Print
Email
Share
Cite
In 1994, two sociologists went to Red Hook, Brooklyn, to solve a mystery. Red Hook abutted the East River, and along the waterfront sat shipping companies and warehouses—all in need of low-skilled labor. Next door sat a housing project teeming with exactly that. But the locals—primarily African Americans—didn’t get hired. Instead, the jobs went to workers from outside the neighborhood, often Caribbean immigrants. Employers, wrote The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell in summarizing the sociologists’ findings, “had developed an elaborate mechanism for distinguishing between those who they felt were ‘good’ blacks and those they felt were ‘bad’ blacks.” Were the employers racist? Yes and no. They clearly held anti-black stereotypes. And they discriminated against those who conformed to them, even by association. But they discriminated in favor of blacks who defied those stereotypes. A man named Bruce Llewellyn described the phenomenon this way: “White people love to believe they’re fair.”
