Systemic racism and discrimination in small communities can undermine a country’s ability to defend itself during conflicts, creating a national security risk, new research says.
Marco Tabellini, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, analyzed Black and white military enrollment at the onset of World War II. He found that Black people were 90 percent more likely to sign up for military service—potentially putting their lives on the line—in communities with less overt discrimination.
“For policymakers, the message of the paper is clear: If you require or expect an equal contribution from your citizens, all citizens must be treated equally,” says Tabellini. “It reveals the costs for society as a whole if you don’t.”
Despite the national reckoning in the United States after the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer last year, some political commentators and elected officials continue to debate not only the implications of institutional racism, but its very existence. Tabellini’s study shows how racial injustice reverberates far beyond its seemingly local source, with significant consequences.
"The government and the bureaucracy and the social apparatus may not work well because of discrimination."
“The government and the bureaucracy and the social apparatus may not work well because of discrimination,” he says. “The state might be in danger because the state itself is officially preventing efficient allocation of resources for the single most important public good: defense of national boundaries from external attacks.”
Quantifying racism’s toll
Economists have looked more frequently at racism’s destructive influence on the US economy in recent years, yet few have examined the impact on a country’s ability to act as a society—its state capacity—in situations that require national unity, such as wars, says Tabellini.
He teamed with Nancy Qian, a professor of managerial economics at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, to study volunteer military enlistment during the eight weeks after the Japanese Navy bombed a US naval base in Honolulu’s Pearl Harbor. The devastating strike marked an immediate change in American public perception of the war—the US was under attack.
During the seven weeks before December 7, 1941, both white and Black volunteer rates were steady, with lower Black rates overall. Afterward, Black enlistment rates rose at one-third the rate of white enlistment. Lower volunteer rates among Black men in counties where racial discrimination was rampant accounted for much of the difference.
To gauge the depth of racism’s impact, the researchers developed a composite index of discrimination for each county in the 48 mainland states. The index considered the pervasiveness of Jim Crow laws, Ku Klux Klan activity between 1915 and 1940, and the number of recorded lynchings before 1939, among other measures. Then the team compared enrollment across races using detailed military recruitment data and US Census figures.
The authors found that Black men from counties that ranked in the 25th percentile of the discrimination index were 90 percent more willing to volunteer than men from counties in the 75th percentile, where systemic racism was worse. White volunteer rates were consistent in counties across all states examined.
For every notch of reduced hostility on the index, Black volunteer enrollees after Pearl Harbor would have climbed by a factor of 30 compared with the period before the attack. Tabellini and Qian detailed their findings in the working paper “Discrimination, Disenfranchisement, and African American WWII Military Enlistment,” released in January.
The researchers found similar patterns among Japanese Americans. In March 1942, the US government forced 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent into internment camps and barred them from military service. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized a segregated military unit for Japanese Americans in 1943, enlistment rates were miniscule. However, in Hawaii, where far fewer Japanese Americans were held captive than on the mainland, volunteer rates rose when enlistment became legal.
From disfranchisement to distrust
The results suggest racism blunted available manpower for the war at a critical time. They also imply the US government shortchanged itself by violating its own social contract—requiring taxes be paid by everyone, for instance—when it disenfranchised those who might have volunteered.
The difference in lower enrollments overall was short lived. By the war’s end, a higher percentage of Black Americans had served in the military than the percentage of white Americans, the researchers note. In fact, Black enlistment rates passed white rates in mid-1942. It stayed that way until the US ended voluntary enlistment, the authors write.
"Our point is not that African Americans did not participate. In fact, they did volunteer—and did so at high rates."
A large part of the change stemmed from the “Double V” campaign, an effort by Black activists and others to fight racism both at home and abroad, the researchers note.
“Our point is not that African Americans did not participate. In fact, they did volunteer—and did so at high rates,” Tabellini says. “Our results show they volunteered more often from places that were relatively less discriminatory.”
Why the initial disparity between Black and white enlistment? Researchers considered a number of possible reasons. Perhaps the discrimination that Black World War I veterans faced when they returned to the United States soured their descendants ahead of World War II. Supporting the public good probably seemed less compelling for those who couldn’t access those benefits. Studies have also found that racism disempowers its targets, hurting political and social engagement.
So much time, so little change
While 75 years have passed since World War II ended, the US seems no closer to addressing the underlying causes of systemic racism. Two months ago, a mob of supporters of former President Donald J. Trump stormed the US Capitol, which had a far smaller law enforcement presence than it did during protests led by the Black Lives Matter movement months earlier.
Tabellini began studying the effects of race and migration as a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This study’s findings go beyond the military or law enforcement to illustrate far deeper problems afflicting America, he says.
“It applies to a society and to the US democracy and government much more broadly and to what many have referred to as the system of institutionalized racism,” Tabellini says.
About the Author
Rachel Layne is a writer based in the Boston area.
[Image: Matt_Gibson]
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