The American racial and ethnic landscape has been radically transformed over the past three decades. A generation ago, blacks had much less education, much poorer jobs and were more likely to live in solidly black neighborhoods than they are today. Yet the old notion of “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal” still persists thirty years after it first appeared in the misguided diagnosis of the Kerner Commission report.

America’s changing racial and ethnic scene is the central theme of Beyond the Color Line. In essays covering a range of areas including education, law, religion, immigration, family structure, crime, economics, politics, and more, this volume examines where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going. Along the way, the authors attempt to illuminate how we have moved from Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream of all Americans being judged solely by the “content of their character, not the color of their skin” to today’s vaguely Orwellian civil rights orthodoxy—that it is necessary to treat some persons differently in order to treat them “equally.”

The product of the Citizens’ Initiative on Race and Ethnicity—formed in 1998 as an alternative to the one-sided official “dialogue” on questions of color—many of these twenty-five brief essays offer either explicit or implicit public policy recommendations. A common theme unites them—new realities require new thinking, and old civil rights strategies will not solve today’s problems. Beyond the Color Line takes the first steps toward a new civil rights agenda.

Abigail Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education since 1995, and Stephan Thernstrom, the Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard University and Manhattan Institute senior fellow, are coauthors of America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible (Simon & Schuster, 1997) and write frequently for a variety of journals and newspapers, including The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, and the UCLA Law Review.

Contributors: David J. Armor, Michael Barone, Douglas J. Besharov, Clint Bolick, David Brady, Linda Chavez, William A.V. Clark, Ward Connerly, John J. DiIulio Jr., Tamar Jacoby, Everett C. Ladd, George La Noue, William J. Lawrence, Nelson Lund, Christine H. Rossell, Sally Satel, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Abigail Thernstrom, Stephan Thernstrom, Martin Trow, Reed Ueda, Eugene Volokh, Finis Welch, James Q. Wilson, C. Robert Zelnick

==============================

Foreword ix

John Raisian and Larry Mone

Contributors xi

Introduction 1

PART ONE THE BIG PICTURE

The Demography of Racial and Ethnic Groups 13

Stephan Thernstrom

Immigration and Group Relations 37

Reed Ueda

What Americans Think About Race and Ethnicity 53

Everett C. Ladd

Wrestling with Stigma 69

Shelby Steele

PART TWO PRIVATE LIVES AND PUBLIC POLICIES

Residential Segregation Trends 83

William A. V. Clark

African American Marriage Patterns 95

Douglas J. Besharov and Andrew West

Crime 115

James Q. Wilson

Health and Medical Care 127

Sally Satel

Supporting Black Churches 153

John J. DiIulio Jr.

PART THREE ECONOMICS

Discrimination, Economics, and Culture 167

Thomas Sowell

Half Full or Half Empty? The Changing Economic Status of African Americans, 1967–1996 181

Finis Welch

Discrimination in Public Contracting 201

George R. La Noue

PART FOUR EDUCATION

Desegregation and Resegregation in the Public Schools 219

David J. Armor and Christine H. Rossell

The Racial Gap in Academic Achievement 259

Abigail Thernstrom

Schools That Work for Minority Students 277

Clint Bolick

Preferential Admissions in Higher Education 293

Martin Trow

PART FIVE LAW

Racial and Ethnic Classifications in American Law 309

Eugene Volokh

Illusions of Antidiscrimination Law 319

Nelson Lund

PART SIX POLITICS

Race, Ethnicity, and Politics in American History 343

Michael Barone

The Politics of Racial Preferences 359

David Brady

From Protest to Politics: Still an Issue for Black Leadership 369

Tamar Jacoby

PART SEVEN ONE NATION, INDIVISIBLE

The New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation 383

Linda Chavez

In Defense of Indian Rights 391

William J. Lawrence

The Battle for Color-Blind Public Policy 405

C. Robert Zelnick

One Nation, Indivisible 415

Ward Connerly

Index 425

==============================

Foreword

Projects with multiple authors scattered across the country are often arduous and unfulfilling. To the contrary, this project was neither. There is a reason we engaged in this effort; we wanted to put together, into one volume, the best work being conducted by the highest-quality scholars addressing race and ethnicity issues facing the citizens of the United States. The opportunity for our two institutions to collaborate with experts in the area of race and ethnic relations to produce this book was one we could not pass on; the results proved to be rewarding.

The exemplary work of the twenty-five scholars and writers that constitute Beyond the Color Line has made this volume comprehensive and influential.We thank each of them for their time, patience, and outstanding scholarship. In addition, we are especially grateful to the editors, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, for their dedication in undertaking and completing this project.

Based on accumulated knowledge, intellectual rigor, reasoned argument, and sound principles, the Hoover Institution and the Manhattan Institute are dedicated to producing and disseminating sound research with public policy implications.

John Raisian, Director, Hoover Institution

Lawrence J. Mone, President, Manhattan Institute

==============================

Contributors

David J. Armor is a research professor at the Institute of Public Policy, George Mason University. Formerly he was Senior Social Scientist at the Rand Corporation and Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He is the author of Forced Justice: School Desegregation and the Law, and he has testified as an expert in more than thirty school desegregation cases.

Michael Barone is a columnist at U.S. News&World Report. The author of Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan (Free Press, 1992), Mr. Barone regularly appears as an analyst and commentator on various television and radio news shows. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School.

Douglas J. Besharov is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and director of the AEI’s Social and Individual Responsibility Project. He is also a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs. He is the author of the forthcoming America’s Families: Trends, Explanations and Choices, and of many other books and articles that have appeared in major magazines and newspapers across the country. Andrew West was a research assistant at AEI.

Clint Bolick serves as vice president and director of litigation at the Institute for Justice, which he co-founded in 1991 to engage in constitutional litigation protecting individual liberty and challenging the regulatory welfare state. He leads the nationwide litigation effort to defend school choice programs and to challenge regulatory barriers to entrepreneurship. The New York Times described Mr. Bolick as “the maestro of the political right on issues of race . . . increasingly setting the tone and defining the terms of the national debate.”

David Brady is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.He is also Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Professor of Political Science and Leadership Values in the Stanford Graduate School of Business and associate dean and professor of political science in the School of the Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. His recent publications include Revolving Gridlock: Politics and Policy from Carter to Clinton (Westview Press, 1998).

Linda Chavez is president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank devoted to the promotion of color-blind equal opportunity and racial harmony. She has held a number of political positions, among them White House Director of Public Liaison and director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She is the author of Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation (Basic Books, 1992) and is currently working on her second book.

William A. V. Clark is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research is focused on the internal changes in U.S. cities, especially in the changes that occur in response to residential mobility and migration. He is author of The California Cauldron: Immigration and the Fortunes of Local Communities (Guilford Press, 1998) and Households and Housing: Choice and Outcomes in the Housing Market (Rutgers, 1996).

Ward Connerly is chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute, a national not-for-profit organization aimed at educating the public about the problems created by racial and gender preferences. A member of the University of California Board of Regents, Mr. Connerly spearheaded the successful fight to end the University’s use of race as a factor in admissions. He has since led campaigns against racial preferences in Florida and Texas. john j. diiulio jr. is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He directs the Jeremiah Project, an initiative of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Civic Innovation. He is also Frederick Fox Leadership Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and senior counsel to Public/Private Ventures.

Tamar Jacoby is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who writes extensively on race issues and other subjects. She is the author of Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration (Free Press, 1998), a book about race relations in three American cities—New York, Atlanta, and Detroit. Ms. Jacoby’s articles and book reviews have been published in a variety of periodicals, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, the New Republic, New York Review of Books, Commentary, Dissent, City Journal, and Times Literary Supplement.

Everett C. Ladd, who died in 1999, was director of the Institute for Social Inquiry at the University of Connecticut and executive director and president of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. He was also an adjunct scholar of the American Enterprise Institute, as well as a columnist for the Christian Science Monitor from 1987 through 1995. Dr. Ladd was the author of seventeen books, most recently The Ladd Report on Civic America (Free Press, 1999).

George R. La Noue is a professor of political science in the Policy Sciences Graduate Program at the Univeristy of Maryland Baltimore County. He is also director of the Project on Civil Rights and Public Contracts at the University. Dr. La Noue’s Ph.D. was granted by Yale University.

William J. Lawrence is publisher of the Native American Press/Ojibwe News, an independent weekly newspaper that serves Minnesota’s Native American community. In 1997, Press/ON was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing and service to the community. The April 1999 issue of Minnesota Monthly featured an article about Mr. Lawrence entitled “The Man Tribal Leaders Love to Hate.” Dr. Lawrence holds a B.A. from Bemidji State University and a J.D. from the University of North Dakota School of Law. He was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Marine Corps serving in Vietnam, and he is an enrolled member of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians.

Nelson Lund is a professor at the School of Law, George Mason University. Before joining the faculty in 1992, he was associate counsel to President George Bush. Mr. Lund has served in the Office of Legal Counsel and the Office of the Solicitor General of the U.S. Department of Justice and as a law clerk to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and to U.S Court of Appeals Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham.

Christine H. Rossell is a professor of political science at Boston University. Ms. Rossell is the author of four books and many scholarly articles in the areas of school desegregation and bilingual education policy. She has been an expert witness in more than twenty school desegregation and bilingual education cases and has helped design and defend more than a half dozen voluntary “incentive” desegregation plans.

Sally Satel is a practicing psychiatrist and lecturer at Yale University School of Medicine. She is staff psychiatrist at the Oasis Clinic in Washington, D.C. In addition to publishing widely in medical journals and the popular press, Dr. Satel is the author of PCMD: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine (Basic Books, 2000).

Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of a nationally syndicated column that appears in over 150 newspapers. Dr. Sowell has written widely on economics, the history of ideas, and social policy. His most recent book is The Quest for Cosmic Justice (Free Press, 1999).

Shelby Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Mr. Steele’s most recent book isA Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America (Harper Collins, 1998). He is also author of The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (HarperCollins, 1990), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990.

Abigail Thernstrom is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and coauthor of America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (Simon & Schuster, 1997). Her previous book, Whose Votes Count: Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights (Harvard University Press, 1987), won four academic prizes. She has been a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education since 1995 and writes frequently for a variety of journals and newspapers, including New Republic, Commentary, theWall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Public Interest.

Stephan Thernstrom is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches American social history. His most recent book, coauthored with Abigail Thernstrom, is America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible (Simon & Schuster, 1997). He is also the editor of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Harvard University Press, 1980).

Martin Trow is emeritus professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley.He holds a degree as a mechanical engineer from Stevens Institute of Technology and a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University. He has written widely on the sociology of politics and higher education. He is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and was recently awarded the Berkeley Citation for distinguised service to the University of California.

Reed Ueda is a professor of history at Tufts University and on the steering group of the Committee on Migration at the Center for International Studies of MIT.He is author of Postwar Immigrant America:ASocial History (Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1994), among other books and articles. Dr. Ueda was also research editor for Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Harvard University Press, 1980).

Eugene Volokh is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law. Before he joined the faculty at UCLA, he clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and for U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski. Mr. Volokh teaches free speech law, copyright law, the law of government and religion, and a seminar on firearms regulation law and policy.

Finis Welch is a professor of economics and George T. and Gladys H. Abell Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. His specialty is in labor economics, on which he has written many articles and papers. Dr. Welch did his doctoral research at the University of Chicago.

James Q. Wilson taught political science at Harvard University from 1961 to 1987, where he was the Shattuck Professor of Government. From 1985 until 1997 he was the James Collins Professor of Management and Public Policy at UCLA. He is the author or coauthor of fourteen books, the most recent of which is Moral Judgment (Basic Books, 1997). In addition, he has edited or contributed to books on urban problems, government regulation of business, and the prevention of delinquency among children.

C. Robert Zelnick, a professor of journalism at Boston University, spent twenty-one years with ABC News, including reporting assignments in Moscow and Israel, at the Pentagon, and covering Congress and politics. A former Hoover Institution visiting fellow, he is the author of Gore: A Political Life (National Book Network, 1999) and Backfire:A Reporter’s Look at Affirmative Action (Regnery, 1996).

==============================

Introduction

The American racial and ethnic landscape has been fundamentally transformed in recent decades. But public understanding has lagged behind new realities. Our gaze is often fixed on the rearview mirror, and even that view is distorted. A color line seems to bifurcate the nation. Blacks appear as permanent victims; white racism looks ubiquitous. Asian and Hispanic Americans, who together now outnumber blacks, are but a shadowy presence hovering in the background. Their experience as “people of color” is portrayed as little different from that of African Americans.

White racism, of course, was ubiquitous not that long ago. And it has not entirely disappeared. But the past is not the present. We have been moving forward. Much of the territory that now surrounds us is unfamiliar, and yet old notions persist. The ethnic and racial categories themselves— white, black, Asian, and Hispanic—never made much sense and are, in any case, dissolving. Half of native-born Asian Americans are now marrying whites. A third of all Hispanics marry non-Hispanic whites. The black intermarriage rate is slowly creeping up. A generation ago blacks had much less education and much poorer jobs and were much more likely to live in solidly black neighborhoods than they are today. Differences persist, but they now have multiple and complex causes.

America’s changing racial and ethnic scene is the central theme of this volume. In essays on topics ranging from religion and immigration to family structure and crime, the authors seek to illuminate where we have been, where we are, and where we are heading. They share a common vision: the color line transcended. One nation, indivisible is still America’s unrealized dream.

The Color-Blind Vision

Pessimism is strikingly pervasive in civil rights circles today. In the heyday of the civil rights movement, by contrast, those who fought for racial equality were optimists, and that optimism seemed vindicated by events. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act a year later, the civil rights movement achieved its main political objectives. As Bayard Rustin, a close adviser to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., noted at the time, the “legal foundations of racism in America” had been “destroyed” with dizzying speed. The “elaborate legal structure of segregation and discrimination” had “virtually collapsed.”1 Most Americans— not just those directly involved in the movement—celebrated.

Indeed, the 1964 election returns were a smashing victory for civil rights proponents. Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for president who opposed the Civil Rights Act, was resoundingly rejected. Democrats gained an additional thirty-seven seats in the House and one more in the Senate, giving them majorities of more than two-thirds in both chambers. It was a partisan imbalance the like of which has not been seen since.

It is no coincidence that in 1965 the United States also abandoned the discriminatory national origins quotas that had governed its immigration law since the 1920s. The notion that only citizens from countries like Great Britain or Germany would make good Americans lost popular support in the increasingly tolerant and cosmopolitan America of the postwar period. Congress amended the Immigration and Nationality Act to open the doors to prospective immigrants from all countries on an equal basis.

Immigration reform and the two landmark civil rights bills—the most important since Reconstruction—all rested on a central moral principle: it is wrong to judge Americans on the basis of race, color, creed, sex, or national origin. People are individuals with equal rights, not fungible members of groups. The Constitution is “color-blind,” John Marshall Harlan had declared in his famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that upheld “separate but equal” railroad accommodations.2 It was the message of the civil rights movement from before the CivilWar to the 1960s.3 Dr. King dreamed of the day when Americans would be judged solely by the “content of their character,” not by “the color of their skin.”4 President John F. Kennedy invoked this core principle in supporting the passage of a sweeping civil rights bill that would demonstrate the nation’s commitment to “the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.”5

The Reversion to Color-Consciousness

The clarity of this moral vision was lost, however, in the turbulent and chaotic years of the late 1960s. In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson took the first step in a radically different direction. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’” Johnson argued. Opening “the gates of opportunity” would not suffice; racial “equality as a fact and as a result” had to be the nation’s goal.6 Although Johnson did not use the term “affirmative action,” his image of blacks as crippled by racism laid the foundation for a generation of racial preferences—race-conscious measures designed to ensure “equality as a fact.” Handicapped citizens were entitled to compete under different rules.

The rationale for the racial preferences that came to be embedded in policies involving employment, education, and public contracting was most famously articulated by Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun in 1978. “In order to get beyond racism,” he said, “we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. We cannot—we dare not—let the Equal Protection clause perpetuate racial supremacy.”7 It was not clear why policies that were explicitly race conscious were the only alternative to racial supremacy; in the extraordinarily long debates on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, no one ever made Justice Blackmun’s argument. The framers of that statute had envisioned aggressive enforcement of its race-neutral antidiscrimination provisions. But by 1978 the vaguely Orwellian notion that it was necessary to treat some persons “differently” in order to treat them “equally” became civil rights orthodoxy.

The Misguided Diagnosis of the Kerner Report

How did race-conscious policies become so accepted by 1978? The answer, in part, is the racial crisis that erupted in the nation’s cities within three months of Johnson’s June 1965 speech. In August, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles exploded in flames, kicking off four “long, hot summers” of looting, burning, and fighting in predominantly black areas of cities across the land.

The riots came to an end in 1968, as suddenly and mysteriously as they appeared, and what caused them is still open to debate. But the explanation offered by President Johnson’s Kerner Commission was a sweeping indictment of American society. Indeed, the Commission’s central finding became, and remains, conventional wisdom in the civil rights community, academia, and the national media. The 1968 report portrayed America in stark—literally black-and-white—terms. The American drama was a play with only two characters: bigoted whites and victimized blacks. Whites were mostly living in suburban comfort, while blacks were trapped by white prejudice in decaying, dead-end inner-city neighborhoods. Curiously, the report barely mentioned the great civil rights statutes that had already irrevocably changed the status of blacks in both South and North. It portrayed the nation as moving backward, “toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” The riots were natural and inevitable protests against “the racial attitudes and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans.” An “explosive mixture” had accumulated in the cities “since the end ofWorldWar II,” and it was not surprising that the powder keg had at last detonated. America would be marked by “deepening racial division” and “ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values” until “white racism” disappeared.8

As an analysis of what had triggered the ghetto riots of the mid-1960s, the Kerner report was useless. Increasing inequality could not have been the explanation; by every conceivable measure the status of African Americans had improved. Their average incomes were rising more rapidly than those of whites—no surprise, given how far behind they had been. In years of schooling, occupational status, quality of housing, and life expectancy, the racial gap was narrowing significantly. The political power of blacks was expanding, and they had an array of new legal rights.9

Of course, African Americans were still more likely than whites to live in poverty and suffered from higher unemployment rates, but those conditions were just as pervasive in the cities that had not experienced riots. Moreover, the riots ended in 1968. Why? Inner-city neighborhoods had not been transformed, white racism had not suddenly disappeared, and in the few months that elapsed between the Kerner report and the last racial disturbance, the federal government had not begun the program of massive new spending that the Commission had recommended.

