Racial Diversity: Strength or Weakness?

In this post I will argue that the empirical evidence favors viewing racial diversity as a negative.

To begin with, in the context of the economy it is often claimed that minorities make firms more innovative. This is false. In fact, racial diversity is negatively related to innovation and overall level of performance (Bell et al., 2010).

At the economy-wide level, Alesina et al. (2004) found that ethnic diversity negatively correlates with economic success such that going from perfect homogeneity to maximal diversity predicts a 2% decline in the annual national growth rate of GDP per capita.

Even comparing nations that start with the same level of economic development, the nation with greater ethnic diversity will have a lesser rate of economic growth going forward (Posner, 2004).

In the context of education people say that experiencing a diverse student body is beneficial for everyone. In reality, school diversity predicts negative outcomes with respect to student-rated school satisfaction.

Consider the evidence from Rothman, Lipset, and Nevitte (2003). This paper analyzed the relationship between racial diversity and the experiences people had at school in a sample drawn from 140 American universities (N = 4,083 individuals, 1,643 students, 1632 faculty members, 808 administrators). They found the following:

“As the proportion of black students rose, student satisfaction with their university experience dropped, as did their assessments of the quality of their education and the work ethic of their peers. In addition, the higher the enrollment diversity, the more likely students were to say that they personally experienced discrimination… Faculty members also rated students as less hard-working as diversity increased… Enrollment diversity was positively related to students’ experience of unfair treatment, even after the effects of all other variables were controlled. (As the proportion of black students grew, the incidence of these personal grievances increased among whites. Among blacks, however, there was no significant correlation. Thus diversity appears to increase complaints of unfair treatment among white students without reducing them among black students.)”.

These perceptions of discrimination were not shared by the non-student sample. The authors write:

“Among faculty and administrators, higher minority enrollment was significantly associated with perceptions of less campus discrimination and, among administrators, more positive treatment of minority students. But these findings were offset by the absence of similar results among students, who reported more personal victimization as diversity increased.”

All these results continued to be true after controlling for various measures of socio-economic status. Owen et al. (2015) also found that

“Students at more racially diverse institutions are less happy. They report lower levels of positive emotional well-being and higher levels of negative emotional well-being and of negative life evaluation”. They report that diversity is a similarly negative experience for each racial group.

Setting how students feel about their school aside, Bohrnstedt (2015) finds that both black and white students score worse on standardized tests the greater the proportion of their school that is black.

Turning to bullying, Farris (2006) finds that black students are more likely to be bullies than are white students while white students are more likely than black students to be the victims of bullying. Latino students are both more likely than black students to be engage in, and be a victim of, bullying. Farris also finds that racial differences in family SES, neighborhood SES, attachment to friends, parents, and school, and physical development, don’t explain racial differences in bullying.

With respect to interracial bullying, Farris finds that black on white bullying is 64% more common than is White on Black bullying.

In part, these differences probably arise because bullying is socially rewarded in non-white student subcultures. After controlling for gender, age, academic performance, family structure, parental educational attainment, and extracurricular activities, Farris finds that the more non-white students bully others, the more popular they are among their peers. This effect does not exist among white students.

Farris also finds the following: “Regardless of race, attending a high-minority school increases risk of suicide significantly: for every one percentage point increase in the percent minority in the school, the likelihood of suicide increases by one percent.”

Sticking with suicide but moving to adult populations, Becares et al. (2018) conducted a meta-analysis and found that a 10% increase in the local representation of one’s own ethnic group predicts an 12% decrease in the odds of a person being suicidal. Similarly, Putnam (2007) found that people who lived in more diverse cities reported being less happy, having fewer friends, and trusting others less. It’s also worth noting that the negative effect of diversity on social capital persists after controlling for socio-economic status (Denisen et al, 2020; Putnam, 2007).

Other research finds that people are happier when they represent the majority of the local population, that being a member of the dominant racial group of a church congregation predicts a greater sense of belonging in the church, having more friends in the church, and participating in more church activities, and that people rate their customer service experiences better when dealing with co-ethnics (Kanazawa et al., 2015; Martinez et al., 2013; Montoya et al., 2013).

At the national level, ethnic diversity is also correlated with higher crime rates (Marier et al., 2020). At the level of US counties, it’s also been shown that the more black or hispanic people live in a county the higher that counties property and violent crime rate tends to be and this remains true after controlling for poverty, region, population density, age, unemployment, education, and divorce rates (Kposowa et al., 1995). In fact, the percent of the population that is black is a better predictor of violent crime than is any of the other variables I’ve just listed.

A final myth about diversity to dispel is the idea, called “contact theory” that if you get people of different races to interact with each other they will become less racially biased. There is research indicating this is true, once you correct for publication bias you find that there is actually a modest (ns) tendency for racial bias to increase in response to cross-racial contact (Paluck et al., 2019).

For these reasons, the evidence we have favors viewing racial diversity as a net negative rather than a strength.