Hat tip to John Lott for this very insightful New York Times piece. It turns out that nannies — including black nannies — try not to work for black families.Of course, you have to look past the absurd editorializing:

“Like hailing a cab in Midtown Manhattan, searching for a nanny can be an exasperating, humiliating exercise for many blacks, the kind of ordeal that makes them wonder aloud what year it is.”

Those poor, put-upon wealthy folks who can’t find nannies! And if black nannies are part of the problem (as black cab drivers are, Dinesh D’Souza showed in The End of Racism), it isn’t a throwback to America’s racist past. Unless blacks have a pervasive bias against their own race (they don’t).

Here’s the best line (though, as Lott points out, the NYT is too afraid to run with it):

“Numerous black parents successfully employ nannies, and many sitters say they pay no regard to race. But interviews with dozens of nannies and agencies that employ them in Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Houston turned up many nannies — often of African-American or Caribbean descent themselves — who avoid working for families of those backgrounds. Their reasons included accusations of low pay and extra work, fears that employers would look down at them, and suspicion that any neighborhood inhabited by blacks had to be unsafe.”

Kudos to the Times for including this, but the logical questions become, Why would someone say that about her own race if it weren’t true? Are there any numbers we can find to back this up? Low pay is debatable from my limited understanding, as blacks seem to pay more for cars while tipping less. There has to be some reason blacks fear other blacks will be more likely to look down on them, but the journalist didn’t bother to ask. And a fear of high-crime black neighborhoods isn’t exactly an irrational one.

Another un-PC fact left unexplored:

“In visits, telephone calls and e-mail exchanges across the country, nannies of all colors spoke of parents in sweeping ethnic generalizations: the Jews this, the Indians that.”

Now, I’m against equating individuals with group norms when it’s not necessary. But the journalist seems to take it at face value that the problem is with the nannies, and that these stereotypes have no basis in reality. Supported by no evidence whatsoever that all ethnic groups treat nannies similarly.

One nanny who expresses prejudice is “basing her conclusions on working for a single black family years ago;” apparently, in the loads of interviews conducted, the journalist couldn’t come up with a single discriminatory nanny with more experience than that.

And:

“The problem may be as much about class as race, said Kimberly McClain DaCosta, a Harvard sociologist who is researching how blacks care for family members. For nannies, working for an employer of the same background or skin color ‘highlights their lower economic status,’ she said, but ‘the fact that their employers are black just makes that more intense.’”

It’s the nannies’ fault. It couldn’t possibly be that the employers also contribute to “highlighting” class-plus-race tensions. (This isn’t necessarily a criticism of the expert, as journalists often leave out crucial bits of interviews.)

The second expert has a more interesting take on it:

“African-American professionals, who constantly battle the stereotype that blacks do not speak proper English, sometimes hesitate to hire Caribbean nannies who speak with lilting accents or island patois, said Cameron L. Macdonald, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.”

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://www.therationale.com and http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.