Looking Backward: Liberal Orthodoxy Today

In spite of these and other glaring flaws, the portrait drawn by the Kerner Commission has had a remarkable life. Its findings are frequently cited as equally valid today. For instance, in December 1999 the attorney general of Massachusetts looked at student scores on statewide tests and recalled the Kerner Commission’s “pessimistic conclusion that our nation was ‘moving towards two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.’”10 Although the Kerner findings were barely mentioned explicitly, the report of the Race Advisory Board appointed by President Clinton and chaired by Dr. John Hope Franklin was a warmed-over version of the Kerner report with updated rhetoric. Its findings were a prime example of what Orlando Patterson has called the “forever racism” mindset. 11

New demographics compelled the Franklin Commission to acknowledge the large and rapidly growing presence of Asians and Hispanics, though it did so largely by conflating the experience of all “people of color.” The United States, it said, is still governed by an oppressive “system of racial hierarchy” in which whites hold all the power and members of “every minority group” face “significant barriers to opportunity.” “Racial and ethnic oppression . . . persist.” “Racial stereotypes” and “racist concepts” abound, as ugly and primitive as ever; no area of life is free of “subtle biases.”12

A similarly gloomy and strident note was struck in a recent address by Julian Bond, the chairman of theNAACP. Though he conceded that African Americans had made some advances since the 1960s, he insisted that the Kerner Commission’s “indictment of white America” was still sound. “Everywhere we look we see clear racial fault lines that divide America now as much as in the past.” Within a few short years of the Kerner report, a “backlash in the discourse over race” had set in, Bond claimed. Its findings were rejected by “a curious mix of whites and a few blacks, academics, journalists and policy makers,” engaged in “blame-shifting” and determined to pervert reality. These “new racists,” he said, see continuing blackwhite disparities as the consequence of “family breakdown,” a “lack of middle-class values,” a paucity of “education and skills,” and the “absence of role models.” But “these are symptoms. Racism is the cause; its elimination is the cure.”13

Looking Forward

The two dozen contributors to this volume disagree about many things; they were not chosen because they follow a particular party line on racial and ethnic issues. But they all reject the civil rights orthodoxy expressed by Julian Bond and the Franklin Commission. The Kerner report was a highly imperfect guide to the American picture when it was first released, and by now it is about as reliable as a telephone directory issued thirty years ago. The ritualistic evocation of a color line perpetuated by old and new racists is futile and counterproductive.The drive for racial equality is unfinished business, yet the civil rights community has almost nothing fresh to offer.

What follows is a guide to the new territory shaped by seismic shifts in American society over the past three decades. How are various groups faring economically, both in absolute terms and in relation to each other? What are the social conditions in the new communities of color? What progress have we made in closing the gap in educational outcomes? How is the law changing? How much has the sharp increase in marriages across racial lines blurred the boundaries between groups and diminished the salience of racial identifications? How are shifting attitudes—white, black, Asian, Hispanic, American Indian—reflected in the nation’s politics? Are voters crossing racial lines in casting ballots for candidates?

The twenty-five brief essays offered here address these questions and more. The authors are scholars, journalists, and activists who specialize in the areas they write about. Grounded in research and close observation, almost every chapter shatters an old stereotype.

Many of the essays offer either explicit or implicit public policy recommendations. A common theme unites them: new realities require new thinking—a new civil rights agenda. It is undeniable that serious racerelated problems persist—most obviously for black Americans. But the causes of those problems entail complexities of which the Kerner Commission never dreamed. White racism does not work as the simple explanation for the relatively poor academic performance of most black students in contexts ranging from affuent suburbia to black-run school districts. Too many black children live in poverty, but almost all are in single-parent households; how can we encourage young women to postpone pregnancy until they are married or well positioned to support a family? The problems of poverty, inadequate education, high unemployment, among others, appear unchanged, but the facade of continuity is deceptive, and old civil rights strategies will not solve today’s problems.

This collection is the work of the Citizens’ Initiative on Race and Ethnicity (CIRE), formed in April 1998 as an alternative to what many Americans saw as President Clinton’s one-sided “dialogue” on questions of color. The Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research generously supported the group’s work and the research and writing that went into the essays. Lindsay Young, director of communications at the Manhattan Institute, served as the project coordinator, and Richard Sousa of the Hoover Institution guided the publication process. All thirteen CIRE members contributed to the conception and planning of the volume.

Citizens’ Initiative On Race And Ethnicity
Clint Bolick, Institute for Justice
Elaine L. Chao, Heritage Foundation
Linda Chavez, Center for Equal Opportunity
Ward Connerly, American Civil Rights Institute
Tamar Jacoby, Manhattan Institute
Barbara J. Ledeen, Independent Women’s Forum
Gerald A. Reynolds, Center for New Black Leadership
T. J. Rodgers, Cypress Semiconductor
Shelby Steele, Hoover Institution
Abigail Thernstrom, Manhattan Institute
Stephan Thernstrom, Manhattan Institute
Robert L. Woodson Sr., National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise
C. Robert Zelnick, Hoover Institution

Notes

1. Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement,”

Commentary, February 1965, reprinted in Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected

Writings of Bayard Rustin (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), p. 111.

2. 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

3. See Andrew Kull, The Color-Blind Constitution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1992).

4. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” speech, 1963 March onWashington.

Reprinted in James MelvinWashington, ed.,ATestament of Hope: The EssentialWritings

of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1986), p. 219.

5. Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil Rights,” June 11,

1963, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, Containing

the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, January 1 to November

22, 1963 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), pp. 468–71.

6. Lyndon B. Johnson, “To Fulfill These Rights,” address at Howard University,

June 4, 1965, reprinted in Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, eds., The Moynihan

Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967), p. 126.

7. Regents of the Univ. of Calif. v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 407 (1978).

8. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders [Kerner Commission] Report

(New York: Bantam, 1968), pp. 1, 2, 10.

9. The data on black progress in this period are assembled in Stephan Thernstrom

and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New

York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), chaps. 3–6.

10. Thomas F. Reilly, “Separate and Unequal Education,” Boston Globe, op-ed,

December 11, 1999, p. A19. For other claims that the Kerner Commission’s findings

were still correct, see Fred R. Harris and RogerW. Wilkins, eds., Quiet Riots: Race and

Poverty in the United States: Twenty Years After the Kerner Report (New York: Pantheon,

1988); Douglas S. Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the

Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 211;

and Charles Bullard, J. Eugene Grigsby III, and Charles Lee, eds., Residential Apartheid:

The American Legacy (Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies, 1994),

pp. 1–2.

11. The Patterson phrase is cited in Jim Sleeper, “Al Gore, Racial Moralist,” New

Republic, March 2, 1998, p. 21.

12. President’s Initiative on Race Advisory Board, One America in the 21st Century:

Forging A New Future (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998),

pp. 36, 43–44.

13. Julian Bond, “Hostility to Civil Rights, ‘Color Line’ Problems to Continue,”

Charlestown Gazette, April 1, 1999, p. 5A.

==============================

PART ONE — THE BIG PICTURE

The Demography of Racial and Ethnic Groups

STEPHAN THERNSTROM

The United States has been a racially and ethnically diverse society from its beginnings. But the conventional wisdom these days is that something radically new is happening now—that demographic changes are fundamentally transforming our society in unprecedented ways. Peering into a crystal ball, many observers have claimed that the groups we currently designate as minorities are destined to become the new majority. By the middle of the twenty-first century, they predict, and perhaps even sooner, whites will have been reduced to minority status and “people of color” will have become the majority. This, it is claimed, will have momentous implications for the nation’s political, social, and cultural life.

Such is the argument, for example, of Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation, a 1995 volume that contended that current population shifts were “so huge and so systematically different from anything that had gone before as to transform—and ultimately, perhaps, even to destroy—the . . . American nation.”1

Table 1 Public Beliefs About the Racial Composition of the U.S. Population, 1995

What percent of the population is . . .?

minority

*Responses by*	*Black*	*Hispanic*	*Asian*	*Total*
Non-Hispanic whites	24	15	11	50
Blacks	26	16	12	54
Hispanics	23	21	11	55
Asians	21	15	8	44
Actual 1995 figures	13	10	4	27

source: WashingtonPost–Kaiser Family Foundation–Harvard University survey, as given in Richard

Morin, “A Distorted Image of Minorities,” Washington Post, November 8, 1995, p. A1. Survey results

are mean figures. The actual 1995 figures are Current Population Survey estimates reported in U.S.

Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1997 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government

Printing Office, 1997), table 12.

Brimelow is a conservative, but many observers on the multicultural left are equally convinced that a profound demographic transformation is under way. They are cheered rather than dismayed by the prospect, however. They welcome the arrival of a minority majority and see it as evidence of the need for immediate action—for more multicultural education in the schools, continued affirmative action and diversity training programs in higher education and the workplace, and an expanded welfare state.

The demographic projections upon which both sides of this debate depend are too flawed to be taken seriously, as I shall argue later. But the general public seems to have got the message—so it would appear, at least, from the results of a 1995 poll that asked Americans to estimate what proportion of the population belonged to various racial or ethnic groups (see Table 1). This survey revealed that whites (that is, non-Hispanic whites, a distinction to be discussed at a later point) thought that the black population was almost twice as large as it was in fact—24 percent in their minds, just 13 percent in reality—and that there were 50 percent more Hispanics and almost three times as many Asians in the country as the Current Population Survey figures revealed there to be. These three minority groups together, whites thought, made up fully half of the total population, when they actually were little more than one quarter. The “minority majority,” in the eyes of whites, was not a possibility in the remote future; whites were already on the brink of losing their traditional majority status.2

It is tempting to interpret this misconception as evidence of widespread white paranoia. But the delusion was not confined to whites. Indeed, blacks and Hispanics were even more prone than whites to exaggerate their numbers. They also greatly exaggerated the size of other minority groups: minorities together, they believed, were already a distinct majority of the population, constituting 54 or 55 percent of the total. Asians were a little better informed than other groups, but they too greatly overestimated the size not only of their own group but also of other minorities. Whatever their backgrounds, most Americans tended to have similar misconceptions about the racial-ethnic composition of the nation’s population.3

It has long been claimed that nonwhite people are socially invisible in American society and that the minority presence deserves to be given far more attention than it receives on television, in the press, in classrooms and textbooks. President Clinton’s Race Initiative was based on the premise that most white Americans do not pay sufficient attention to their fellow countrymen with skins of a different hue. These polling numbers suggest that the opposite may be closer to the truth: Americans have become so attentive to racial divisions and so obsessed with racial matters that they have developed a badly distorted picture of the shape of their society.

The Arbitrary and Unscientific Character of the Official Racial-Ethnic Categories in Current Use

The survey referred to above employed four crude categories: white, black, Hispanic, and Asian. Why are these the relevant categories for subdividing the population into cultural groups? Why are these few groups singled out for attention, while a great many others with some claim to a distinct identity are not? What about Italian Americans, for example, or Jews? Are divisions among “races” deeper, more fundamental, and more enduring than divisions among “ethnic groups”?

The idea that “race” is a crucial and immutable division of mankind is a product of the primitive social science of the nineteenth century. According to theorists of the day, all the peoples of the world were divided into four distinct races: white or “Caucasian,” black or “Negroid,” yellow or “Oriental,” and red or Indian. White, black, yellow, and red people were profoundly different from each other, as different as robins from sparrows, trout from salmon, rabbits from squirrels.People who belonged to different races were not only distinct physical types; they differed in innate intellectual potential and in cultural development. If they were to mate across racial lines, their offspring would be biological monstrosities.

Since these race theorists were white, it is hardly surprising that they fervently believed that Caucasians were the superior race. Orientals were next in line, with blacks and American Indians at the bottom of the heap. Given this premise, it was only natural that representatives of the “most advanced” race believed that they were entitled to rule over the “lesser breeds.”

Such ideas have long been discredited and are now held only by those on the lunatic fringe. Scientists today agree that the genetic differences that distinguish members of supposedly different “races” are small, and that the races have become so intermixed that few people can claim to be of racially “pure” origins. The range of biological variation within any one race is far greater than the average differences among races.

And yet the government of the United States, remarkably, still utilizes these antiquated and pernicious categories in compiling statistical information about the American people. The entry on the black population in the index to the 1997 edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States gives 230 citations to tables that distinguish African Americans from other Americans. Another 140 citations direct the reader to data on “Hispanics,” a newly invented quasi-racial category whose origins will be traced below. Asians and Pacific Islanders get 42 references, and American Indians and Alaskan natives 47. If you want to know how many African Americans regularly use the Internet, how many Asians were treated in hospital emergency rooms in the preceding year, how many Hispanics usually eat breakfast, or how many American Indians were arrested for burglary, the answers are all there. The federal government inundates us with data that convey the unmistakable message that Americans of different “races” differ from each other in many important ways.

It is very striking that the American public is not bombarded with similar official statistics on the socioeconomic characteristics of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims, and the many denominational subdivisions within those broad categories. Why not? Religious groups in the United States differ, often quite dramatically, in levels of education, income and wealth, SAT scores, unemployment rates, and most other socioeconomic measures. Why shouldn’t the public be able to find out if Jews are much wealthier than Presbyterians, on the average, or if Mormons are more likely to attend college than Southern Baptists? The government of the United States has never inquired into the religious affiliations of individual citizens because religion is regarded as a private matter in American society and not the business of government. If such information did become readily available, the effect might be to heighten tensions between people of different faiths, inspiring some to complain that they did not have their “fair share” of federal judgeships or of seats on the boards of large corporations and that others were “overrepresented” in those positions.

If not religion, why race? The racial categories currently used by the federal government derive from discredited racial theories more than a century old, with only minor changes in nomenclature. “Negroid” has given way to “black” or “African American,” and “Oriental” has been replaced by “Asian.” But the idea that it is meaningful and socially useful to cram us all into one of the four racial boxes constructed by racist thinkers more than a hundred years ago remains unchanged. The previous decennial census, in 1990, still accepted the traditional premise that every American belongs in one and only one of four mutually exclusive racial categories; people of racially mixed ancestry were required to record just one race on the census forms. The Census of 2000 has broken from this tradition and allowed respondents to give more than one answer to the race question, but for purposes of civil rights enforcement the results will be tabulated in the same old crude categories, rendering the change virtually meaningless.4

The issue is not confined to the U.S. Census. Nineteenth-century conceptions of race are also alive and well in the official guidelines that govern the statistical information that all federal agencies must gather. The authoritative statement of current practice is the Office of Management and Budget’s Directive No. 15, “Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting,” first issued in 1977 and still in effect.5 Directive 15 declared that the population of the United States was divided into four “races” and two “ethnic” groups and required all agencies of the federal government to compile data using these categories in order to assess the impact of their programs.

The “racial” groups identified in Directive 15 were the usual ones: whites, blacks, Asians and Pacific Islanders, and American Indians and Alaskan Natives. Even though the old idea of a racial hierarchy with whites on top had lost all intellectual respectability, the guidelines set forth in Directive 15 were designed to subvert that hierarchy. The rationale for requiring all governmental agencies to subdivide the population into these particular racial categories was that these nonwhite groups had been the targets of prejudice in the past. (So had many white immigrant groups, of course, but the guidelines made no mention of that.) It was necessary to monitor how the nonwhite races were faring in the present in order to overcome the allegedly lingering remnants of a history of white supremacy. The three minority races were victim groups that had once “suffered discrimination and differential treatmenton the basis of their race.”As victims, they were—and are—entitled to a variety of special protections and preferential programs not available to whites.

Does it make sense at the end of the twentieth century to identify “races” as defined by nineteenth-century supporters of white supremacy? The authors of Directive 15 were careful to say that “these classifications should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature.” True enough, but the admission only makes their decision to utilize them more dubious. If these categories are not “scientific” or “anthropological,” what are they? Why should the U.S. government distinguish some citizens from others on a basis that is not “scientific” or even “anthropological” (whatever that means) and use those distinctions in allocating public resources? Perhaps the answer is that the OMB assumed that Americans today habitually draw these crude distinctions in their daily lives, and that recognition of social reality requires the government to do the same. This is a feeble argument. What is the evidence of a societal consensus on precisely these distinctions? Some Americans may see the population as divided into two groups, whites and nonwhites. Some, on the other hand, may make much finer distinctions than these racial categories provide, seeing Japanese Americans as quite different from Korean Americans, for example. It is certainly questionable whether Koreans and Japanese feel a strong sense of kinship and solidarity as “Asians”; there is considerable antipathy between these groups that grows out of the fact that Korea was under Japanese rule for most of the first half of the twentieth century. Immigrants from Ethiopia and Jamaica likewise differ from blacks whose ancestors came to North America as slaves centuries ago, but those differences are obscured when all are thrown together into the black racial category.

Even if it could be shown that these unscientific racial categories did correspond at least moderately well to the way in which the general public perceives the racial landscape, it does not follow that it is wise for the government to insist upon the saliency of race. Justice Harry Blackmun argued two decades ago that “in order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. . . . And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.”6 But the race-conscious policies that have been pursued in the United States for a generation have plainly not taken us “beyond racism.”7

President John F. Kennedy was wiser than Justice Blackmun, I believe, when he said that “race has no place in American life or law.”8 To continue to draw racial distinctions in our laws and to compile massive amounts of official statistical data about racial differences among racial groups will not serve to make race less important in “American life.” We need not go so far as to bar government from collecting any information whatever about the ethnic composition of the population. But the evidence necessary to monitor the socioeconomic progress of groups and to identify problems can be obtained without pertetuating the dangerous fiction of race. The census currently includes a question about the “ancestry or ethnic origin” of respondents, a concept broad enough to include African Americans, Asian Americans, and all other Americans. The answers to this question will yield information about what arenow classified as racial groups without contributing to the fallacy that they are fundamentally different from other groups based on a sense of common origins and peoplehood.

Is Racial Victimization Hereditary?

The rationale for making racial distinctions in official statistics is remedial. Directive 15 rests on the premise that being a member of a particular race that was treated unfairly at some point in the past leaves an indelible imprint on everyone with the same “blood.” Is there no statute of limitations for complaints of historical victimization? Does the discrimination experienced by your grandparents, great-grandparents, or even more remote ancestors have any relevance to your life today?

The case for classifying some Americans as belonging to a victim group is, of course, strongest for blacks. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that official racial statistics would still be gathered but for the continuing “American dilemma,” the seemingly never ending problem of how black Americans can be integrated into American society. The situation of blacks in the United States is sui generis. Although there are many points of resemblance between African Americans and immigrant groups that also encountered prejudice and discrimination, the differences are fundamental. No other group has such a bitter heritage of centuries of enslavement, followed by several decades of disfranchisement and legally enforced separation and subordination in the Jim Crow South and by intense racist hostility in the rest of the country.

Nonetheless, in spite of this unique history, the assumption that blacks today should still be regarded as victims who must be treated “differently” in order to be treated “equally” is mistaken. African Americans made stunning educational and economic advances in the 1940s and 1950s, which made possible the triumph of the civil rights revolution and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and since then they have continued to make gains. And white racial attitudes have changed dramatically for the better.9 Anti-black racism has by no means disappeared altogether, but it is no longer the chief obstacle in the way of further progress by African Americans.

Note, for example, that more than seven out of ten black babies today are born out of wedlock, and that fully 85 percent of black children living in poverty reside with a mother and no father.10 Suppose that these children had the same mothers and (absent) fathers and lived in the same neighborhoods but had somehow arrived in the world with white skins. If these children were all “white,” would their life prospects be notably better? It seems highly doubtful. Or consider the dismal fact that the average black twelfth-grader today reads at the same level as the average white child in the eighth grade and is about as far behind in math, writing, and science.11 In an economy that increasingly rewards those with strong cognitive skills, this pattern of low educational achievement guarantees that African Americans will be disproportionately concentrated in the least attractive and poorest-paid jobs. Again, if they had the same limited cognitive skills but white skins, it would not improve their job prospects significantly.

