Black person could become was constrained by racial control.
What does “equal pay for equal work” mean when the society denies equal work in the first place? When the same state that underfunds your schools writes your job ceiling into law? When apprenticeships are barred, unions segregated, and Black applicants are never even told a job is open? Productivity becomes a post hoc rationalization. It’s the smoke, not the fire.
Gary Becker’s theory is often cited with a kind of reverence, or at least a disconnection between social reality and economic life: if employers discriminated, they’d lose money. Therefore, they wouldn’t discriminate, or at least not much.
It’s elegant.
It’s logical.
It’s also naive.
Because in America—then and now—employers often do discriminate, and they still make money. They collude. They exploit segmented labor pools.
They cater to the prejudices of their White customers, their White employees, their White shareholders. They limit opportunity not because it’s costless, but because they expect others to bear the cost: the worker, the community, the next generation.
Do we really believe the post-bellum South was a bastion of economically rational meritocracy? Do we really want to argue that when Black teachers were paid half the wages of their White counterparts, it was because they were only half as good? That when Black farmers got worse land, it was because of some neutral principle of soil distribution? Let’s not hide our shame behind spreadsheets.
Much is made of surveys where landlords in 1887 said they paid Black and White workers the same. But what was the broader system within which these wages were set? What were the job categories open to Black men? What kinds of work were Black women permitted to do? And what did it mean for a Black child to try to move beyond the labor caste into the skilled trades, the professions, the salaried world?
The absence of wage gaps within certain unskilled roles is not evidence that the system was fair. It is evidence that the system sorted unfairly, then paid equally for jobs it had already stripped of advancement. It’s like marveling at the equal treatment of men and women at the bottom rung of a ladder that women were barred from climbing.
And when proper controls are introduced—longitudinal studies, within-family analyses, matched-occupation comparisons—discrimination shows up. Not always with a trumpet, but with the steady hum of statistical significance. Mill and Stein (2016) followed siblings labeled “mulatto” in 1910, some of whom were later recorded as White, some as Black. They found a wage gap of 14% in the 1930s within families, conditional on appearance alone. That is discrimination. In the bones of the market. The author may find that trivial.
Is it?
Think of it over a lifetime. Say that one person made 25K, another 14% less. Both worked for 40 years. What’s 40x14, with interest at 7%?
It’s maybe $700,000 with compound interest.
But even without a penny invested, the cumulative wage loss from a 14% gap over a modest $25,000 salary amounts to perhaps $140,000—in historical dollars. That’s enough for a house, a car, and college or vocational training for three kids.
Or a better piece of land.
This isn’t about the personal wickedness of every employer or the prejudice of every foreman. It’s about the structure of labor markets that were racially coded by design. It’s about monopolies of skill, education, credit, and capital. It’s about “productivity” as a circular metric—shaped by schooling denied, apprenticeships closed off, and neighborhoods starved of investment.
And let’s not pretend it was all a distant memory. The post-war economic boom excluded Black Americans from the GI Bill, from FHA home loans, from the suburbanization that built White wealth. These weren’t minor administrative oversights. They were policies. Crafted, enforced, defended. Their effects were not indirect—they were economic.
You can admire the elegance of free-market theory. It is admirable, goddamit. But it's also at times detached from history. You can find some satisfaction in a tidy regression table. But do not confuse a controlled variable with a clean conscience. The wage gap was real. It was created. And the hand that shaped it was not invisible. It was political. It was racial. It was deliberate.
So let’s stop pretending that we can explain 100 years of labor inequality with the word “productivity,” as though that settles the matter. The burden of proof is not on those who see a pattern in the disparity—it is on those who think that, in a deeply segregated, legally unequal, violence-enforced society, the economy just happened to land on the same outcome by accident.
That’s not history. That’s exoneration by euphemism.
An interesting take on a very complicated subject. However, as a born and bred white Southerner (Mississippi) I think Blacks got the shitty end of the stick, but non-elite (poor) whites got the other end of that same stick.
No punches pulled... love it. I predicted a perceptible opening up of discussion around these topics (feminism and psychopathology, the Jews and history, race science and trans and mental illness, etc.). Is it possible that 50% of what we "know" about public policy are really platitudes, authored by progressive academics and writers and researchers, and then rubber-stamped by dominant institutions? I'm beginning to believe that this is the case.
