Ever wondered why advertisements heavily feature Black actors when they're just 12-14% of the population?
I might have an explanation:
Black viewers have a strong preference for seeing other Blacks in media, whereas Whites have no racial preferences.
These results are derived from a meta-analysis of 57 pre-2000 and 112 post-2000 effect sizes for Blacks alongside 76 and 87 such effect sizes for Whites.
If you look at them, you'll notice that Whites' initial, slight preference declined and maybe reversed.
It's worth asking if this is explained by publication bias.
It's not!
Neither aggregately (as pictured), nor with results separated by race.
This study also plotted an alternative measure of racial preferences: differences in thermometer ratings.
These are ratings of how "warm" people feel towards other groups.
For Blacks, a persistent, consistent in-group preference. For Whites, in the past, yes, but now, no.
The hypothesis that Black media overrepresentation is due to catering to higher propensities for Blacks to spend, all else equal, is interesting, but it fails on the merits (less total spending).
It seems plausible that advertisers and media creators are just catering to demand.
Of course, people could just ask.
We do see this crop up in many other areas too. There is usually a Black in-group bias, and at the very least, no/a small White net disdain for Blacks or preference for Whites.
Amy Wax got in trouble for remarking that she'd not seen a Black student in the top quarter of a Penn Law class.
Thanks to hacked Columbia data, we can see that she was...
Probably right!
In the decade before her statement, there were just two top-25% Black students.
It is *totally* plausible that she never met these students. And it's also plausible that she rarely saw Black students in the top *half*, because each year, the number of them was just 1-4.
But, despite being 8% of the class, they were ~40% of the bottom 10%-ranked students:
Note: Penn is on-par/slightly less elite than Columbia, so it's likely that the Black students there were somewhat *worse*, as the article notes, making her claims more likely.
This all comes from @zagrebbi's latest article. It's well worth a read!
Big day if you think Roe v. Wade was correctly decided.
My favorite part (note that I've only read 150 pages so far) was Thomas explaining that, no, the Founding g Fathers did not adopt the English feudal system.
This fact was clearly lost on the other side.
The Court's reliance on a random remark from a case that ultimately didn't even produce lasting changes raises the question of whether that sort of thing even matters.
Why shouldn't I cite the Dred Scott case as the law of the land?