With other “racial” groups, the assumption that exposure to discrimination in the past continues to be a major obstacle is even more questionable. During World War II, Japanese American citizens living on the West Coast were presumed to be of questionable loyalty to the United States because of their “blood” ties to Japan, and for that reason they were forced to abandon their homes and businesses and were locked up in relocation camps for the duration of the war. Almost all of them were deprived of their liberty for four years, and many lost valuable property, receiving only partial compensation long after the war had ended. But by 1990 native-born Japanese Americans had median family incomes 47 percent higher than those of whites, and they were 57 percent more likely to have a college degree.12 Some doubtless still bore psychic scars from their bitter experience half a century before, but that did not prevent the dramaticupward mobility of the group in the postwar years. By 1990 most of those who been locked up because of their race were retired or dead; two-thirds of the Japanese Americans then alive had been born after the relocation camps had been shut down.13 And yet Japanese American entrepreneurs today are given an edge over whites in the competition for federal contracts (and state and local governmental contracts in many places) because they belong to the Asian “race.”

An even more strained historical argument has been made about another Asian group—Chinese Americans—in the recent report of the Advisory Board to the President’s Initiative on Race. The report speaks of “the forced labor of Chinese Americans” as part of “a history of legally mandated and socially and economically imposed subordination to white European Americans and their descendants.”14 This is a lurid and tendentious description of the “coolie” system, a form of indentured servitude in which Chinese merchants advanced passage money to America to unskilled workers who then paid off their debt through labor. But even if the coolie system was as bad as the quoted characterization, how is the indentured labor of the Chinese in California in the 1870s relevant to the situation of Chinese Americans in the 1990s? Chinese immigrants did indeed encounter horrendous prejudice in the nineteenth century and after, but the 1990 Census revealed that native-born Chinese Americans were even more successful than the enormously prosperous Japanese Americans, with median family incomes some 58 percent higher than those of whites.15 But Chinese Americans are nonetheless favored over whites in various public contracting programs on the assumption that their “race” remains a major handicap.

If the connection between the coolie system or the internment camps and the Chinese and Japanese Americans of today is tenuous, it shrinks to the vanishing point when this purported link is extended to all persons of Asian “race.” It happens that more than four out of five Asian American adults living in the United States today were born abroad; indeed, almost all the foreign-born have arrived in the past three decades, at a time when anti-Asian prejudice was disappearing and public commitment to equal treatment for all Americans had brought about strong federal legislation to combat racial discrimination.16 Many of these newly arrived Asians— Koreans, Cambodians, and Vietnamese, for example—are from countries that sent virtually no immigrants to the United States before World War II, so there was no history at all of racism against their ancestors in the United States. The earlier mistreatment of Chinese and Japanese Americans did nothing to dissuade these newcomers from moving to America in search of greater opportunity, nor should it have. It had no bearing whatever on their prospects for a better life in contemporary America.

The Invention of “Hispanics” as a Quasi-Racial Group

In addition to the three groups presumed to be disadvantaged because of their race, Directive 15 added a fourth—”persons of Hispanic origin.”17 When the OMB issued its guidelines in 1977, the number of Mexican Americans in the United States had been growing dramatically, and immigration from Central and South America was also accelerating. Disproportionately large numbers of the newcomers from Latin countries had poorly paid unskilled jobs and family incomes below the poverty line.

Were their economic difficulties due largely to prejudice against them, or were they due to the fact that they had arrived in the United States with little education, limited or no command of English, and few marketable skills? The OMB did not even acknowledge the question. Directive 15 assumed that the depressed economic and social position of Hispanics was mainly the result of racism and that federal agencies accordingly must compile statistics on the group and do as much as possible to assist them.

Another problem with the “Hispanic” concept was the attitude of the so-called Hispanics themselves, most of whom did not regard themselves as members of a nonwhite “race.” Although activists from the group insisted that they were “people of color,” that was not the perception of most of those they claimed to speak for. People of Hispanic ancestry typically identified themselves as whites on the census and other official forms that included a race question—marriage licenses and birth and death records, for example.18

At one point earlier in the century, Mexican Americans were categorized as nonwhite by the census takers, and the results were instructive. In 1930 the Census Bureau departed from its earlier practice of classifying Mexican Americans as white and instead employed a Mexican “race” category. Enumerators were to use it for “all persons born in Mexico, or having parents born in Mexico” who in their judgment were “not definitely white.”19 People of Mexican ancestry were lumped together with blacks, Asians, and American Indians in the reported totals for “nonwhites.” After Mexican American organizations and the Mexican government furiously protested the decision to relegate members of the group to the nonwhite category, census officials abandoned the categorization and restored Mexican immigrants and their children to the white column.20

This pattern of racial identification continues today also and applies not only to Mexican Americans but also to other Hispanics. Although Latinos tend to have darker skins than the typical American of European ancestry, a large majority—95.7 percent, according to a 1991 Current Population Survey—report themselves to be white.21 And very few of those who reject the white designation identify with any of the other three races; they think of themselves as being of racially mixed origins, rejecting the Census Bureau’s traditional view that everyone belongs in one and only one racial box.

To overcome this awkward difficulty—alleged victims of racism who did not belong to a nonwhite race—the OMB created a new category, “Hispanic.” According to Directive 15, Hispanics were frequently the objects of prejudice and “differential treatment,” not because of their “race” but because of their “ethnicity.” Federal agencies were required to compile data on Hispanics as well as on the three nonwhite races because “ethnicity” for Hispanics was presumed to be the functional equivalent of race for blacks, Asians, and American Indians.

The concept of “ethnicity” had long been an essential analytical tool for understanding American society, but Directive 15 used the term in a novel, indeed bizarre, way. The common understanding of American society was that immigration had played a central role in its development and that many distinct “ethnic groups” had emerged out of the immigration experience and then faded away as later generations became more integrated into the larger society. Being a stranger in a strange land was difficult, and newcomers naturally felt the need to associate with other people who spoke their native tongue, liked similar food, worshiped in the same way, and had similar customs and values. The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups describes more than one hundred such ethnic groups, many of them extinct or close to it by now.22

It is thus remarkable that the official guidelines employed by the federal government maintain that there are just two ethnic groups in the United States: persons of “Hispanic origin” and those “not of Hispanic origin.”23 Several dozen white ethnic groups with distinct identities were suddenly collapsed into a single group with the awkward label “not of Hispanic origin.” All the white ethnic groups had presumably merged into the general population, while Hispanics were taken to be an unassimilable, race-like group that would be as enduring as the “races” that the federal government was so dedicated to enumerating—even though most Hispanics considered themselves, and had always been officially classified as, “white.”

Equally dubious was the assumption that the umbrella label “Hispanic” designated a coherent entity with a common historical experience of oppression at the hands of white Americans. What do Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Argentineans, Colombians,Venezuelans, Chileans, and more than a dozen other immigrant nationalities from Central or South America really have in common? Not even some variant of the Spanish language as their mother tongue, because the label has been defined to include people who trace their origins to Portugal or Brazil and are Portuguese-speakers. And it includes a variety of Indian peoples whose home language is not Spanish. Perhaps most remarkably, the rubric includes the descendants of roughly three-quarters of a million immigrants from Spain or Portugal, although no one could seriously argue they have encountered more prejudice in the United States than immigrants from countries like France, Italy, Poland, or Greece. The category Hispanic is more like the category European than the category Italian or German, and no scholar considers the dozens of American ethnic groups that derive from Europe a single ethnic group with a common experience.

A majority of the Americans now designated as Hispanic are Mexican Americans, and the case for viewing their history as one dominated by “racism and oppression” cannot withstand critical scrutiny either. The report of the President’s Initiative on Race advances this charge, speaking of “the conquest and legal oppression of Mexican Americans and other Hispanics.”24 This is absurdly oversimplified history. The five southwestern states from New Mexico to California were indeed once part of Mexico and were annexed to the United States at the end of a war between the two nations in the 1840s. But only a tiny fraction of the Mexican American population today can trace their origins to that conquest. A mere 13,000 people born in Mexico were recorded as U.S. residents in the Census of 1850, and they were people who had chosen to remain and live under American rule following the Mexican War.25 Mexican Americans did not become a quantitatively significant element of the U.S. population until well into the twentieth century. As late as 1910, they were no more than 0.4 percent of the total U.S. population.26 The real growth of the group was the result of a huge wave of immigration from Mexico that began during the World War I decade, an immigration that was basically similar to the peasant migrations from eastern and southern Europe early in the century. Another much larger immigration wave from Mexico began in the 1950s and continues today.

The idea that the lives of Mexican Americans are somehow blighted by a legacy of “conquest” makes no sense unless one assumes that the historical memory of having lost territory to the United States a century and a half ago is somehow carried in the blood of everyone of Mexican American descent. Immigrants from Mexico who arrived in the twentieth century encountered prejudice, of course, but whether the hostility was any greater than that met with by Italians, Poles, or Jews is questionable. Certainly they were not subjected to “legal oppression” comparable to what blacks experienced in the Jim Crow South.

Because of their strong historical concentration in the Southwest and their traditional employment as farm laborers, Mexican Americans tended to have low incomes and limited opportunities to obtain an education that would facilitate their mobility in the larger society. In recent decades, movement out of rural areas and agricultural occupations has gradually resulted in the growth of a Mexican American middle class, at a pace comparable to that of groups like Italians and Poles earlier in the century. The impressive upward mobility of Mexican Americans has been obscured, however, by the continuing influx of large numbers of relatively uneducated immigrants from Mexico, both legal and illegal, whose lowly status pulls down the average for the group as a whole.27

To view American society as divided into four separate, watertight compartments called “races,” with a fifth compartment for a “Hispanic” race that is not quite a race, is profoundly misleading. So is the assumption that public policy should be based on the assumption that three of these races and the Hispanic ethnic group have been oppressed and victimized by the white majority for so long that they need preferential treatment in education, employment, and public contracting into the indefinite future.

The Myth of the Impending Minority Majority

The picture of the American people as divided into oppressors and oppressed racial-ethnic groups is an oversimplification and a distortion. The errors it entails are compounded when we attempt to peer into the future and calculate what the racial and ethnic mix of the American population will eventually be. Projections of precisely this kind have attracted considerable public attention, thanks to a credulous press. The cover story in the April 9, 1990, issue of Time featured a Census Bureau projection that concluded that the United States would have a “minoritymajority” population by the year 2050, Since then, the official estimates have been revised slightly, with the latest indicating that the “minority” population (blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and American Indians) will be a shade less than a majority in 2050—49.7 percent of the population.28 Will this in fact happen? Will it matter if it does? The first thing to notice is that demographers have never been much good at prediction. In the l930s, population experts were unanimous in foreseeing a sharply declining population in the U.S. and other industrial societies. Not one predicted the postwar Baby Boom or the resumption of mass immigration to American shores. In the past half century, instead of declining, the U.S. population has almost doubled. Demographers project future populations on the basis of currently observable patterns of immigration, fertility, and mortality. The more remote the future, the greater the possibility that these variables will change in unanticipated ways.

Indeed, the Census Bureau recognizes some of the uncertainty by issuing a series of different projections of the expected population at various future dates. The projection cited above is based on the “middle series” estimate, which puts the total U.S. population at 394 million in 2050. But the “low series” estimate the bureau makes for that year is just 283 million, and the “high series” estimate is 519 million.29 The high and low estimates vary from each other by a staggering 236 million. Thus the population half a century from now may be nearly double what it is today (approximately 270 million), but it might instead be a mere 5 percent larger than it is now. If there is such great uncertainty about what the total population will be half a century from now, there must be similar uncertainty about the size of the various racial and ethnic subgroups that make up the total.

Why do these projections vary so enormously? Because they necessarily rest on assumptions about the determinants of population growth that may prove mistaken. For example, they require accurate estimates of the level of immigration to the United States thirty or forty years hence. Obviously, we cannot know that with any reliability because our immigration policy may become far more restrictive than it is now. Laws enacted in the 1920s sharply cut back on the number of new arrivals, and we cannot be sure that a similar anti-immigrant backlash will not again close the door to newcomers from abroad.

Nor can we be at all sure about a second variable that determines how the size of a population changes over time—its fertility patterns. (Changes in mortality rates can also affect population size, but mortality usually does not fluctuate dramatically enough to make a big difference, except in the case of demographic catastrophes like the Great Plague of the fourteenth century.) At the beginning of the twentieth century, a greatmany Americans of native stock worried about the consequences of their own rapidly declining fertility. Many feared that they were being swamped by huge waves of new immigrants and the large families the new arrivals typically had. Lothrop Stoddard, a leader of the Immigration Restriction League, warned that Anglo-Saxons were committing “race suicide.” According to his calculations, after 200 years 1,000 Harvard men would have left only 50 descendants, while 1,000 Romanian immigrants would have produced 100,000!30

There was nothing wrong with Stoddard’s math. The problem lay with his straight-line projection of the fertility differentials of his day 200 years into the future. He failed to comprehend that in the second and third generations Romanian Americans would adjust their fertility patterns to the American norm and would produce many fewer children than did the immigrant generation.31

This process of assimilation to the prevailing national fertility norm continues to operate today. Although the current fertility rate of Mexican immigrantwomen is twice the national average, Mexican Americanwomen born in the U.S. have 23 percent fewer children than did their mothers.32 And Mexican American women who graduate from college have families that are 40 percent smaller than those of their ethnic sisters with less than nine years of schooling.33 The high average fertility of women of Mexican origin will drop in the future if the group does not continue to be replenished by huge numbers of new immigrants and if an increasing proportion of Mexican American females go on to college. Both are big ifs, which indicates how difficult it is to make confident predictions about the demographic future.

Stoddard also erred in his implicit assumption that Romanian immigrants and their children would keep marrying with the group, perpetuating the cultural patterns of their country of origin. Quite the opposite happened. Romanians, like most other immigrants, often married non-Romanians, with the probability rising the longer they lived in the United States. Ethnic intermarriage complicates ethnic identification. Are you still a Romanian American if just one of your four grandparents was Romanian? What if two of the four were? The immigrants of the early twentieth century, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, usually chose mates of the same ethnic background, but many of their children and a great many of their grandchildren did not. The population derived from the great waves of European immigration is by now so thoroughly interbred that their ethnic origins are difficult to disentangle and of little consequence.

Assimilation via the “marital melting pot” has also occurred at a rapid pace among the immigrants of the post–WorldWar II era. Recent evidence as to how many Hispanics are marrying non-Hispanics is lacking, but a classic earlier study of Mexican Americans found that 40 percent of those who wed in Los Angeles County in 1963 chose non-Hispanic mates. By the third generation, indeed, members of the group were more likely to marry non-Hispanic whites than persons of Mexican ancestry.34 The rate may be somewhat lower today because the volume of recent immigration from Mexico has been so high, but it can be expected to climb if and when the influx of newcomers declines. Asian Americans are, if anything, more likely than Mexican Americans to marry outside the group, almost always to whites.35 In the past three decades, the rate of black-white intermarriage has also risen precipitously, though it started from a very low level.36

If intermarriage continues at such high levels, a very large proportion of all Americans in 2050 and even sooner will have some Hispanic, Asian, or African “blood.” But it does not follow that all or even most of these individuals will identify more with their one Hispanic, Asian, or black ancestor than with those who were non-Hispanic whites. To believe that nonwhite “blood” or Hispanic “blood” trumps all other identities is simply an extension of the traditional and pernicious “one drop” rule, the notion that “one drop of black blood makes you black.” Even in the case of African Americans, the “one drop” rule is no longer unquestioned, as the example of TigerWoods suggests. And certainly there is no consensus that one drop of Asian, Hispanic, or American Indian blood consigns you to membership in those groups.

The Census Bureau today has more sophisticated techniques for modeling population change than were available to Stoddard, but it has been no more successful than he was at grappling with the reality of ethnic intermarriage, assimilation, and loss of ethnic identity, a reality that fatally confounds all efforts to extrapolate contemporary ethnic divisions into the remote future. Even if the descendants of Romanian Americans and the other “new immigrants” of the early twentieth century who so worried the Immigration Restriction League are now a majority of the population, as Stoddard feared, who could possibly care? By the time that the groups currently classified as “minority” become a majority, if that ever happens, it will be equally irrelevant, because they will no longer be thought of as minorities.

Moreover, if today’s immigrants assimilate into the American stream as readily as their predecessors did at the turn of the century, there will not be any minority majority issue. Whatever their origins, they will have joined the American majority, which is determined not by one’s bloodlines but by one’s commitment to the principles for which this nation stands.

One America in the 21st Century?

Still, assimilation cannot be taken for granted. We cannot reliably predict the shape of the ethnic and racial future of the United States. The historical parallels drawn above may not hold because the melting pot ideal that was once so widely accepted has by now been largely displaced by the competing ideal of multiculturalism, which implies that racial and ethnic divisions are and should be permanent.

The Clinton administration has optimistically labeled the President’s Initiative on Race “One America in the 21st Century,” and that phrase was used as the title of the final report of the Race Initiative’s Advisory Board. Rhetoric about “one America” is good p.r., but in fact the thinking behind the Race Initiative is likely to lead us toward a balkanized future. Chapter 1 of the Advisory Board’s 1998 report is supposed to illuminate the “common values and concerns” that Americans “share, regardless of racial background.” 37 But only its first section, headed “Americans Share Common Values and Aspirations,” makes the point, and it is just one paragraph long and hopelessly vague—no mention at all of common commitment to the Constitution of the United States and to the rule of law, no reference either to the melting pot ideal.

After this perfunctory nod to the notion of common American values, the chapter devotes a full sixteen pages to platitudes such as “dialogue is a tool for finding common ground,” “dialogue helps to dispel stereotypes,” “the role of religious leaders,” “the role of business leaders,” “the role of young leaders.” The assumption seems to be that genuine national unity cannot be attained unless we all participate in group discussions designed to enhance our “awareness of the history of oppression, conquest, and private and government-sanctioned discrimination and their present-day consequences.”38 We are all enjoined to “commit at least one day each month to thinking about how issues of racial prejudice and privilege might be affecting each person you come into contact with.”39

Although the report asserts ritualistically that Americans share “common values and concerns,” it rejects the idea that a common American culture binds us together. Highlighted in a box is a quotation from a student who said, at a “children’s dialogue on race, poverty, and community,” “I don’t think we need to become one culture. I think we just need to respect the differences of each culture.”40 The simplistic view that the American people belong to five separate cultures, with all but non-Hispanic whites the victims of racial oppression, is hardly a recipe likely to make us “one nation, indivisible.”

If the assumptions behind the President’s Initiative on Race continue

to shape public policy in the decades to come, the aim of “One America”

will not be realized. By continuing race-driven policies in the delusion that

they will enable us to “get beyond racism,” we will only ensure the perpetuation

of racial and ethnic divisions far into the future.

Notes

1. Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration

Disaster (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 1.