"But dose this position as the romanticized other actually benefit the black folk? As regards to welfare and lowering standards for partitions will yes. Many black folk like Al Sharpton and others own their very careers as being the romanticized, grifting off the good well of none black folks. Black graveness is a multi-billon dollar industry, BlackLivesMatter the organization have rank in billions during the wave of “peaceful” protests during 2020AD, even though the black homicide rate actually increase. That’s the thing, all that grifting from black graveness seem to have little positive impact on the Hamburgerian populace itself. #BlackLivesMatter’s stance on de-policing seem to have only the increase the killing and inter-killing of black folk, and soft on crime have only led to black own businesses being closed because of the cost of retail theft, the monopolization of companies like Amazon, and the increase of food deserts."
Blacks were blocked from employment in quite a few occupations in the north, even in liberal cities like New York. That's why there were “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” boycott campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s of retailers such as department stores.
Excellent essay....an impressive assembling of nuanced evidence on an aspect of American racial history that has been omerta'd off the table in polite discourse. I would just add some nuanced remarks from an essay I wrote in the wake of the monstrous, racist-anti-racist George Floyd blamefest.
"....wind the clock back seventy years or so and the narrative would have been a substantially correct one. It is probably fair to say that, until the 1960s, a majority of white Europeans and Americans would – and without feeling any need to give it much thought – think of black African ethnicity as inherently inferior..... And within American society in those days, a much, much smaller subset seethed with a racial vitriol that would make of this supposed inferiority a justification for their malignant desire to persecute and subdue. A less often told story though - given the inbuilt conflict dramatising tendencies of media narratives - is the racial harmony and goodwill that also existed in pre-civil rights America alongside - and in contrast to - the Jim Crow mentality. One has only to look at footage of adoring white fans of the Swing bands of the 1930s to get a glimpse of this now air-brushed counter-narrative." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/back-in-the-summer-of-2020
You're basically correct
To argue that wage discrimination against Black Americans was rare or negligible during the era of codified segregation and extralegal racial terror is not only historically incorrect—it is morally unserious. The wage gap had causes, yes. But when a system is designed to train, sort, and exclude by race, the market is not a neutral stage—it is part of the script.
Let’s begin with the concession everyone likes to make before they take it back: Yes, Black Americans earned less than White Americans in the period under study. The numbers are not in dispute. In the South in 1880, Black incomes were roughly 53% of White incomes. By 1940, the gap was wider: 42% (Ng & Virts, 1993; Bayer & Charles, 2017). Those who argue there was “not much discrimination” do not deny this. They just want you to believe that something other than racism caused it.
And that something turns out to be… “productivity.” Or “human capital.” Or “market sorting.” Choose your term, but know this: all of them are code for the same slippery assumption—that Black workers, through some tragic but apolitical twist of history, just happened to end up in worse jobs, with worse schooling, fewer skills, and lower pay. No malice. Just market dynamics.
Let’s be clear. Productivity is not an independent variable floating in space. It is shaped. It is trained, tracked, permitted, and denied. And from the moment slavery was replaced with sharecropping and convict leasing, every structure that determined what kind of worker a Black person could become was constrained by racial control.
What does “equal pay for equal work” mean when the society denies equal work in the first place? When the same state that underfunds your schools writes your job ceiling into law? When apprenticeships are barred, unions segregated, and Black applicants are never even told a job is open? Productivity becomes a post hoc rationalization. It’s the smoke, not the fire.
Gary Becker’s theory is often cited with a kind of reverence, or at least a disconnection between social reality and economic life: if employers discriminated, they’d lose money. Therefore, they wouldn’t discriminate, or at least not much.
It’s elegant.
It’s logical.
It’s also naive.
Because in America—then and now—employers often do discriminate, and they still make money. They collude. They exploit segmented labor pools.
They cater to the prejudices of their White customers, their White employees, their White shareholders. They limit opportunity not because it’s costless, but because they expect others to bear the cost: the worker, the community, the next generation.
