white-privilege-is-real.html
NEW HAVEN — THE recent reunion show for the 40th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live” re-aired a portion of Eddie Murphy’s 1984 classic “White Like Me”
skit, in which he disguised himself to appear Caucasian and quickly
learned that “when white people are alone, they give things to each
other for free.”
The
joke still has relevance. A field experiment about who gets free bus
rides in Brisbane, a city on the eastern coast of Australia, shows that
even today, whites get special privileges, particularly when other
people aren’t around to notice.
As they describe in two working papers, Redzo Mujcic and Paul Frijters,
economists at the University of Queensland, trained and assigned 29
young adult testers (from both genders and different ethnic groups) to
board public buses in Brisbane and insert an empty fare card into the
bus scanner. After the scanner made a loud sound informing the driver
that the card did not have enough value, the testers said, “I do not
have any money, but I need to get to” a station about 1.2 miles away.
(The station varied according to where the testers boarded.)
With
more than 1,500 observations, the study uncovered substantial,
statistically significant race discrimination. Bus drivers were twice as
willing to let white testers ride free as black testers (72 percent
versus 36 percent of the time). Bus drivers showed some relative
favoritism toward testers who shared their own race, but even black
drivers still favored white testers over black testers (allowing free
rides 83 percent versus 68 percent of the time).
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