2. Lest it be thought that this 1995 poll was an aberration, it should be noted that

a 1990 Gallup poll found that white Americans thought that blacks were no less than

32 percent of the population, even further from the mark than the 24 percent estimate

of those polled in 1995. Similarly, African Americans in 1990 thought that blacks were

42 percent of the population, 3.5 times as many as there were in fact. See George Gallup

Jr. and Frank Newport, “Americans Ignorant of Basic Census Facts,” Gallup Poll

Monthly, no. 294 (March 1990), p. 2.

3. For some perceptive comments on the implications of this survey, see Orlando

Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial”

Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Civitas/Counterpoint, 1997), pp. 56–60.

4. Although the Office of Management and Budget has ordered that 63 different

racial combinations be tabulated, which becomes 126 when you add Hispanics to the

mix, it has ruled that in order to assess possible civil rights violations, those fine

distinctions are to be ignored. Persons who report themselves a mixture of white and

some other race are all to be put in the other racial category, a reversion to the old “one

drop rule.” See Stephan Thernstrom, “One Drop Still—A Racialist’s Census,” National

Review, April 17, 2000.

5. Office of Management and Budget, Statistical Directive No. 15, “Race and

Ethnic Standards for Federal Agencies and Administrative Reporting, as Adopted on

May 12, 1977,” Federal Register, v. 43, 19629–19270. The quotations in this and the

following two paragraphs are drawn from this document. For an excellent brief analysis

of these guidelines, see Peter Skerry, “Many American Dilemmas: The StatisticalPolitics

of Counting by Race and Ethnicity,” Brookings Review, Summer 1996, pp. 36–39. In

October 1997 the OMB announced some revisions in its classification scheme. It

subdivided the “Asian and Pacific Islander” category into two: “Asian” and “Native

Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islanders,” so there are now five officially recognized races.

And it allowed people of mixed race to select more than one racial designation from

the list of five.

6. Regents of the Univ. of Calif. v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 407 (1978).

7. See Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White:

One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), part III, for a critical

analysis of racially preferential policies.

8. As quoted in ibid., p. 138.

9. The history of racial segregation and subordination and the struggle against it

are traced in ibid., part I. The enormous progress made by blacks since the 1960s and

the sharp decline in white prejudice are reviewed in part II and the conclusion to the

work.

10. Ibid., pp. 237, 240.

11. The evidence on the racial gap in cognitive skills at age 17 is set forth in ibid.,

pp. 352–59. Possible explanations for the gap are reviewed in ibid., pp. 359–82.

12. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1990 Census of the Population, Asian and Pacific

Islanders in the United States, 1990 CP-3-5 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government

Printing Office, 1993), tables 3 and 5; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population

Reports, P-60-174, Money Income of Households, Families, and Persons in the United

States: 1990 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991), table 13; U.S.

Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1991 (Washington, D.C.:

U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991), table 43.

13. Asian and Pacific Islanders, table 1.

14. President’s Initiative on Race Advisory Board Report, One America in the 21st

Century: Forging a New Future (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,

1998), pp. 36, 43.

15. Asian and Pacific Islanders, table 5; Money Income of Households, table 13.

16. Asian and Pacific Islanders, table 1.

17. Some precedent for the creation of this category was provided by the 1970

Census, which identified the “Spanish origin or descent” population by asking respondents

whether they were Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American,

or “other Spanish.” See A. J. Jaffe, et al., Spanish Americans in the United States: Changing

Demographic Characteristics (New York: Research Institute for the Study of Man, 1976),

pp. 347–48.

18. A March 1991 Current Population Survey found that 95.7 percent of those who

identified themselves as of Hispanic origin considered themselves white, 2.2 percent

black, 0.4 percent American Indian, and 1.5 percent of “other race”; U.S. Bureau of

the Census, CurrentPopulationReports: Special Studies, P23-182,Exploring Alternative

Race-Ethnic Comparison Groups in Current Population Surveys (Washington, D.C.: U.S.

Government Printing Office, 1992), table A. The 1990 Census, by contrast, found that

51.7 percent of Hispanics regarded themselves as white, and 42.7 percent said they

were of “other race.” The difference is attributable to the fact that the CPS accepts

“other race” as an answer only when respondents say they are unable to choose among

the four given to them, whereas the census lists “other race” as an option, and indeed

frames the race question in a way that encourages Hispanics to check the “other race”

box. For a critique of the census race question, see Stephan Thernstrom, “American

Ethnic Statistics,” in Donald L. Horowitz and Gerard Noiriel, eds., Immigrants in Two

Democracies: French and American Experience (New York: New York University Press,

1992), pp. 100, 108.

19. Jaffe, Spanish Americans, p. 346.

20. S. Thernstrom, “American Ethnic Statistics,” p. 91.

21. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Exploring Alternative Race-Ethnic Comparison

Groups, table A.

22. Stephan Thernstrom, ed., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).

23. Statistical Directive No. 15, 19629.

24. One America in the 21st-Century, p. 36. For more sophisticated and nuanced

treatments of this group, see Peter Skerry, Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority

(New York: Free Press, 1993), and the essays inWalker Connor, ed., Mexican-Americans

in Comparative Perspectives (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 1985).

25. Jaffe, Spanish Americans, p. 134.

26. Ibid., pp. 134–35.

27. For impressive evidence of upward mobility by Mexican Americans in Southern

California over the 1980–1990 decade, see Dowell Myers, The Changing Immigrants of

Southern California, research report no. LCRI-95-04R, Lusk Center Research Institute,

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1995.

28. The latest estimates appear in U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of

the United States: 1998 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998),

table 12.

29. Ibid., table 3.

30. Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under

Men (New York: Scribner’s, 1923), pp. 112–13.

31. Tamara K. Hareven and John Modell, “Family Patterns,” in S. Thernstrom, ed.,

Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, pp. 348–49. The typical Italian immigrant

woman recorded on the 1910 Census gave birth to seven children; their

American-born daughters produced an average of five; see S. Philip Morgan, Susan

Cotts Watkins, and Douglas Ewbank, “Generating Americans: Ethnic Differences in

Fertility,” in Susan CottsWatkins, ed., After Ellis Island: Newcomers and Natives in the

1910 Census (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994), pp. 94–95.

32. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1990 Census of the Population, Persons of Hispanic

Origin in the United States, 1990 CP-3-3 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing

Office, 1993), table 1.

33. James A. Sweet and Larry L. Bumpass, American Families and Households (New

York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1987), p. 135.

34. Leo Grebler, Joan W. Moore, and Ralph C. Guzman, The Mexican-American

People: The Nation’s Second Largest Minority (New York: Free Press, 1970), pp. 408–9.

35. Harry L. Kitano, Asian Americans: Emerging Minorities (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:

Prentice-Hall, 1995), pp. 176–80.

36. Some 12.1 percent of the African Americans who married during 1993 had

white mates, as compared with 0.7 of those who wed a generation earlier, in 1963;

Thernstrom and Thernstrom, America in Black and White, p. 526. Although 12 percent

may not seem a very high number, it is much higher than the rate of intermarriage

between Jews and Gentiles in New York City and between Japanese Americans and

whites in Los Angeles County beforeWorld War II; ibid., pp. 526, 536.

37. One America in the 21st Century, p. 12.

38. Ibid., p. 35.

39. Ibid., p. 102.

40. Ibid., p. 26.

==============================

Immigration and Group Relations

REED UEDA

The United States is the prototype of a country built by immigration and assimilation. The blurring of ethnic lines through the process of assimilation has promoted equality of economic opportunity and produced a cultural life open to popular participation and relatively free of constraints imposed by group membership.1 African Americans are the obvious exception to this pattern, since their ancestors came as slaves, not as “immigrants”—as the word is customarily used—and they are not a subject in this essay.

Those who arrived as newcomers on the American shore were thrown into a “melting pot,” almost every scholar once assumed. It was much too simple a notion. Many immigrants joined the mainstream while preserving much of their own ethnic culture. In fact, American liberty has allowed precisely that process of preservation. Freedom and tolerance have permitted religious and cultural minorities who were marginalized or persecuted in their homelands to maintain a distinctive way of life free from fear. The consequence of limited government has been an extraordinarily strong civil society within which groups have organized on their own terms.2 Widespread assimilation is thus coupled with a vibrant ethnic pluralism. American society resembles a simmering stewpot of gradually blending fragments; no crucible immediately melted newcomers into homogeneous Anglo-conformity.

But collective ethnic identity has never been a self-evident and permanent “given”; it has required much energy to sustain. The loose, open, and eclectic organization of American society has been, at one and the same time, a gift and a mortal enemy, affording spaces for ethnic life yet confounding those who would preserve a cultural inheritance in its more or less original form. In the era of industrialization and urbanization, an immense array of foreign nationalities settled together in rough propinquity, each group exposed to the different habits of new neighbors, and to a consumer-oriented mass culture that eroded their traditions.3

In addition, although immigrant communities have not “melted,” with each successive generation they have tended to become increasingly American. Over successive generations, social mobility and acculturation produced positive changes in social class, schooling, and participation in public life and affairs. And thus by intergenerational measures of occupational mobility, residential patterns, income, property ownership, and education, members of European and non-European immigrant groups (to varying degrees) came to look much alike.

Furthermore, paradoxically, as newcomers from the Western Hemisphere, Asia, and Africa made American society more culturally and racially pluralistic, the possibilities for assimilation increased. The influx of newcomers produced a greater tolerance of intergroup differences, making the society more absorptive. Thus Poles, for instance, became more willing to shed their Polishness in favor of “the American way.” Had the society been less tolerant, groups would have held fast to their ethnic traditions in residential enclaves. As it was, groups underwent a gradual but steady course of cultural transformation. That process began with northern and western Europeans in the nineteenth century; they were followed in the early twentieth century by southern and eastern Europeans, Asians, and immigrants from Western Hemisphere countries. More recently an influx of people from the Third World have followed in their footsteps. These new Americans shaped a creative assimilative process in which they both changed themselves and became part of the whole by changing the whole. The national culture was porous and absorbent, but so were the subcultures arising out of the adaptation of immigrants and their children.4

The movement of immigrant groups into the center of national life constituted a creative achievement in the face of imposing challenges and obstacles. The alienated and disempowered multitudes from abroad arduously devised the arts of coexistence with others. They learned to act together with culturally distant—sometimes hostile—natives and other newcomers who had been strangers or antagonists in the countries they left behind. In their new homes in America, the Jews, Poles, Russians, and Germans of Chicago came to accept each other as neighbors and as equals. Immigration was a rigorous school in which new lessons of group cooperation and interdependence had to be learned for the sake of survival.5

The new cultural relationships in which immigrants found themselves inevitably attenuated the transplanted forms of homeland culture. Pathways of multigenerational change varied in timing and length, but they all tended to head in the same direction. The English, the Welsh, the Dutch, and the Scots, and to a lesser degree the descendants of Norwegians, Danes, Swedes, and Germans—those whose ancestors were part of the American population since the colonial and early national era—experienced the greatest divergence from homeland cultural legacies. Americans whose forebears came from southern and eastern Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America exhibited a stronger tendency to retain distinctive ethnic features. But even for them, the ties and feelings of a homeland-based identity yielded in degrees to the syncretic and eclectic forms of American culture.

Immigrants were often unaware of how far they had departed in habit and custom from the ancestral culture. An American-born Chinese girl in the 1930s described the experience of self-discovery on a visit to China:

I gave up trying to be a Chinese; for as soon as the people in China learned that I was an overseas Chinese, they remarked, “Oh, you are a foreigner.” Some asked, “Where did you learn to speak Chinese?” Some thought it remarkable that I spoke Chinese at all. So you see I was quite foreign to China. I wore Chinese clothes and tried to pass as a Chinese, but I could not so I gave up and admitted my foreign birth and education. I lack very much a Chinese background, Chinese culture, and Chinese manners and customs; I have neither their understanding nor their viewpoint nor their patience. Sometimes I was homesick for America. Where I had friends, I felt better.6

The inescapable forces of social change made ethnic identity only one part of personal identity. Increasingly, over the generations, individuals were shaped by the jobs they held, the churches they attended, their places of residence, and by their schooling, peer culture, and consumer tastes.7 In addition, the public forms of Anglo-Saxon society became, for immigrants and their descendants, a cultural lingua franca. For later descendants of European immigrants, ethnicity itself became increasingly thin and symbolic, a matter of personal choice.8

Assimilation also meant a very high degree of linguistic unification in twentieth-century America, in spite of a mass immigration that introduced a linguistic diversity greater than that found in any other modern society. In the early twentieth century, several dozen languages were spoken; in the 1990s, the number of foreign languages in use probably rose even higher and certainly included many more non-European languages. But people may know and use both the language of their homeland and English; over time, immigrantswho speak Vietnamese at home have nevertheless become absorbed into an English-language culture.

Thus, a study based on the 1990 U.S. Census showed that among all immigrants, the proportion of those who spoke only English or who spoke English very well rose from 36 percent among those who had been in the United States five years or less, to 57 percent among those who had been residents from sixteen to twenty-five years, to 77 percent for those who had been here for forty or more years.9

In addition, the numbers of those who primarily used a foreign tongue dwindled sharply by the second generation. The federal Census of 1980 showed that almost all natives (more than four years old) spoke English as their primary language, although many were of immigrant ancestry. Since many recent immigrants arrived well educated and had often studied English, they moved rapidly into the English linguistic mainstream. Even Hispanics, represented by group spokesmen advocating an official policy of bilingualism, have nevertheless made large strides toward English usage. In the 1970s, the majority of American-born Hispanic adults—including three-quarters of Mexicans, four-fifths of Puerto Ricans and Cubans, and nine-tenths of Central or South Americans—used English as their principal or sole language.10

The impressive rise in the rate of intermarriage among the descendants of immigrants may have been the trend with the most profound impact, however. The extraordinary degree to which the American population has become defined by mixed ancestry in the late twentieth century is evident in Census data. “Intermarriage [became] so common in the postwar era that by 1980 the vast majority of Americans had relatives, through birth or their own marriage, from at least two different ethnic backgrounds,” an expert on American pluralism has noted.11

Indeed, well beforeWorldWar II, social scientists were calling attention to the rise in ethnic intermarriage. The pioneering sociologist of the University of Chicago, Robert E. Park, saw the fusion of races in Hawaii where “new peoples are coming into existence” as a harbinger of the future.12 On the other hand, a well-known study of religious intermarriage in 1940 found that, yes, Italians were marrying the Irish, but Catholics were choosing Catholic spouses, Jews other Jews, and Protestants, too, were sticking to their own. As Will Herberg was later to put it, the American experience was thus characterized by not one but three melting pots—Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant. Separate processes of melting took place within each of these pots.13 Fifty years later, however, that picture had changed. By the 1990s, half of Catholics and Jews were marrying outside the faith.14

At the end of the twentieth century intermarriage among both religious and ethnic groups of European origin was pervasive.15 Indeed, by the third or fourth generation intermarriage is frequent, if not the norm, among many European ethnic groups. In 1972, in a special population survey conducted by the Bureau of the Census, 40 percent of white respondents chose not to identify with any specific heritage.16 In subsequent years, the number of Americanswho saw themselves as simply “American” continued to rise. A 1979 Census survey encouraged respondents to choose ethnic ancestries, and yet 13.5 million refused and gave “American” or “United States” as their ancestry; they became the seventh largest “ethnic” group on the government’s list.17

That survey included members of non-European groups; newcomers from Asia and Latin America also have significant rates of mixed ancestry and intermarriage. In the 1979 poll, 31 percent of Filipinos, 23 percent of Chinese, 22 percent of Japanese, and nearly 22 percent of the Spanish ancestry population claimed multiple ancestry.18 These rates of intermarriage provoked a heated debate over whether the federal census of 2000 should include a “multiracial” enumeration category for the rising number of offspring of such unions.19 These high rates of intermarriage led to the decision to allow multiple answers to the race question on the federal census of 2000.

When Asian or Hispanic minorities marry outside their groups, the spouses are usually white. A study of 1990 federal census returns found that, looking at all married couples with an Asian spouse, 27 percent had a white spouse, and 3 percent had a nonwhite or Hispanic. Among married couples with a Hispanic spouse, 29 percent had a non-Hispanic white spouse, while only 2.1 percent had a nonwhite. Nearly a quarter of the 2.0 million children who had at least one Asian parent, and a quarter of the 5.4 million children with at least one Hispanic parent, lived in interracial households with a white parent or stepparent.20 The rates of mixed ancestry among Asians and Hispanics appear especially impressive when one takes into account group sanctions against exogamy, the operation of laws barring miscegenation that were not completely stricken from state statutes until the 1960s, and the high percentage of recent immigrants who might have been expected to maintain group ties.

These assimilative patterns obviously took time to take hold, and the process was not all sweetness and light. In the immediate wake of the migrations of the twentieth century, ethnic boundaries usually tightened, cultural distances widened, and social divisions deepened. Large numbers of new immigrants strained institutions and public services. In the Progressive era, middle-class natives complained that Italian, Jewish, and Slavic immigrants meant expensive Americanization programs, overcrowded schools, overburdened charity organizations, spreading slums, disease, crime, political corruption, and the propagation of alien cultural values. These disorders were handled by teachers, policemen, physicians, nurses, inspectors, administrators, bureaucrats, and elected officials at a high cost to the public. In post–Cold War America, the same complaints about the burdens of immigration could be heard in updated form. Those concerned about the continuing flood of newcomers talked about the costs of bilingual and multicultural school programs, the spread of barrios, overtaxed hospital and medical facilities, the environmental impact, ethnic favoritism in the form of racial and ethnic preferences, and the spread of non-Western values and customs.21

But such doubts and fears ignore much good news. Immigrants have been producers, consumers, and entrepreneurs, and their economic energy has increased the gross national product and made for greater general prosperity. Often self-educated, hard working, and thrifty, they have also brought to their adopted land valuable cultural capital. Immigrants have helped, too, to expand the dimensions of American liberty and democracy. They have insisted on their right to maintain their ethnic heritage, as well as to modify or reject it. And wanting to ensure their own self-determination— their right to make social, cultural, and political choices—they have widened the degrees of freedom for others.22

As a corollary, immigrants have demonstrated that American opportunities for the individual could work to overcome notions of group determinism. They have affirmed the principle that personal achievement is the basis of self-worth and have in that way helped to shape and reaffirm a national culture that rewards individual effort and accomplishment. Immigrants and their descendants have proved they are productive workers, trustworthy neighbors, and patriotic citizens, whatever their ethnic origins, thereby making individual behavior, not background, the standard by which most Americans continue to judge others.23

Immigrants have also demonstrated the viability of collective organization for mutual progress. Transplanted communities of Chinese, Japanese, Asian Indians, Greeks, Jews, and Lebanese in different parts of the nation employed similar forms of cultural solidarity to promote group economic progress.24 Networks of kinship and communalism have been the foundation of their ability to build communities. Immigrant ethnic groups have thus exemplified the formation of social capital—that set of social connections and social assets that promote positive collaborative endeavor. They brought with them norms of reciprocity and networks of civic engagement.25

Immigrants have furthered the evolution of a society based on achieved status, voluntary identity, and free association. And what ethnic groups developed in common through mutual activity became more important than what made them different. The opportunities of liberal democracy released the innate talents and drive of immigrants. In the twentieth century, immigrants from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Pacific, and the Western Hemisphere all contributed to economic and social progress.