Do we really believe the post-bellum South was a bastion of economically rational meritocracy? Do we really want to argue that when Black teachers were paid half the wages of their White counterparts, it was because they were only half as good? That when Black farmers got worse land, it was because of some neutral principle of soil distribution? Let’s not hide our shame behind spreadsheets.
Much is made of surveys where landlords in 1887 said they paid Black and White workers the same. But what was the broader system within which these wages were set? What were the job categories open to Black men? What kinds of work were Black women permitted to do? And what did it mean for a Black child to try to move beyond the labor caste into the skilled trades, the professions, the salaried world?
The absence of wage gaps within certain unskilled roles is not evidence that the system was fair. It is evidence that the system sorted unfairly, then paid equally for jobs it had already stripped of advancement. It’s like marveling at the equal treatment of men and women at the bottom rung of a ladder that women were barred from climbing.
And when proper controls are introduced—longitudinal studies, within-family analyses, matched-occupation comparisons—discrimination shows up. Not always with a trumpet, but with the steady hum of statistical significance. Mill and Stein (2016) followed siblings labeled “mulatto” in 1910, some of whom were later recorded as White, some as Black. They found a wage gap of 14% in the 1930s within families, conditional on appearance alone. That is discrimination. In the bones of the market. The author may find that trivial.
Is it?
Think of it over a lifetime. Say that one person made 25K, another 14% less. Both worked for 40 years. What’s 40x14, with interest at 7%?
It’s maybe $700,000 with compound interest.
But even without a penny invested, the cumulative wage loss from a 14% gap over a modest $25,000 salary amounts to perhaps $140,000—in historical dollars. That’s enough for a house, a car, and college or vocational training for three kids.
Or a better piece of land.
This isn’t about the personal wickedness of every employer or the prejudice of every foreman. It’s about the structure of labor markets that were racially coded by design. It’s about monopolies of skill, education, credit, and capital. It’s about “productivity” as a circular metric—shaped by schooling denied, apprenticeships closed off, and neighborhoods starved of investment.
And let’s not pretend it was all a distant memory. The post-war economic boom excluded Black Americans from the GI Bill, from FHA home loans, from the suburbanization that built White wealth. These weren’t minor administrative oversights. They were policies. Crafted, enforced, defended. Their effects were not indirect—they were economic.
You can admire the elegance of free-market theory. It is admirable, goddamit. But it's also at times detached from history. You can find some satisfaction in a tidy regression table. But do not confuse a controlled variable with a clean conscience. The wage gap was real. It was created. And the hand that shaped it was not invisible. It was political. It was racial. It was deliberate.
So let’s stop pretending that we can explain 100 years of labor inequality with the word “productivity,” as though that settles the matter. The burden of proof is not on those who see a pattern in the disparity—it is on those who think that, in a deeply segregated, legally unequal, violence-enforced society, the economy just happened to land on the same outcome by accident.
That’s not history. That’s exoneration by euphemism.
An interesting take on a very complicated subject. However, as a born and bred white Southerner (Mississippi) I think Blacks got the shitty end of the stick, but non-elite (poor) whites got the other end of that same stick.
An interesting take. Thanks.
No punches pulled... love it. I predicted a perceptible opening up of discussion around these topics (feminism and psychopathology, the Jews and history, race science and trans and mental illness, etc.). Is it possible that 50% of what we "know" about public policy are really platitudes, authored by progressive academics and writers and researchers, and then rubber-stamped by dominant institutions? I'm beginning to believe that this is the case.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/horizontal-information-flow
https://birbantum.substack.com/p/the-black-fetish
"But dose this position as the romanticized other actually benefit the black folk? As regards to welfare and lowering standards for partitions will yes. Many black folk like Al Sharpton and others own their very careers as being the romanticized, grifting off the good well of none black folks. Black graveness is a multi-billon dollar industry, BlackLivesMatter the organization have rank in billions during the wave of “peaceful” protests during 2020AD, even though the black homicide rate actually increase. That’s the thing, all that grifting from black graveness seem to have little positive impact on the Hamburgerian populace itself. #BlackLivesMatter’s stance on de-policing seem to have only the increase the killing and inter-killing of black folk, and soft on crime have only led to black own businesses being closed because of the cost of retail theft, the monopolization of companies like Amazon, and the increase of food deserts."
I avoid blacks as much as possible.