{"id":28868,"date":"2023-10-03T22:36:40","date_gmt":"2023-10-04T05:36:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=28868"},"modified":"2023-10-03T22:36:41","modified_gmt":"2023-10-04T05:36:41","slug":"frederick-hoffmans-race-traits-the-origins-of-statistical-based-bias-towards-black-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/10\/03\/frederick-hoffmans-race-traits-the-origins-of-statistical-based-bias-towards-black-people\/","title":{"rendered":"FREDERICK HOFFMAN\u2019S RACE TRAITS: THE ORIGINS OF STATISTICAL BASED BIAS TOWARDS BLACK PEOPLE"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The legacy of racism pervades the financial system to this day\u200a\u2014\u200aAfrican-Americans are still discriminated against on the basis of a long-disproven methodology.<\/a><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"Derrion<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Derrion Arrington<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aug 31, 2020 (Medium.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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\u200a\u2014\u200awith statistical reliability\u200a\u2014\u200athat 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, \u201cGiven 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.\u201d He also presented statistics about prisoners\u2019 races with the crimes they were convicted of, writing, \u201cThe colored male\u2026only too often leads the life of a vagrant,\u201d and that the Black race had a \u201cgreater tendency to crime and pauperism than the whites.\u201d This pivotal text\u200a\u2014\u200awhich was presented as a scientific study\u200a\u2014\u200aused the language of white supremacy and explicitly stated that violence and crime are within the nature of Black people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reception fulfilled Hoffman\u2019s hopes for the piece and the positive reviews confirmed that he had achieved exactly what he set out to do. \u201cOnly 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 \u2018Negro problem\u2019 be understood,\u201d pronounced Hoffman in the early pages of Race Traits. \u201cBeing of foreign birth, a German, I was fortunately free from a personal bias which might have made an impartial treatment on this subject difficult.\u201d Yet despite its glowing reception, the statistician\u2019s work would prove to be neither as fact-based nor as neutral as its author claimed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe central fact deducible from the results of this investigation into the traits and tendencies of the colored population of this country,\u201d surmised Hoffman, \u201cis plainly and emphatically the powerful influence of race in the struggle for life.\u201d 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. \u201cIt is not in the conditions of life, but in the race traits and tendencies that we find the causes of excessive mortality,\u201d he resolved, a statement that summarizes both the central tenet of his text and the piece\u2019s most glaring logical fallacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That language and Hoffman\u2019s findings did not go unchallenged. In an 1897 review of the text, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, \u201cCriminal statistics raise the whole question as to how far black and white malefactors are subjected to different standards of justice.\u201d He also wrote, \u201cWhen the younger generation came on the stage with exaggerated but laudable hopes of \u2018rising,\u2019 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.\u201d Du Bois made two points that we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Howard University mathematician Kelly Miller joined Du Bois in critiquing Hoffman\u2019s mishandling and misapplication of data. Perhaps no charge was more critical than Du Bois\u2019 observation that Hoffman had failed to stratify his findings. \u201cThe 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,\u201d 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.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Derrion<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Written by Derrion Arrington<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historian, Librarian, and Archivist<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The legacy of racism pervades the financial system to this day\u200a\u2014\u200aAfrican-Americans are still discriminated against on the basis of a long-disproven methodology. Derrion Arrington 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… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1159],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28868"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28868"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28869,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28868\/revisions\/28869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}