In the final analysis, the vitality of America’s assimilative pluralism limited the ability of policy makers and opinion makers to consign immigrants to permanent compartments. Race, especially, proved an inadequate “container” for ethnic Americans whose core identities continued to shift and expand as employment, levels of educational attainment, marriage and other social patterns, consumer tastes, and places of residence changed. In the era of industrialization, European immigrants were once divided into “The Races of Europe,” but racial classifications such as “Southern Italians” and “Hebrews” (actually used by federal immigration agencies from the 1890s to the 1940s) became practically meaningless after two or three generations. The classification of the newest global immigrants as disadvantaged racial minorities labeled African, Hispanic, and Asian and Pacific American suffers from a similar inadequacy; these categories fail to capture the fluid character of an individual’s social identity and social status, which makes the dichotomy “people of color” versus “white” much too simplistic. The historian Donna Gabaccia has noted:

In American eyes immigrants of Asian, African, or Native American descent become Americans by becoming racial minorities. Recently arriving elite, well-educated immigrants from the third world contemplate this road with much ambivalence. Many prefer to become ethnic Americans—Korean Americans or Jamaican Americans—rather than “blacks” or “Asian Americans.” 26

The capacity for mobility and adaptation possessed by these newest immigrants will, as Gabaccia points out, “fruitfully challenge American assumptions about class and race.” As long as immigrant groups have an open society in which to create new patterns, they will resist the petrifaction of ethnic boundaries into racial boundaries.

Over the course of the twentieth century, immigrants increased the power of such assimilative factors as an expansive economy, an absorbent composite culture, a fluid social structure, and a cosmopolitan democracy. And deeply woven patterns of group intermixing immunized the society against ethnic and racial fragmentation.Whether such assimilative patterns can be carried forward into the twenty-first century will depend on the degree of public commitment to America’s nationalizing and democratizing traditions. The successful integration of current and future immigrants will require maintaining a framework for ethnicity that encourages assimilative behavior within a democratic, pluralistic context. Ethnic identities have coexisted with acculturation, pluralism with assimilation, and differences with commonality. That is the mix upon which individual opportunity will continue to depend.

Americans who consider themselves liberal and progressive on ethnic questions often embrace the notion that people must belong to separate groups and cultures. And yet the idea that particular groups have a fixed culture and identity has profound consequences for the future of democracy, especially when it is manipulated by the forces of statism and modernization.

The idea that culture and identity are possessed by unique groups encourages a political language that homogenizes and reduces individuals into stereotypical collective categories. Even more important, this sort of ethnic reductionism leads to the dangerous position that in the realm of government only a Hispanic legislator, for instance, can adequately represent Hispanic voters; an “Anglo” inevitably speaks only for “Anglo” interests. Similarly, Asians are disfranchised when a Hispanic is elected from the district in which they live. This form of functional representation can bring more group solidarity, but at a cost: the erosion of the freedom of individuals to define themselves and their interests regardless of their social origins—a freedom fundamental to liberal democracy.

The drive to repackage people by labels and categories that can be publicly managed is not a uniquely American phenomenon; it is well known in other countries with historically less democratic polities. The University of Chicago political scientists Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph see similar patterns in the United States and India:

Which identities become relevant for politics is not predetermined by some primordial ancientness. They are crafted in benign and malignant ways in print and the electronic media, in textbooks and advertising, in India’s T.V. megaseries and America’s talk shows, in campaign strategies, in all the places and all the ways that self and other, us and them, are represented in an expanding public culture.27

In spite of both the media and the state, which invent official groups, a new diversity is forming in the United States in which ethnic particularism is increasingly irrelevant. Deeply rooted universalizing and acculturating forces are at work. As sociologist Orlando Patterson has argued, American culture is not owned by any particular group:

Once an element of culture becomes generalized under the impact of a universal culture, it loses all specific symbolic value for the group which donated it. It is a foolish Anglo-Saxon who boasts about “his” language today. English is a child that no longer knows its mother, and cares even less to know her. It has been adapted in a thousand ways to meet the special feelings, moods and experiences of a thousand groups.28

“Ethnic WASP culture is no longer the culture of the group of Americans we now call WASP’s,” Patterson concluded. Jim Sleeper, who noted these insights by Patterson in his book, The Closest of Strangers, recalled how a stint teaching in a New York high school showed him that “the Chinese-American students . . . were [not] interested in adopting ‘white’ culture as much as they were interested in becoming part of the larger ‘universal’ culture of constitutional democracy and technological development.” Immigrant minorities today have a hard time not being affected by assimilation in the globalizing democratic society that America has become.29

In a plural society that aims to be democratic, people need to be free to mix and blend with those outside their ethnic group. All change begins at the margins, and the margins are where individuals can make new changes and choices a part of their lives. Without this dimension of personal freedom, group boundaries and identities tighten and become impassable. It is often today’s immigrants who truly understand the value of American freedom. The journalist Richard Brookhiser has reported that when a liberal “pol” tried to tell a Pakistani immigrant cabdriver about the error of registering Republican, the “cabbie defended his dislike of ethnic group politics. ‘I came here to get away from it,’” he said.30

Those who have seized the opportunity to leapfrog ethnic identities have become the agents for a creative, open, and voluntary national life. Because of his transcultural connections, Fiorello LaGuardia, mayor of New York City during the Great Depression, gained legitimacy and popular support from a variety of ethnic interest groups. Historian Arthur Mann provided an unforgettable glimpse of LaGuardia:

Tammany Hall may have been the first to exploit the vote-getting value of eating gefullte fish with Jews, goulash with Hungarians, sauerbraten with Germans, spaghetti with Italians, and so on indefinitely, but this unorthodox Republican not only dined every bit as shrewdly but also spoke, according to the occasion, in Yiddish, Hungarian, German, Italian, Serbian-Croatian, or plain New York English. Half Jewish and half Italian, born in Greenwich Village yet raised in Arizona, married first to a Catholic and then to a Lutheran but himself a Mason and an Episcopalian, Fiorello LaGuardia was a Mr. BrotherhoodWeek all by himself.31

In my own explorations as a historian, I once stumbled upon a page from a 1911 federal immigration report that recorded the numbers of Albanians, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Serbs, and Croatians arriving in the United States. Almost a century later, their descendants have assimilated and learned to coexist as members of one American nation. In their homeland of former Yugoslavia, by contrast, their countrymen reenact a tragic cycle of destructive ethnic conflict and separatism. The historic American conditions of soft and open group boundaries, once symbolized by the melting pot, ensured that, in this country, southeast European minorities would not follow that path.

It is a cliche´ to say that those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat its errors. But we should not forget that an American framework for ethnicity that rests on the opportunity to assimilate in a pluralistic democracy has proved to be highly effective in getting different people to live and act together productively, on terms of equality and freedom.32 It is an achievement with important and broad implications. In a time of global ethnic strife, the United States more than ever can demonstrate to the world that pluralism works and can work democratically.

Notes

1. See Richard D. Alba, “Assimilation’s Quiet Tide,” Public Interest 119 (spring

1995): 4.

2. Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy

(New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 24–26; Donald L. Horowitz, “Immigration and

Group Relations,” Immigrants in Two Democracies: French and American Experience

(New York: New York University Press, 1992), pp. 23–25.

3. Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development,

and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1982), chaps. 4, 7; Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: IndustrialWorkers in Chicago,

1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chaps. 1–3; David Ward,

Cities and Immigrants: A Geography of Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1971), chaps. 3, 4; Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants:

A Study in Acculturation, 1790–1880, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 1969), chaps. 4–6; James R. Barrett,Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s

PackinghouseWorkers, 1894–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 75–

76, 78–79.

4. John Higham, Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America

(New York: Atheneum, 1975), pp. 18–20, 24–28; Sean Wilentz, “Sense and Sensitivity,”

New Republic, October 31, 1994, p. 46.

5. Oscar Handlin and Mary Handlin, The Dimensions of Liberty (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 130.

6. William Carlson Smith, Americans in Process: A Study of Our Citizens of Oriental

Ancestry (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Edwards Brothers, 1937), p. 243.

7. Richard D. Alba, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (New

Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 4–15.

8. Mary C.Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1990), pp. 147–55.

9. Barry R. Chiswick and Teresa A. Sullivan, “The New Immigrants,” in Reynolds

Farley, ed., State of the Union: America in the 1990s, vol. 2, Social Trends (New York:

Russell Sage Foundation, 1995), p. 238.

10. Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1990), tables 28, 31, p. 208.

11. Lawrence H. Fuchs, The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity, and the Civic

Culture (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1990), p. 327.

12. Robert E. Park, Race and Culture (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950), pp. 116, 149,

151, 191–95.

13. Ruby Jo Reeves Kennedy, “Single or Triple Melting Pot? Intermarriage Trends

in New Haven, 1870–1940,” American Journal of Sociology 49 (1944): 331–39; Will

Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1960; 1955),

pp. 32–34.

14. In 1990, Richard D. Alba concluded that “the rising tide of intermarriage is also

sweeping across religious lines,” thus showing that the triple melting pot theory “does

not seem to be holding up.” Ethnic Identity, p. 14.

15. Alba describes “the wide dispersion of ethnically mixed ancestry” as the most

profound ethnic change among whites in the twentieth century. Ibid., pp. 15, 310–13.

16. U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Characteristics of the Population by Ethnic Origin:

March 1972 and 1971,” Current Population Reports, P-20, no. 249 (Washington, D. C.:

Government Printing Office, 1973); Higham, Send These to Me, pp. 9–11.

17. The English, German, Irish, black, Italian, and French were the only larger

groups. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Ancestry and Language

in the United States: November 1979, series P-23, no. 116 (Washington, D.C.: U.S.

Government Printing Office, 1982). Examining this data, sociologists Stanley Lieberson

and Mary Waters saw the genesis of a “new American ethnic group” whose members

did not identify with premigration antecedents; Stanley Lieberson and Mary C.Waters,

From Many Strands: Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America (New York:

Russell Sage Foundation, 1988), pp. 264–68. See also Harold J. Abramson, Ethnic

Diversity in Catholic America (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1973), chap. 4.

18. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Ancestry and Language

in the United States: November 1979, p. 7; David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America:

Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 165–66.

19. Michaell S. Teitelbaum and Jay Winter, A Question of Numbers: High Migration,

Low Fertility, and the Politics of National Identity (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998), p.

171; Stephan Thernstrom, “One Drop Still—A Racialist’s Census,” National Review,

April 17, 2000, pp. 35–37.

20. Roderick J. Harrison and Claudette E. Bennett, “Racial and Ethnic Diversity,”

in Reynolds Farley, ed., State of the Union: America in the 1990s, vol. 2, Social Trends

(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995), pp. 165–67.

21. U.S. Immigration Commission, Abstracts of Reports, vol. 1–2 (Washington,

D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1911); Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in

American Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1957), chap. 5; Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation:

Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster (New York: Random House,

1995).

22. See, e.g., Ellen Smith, “Strangers and Sojourners: The Jews of Colonial Boston”

and “‘Israelites in Boston,’ 1840–1880,” in Jonathan D. Sarna and Ellen Smith, eds.,

The Jews of Boston: Essays on the Occasion of the Centenary (1895–1995) of the Combined

Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston (Boston: Combined Jewish Philanthropies of

Greater Boston, 1995), pp. 44, 65.

23. David B. Davis, “The Other Zion,” New Republic, April 12, 1993, pp. 29–36;

Francis Fukuyama, “Immigrants and Family Values,” Commentary, May 1993, pp. 26–

32; John F. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row,

1964), pp. 67–68.

24. The argument that cultural capital operates as an independent variable is found

in Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Cultures: A World Perspective (New York: Basic

Books, 1996).

25. On this point, see RobertD. Putnam, Making DemocracyWork: Civic Traditions

in Modern Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 167, 168–71;

Robert D. Putnam, “The Strange Disappearance of Civic America,” American Prospect,

winter 1996, pp. 34–48.

26. Donna Gabaccia, From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in

the United States, 1820–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. xvii.

27. Susan Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, “Modern Hate,” New Republic,

March 22, 1993, pp. 24–29.

28. Orlando Patterson, Ethnic Chauvinism: The Reactionary Impulse (New York:

Stein & Day, 1977), pp. 149–50.

29. Jim Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New

York (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), p. 234.

30. Richard Brookhiser, “Melting Pot or Boiling Pot?” New York Observer, May 28,

1990, p. 5.

31. Arthur Mann, LaGuardia: A Fighter Against His Times (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1959), p. 21.

32. Recent arguments for the benefits of immigrant assimilation are Linda Chavez,

Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation (New York: Basic

Books, 1992); John J. Miller, The Unmaking of Americans: How Multiculturalism Has

Undermined the Assimilation Ethic (New York: Free Press, 1998).

==============================

What Americans Think About Race and Ethnicity

EVERETT C. LADD

The United States faces two big challenges in ethnic relations: moving to further eradicate the bitter racial legacy that began with slavery and Jim Crow; and successfully assimilating into an increasingly diverse American family millions of new immigrants, drawn heavily from Central and South America, and Asia. Both areas have problems and tensions aplenty. Norman Hill, president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, has reminded readers of an inescapable fact of American history—that African Americans are the only ethnic group that was brought here against its will “as chattel,” and then faced another century of institutionalized racism, known as Jim Crow.1 Even the wisest of subsequent policies could not have swept away this tragic legacy, and U.S. policies on race over the last half century have often not been the most enlightened.Onimmigration, this country’s fabled melting pot has achieved extraordinary successes in making e pluribus unum a substantial reality rather than a pious wish. Still, each major wave of immigration has brought with it conflict between newcomers and older, established groups. The present wave is no exception. We know that problems still abound in ethnic relations. What we need to know is how things are trending. How successful is the contemporary United States in reducing ethnic-based animosity—in giving one of the country’s oldest groups, African Americans, a surer sense of opportunity and progress, and its own responsibility, and convincing new immigrants that the promise of American life is for them and the future, not a thing of the past?

The Debate over Racial Progress

Events in America’s race relations have periodicallyprompted fear that we are losing ground. In the midst of the civil rights protests of the late 1960s, a presidential commission chaired by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner concluded that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white.”2 In 1995, following the verdict in the O. J. Simpson case, a bevy of news magazines and commentators concluded that the Commission’s prophecy had been realized. A huge literature on American race relations has appeared in recent years, with authors offering sharply divergent interpretations of whether data show a narrowing or a widening of this largest-of-all ethnic divide. Andrew Hacker has forcefully argued the “two societies” thesis; Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom have found great progress in black-white relations and in the status of African Americans— much more than is usually acknowledged.3

A Lessening of the Divide

For more than two decades now, my colleagues and I at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research have been examining survey findings on ethnic relations. These data show unequivocally that both African Americans and their fellow citizens who are called whites see the country’s race relations in terms far more complex and ambiguous than “two societies” envision them. As we would expect, given their experience, those who are called blacks are much more inclined than others to emphasize the problems racism has bequeathed. But they now see comity along with conflict, opportunity as well as discrimination, progress together with persisting difficulties. And like others, African Americans find that the problems confronting their communities in the 1990s have roots running far deeper than present discrimination and requiring new solutions. For all the legacy of pain and anger, separation and name-calling, stereotyping and oversimplification, many Americans see race relations today in hues vastly more subtle than black and white. Let us look at the survey record.

The Legacy of the Past

Because they have felt racism as others have not, African Americans remain today more insistent on the assumption of national responsibility for remedies. They are more inclined than any other group to back calls for government efforts at remediation. Asked, for example, whether we are spending “too much, too little, or about the right amount” on assistance to blacks, two-thirds (65 percent) of African Americans told interviewers for the National Opinion Research Center in 1996 that we’re spending too little, a position taken by less than one-fifth (17 percent) of whites. A Gallup poll of early 1997 found whites by roughly two to one saying that government should not make any special effort to help minorities because they should help themselves, blacks by a virtually identical two-to-one majority saying that the national government should make every effort to improve the position of blacks and other minorities.

Though a majority of African Americans say that they have never personally been denied a job or promotion because of their race, the proportion who claim that they have (44 percent) is more than three times that of whites (13 percent; survey by ABC News and the Washington Post, March 16–19, 1998). It is not surprising, then, that blacks are much more supportive than whites of affirmative action programs designed to give compensatory preference to minorities. Hispanic Americans are more inclined to endorse affirmative action than non-Hispanic whites but are significantly less so than blacks (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Opinions of affirmative action programs; survey by ABC News/

Question: Do you support or oppose: affirmative action programs giving preference to women, blacks, and other minorities?

	Support	Oppose
White	40%	56%
Black	86%	12%
Hispanic	65%	30%

Washington Post, August 1–5, 1996.

Beyond Victimization

Yet if African Americans more than other groups see the need for special federal remedial efforts, many in the community now reject the view that their problems are primarily white inflicted. Asked in October 1995 in a Yankelovich Partners survey for Time/CNN whether they think “the problems that most blacks face are caused primarily by whites,” only 30 percent of blacks (and 13 percent of whites) said they are. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted that same month found only 25 percent of African Americans saying that the most important step in improving race relations involves “white Americans doing more to recognize and reduce racism by whites against blacks.”

Fig. 2A. Black attitudes and experience on discrimination; survey by Yankelovich Partners, Inc., for Time/CNN, September 23–October 2, 1997.

Question: Which of the following statements do you agree with most: (A) Black job applicants have to be better qualified than whites to get a job; (B) Black job applicants have to be as qualified as whites to get a job; (C) Black job applicants can get jobs even when they are less qualified than other applicants?

	Black teens	Black adults
A	31%	53%
B	38%	29%
C	25%	12%

Question: Have you yourself ever been a victim of discrimination because you are black?

	Black teens	Black adults
Yes	23%	53%
No	77%	45%

Perhaps the most dramatic evidence of African Americans’ rejecting victimization as a prime or sufficient explanation for their community’s problems comes from surveys taken by Yankelovich Partners for Time and CNN in September 1997. Along with regular national samples of white and black adults, the survey added special samples of teenagers. These studies show dramatic generational changes, away from historical stereotypes of the respective groups. For example, while a clear majority of black adults attribute black Americans having worse jobs, income, and housing (compared with whites) “mainly . . . to discrimination,” a solid majority of black teens reject this view (Fig. 2A). This difference seems to result in large part from contrasting generational experiences: whereas a slight majority of adult blacks said they had been victims of racial discrimination, only one black teen in four said he or she had been. Moreover, a large majority of adult blacks think most whites consider blacks inferior, a majority of black teens do not think so.

Important generational shifts are also evident in the white population. A large majority of white adults said that failure to take advantage of opportunities is a greater problem for black Americans today than discrimination by whites. Among teens it was reversed: a large plurality of white teenagers called discrimination by whites the greater problem for black Americans (Fig. 2B).

The last chart in Figure 2 (Fig. 2C) confounds expectations about current racial attitudes. All four groups—teens and adults—reject the idea that the problems most black Americans face are caused primarily by whites. Black teenagers are as inclined to this stance as are white adults. White teenagers are more likely than black teenagers to attribute black Americans’ problems to whites’ prejudice and discrimination. Over half of the black teens think members of their community have worse jobs, income, and so on because “most blacks don’t have the motivation or will to pull themselves up out of their poverty”; only 24 percent of white teens take this view.

