Black economists recall a half-century of struggle

Trevon Logan, who’s black, was called “boy” while seeking his first job as an economist. Economics professor Cecilia Conrad, also black, had three of her white male students complain about being taught by an “obvious affirmative-action hire.” Black people are less represented in economics than in STEM fields-science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. And their share has trended down since the mid-1990s.
That economics has a problem with race isn’t even in doubt, Janet Yellen, former chair of the Federal Reserve, said on Jan. 3 at a panel where Logan and Conrad spoke during the American Economic Association’s annual meeting in San Diego. The only question, Yellen said, is what to do about it. The panel’s blunt title: “How Can Economics Solve Its Race Problem?”

The aspirations for black women and men in economics were higher half a century ago. At the height of the civil rights struggle, in April 1969, a National Black Economic Development Conference meeting in Detroit issued a manifesto demanding $500 million in reparations from churches and synagogues, “because racist white America has exploited our resources, our minds, our bodies, our labor.” Some of the money was to go for research on the problems of black people. “All roads must lead to revolution” was one of the manifesto’s slogans.

Black economists were less prone to call for revolution, but they did want change. That December, those attending the American Economic Association’s annual meeting, held in New York City, formed a caucus and issued a statement of concern about “the gross underrepresentation of black economists in the life of the Association and the profession.”

Many of the problems identified in the statement of the Caucus of Black Economists sound familiar today. The statement pointed out that the underrepresentation of black economists “has been taken to mean an absence of ability.” It said “form and technique have been favored over substance and value,” and that “in its apolitical zeal, the Association has remained silent” on issues involving racial minorities. “By design and default the economic well-being of large numbers of the minority population is being sacrificed for the illusion of neutrality on social and political questions,” said the statement, which was included in the conference’s official papers and proceedings.

Caucus members debated in the following years whether to become an advocacy organization or to focus on academic research and increasing the supply of black economists. Given limited resources, they chose the latter course, reorganizing in 1974 as the National Economic Association, recalled Margaret Simms, an early member of that association who’s a nonresident fellow of the Urban Institute, at a Jan. 4 luncheon honoring the 50th anniversary of the caucus’s founding. This year the NEA sponsored panels at the conference in San Diego on such topics as “Race, Ethnicity, and the 2020 Election” and “Discrimination in Labor Markets and Educational Settings: Experimental Evidence.”

Progress for black economists has been slow despite a variety of efforts by the National Economic Association as well as the American Economic Association. The AEA has an active Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession, which was founded in 1968 and covers Hispanics and American Indians as well as black people. It sponsors mentorships for Ph.D. candidates and a summer program for talented undergraduates to develop the technical skills they need to pursue a Ph.D. About a fifth of minorities who’ve earned economics doctorates in the past two decades were graduates of the summer program.

The share of Ph.D. degrees awarded to black students remains “strikingly low,” Yellen said, with survey participants reporting both overt acts of discrimination and “more subtle forms of marginalization.” While black graduates’ share of degrees in all subjects has risen from less than 8% in 1995 to more than 10% in 2017, their share of economics degrees has fallen from 6.4% to 5.3%, according to a 2018 report by the Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession.

“I don’t have to tell anyone in this room that far more needs to be done,” Bernard Anderson, the first black professor to earn tenure at the University of Pennsylania’s Wharton School, said at the NEA’s anniversary luncheon. He was one of five founding members of the Caucus of Black Economists to speak at the event. Another was Theodore Spratlen, professor emeritus of marketing at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. Spratlen said he found out 20 years after the caucus’s founding that the leadership of the American Economic Association had New York City police officers standing by that day in 1969 in case the group became disruptive. “When all we wanted,” he said, “was to be economists.”