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from group to group. This is not to say that intergroup differences dont matter. Some of these differences matter greatiy.

What are the reasons behind these disparities? Perhaps a more fundamental question might be: What reason was there to expect these groups to be the same in thefirst place? Geography, demography, history and culture have all differed among groups in countries around the world.8 We have already seen how widely the median ages of groups can vary, even within a given country and how much difference there is in native birth within Asian Americans alone. The same is true in other countries and between one country and another. The median age in Germany and Italy is forty, while in Yemen and Afghanistan it is below twenty.9

Put differendy, there are many opportunities for fallacies. Many of those fallacies arise from implicitly assuming that the various groups are comparable in skills, experiences, or attitudes, so that statistical disparities among them can only be explained by the different ways that the society around them treats them. Many, if not most, societies have discriminated among groups throughout most of history. But that discrimination has not been the only factor at work producing intergroup differences and the challenge is to assess the effects of all the factors involved. Moreover the relative weights of different factors do not remain the same over time, so some consideration of history is also necessary.

HISTORY

Perhaps the biggest fallacy about the history of racial and ethnic minorities is that the passage of time reduces the hostility and discrimination they face. In many countries, minorities have faced greater hostility and discrimination in a later period than in earlier periods. In other countries, the reverse has been true. But the passage of time alone does not automatically produce either result.

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The Role of Time
Back at the end of the fifteenth century, Jews expelled from	Spain fled

primarily to the Islamic countries of the Middle East, where they were generally treated better than they were in Europe—and far better than they would be treated in the same Middle Eastern countries in the twentieth century. Jews became prominent as physicians in the Ottoman Empire and it was not uncommon in the sixteenth century for Sultans of the Ottoman Empire to have Jewish physicians present, or even predominant, on their medical staffs,10 or for Jews to be used as translators for Ottoman envoys to European countries.1 1 Jews were so common as customs officials that many of the Ottoman customs receipts from that era were written in Hebrew.1 2 In the Ottoman economy, Jews were prominent in roles ranging from peddlers in villages to international traders.1 3

However, as the age of the Ottoman Empires pre-eminence in military, cultural, and scientific achievements gave way to centuries in which European countries overtook them in all these respects, the confident and cosmopolitan toleration of minorities within the Ottoman Empire gave way to an era of Ottoman anxiety about dangers from without and within, and to xenophobia that gready restricted and endangered Jews and other minorities. By the early twentieth century, Jews were persecuted worse in the Middle East than anywhere else, until the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany. The Nazis' racism in general and their anti-Jewish doctrines and policies in particular found many Middle Eastern sympathizers both before and during the Second World War. By the time the modern state of Israel was created after that war, hatred of Jews was already widespread in Middle Eastern countries that had once been part of the Ottoman Empire.

Within an even shorter span of time, the island nation of Sri Lanka, off the coast of India, went from being a country whose good relations between majority and minority had become a model for intergroup harmony to one with a decades-long civil war taking tens of thousands of lives. During the first half of the twentieth century, there was not a single riot between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. But, during the second half of that century, there were many such riots, marked by unspeakable atrocities,

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and ultimately degenerating into a civil war that was still not completely ended as the twenty-first century dawned.

Other such examples could be found in many countries and in many periods of history. In Bohemia, Germans and Czechs co-existed peacefully for centuries, until the rise of Czech nationalism, climaxed by the creation of the new nation of Czechoslovakia after the First World War, led to discrimination against Germans and then to a German backlash that led ultimately to the Munich crisis of 1938, when the Czechs were forced to relinquish the predominantly German Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. After Germany later took over all of Czechoslovakia, the Germans in that country then joined in the Nazis' persecution of Czechs. After the defeat of Germany in World War II, Germans in Czechoslovakia were expelled by the millions, often under brutal conditions that led to many deaths.

Such retrogressions in intergroup relations were not unknown in the United States, though not usually to such extremes. The predominantly German Jewish population of the United States was far better assimilated and accepted before the arrival of millions of unassimilated Eastern European Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to a social backlash against all Jews that resulted in restrictions against Jews in places where such restrictions had not existed before. Black Americans, meanwhile, were far better accepted in Northern cities at the end of the nineteenth century than they would be in the first half of the twentieth century, after massive migrations of less assimilated Southern blacks caused a similar backlash that created new restrictions against all blacks. Northern cities in which blacks had lived largely dispersed among whites saw in the early twentieth century the rigid residential segregation patterns that would create the black ghettoes which quickly became the norm.

It would be as fallacious to depict racial retrogression as an inevitable result of the passage of time as to depict racial progress as something happening automatically over time. Much racial progress occurred in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States, especially for blacks. Since this was not something that happened automatically, it is important to understand the causes and the timing. It is especially important to scrutinize the evidence because many individuals and

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organizations have a vested interest in claiming credit for progress, and incessantly repeated claims can sometimes be mistaken for facts.

Progress and retrogression are not always separated in different eras. There can be much progress in some respects during the same time when there is retrogression in other respects. That was especially true among black Americans in the second half of the twentieth century.

Before the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the racial segregation of schools was required in all the Southern states that had formed the Confederacy, as well as in Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, and the District of Columbia— and racial segregation of the schools was permitted in Wyoming, Arizona, and New Mexico. All such laws were nullified by the Supreme Court decision and, over the next decades, the practice of racial segregation in the schools was dismanded. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 oudawed racial segregation in both public and private enterprises and institutions, and forbad employment discrimination as well. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed practices which had disenfranchised black voters in the South and the 1970s saw "affirmative action" take on the meaning of preferential hiring of minority workers.

These major legal landmarks of the civil rights revolution have often been credited with the economic and political advances of the black population. Certainly the Voting Rights Act was responsible for a huge increase in black voting in the South and the subsequent skyrocketing of the number of black elected officials throughout the region. But history tells a very different story as regards the economic advancement of blacks.

The percentage of black families with incomes below the poverty line fell most sharply between 1940 and 1960, going from 87 percent to 47 percent over that span, before either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and well before the 1970s, when "affirmative action" evolved into numerical "goals" or "quotas." While the downward trend in poverty continued, the pace of that decline did not accelerate after these legal landmarks but in fact slackened. The poverty rate declined from 47 percent to 30 percent during the decade of the 1960s and then only from 30 percent to 29 percent between 1970 and 1980.1 4 However much credit has been claimed for the civil rights laws of the 1960s or the War on Poverty