These extraordinary findings reflect a growing tendency on the part of both groups, especially the young among them, to reject past racial stereotypes and easy, self-serving answers. Both white and black teenagers seem to have moved toward accepting their own group’s responsibility for racial problems, rather than dismissing the problems as simply “their fault.”

Comity and Opportunity

Few blacks or whites believe that a satisfactory state has been reached in racial comity, but judgments are far from bleak. In a Gallup survey conducted in June 1998, 59 percent of African Americans said that “only a few” of their group dislike whites; 27 percent attributed that stance to “many” African Americans, and only 5 percent to most. The responses were almost identical when whites were asked to assess blacks’ feelings toward them. Only 20 percent of black respondents told Gallup interviewers in October 1995 that they believe most white people “want to keep blacks down.”

Fig. 2B. Generational attitude of blacks and whites on questions of discrimination; survey by Yankelovich Partners, Inc., for Time/CNN, September 23–October 2, 1997.

Question: In your view, which of the following is more of a problem for black Americans today: (A) failure to take advantage of available opportunities, or (B) discrimination by whites?

	White teens	White adults
A	31%	52%
B	47%	22%

Question: On the average, black Americans have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think these differences are . . .

. . . mainly due to discrimination?

	Black teens	Black adults
Yes	35%	56%
No	56%	30%

. . . mainly because most blacks don’t have the motivation or will power to pull themselves up out of their poverty?

	Black teens	Black adults
Yes	52%	44%
No	38%	42%

Many blacks see progress and greater opportunity. For example, in a survey taken for the Washington Post in the summer of 1996, although 45 percent of black respondents said that they have less opportunity than whites to live a middle-class life, 44 percent said they have about the same degree of opportunity, and 6 percent that they have even more. Sixty-five percent of blacks, compared with 63 percent of whites, told interviewers for theNational Opinion Research Center in the spring of 1996 that “people like me and my family have a good chance of improving our standard of living.”

Fig. 2C. White responsibilities—blacks and whites compared; survey by Yankelovich Partners, Inc., for Time/CNN, September 23–October 2, 1997.

Question: Do you think the problems that most black Americans face are caused primarily by whites, or don’t you think this is the case?

	Black teens	Black adults	White teens	White adults
Yes	18%	29%	32%	14%
No	74%	61%	55%	72%

Integration and Shared Values

What is perhaps most striking in our survey findings is the increase in the proportion of white and blacks alike reporting interaction with members of the other group as friends and neighbors. For example, ABC News and the Washington Post have asked whites on a number of occasions since 1981, most recently in 1997, whether they know any African American whom they consider a fairly close personal friend, and the counterpart question (for African Americans) on white friends.We now report many more cross-group friendships than we did a decade ago (Fig. 3). Similarly, surveys taken by the National Opinion Research Center of the

Fig. 3. Cross-group friendships, 1981–1997; survey by ABC News/Washington Post, latest that of June 5–8, 1997.

Question: (asked of blacks only) Do you yourself know any white person whom you consider a fairly close personal friend?

Question: (asked of whites only) Do you yourself know any black person whom you consider a fairly close personal friend?

(proportion answer “Yes”)

	Black	White
1981	69%	54%
1986	69%	Not asked of whites in this year.
1989	80%	66%
1997	83%	71%

University of Chicago since the late 1970s show a fairly steady increase in the proportion of whites reporting that they live in neighborhoods with blacks (Fig. 4). The same NORC surveys show a big gain in support for open housing laws—from 37 percent in 1978 supporting legislation that says “a homeowner cannot refuse to sell to someone because of their race or color,” to 65 percent backing it in 1996 (Fig. 5).

Fig. 4. Changes in neighborhood integration, 1978–1996; surveys by the National Opinion Research Center-General Social Survey.

Question: Are there any [Negroes/blacks/African Americans] living in this neighborhood now?

In a survey taken by Gallup in January and February 1997, only 24 percent of white respondents said they would rather live in a neighborhood with white families only; 61 percent said that if they could find the housing they wanted they would rather live in a neighborhood that had both blacks and whites. In the same study, just 7 percent of blacks opted for a neighborhood exclusively black; 83 percent preferred one that was racially integrated. Such findings need to be viewed cautiously and interpreted carefully. Saying one is committed to integrated housing is now the only acceptable professed norm; some almost certainly opt for it in polls who would not follow it in real life. But professed norms are themselves important. The proportion of Americans living in integrated neighborhoods is on the increase, in fact, and residential integration as a norm has gained substantially.

Fig. 5. Attitudes toward open housing laws, 1978–1996; surveys by the National Opinion Research Center-General Social Survey.

Question: Suppose there is a community-wide vote on the general housing issue. There are two possible laws to vote on. Which law would you vote for? (A) One law says that a homeowner can decide for himself whom to sell his house to, even if he prefers not to sell to [Negroes/ blacks/African Americans]. (B) The second law says that a homeowner cannot refuse to sell to someone because of their race or color.

For all the bitter history of black-white relations in the U.S., the two groups share the same underlying values. There is, then, a real base on which to build better relations. Norman Hill of the A. Philip Randolph Institute finds it remarkable “that blacks, who bear the legacy of slavery, segregation, oppression, exclusion, and the daily indignities of racism are, in many ways, the most resilient archetypal Americans, still holding on to the notion that perseverance and hard work will give them a real shot at opportunity and equality.”4 It is indeed remarkable, though not, I think, surprising. There is broad ideological agreement across the American people on such basic ideals as a distinctive understanding of equality—pegged to opportunity rather than results—and a sense that the American system, for all its faults, does much to extend opportunity. Asked, for example, in a Los Angeles Times survey of October 1995 which statement is closer to their opinion, “In the United States today, anyone who works hard enough can make it economically,” or “No matter how hard you work you just can’t make it economically in this country today,” a large majority of blacks took the “anyone can make it” position. The proportion of whites taking that position was higher than that of blacks, but only modestly so.

Immigration and Changing Ethnic Backgrounds

Since its founding, the United States has grappled with vast problems and inequities in black-white relations. But along with this enduring cleavage there has been a series of shifting ethnic group conflicts and accommodations, prompted by succeeding waves of immigration. The U.S. is highly diverse ethnically, yet for all this heterogeneity, it is a nation, not just a collection of separate ethnic groups. It is hardly surprising, given our need to create and maintain a nation on the lines e pluribus unum describes, that we have periodically worried about our ability to maintain and indeed enhance “one nation” status.

G. K. Chesterton described the continuing challenge in his brilliant opening chapter of What I Saw in America.5 Chesterton wrote of “the great American experiment; the experiment of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a melting pot.” This experiment naturally puts great pressure on the vessel: “That metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The melting pot must not melt.” How well is the pot holding now, as a new century begins?

After a period of low immigration that followed a vast tightening of American immigration law in the 1920s, legal immigration was again expanded in the 1960s. In recent years, too, substantial numbers of immigrants have entered the country illegally. As a result, the foreign-born population of the U.S. has climbed—from 5.4 percent in 1960 to 9.3 percent in 1996. And, far more than their predecessors, recent immigrants have come from Latin America and from Asia.

Worries about the impact of the new waves of immigration on national unity and values should be greatly tempered by the fact that such concerns have proved ill founded in previous periods, when rates of immigration relative to the base population exceeded those of the present day. They should also be greatly diminished, if not dismissed, by recent survey findings that show newcomers to America committed to its values and confident of their chance to succeed in their adopted home.

In mid-1995, Gallup surveyed a national cross-section of all adult Americans and large samples of immigrants—including “most recent arrivals” who have been in the U.S. ten years or less. The survey found that the immigrants closely resemble the entire adult population on most matters of policy and values. For example, 59 percent of all adults and 59 percent of immigrants (including 57 percent of the most recent arrivals) said national policy should encourage immigrants “to blend into American culture by giving up some important aspects of their own culture.” Only 32 percent of all adults and 26 percent of recent immigrants favored encouraging immigrants “to maintain their own culture more strongly.” The idea of the U.S. as a melting pot “in which people of different cultures combine into a unified American culture” was endorsed by a full threequarters of the immigrant population.

The Gallup survey found immigrants even more likely than other Americans to see the country as a land of opportunity: 93 percent of the immigrants surveyed agreed with the statement that “people who work hard to better themselves can get ahead in this country,” the position of 85 percent of the entire population. Immigrants overwhelmingly described the reception they received upon arrival as welcoming—by margins of nine to one and better.6 Looking ahead, three immigrants in every four said they expect their children to have even better economic opportunities in the U.S. than they themselves have had, and that the children will face even less discrimination.

On such matters as the opportunity for themselves and their children to find good jobs, the amount of political freedom, and the chances of being treated fairly under the law, immigrants of all arrival times gave the U.S. extraordinarily positive marks. Seventy-five percent of the immigrants called the U.S. better than their homeland in the amount of political freedom; only 5 percent ranked it lower on this dimension than their place of birth. In two areas, however—feeling safe from crime, and the moral tenor of the society—the U.S. got quite low marks. Only 33 percent said the U.S. was better than their homeland in realizing moral values; 48 percent ranked it lower.

What is most important, we see no signs in the survey findings of a serious split between immigrant newcomers and longer-term residents. States like California and Texas, which have experienced heavy immigration in recent years, certainly have had conflicton issues like bilingual education. But in all important regards this latest great wave of immigration to the United States resembles the earlier ones. The bulk of the new immigrants seek integration into their new nation and espouse its ideals.

Taking Yes for the Answer

Societies sometimes find themselves inclined to resist good news. Developments in ethnic relations in the United States are now a case in point. It is not hard to see why the extent of the positive trends is resisted. Long-standing tensions and prejudice, especially involving whites and blacks, have been the unhappiest chapter in American historical experience. Stressing the positive now may seem an attempt to gloss over past wrongs and minimize current needs. Against the backdrop of problems as wrenching as those that have surrounded race relations, no analyst wants to be cast in the role of Pollyanna.

Nonetheless, tensions in American ethnic relations have diminished in recent decades. All the groups making up the American mosaic appear more positive and optimistic today than they were when the civil rights revolution began. Set against the standard of where we would like our society to be, the present mix of ethnic group attitudes and relations leaves much ground to be covered. But set against past experience—indeed that of any previous point since the country’s founding—today’s ethnic relations manifest striking progress.

Notes

1. Norman Hill, “Race in America—Through a Glass, Darkly,” Public Perspective,

February/March 1996, pp. 1–4.

2. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report (New York: Bantam,

1968), p. 1.

3. Andrew Hacker, TwoNations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New

York: Scribner’s, 1992); Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black

and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

4. Hill, p. 3.

5. G. K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1922;

repr. 1968, Da Capo Press).

6. The survey reported on here was taken by the Gallup organization for CNN

and USA Today, May 25–June 4, 1995.

==============================

Wrestling with Stigma

SHELBY STEELE

This essay was previously published as Part 1 of “Wrestling with Stigma” from A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, by Shelby Steele, copyright 1998 by Shelby Steele. It is reprinted here by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

I have a white friend who has told me many times that he feels no racial guilt despite the fact that he was raised in the Deep South before the end of segregation. Though he grew up amid the inequality and moral duplicity of segregation, and inevitably benefited from it as a white, he says simply that he did not invent the institution. He experienced it as a fate he was born into. And when segregation was finally challenged in the civil rights era, any solidarity that he felt with other southern whites was grounded more in a sense of pathos than in any resistance to change. So, he says, there is no “objective basis” for racial guilt on his part.

Recently I was surprised to hear the novelist William Styron, a southerner by birth and upbringing, say on television that he, too, felt “no [white] guilt” despite the fact that his grandmother had owned slaves as a girl. And there was something emphatic, even challenging in his pronouncement that discouraged questioning. For as long as I can remember, I have heard white Americans of every background make this Pronouncement.

This is certainly understandable. White guilt threatens the credibility of everything whites say and do regarding race. Specifically it threatens them with what I have called ulteriorality—the suspicion that their racial stands do not come from their announced motivations but from ulterior ones driven by guilt.We can say, for example, that the white liberal bends over backward because he is motivated by guilt even though he says he is motivated by true concern. Or we can say the anger of the “angry white male” is simply his way of denying guilt.We can use guilt to discredit every position whites take on racial matters. So it is not surprising to hear so many reflexive denials. When people like my friend or Styron do this, they are disclaiming ulterior motives. They want us to accept that they mean exactly what they say.

But I, for one, very rarely do accept this, or at least not without a glimpse past their words to the matter of ulterior motive. This is because there simply is no social issue in American life more driven by ulterior forces than race. One reason for this is that white American motivation in racial matters has gone largely unexamined, except to attribute support for policies like affirmative action to white goodwill and nonsupport to white racism. “White guilt” is almost a generic term referring to any ulterior white motivation. But the degree of ulteriorality in American race relations is far too great to be explained entirely by guilt. I think the great unacknowledged event of the civil rights era was that white Americans became a stigmatized group. I also believe that our entire national culture of racial and social reform—the policies, programs, norms, and protocols by which we address race-related problems—has been shaped more by the stigmatization of whites than by any other factor, including the actual needs of blacks.

Ironically, it was the idea of equality that brought stigma to whites. In the civil rights era, when white America finally accepted a legal equality that would extend to different races, it also accepted an idea that shamed it. For three centuries white America had used race to defeat equality. It had indulged in self-serving notions of white supremacy, had transgressed the highest principles of the democracy, and had enforced inequality on others while possessing the ideas to know better.The American racial shame is special in that slavery and segregation were knowing indulgences. The nation’s first president had denounced the institution of slavery and freed his own slaves, yet it would take two more centuries for segregation to be outlawed. An evil strung out over the centuries and conducted in a full knowledge of itself.

America’s new commitment to equality in the civil rights era brought with it an accountability for all this. What no one could have foreseen was that a great shaming of white Americans and American institutions was a condition of greater racial equality. In a sense the new embrace of equality floated the nation’s racial shame, unanchored it, so that it rose to the surface of American life as a truth that the nation would have to answer for. As a result equality in the United States has depended on a vigilance that associates this racial shame with whites and American institutions. This association, of course, is the basis of white stigmatization.

In this way the idea of equality has established a social framework in which white Americans are no longer “universal” people or “Everyman” Americans. Today there is a consciousness that whites are a specific people, a group with a history, a fate, and a stigma like other groups. So far equality has worked by bringing whites down into stigma rather than by lifting lacks and other minorities up out of it. The morality implied in equality stigmatized whites as racist and thus gave them a group identity that they are accountable to in the eyes of others even if they reject its terms. Very often the strongest group identities form in response to stigmatization because stigmas are a kind of fate, a shared and inescapable experience. In any case the history of white racism, the idea of equality, the stigma created by these two things, and the need to wrestle with this stigma as the way back to decency—all this gave white Americans a new post-sixties identity that was not universal. In the way that blacks had been stigmatized as inferior, whites, too, became a group marked by a human incompleteness.

As black Americans know only too well, to be stigmatized is to be drawn into a Sisyphean struggle for redemption from the accusation carried by the stigma. It is also to lose some of one’s freedom to the judgment, opinion, or prejudice of others. White Americans now know what it is like to be presumed racist and to have that presumption count as fact against them. What blacks know is that one group’s stigma is another group’s power. Stigmatized as inferior, blacks were deprived by whites of freedom itself. Now stigmatized as racists, whites can easily be extorted by blacks for countless concessions. So, when a group fights against its stigma, it is also fighting for its freedom from the power of another group.

Being white in America has always meant being free from racial stigma, as if “whiteness” might be defined as simply the absence of stigma. Until recently we never had stigmatizing epithets for whites of any real power. “Honky” hardly compared to the visceral “nigger.” (Today the term “racist” is quite effective against whites, but this is a post-sixties phenomenon.) This absence of stigma was always the blessing of being white in the United States, while color, even “one drop,” was a stigma in itself that defined all who carried it as alienated “others.” In America whites have been the “it,” not the “other,” so they have always had a rather myopic view of race as essentially a problem of “others.”

One of the best-selling books on race during my youth was a book called Black Like Me by a white man, John Howard Griffin, who had chemically darkened his skin and traveled the South passing for black. What made the book sensational was that a white man had volunteered for the black stigma, the experience of the alienated other. But it was little more than a novelty book that put off many blacks because its very premise tended to mistake the black stigma for the entire black experience. The reader, whom the narrator presumed to be white, was invited to watch one of his or her own in the land of the “other.” And the black “other” was shown to endure little melodramas of man’s inhumanity to man at which the “good” white reader could be appropriately aghast. This began an age when white America was invited not to see black life but to be aghast at it. However, the book’s greater sin was to suggest that even if whites were morally obligated to support equality, race was still a problem that affected others.

But equality finally gave whites their own racial otherness. The idea of democratic equality—explicitly applied beyond even the boundary of race by the 1964 Civil Rights Bill—showed white Americans as a group to have betrayed the nation’s best democratic principles. Even though it was the white embrace of these principles that brought the civil rights victories, it was the need to embrace them in the middle of the twentieth century that proved the white betrayal of them. And this profoundly injured the legitimacy of whites as a group in relation to principles of any kind. They had used race to give themselves license from principle.

Of course, the fact of a group finding a pretext for violating its own principles was hardly new. What is new is for an oppressive group to embrace equality at the expense of its own moral legitimacy so that it has to live with those it once oppressed without the moral authority to enforce the society’s best principles. This situation, this fate, comprises the “otherness” of white America today. It is alienating to live with this stigmatic association with shame, and to have lost standing in relation to the principles one was raised to cherish, to watch the institutions of one’s society— from the family to the public schools—weaken for want of demanding principles, and to be without the necessary authority to restore them, to lose “universality,” to have one’s angry former victim define social morality, to feel both a little guilty and falsely accused, to feel pressured toward a fashionable relativism as toward racial decency itself—all this and more has come to whites as an experience of “otherness” that I believe is the unexamined source of U.S. racial policy since the sixties. The idea of racial equality has given a new and unique contour to the white American experience. Perhaps a White Like Me is now called for, a book that looks into the world behind the white stigma and reports back to us.

One point such a book would no doubt make is that stigmas are often double binds. The stigma of whites as racists mandates that they redeem the nation from its racist history but then weakens their authority to enforce the very democratic principles that true redemption would require. And this is no small problem, because the United States is no better than its principles. It may be the first country in the world to have principles and ideas for an identity.

The promise of the American democracy was that freedom, and the discipline of principles that supports it, would be the salvation of humanity. This discipline would replace the atavistic power of divine kings and feudalism with a power grounded in reason. Principle would be not only the soul of America but also the basis of its very legitimacy as a nation among nations. The principles of freedom were the case for a new nation. And yet race is always an atavistic source of power, going back to a primordial source, back to the natural order. Like a divine or natural right, it comes from God or nature and presumes that one’s race is free to dominate other races by an authority beyond reason. The white racist believes that God made whites superior so that even a democracy grounded in principle and reason is not obligated to include blacks and other races. Atavistic power always oppresses because it is immune to reason and principle. The great ambition of democracy was precisely to free man from atavistic power through a discipline of principle that would forbid it. I say all this to make the point that white racism was no small thing. It was a primitivism, a return to atavistic power, and, most important, a flaunting of the precept that America was founded on: that the freedom of man depended on a discipline of fragile and abstract ideas and principles.

White racism made America illegitimate by its own terms, not a new nation after all, but an “old world” nation that used God as an excuse for its oppression and exploitation, a pretender to reason and civilization. So what happens today when a white American leader, even of the stature and popular appeal of a Ronald Reagan, questions affirmative action on grounds of principle? The Reagan administration, famous for its disbelief in racial preferences, refused to challenge these policies because even this extremely popular president lacked the moral authority as a white to enforce the nation’s very best principles—advancement by merit, a single standard of excellence, individual rather than group rights, and the rest. Not only have white Americans been stigmatized as betrayers of principle, but also those principles themselves have been stigmatized by their association with white duplicity.

Here were whites exclaiming the sacredness of individual rights while they used the atavism of race to deny those rights to blacks. They celebrated merit as the most egalitarian form of advancement, yet made sure that no amount of merit would enable blacks to advance. Therefore these principles themselves came to be seen as part of the machinery of white supremacy, as instruments of duplicity that whites could use to “exclude” blacks. The terrible effect of this was the demonization of America’s best principles as they applied to racial reform.

This situation, I believe, has given post-sixties racial reform its most stunning irony: Because difficult principles are themselves stigmatized as the demonic instruments of racism, white Americans and American institutions have had to betray the nation’s best principles in racial reform in order to win back their own moral authority. For some thirty years now white redemption has required setting aside the very discipline of principles that has elsewhere made America great.

If not principles, then what? The answer in a word is deference. Stigmatized as racist, whites and American institutions have no moral authority over the problems they try to solve through race-related reform. They cannot address a problem like inner-city poverty by saying that government assistance will only follow a show of such timeless American principles as self-reliance, hard work, moral responsibility, sacrifice, and initiative—all now stigmatized as demonic principles that “blame the victims” and cruelly deny the helplessness imposed on them by a heritage of oppression. Instead their racial reform must replace principle with deference. It must show white American authority deferring to the nation’s racial tragedy out of remorse. And this remorse must be seen to supersede commitment to principles. In fact, any preoccupation with principles can only be read as a failure of remorse. “Caring,” “compassion,” “feeling,” and “empathy” must be seen to displace principles in public policy around race.

But deference should not be read as an abdication of white American authority to black American authority. American institutions do not let blacks, in the name of their oppressive history, walk in the front door and set policy. It is important to remember that these institutions are trying to redeem their authority, not abdicate it. Their motivation is to fend off the stigma that weakens their moral authority. So deference is first of all in the interest of white moral authority, not black uplift. Certainly there may be genuine remorse behind it, but the deference itself serves only the moral authority of American institutions.

And this deference is always a grant of license—relief from the sacrifice, struggle, responsibility, and morality of those demanding principles that healthy communities entirely depend on. And virtually all race-related reform since the sixties has been defined by deference. This reform never raises expectations for blacks with true accountability, never requires that they actually develop as Americans, and absolutely never blames blacks when they don’t develop. It always asks less of blacks and exempts them from the expectations, standards, principles, and challenges that are considered demanding but necessary for the development of competence and character in others. Deferential reform—everything from welfare to affirmative action to multiculturalism—is the license to be spared the rigors of development. And at its heart is a faith in an odd sort of magic—that the license that excuses people from development is the best thing for their development.

Nowhere in the ancient or modern world—except in the most banal utopian writing—is there the idea that people will become self-sufficient if they are given a lifetime income that is slightly better than subsistence with no requirement either to work or to educate themselves. Nowhere is there the idea that young girls should be subsidized for having children out of wedlock, with more money for more children. And yet this is precisely the form of welfare that came out of the sixties—welfare as a license not to develop. Out of deference this policy literally set up incentives that all but mandated inner-city inertia, that destroyed the normal human relationship to work and family, and that turned the values of hard work, sacrifice, and delayed gratification into a fool’s game.

Deferential policies transform black difficulties into excuses for license. The deferential policy maker looks at the black teen pregnancy problem with remorse because this is what puts him on the path to redemption. But this same remorse leads him to be satisfied by his own capacity to feel empathy, rather than by the teenage girl’s achievement of a higher moral standard. So he sets up a nice center for new mothers at her high school, thereby advertising to other girls that they too will be supported—and therefore licensed—in having babies of their own. Soon this center is full, and in the continuing spirit of remorse, he solicits funds to expand the facility. It was not Joblessness that bred the black underclass; it was thirtyfive years of deference.

Deferential policies have also injured the most privileged generation of black Americans in history. Black students from families with incomes above seventy thousand dollars a year score lower on the SAT than white students from families with incomes of less than ten thousand a year. When the University of California was forced to drop race-based affirmative action, a study was done to see if a needs-based policy would bring in a similar number of blacks. What they quickly discovered is that the needsbased approach only brought in more high-achieving but poor whites and Asians. In other words, the top quartile of black American students—often from two-parent families with six-figure incomes and private-school educations— is frequently not competitive with whites and Asians even from lower quartiles. But it is precisely this top quartile of black students that has been most aggressively pursued for the last thirty years with affirmativeaction preferences. Infusing the atmosphere of their education from early childhood is not the idea that they will have to steel themselves to face stiff competition but that they will receive a racial preference, that mediocrity will win for them what only excellence wins for others.

Out of deference, elite universities have offered the license not to compete to the most privileged segment of black youth, precisely the segment that has no excuse for not competing. Affirmative action is protectionism for the best and brightest from black America. And because blacks are given spaces they have not won by competition, whites and especially Asians have had to compete all the harder for their spots. So we end up with the effect we always get with deferential reforms: an incentive to black weakness relative to others. Educators who adamantly support affirmative action—the very institutionalization of low expectations—profess confusion about the performance gap between privileged blacks and others. And they profess this confusion even as they make a moral mission of handing out the rewards of excellence for mediocre black performance.

A welfare of license for the poor and an affirmative action of license for the best and brightest—the perfect incentives for inertia in the former and mediocrity in the latter. But this should not be surprising. Because “racial problems” have been a pretext for looking at blacks rather than at whites, we have missed the fact that most racial reforms were conceived as deferential opportunities for whites rather than as developmental opportunities for blacks.

Because deference is a grant of license to set aside demanding principles, it opens the door to the same atavistic powers—race, ethnicity, and gender—that caused oppression in the first place. Again, the United States was founded on the insight that freedom required atavisms to be contained by a discipline of principles. The doctrine that separates church from state is an example. And race, ethnicity, and gender are like religion in that they arise from a different authority than the state. They come from fate, or some would say from God, and so are antithetical to democracy, which comes from an agreement among men to live by a social contract in which no single race can be validated without diminishing all others.

But thirty-some years of deferential social policies that work by relieving us of principle have joined atavisms to the state as valid sources of power. (This also happened recently in Eastern Europe, where the unifying principles of Communism collapsed so that the atavisms of tribe, clan, and religion surged back as valid sources of power and entitlement. War has been the all too frequent result.)Aquick look at America’s campuses reveals what I have elsewhere called a “new sovereignty,” in which each minority carves out a sovereign territory and identity based on the atavisms of race, ethnicity, and gender. And this new atavistic sovereignty supersedes the nation’s sovereignty and flaunts its democratic principles. One is a black or a woman before one is an American.

It is no accident that preferential affirmative action became the model for racial and social reform after America’s great loss of moral authority in the sixties. Affirmative action is an atavistic model of reform that legalizes the use of atavisms in place of principles right in the middle of a democracy. In this way it mimics the infamous Jim Crow laws that also legalized the atavism of race over democratic principles. In Jim Crow, white supremacy was the motivation; in affirmative action it was deference. The first indulgence in atavisms so wiped out white moral authority that it made the second indulgence inevitable.

To take all this a step further, liberal whites and American institutions also shifted the locus of social virtue itself from principles to atavisms. Since the sixties, social virtuousness has lost its connection to difficult and raceless principles and become little more than a fashionable tolerance for atavisms. Of course tolerance of different races, ethnicities, and genders is virtuous. But moving out of a spirit of deference, white liberals and American institutions have asked that these atavisms be tolerated as legalized currencies of power. This is how the virtue of tolerance becomes a corruption of democratic fairness—you don’t merely accept people of different races; you validate their race or ethnicity as a currency of power and entitlement over others.

This is the perversion of social virtue that gave us a multiculturalism that has nothing to do with culture. The goal of America’s highly politicized multiculturalism is to create an atavistic form of citizenship—a citizenship of preferential status in which race, ethnicity, and gender are linked to historic victimization to justify entitlements unavailable to other citizens. Culture is a pretext, a cover. The trick of this multiculturalism is to pass off atavisms as if they were culture. So people think they are being “tolerant” of “cultural diversity” when, in fact, they are supporting pure racial power.

In fact multiculturalism actually suppresses America’s rich cultural variety, because much actual culture does not mesh with victimization. A troublesome implication of jazz, for example, is that blacks are irrepressible because they created one of the world’s great art forms in the midst of oppression. It is images of helplessness that highlight their racial atavism as a source of entitlement. So the black cultural genius for self-invention and improvisation that made jazz possible are not drawn out and celebrated in multiculturalism. Nor are the many other cultural ingenuities—psychological, social, and political—by which blacks managed to live fully human lives despite their hard fate. Culture gets in the way of multiculturalism.

But multiculturalism is the kind of thing that happens when a democracy loses the moral authority to protect the individual citizen as the only inviolate unit of rights. In any society atavisms can only be repressed, never entirely extinguished. They are always waiting for the opportunity to wedge themselves into the life of society under some high-sounding and urgent guise. No one invents the moral mask better than those driven to have their race, ethnicity, or gender bring them a preference over others— whether white segregationists or minority supporters of affirmative action. And when the majority of a society is stigmatized for past betrayal of principles, and when those principles themselves are emblems of duplicity, then primitive atavisms easily present themselves as salvation itself. Multiculturalism masks a bid for pure atavistic power; it is an assault on democracy that Americans entertain because they feel they must. It was conceived not to spread culture but to win some of the territory opened up by the weakened moral authority of American institutions.

==============================

PART TWO — PRIVATE LIVES AND PUBLIC POLICIES

Residential Segregation Trends

WILLIAM A. V. CLARK

Ethnic and racial segregation has declined substantially from the 1960s when the Kerner Commission Report suggested that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white— separate and unequal.” Decade by decade, residential integration has increased, and it will probably continue to do so. Of course, this does not mean that segregation has vanished or that housing discrimination has been eliminated, but it does indicate that there has been impressive racial progress in the past three decades.

Seventy years ago, the Chicago school of urban sociology studied the changing residential map of European newcomers who had flooded into cities on the East Coast and in the Middle West. Later, with the influx of African Americans from the South into northern cities, the focus of research shifted to blacks and whites. Today, scholars look beyond black and white, as urban America has become multiethnic and, once again, residential patterns have changed. In fact, two dozen cities now have no majority ethnic or racial group, and the number will grow with continuing immigration.

The changing economic status of members of racial and ethnic groups alters residential patterns, and the evidence from national and selective regional studies indicates that segregation is declining, especially for the more affluent. Yet the residential choices people make inevitably will result in a certain degree of continuing racial and ethnic clustering—a phenomenon that should not be confused with discrimination. For instance, Koreans have gravitated toward certain high-status California suburbs; newly wealthy Asian Indians have chosen to live in certain neighborhoods in Silicon Valley; and Armenians are concentrated in the Glendale region of Los Angeles. Do such patterns suggest unequal residential access? In reality, the residential mosaic is shaped in part by a combination of economic forces and group preferences, and it is simplistic to assume the driving force to be clearly racial animus.

Changing Patterns of Residential Segregation

Residential integration has increased in the past forty years. The changes were slow at first, but the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent fair housing laws accelerated the process. A standard way of measuring the level of residential segregation is to use what is called the index of dissimilarity, which ranges from a high of 100 (total segregation) to a low of zero (members of racial and ethnic groups randomly distributed). Thus, each census tract (a largish neighborhood of about 4,000 to 6,000 people) in a city with an index of zero would perfectly mirror the racial and ethnic makeup of the larger community.

Table 1 looks at selected cities in the period 1960–1990. In cities in which the minority population is predominantly African American, the index of dissimilarity has dropped from the high 80s to the high 70s; where other minorities are also present, the decline has been considerably greater. Other data from the 1980s confirm this general picture of increased integration, especially in southern and western metropolitan areas with significant new housing construction.1

Table 1 Housing Segregation in the Twenty-one Largest Cities with Over 50,000 Blacks

index of dissimilarity a

*City*	*1960*	*1970*	*1980*	*1990*
*Mostly Black Minority*
Chicago	93	93	90	86
Philadelphia	87	84	85	84
Detroit	84	82	84	86
Washington, D.C.	80	79	77	76
Boston	84	84	79	73
Atlanta	89	88	80	81
St. Louis	90	90	76	74
Baltimore	90	89	82	80
Pittsburgh	85	86	79	77
Cleveland	91	90	88	85
Newark	72	76	79	79
Kansas City, Mo.	91	90	83	76
Cincinnati	89	84	79	75
Milwaukee	88	88	81	79
averages	87	86	82	79
*Black and Hispanic*
Los Angeles	82	90	78	66
Houston	94	93	79	66
Dallas	95	96	81	63
Oakland	73	70	71	63
Tampa	94	92	76	65
Miami	98	92	81	74
San Francisco	69	75	65	61
averages	86	87	76	65

source: David Armor and William A. V. Clark, “Housing Segregation and School Desegregation,” in David Armor, Forced Justice: School Desegregation and the Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 128.

a For 1960 and 1970 the index is for cities and for whites versus blacks. For 1980 and 1990 the index is for counties and for nonblacks versus blacks.

In Southern California, for example, in many suburban counties outside Los Angeles, indexes of dissimilarity are in the mid-30s. The number of Hispanics, African Americans, and Asians is increasing steadily.2 Thus, though Orange County may still be viewed as a conservative Republican bastion, by 1990 only a little more than 30 percent of the neighborhoods (census tracts) were over 80 percent non-Hispanic white. Diversity in general had increased dramatically—a picture that squares with the work of scholars who stress the gains brought in recent decades by the drive to reduce discrimination.

The change in the status of blacks is particularly striking. As late as 1970, rich and poor blacks were equally likely to be segregated from white households, but today in Southern California, high-income black households live in highly integrated neighborhoods. Families with incomes less than $10,000 remain in areas with an index of dissimilarity close to 90, but the figure for those with earnings above $60,000 is 40. The civil rights movement is now more than forty years old, and the sustained attack on American racism has paid off.

In 1960 few African Americans lived in suburbia. By 1999 the number of African Americans in the suburbs was about 10.9 million, more than 30 percent of the total black population. Blacks are now about 8 percent of the total population residing in suburbia, and the proportion will continue to increase with rising black incomes. Moreover, increasingly, suburban middle-class blacks are almost indistinguishable from whites with the same education and income.3

As the racial gap in family income is further reduced, the level of residential integration will rise. At the same time, it is important to note that the index of dissimilarity is not likely to drop much below 30. Differences in wealth, in neighborhood preferences, and in the structure of urban housing all work to separate members of different racial and ethnic groups.

Residential Patterns

Just why racial and ethnic groups tend to cluster in separate residential areas is a matter of ongoing and contentious debate.4 Some scholars stress the role of discrimination and argue that income and housing costs play only a minor role in the segregated residential patterns so evident in large metropolitan areas.5 But there is also a substantial literature that emphasizes not only economic factors but also the choices minorities make—that is, their preference for living with members of their own group (and avoiding others).6

The debate over the causes of residential separation is one aspect of the attempt to understand the creation and modification of urban patterns over time. A large literature has documented the role of socioeconomic and family status, as well as ethnic characteristics in defining the ecology of the city.7 It is certainly possible to identify and classify residential areas within cities on the basis of such variables, and to some degree communities change as the income, ethnicity, and composition of families within them shift. But the intersection between class and race is also important. For instance, white movement out of an inner-city neighborhood that has become heavily African American and often overwhelmingly poor is central to understanding the emergence of black urban concentrations and more affluent, predominantly white suburbs.8 That classic pattern, however, will continue to change as blacks and Hispanics move up the economic ladder.

Indeed, some new evidence from Southern California suggests that income and education may be more important than previously believed.9 Well-educated and higher-income black households live in relatively integrated settings—a harbinger of the future in other regions, it would seem (see Fig. 1). Survey data indicate that changing social status, especially that generated by education, has an important effect on the acceptance of “other race” residents in a neighborhood.10 At the same time, however, lowincome households may be experiencing increased segregation, a phenomenon consistent with the pessimism of scholars like Massey and Denton, who write of hypersegregation in many cities.11

Fig. 1. Average segregation levels by education and income in 1970 and 1990;

William A. V. Clark and Julian Wave, “Trends in Residential Integration by

Socio-Economic Status in Southern California,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 32

(1997).

Education: Average Segregation Score

	10 urban areas (1970)	Southern California (1990)
0–8th	88	73
Some HS	87	70
HS Grad	86	58
Some College	85	50
College Grad	84	49

Income (000’s): Average Segregation Score

	10 urban areas (1970)	Southern California (1990)
<5	87	76
5–10	89	70
10–14	88	72
15–20	87	59
20–24	86	57
25–40	86	53
40+	85	49

Self-selection and group avoidance have also shaped the residential patterns of European immigrant groups, and that process continues today. Preferences for particular combinations of ethnic neighbors play an important role in the choices families make. But the African American experience has been different from the European. Whites and Asians have a stronger desire than do blacks and Hispanics for neighborhoods of their own race; the ideal mix thus differs for the two groups, and their separate preferences are not so easily reconciled (see Fig. 2). That fact, too, is likely to perpetuate a certain degree of urban residential separation for some time to come.12

Diverse preferences, along with group differences in education and income, thus shape the residential landscape, yet some scholars see prejudice as the basic explanation for racial and ethnic clustering.13 If housing discrimination is indeed still a major force, then changes in the socioeconomic status of blacks—and even in racial attitudes—will not suffice to alter the basic picture. Several studies that have used testers to determine the receptivity of landlords and real estate agents to black families provide evidence that doors are still closed.14 But surveys that ask households whether they have actually experienced discrimination find relatively few respondents who answer yes. The survey results suggest that the patterns of separation that we see in our cities are more the result of economic differences among groups, and of preferences for living in a neighborhood with people who are similar, than they are of discrimination.15

Prospects for Stable Integrated Neighborhoods

Fig. 2. Multiethnic racial preferences (choices of preferred combinations of neighbors) for Los Angeles and Boston; Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality 1993–1994 (MCSUI).

Los Angeles: Percent of choices

	Hispanic	Black
All Hispanic	63	1
	22	2
50/50 Hispanic/Black	11	48
	2	31
All Black	3	18

	White	Black
All White	30	1
	20	5
50/50 White/Black	20	57
	4	4
All Black	2	2

Boston: Percent of choices

	Hispanic	Black
All Hispanic	26	2
	43	4
50/50 Hispanic/Black	24	39
	1	22
All Black	2	22

	Asian	Black
All Asian	15	5
	57	8
50/50 Asian/Black	25	50
	7	18
All Black	3	13

The future of residential integration is bound up with the fundamental demographic changes that are sweeping the nation. The new demography is particularly apparent in California, New York, Florida, Arizona, and Texas—all entry-point states for Hispanic and Asian immigrants. And even though the country is still 75 percent Anglo, several states, including California, as well as some metropolitan areas, already have populations that are majority minority. Some of the new immigrant groups stick together by choice, and in such a context notions of segregation and separations become increasingly antiquated. In Los Angeles, for example, the index of dissimilarity for Armenians is roughly 90, which means almost total segregation. Several Asian groups (Cambodians, Koreans, Vietnamese, for example) are also residentially concentrated.16

There is thus intense clustering for some groups. But, at the same time, old patterns of white flight from incoming African Americans appear to be changing. Overall levels of separation may therefore be declining.17 On the other hand, stable racially integrated communities are still unusual, and greater integration may simply be the consequence of an influx of white Hispanics rather than of Anglos. Whites and blacks may be living apart, but the arrival of Hispanics has integrated neighborhoods that were formerly overwhelmingly one race—that is, black. The change in the demographic makeup of the nation as a whole, in other words, inevitably has an impact on living patterns.

The two processes—increasing segregation and greater integration— are thus occurring at the same time, although the latter is the stronger (if slower) trend. The future remains unpredictable. As more blacks acquire middle-class status, urban neighborhoods are more and more likely to become a mix of new immigrants and African Americans. But it is also possible that very large scale immigration could undermine the progress made over the past three decades. Moreover, income separates people. The Kerner Report warned against two nations, one black and one white; the real worry may be two societies, one poor and the other affluent—living apart.

Observations and Summary

Pessimists argue that declines in segregation occur only where there are small numbers of African American households, not in the places where most blacks live. And on that basis they conclude that whites want only limited interracial contact. But more affluent and more highly educated black families are clearly welcome in suburban communities, and that fact suggests real change. Will that change be sustained? It will take another decade before we know for certain. Already, however, it is legitimate to ask whether urban concentrations of low-income black households are the result primarily of prejudice or of income constraints.

Notes

1. Reynolds Farley and William Frey, “Changes in the Segregation of Whites from

Blacks During the 1980s: Small Steps Toward a More Integrated Society,” American

Sociological Review 59 (1994): 23–45.

2. William A. V. Clark, “Residential Patterns, Avoidance, Assimilation, and Succession,”

in R. Waldinger and M. Bozorgmehr, eds., Ethnic Los Angeles (New York:

Russell Sage Foundation, 1996), pp. 109–38.

3. Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Anchor Books,

1992); Richard Morrill, “Racial Segregation and Class in a Liberal Metropolis,” Geographical

Analysis 27 (1995): 22–41.

4. William A. V. Clark, “Residential Segregation in American Cities: A Review and

Interpretation,” Population Research and Policy Review 5 (1986): 95–127; William A.

V. Clark, “Residential Segregation in American Cities: Common Ground and Differences

in Interpretation,” Population Research and Policy Review 8 (1989): 193–97;

George Galster, “Residential Segregation in American Cities: A Contrary Review,”

Population Research and Policy Review 7 (1988): 113–21.

5. Nancy Denton, “The Persistence of Segregation Links Between Residential Segregation

and School Segregation,” Minnesota Law Review 80 (1996): 795–824; John

Farley, “Race Still Matters: The Minimal Role of Income and Housing Cost as Causes

of Housing Segregation in St. Louis, 1900,” Urban Affairs Review 3 (1995): 244–54.

6. David Armor and William A. V. Clark, “Housing Segregation and School Desegregation,”

in David Armor, Forced Justice: School Desegregation and the Law (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 117–53.

7. Brian Berry and John Kasarda, Contemporary Urban Ecology (New York: Macmillan,

1979), provide a review of the ecological background of the urban mosaic.

8. William Frey, “Mover Destination Selectivity and the Changing Suburbanization

of Metropolitan Whites and Blacks,” Demography 22 (1985): 223–43; William J.

Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

9. William A. V. Clark and Julian Ware, “Trends in Residential Integration by

Socio-Economic Status in Southern California,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 32 (1997):

825–43.

10. Howard Schuman, Charlotte Steeh, and Lawrence Bobo, Racial Attitudes in

America: Trends and Interpretations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1985).

11. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1993).

12. William A. V. Clark, “Residential Preferences and Neighborhood Racial Segregation:

A Test of the Schelling Model,” Demography 28 (1991): 1–19; William A. V.

Clark, “Residential Preferences and Residential Choices in a Multi-Ethnic Context,”

Demography30 (1992): 451–66; Schuman, Steeh, and Bobo, Racial Attitudes in America:

Trends and Interpretations.

13. George Galster and William Keeney, “Race, Residence, Discrimination and

Economic Opportunities,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 24 (1988): 87–117.

14. See, e.g., John Yinger, Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost: The Continuing Costs of

Housing Discrimination (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995).

15. Armor and Clark, “Housing Segregation and School Segregation,” p. 145.

16. James Allen and Eugene Turner, The Ethnic Quilt: Population Diversity in

Southern California (California State University, Northridge: Center for Geographical

Studies, 1997).

17. Barrett Lee and Peter Wood, “Is Neighborhood Social Succession, Place Specific?”

Demography 28 (1991): 21–40.

==============================

African American Marriage Patterns

DOUGLAS J. BESHAROV and ANDREW WEST

In 1968, the Kerner Commission declared that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”1 Happily, many of the Commission’s most distressing predictions have not come true. But with respect to marriage and child rearing, black and white Americans do live in substantially different worlds. Over the past fifty years, for all Americans, marriage rates have declined while divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births have climbed. But the negative changes have been greatest among African Americans.

The Decline of Marriage

NONMARRIAGE

Compared with white women, African Americanwomenare 25 percent less likely ever to have been married and about half as likely to be currently married. According to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS), in 1998, about 29 percent of African American women aged fifteen and over were married with a spouse present, compared with about 55 percent of white women and 49 percent of Hispanic women.2 African American women are estimated to spend only half as long as white women married (22 percent vs. 44 percent of their lives).3

In the 1950s, after at least seventy years of rough parity, African American marriage rates began to fall behind white rates. In 1950, the percentages of white and African American women (aged fifteen and over) who were currently married were roughly the same, 67 percent and 64 percent, respectively. By 1998, the percentage of currently married white women had dropped by 13 percent to 58 percent. But the drop among African American women was 44 percent to 36 percent—more than three times larger.4 The declines for males were parallel, 12 percent for white men, 36 percent for African American men.

Among Hispanics, the decline in marriage rates appears to have been less steep, but only because we have no information on Hispanics prior to 1970. From 1970 to 1998, the percentage of currently married Hispanic women dropped 13 percent, from 64 percent to 56 percent (see Fig. 1).5

Even more significant has been the sharp divergence in never-married rates. Between 1950 and 1998, the percentage of never-married white women aged fifteen and over rose from 20 percent to 22 percent, a 10 percent rise. But the percentage of never-married African Americanwomen about doubled, from 21 percent to 41 percent.6 For Hispanics, the data begin only in 1970; since then, the percentage of Hispanic never-married women has risen from 24 percent in 1970 to 29 percent in 1998, about a 21 percent rise.7

Later marriage among African Americans accounts for only some of this difference. For example, between 1950 and 1998, the percentage of never-married white women aged forty and over actually fell from 9 percent to 5 percent, a 44 percent drop. But the percentage of never-married African American women aged forty and over rose by 200 percent, from 5 percent to 15 percent.8 (Thus, even adjusting for age at first marriage, marriage rates decline after about 1970 for whites and 1960 for African Americans).9

Fig. 1. Marital trends, 1890–1998. Although the 1890 data have not been analyzed, results from 1910 indicate that about 2 percent of black women classified as widows in that year were actually never-married or divorced. See Samuel H. Preston, Suet Lim, and S. Philip Morgan, “African-American Marriage in 1910: Beneath the Surface of Census Data,” Demography 29 (February 1992): 1–15. Data for 1890–1990 from decennial census data for those years; data for 1998 from Bureau of the Census, Marital Status and Living Arrangements: March 1998, by Terry A. Lugailia (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1999), p. 1, table 1.

Among Hispanics, there has been almost no change in the percentage of never-married women. In 1970, about 7 percent of women forty and over were never married. By 1998, that figure had risen by only one percentage point.

DIVORCE AND SEPARATION

At the same time that African American women are half as likely to marry as whites, they are more than twice as likely to divorce. Although African American divorce rates have long been higher than those of whites, they are now more so. For example, in 1890 (the first year for which national census data are available) the number of divorced women per thousand married women was 45 percent higher for African Americans than for whites, 9 vs. 6.10 These are relatively small numbers, but they suggest that even when families were on the whole much stronger than they are today, African American women were still much more likely to face marital disruption. These early divorce figures may not be completely accurate, however.11

Not only was divorce highly stigmatized before the 1960s, making it likely that divorces were underreported in early census years, but also, as E. Franklin Frazier pointed out sixty years ago, “divorces”among rural African Americans were most likely informal agreements (between two married people or two people living together) or the de facto result of long-standing separations.12 Thus, it is likely that formal divorces among African Americans were much lower, and perhaps much lower than among whites.

Regardless of the reliability of earlier census data, however, the racial difference in divorce is now quite large. By 1998, the African American divorce rate was more than twice as high as the white rate (422 per thousand compared with 190 per thousand). The divorce rate for Hispanic women doubled between 1970, the first year for which data are available, and 1998, from 81 to 171 per thousand (compared with a quadrupling of the African American rate and a tripling of the white rate over the same time period).13

Separation is about four times more common among African Americans than among whites and about one and a half times more common than among Hispanics. In 1998, according to CPS data, over 20 percent of married black women aged fifteen and over had an absent spouse, compared with 5 percent of married white women and 13 percent of married Hispanic women of the same ages.14 Some experts question whether the black separation rate is really this high, speculating that black women consider the breakup of a long-term cohabitation (an informal commonlaw marriage, if you will) to be a “separation.”15

NONMARITAL BIRTHS

Along with the weakness of marriage, there has been an increase in nonmarital births, especially among teenagers. Once again, African Americans have experienced the greatest increases, although they have also been responsible for most of the recent decline in both teen births and nonmarital teen births. According to Larry Bumpass and Hsien-Hen Lu, an African American child is three times more likely to be born out of wedlock than a white child and, on average, will spend only six years in a two-parent family, compared with fourteen years for a white child and thirteen years for a Hispanic child.16

The proportion of births to unwed mothers has risen steadily since 1950, so that now almost one-third of all American children are born out of wedlock (see Fig. 2). From 1950 to 1997, the proportion of births to unmarried white women (non-Hispanic) increased almost twelvefold, from 2 percent to 22 percent. The African American proportion increased fourfold, from 18 percent to a striking 69 percent. (The African American rate could not have risen much more because it was already so high.) The proportion of births to Hispanic unwed mothers has also increased by 5 percent between 1992 and 1997, rising from 39 percent to 41 percent.17

A major factor driving these rates has been the decline in the birthrates for married couples—rather than an explosion of births outside of marriage (Fig. 3). As Thernstrom and Thernstrom point out, “In 1987 the birth rate for married black women actually fell below the birth rate for unmarried black women, the first time that has ever happened for any ethnic group.”18

Among white women, the overall fertility rate fell from 102.3 births per thousand women aged fifteen to forty-four in 1950 to 63.9 in 1997. (At the same time, the unwed fertility rate rose from 1.8 to 16.5, in part because there were many fewer marriages.) Had the fertility rate of white married women remained at 102.3 (while the rate for white unwed women rose to 16.5), the proportion of births in 1997 to unwed white mothers would be only 16 percent, not 26 percent.

Fig. 2. Nonmarital birthrates, 1940–1995, by race. Data on nonmarital birthrates for white and black women 1950–1990 and for Hispanic women in 1980 from Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, Births to Unmarried Mothers in the United States, 1980–92, by Stephanie J. Ventura, Vital and Health Statistics, series 12, no. 53 (Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics, 1995), p. 27, table 1; data on nonmarital birthrates for white, black, and Hispanic women for 1995 from Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, Births: Final Data for 1997, by Stephanie J. Ventura et al., National Vital Statistics Report 47, no. 18 (Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics, 1999), p. 43, table 18.

Similarly, the fertility rate of married African American women fell from 137.3 per thousand in 1950 to 70.7 in 1997 (Fig. 4). Had their fertility rate remained the same, the percentage of African American children born out of wedlock in 1997 would have been 36 percent, not 69 percent.19 Unfortunately, data for Hispanic out-of-wedlock births are not available for years earlier than 1989, making it impossible to make the equivalent calculation for Hispanics.

Fig. 3. White fertility rates for married and unmarried women, 1940–1995. From authors’ calculations based on data from Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, Births: Final Data for 1997, by Stephanie J. Ventura et al., National Vital Statistics Report, vol. 47, no. 18 (Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics, 1999), p. 22, table 1; Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, Births to Unmarried Mothers in the United States 1980–92, by Stephanie J. Ventura, Vital and Health Statistics, series 12, no. 53 (Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics, 1995), p. 35, table 4; data for 1995 taken from Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, Report of Final Natality Statistics, 1995, by Stephanie J. Ventura et al., Monthly Vital Statistics Report, vol. 45, no. 11, supplement (Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics, 1997), p. 40, table 14.

TEENAGE BIRTHS

Having a baby out of wedlock is difficult enough; having a baby as an unwed teenager is even more difficult. One in five African American babies is born to a teenage mother, about twice the white rate and one and a half times the Hispanic rate. In 1996, about 22 percent of all live births to African Americans were to women under age twenty, compared with just over 10 percent for white women and 13 percent for Hispanic women.20

Fig. 4. Black fertility rates for married and unmarried women, 1940–1995. From authors’ calculations based on data from Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, Births: Final Data for 1997, by Stephanie J. Ventura et al., National Vital Statistics Report, vol. 47, no. 18 (Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics, 1999), p. 22, table 1; Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, Births to Unmarried Mothers in the United States, 1980–92, by Stephanie J. Ventura, Vital and Health Statistics, series 12, no. 53 (Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics, 1995), p. 35, table 4; data for 1995 taken from Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, Report of Final Natality Statistics, 1995, by Stephanie J. Ventura et al., Monthly Vital Statistics Report, vol. 45, no. 11, supplement (Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics, 1997), p. 40, table 14.

Over the past forty years, the overall teenage birthrate first rose and then declined. Throughout, though, there were sharp racial and ethnic differences. According to theNational Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the birthrate for females aged fifteen to nineteen peaked in 1960, at 79.4 per thousand for whites and 156.1 for African Americans. The rates then declined until 1985 or 1986, when the white rate hit 42.3 and the African American rate 94.1.21 The rates continued to rise for a few more years and began declining again in 1992 to their 1997 levels of 36 for whites and 91 for African Americans.22 Among Hispanics, the teen birthrate rose from 100.8 per thousand in 1989 to a 1994 peak of 107.7 per thousand. The birthrate for Hispanic teens has since declined to 97.4 per thousand in 1997.23

For those concerned only about too early parenthood, the recent decline in teenage parenthood is good news. But out-of-wedlock birthrates are still at 1975 levels. More important, the decline is largely driven by the sharp drop in teenage marriage (so that there are fewer married couples trying to have a baby). This is, moreover, all teenage births, marital as well as nonmarital. The trend for nonmarital teenage births, as opposed to marital births, is sharply up. Almost all births to black teens are now out of wedlock. As overall births to teenagers were falling, the proportion of out-of-wedlock teenage births continued to rise because teens just don’t marry very much any more, but many are still having babies. For African Americans, between 1950 and 1997, the proportion of births to teenage unwed mothers rose from 36 percent to 96 percent, a 166 percent rise. For whites, the rise was steeper, almost twelvefold (because the base was so much lower), 6 percent in 1950 to 71 percent in 1997. The proportion of Hispanic teenage unwed births rose by 71 percent from 1980 to 1997, from 42 percent of all teenage births to 72 percent of all teenage births.24

RECENT DECLINES

Recent trends are much more hopeful. For the past few years, nonmarital births have been declining. The rate for whites peaked in 1994 at 28.5 per thousand single women and has declined slightly since then to 27 per thousand. The African American rate has declined more sharply, following a 1989 peak of 90.7. It is now 73.4. The rate for Hispanics reached its zenith in 1994 at 101.2 and has also declined to 91.4.25 Since 1991, teen births are down 8 percent for whites and 21 percent for African Americans.

Teenage nonmarital births have declined even more, again most significantly for blacks. Nonmarital birthrates for white teenagers peaked in 1994 at 28.1. Since then the rate has declined to 25.9, an 8 percent decline, but this is not a large enough drop to tell us what is happening. The rate for black teens, on the other hand, dropped a substantial 20 percent, from a high of 108.5 in 1991 to 86.4 in 1997. The drop for Hispanics has been only slightly larger than for whites. The rate of nonmarital births to Hispanic teenagers has fallen 9 percent, from a high of 82.6 in 1994 to 75.2 in 1997.26

Second-order births are also declining, once again most significantly for African Americans. Data from the NCHS indicate that, in 1992, the second-order or higher birthrate for teens was 15.6 per thousand. In 1997, the rate had fallen by 27 percent to 11.4. In 1992, the rates by race had been 8.3 for white teens, 39.5 for African American teens, and 28 for Hispanic teens. In 1997, the rates had fallen to 6.4, 25, and 23.5, respectively.27

A Balanced Perspective

At least since the appearance of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, “the plight of the black family” has been the focus of much anxiety and debate. On the one side have been those who think the black family is a “tangle of pathology,” to use Moynihan’s phrase.28 On the other side have been those who see the black family as strong and vibrant, emphasizing its “adaptability,” to use Belinda Tucker’s phrase.29

TERMINOLOGY

The disagreement about the state of the black family is partly the result of misunderstanding. The first side tends to use “family breakdown” primarily to mean nonmarriage, divorce, and nonmarital childbearing. The other side tends to use the term “family” more broadly, to include kin networks of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and so forth, that often help support single mothers and their children and sometimes take them into their own homes. In an attempt to bridge this disagreement, this paper seeks to make a clear distinction between the breakdown of marriage, which it calls “marital breakdown,” and the role of extended family structures, which, in all communities, is more important when marriages are weaker.

Without doubt, today’s unprecedentedly high rates of divorce and nonmarital childbearing—across all American society and indeed in most other Western nations—should be a matter of grave concern. Marital breakdown harms many of the adults and children involved and, because of its disproportionate impact on African Americans, is a particular tragedy in that community. Public discourse, however, often goes too far in blaming marital breakdown for all the poverty and social dysfunction that afflict the black community. That is an equally terrible mistake because marital breakdown, poverty, and social dysfunction interact. They are, simultaneously, both causes and effects of each other.

MARITAL BREAKDOWN OR POVERTY?

At first glance, marital breakdown has devastating effects on children, and to African American children in particular because so many are born to unwed teenagers. Children born out of wedlock fall substantially below children from intact families on many important measures.30 A 1995 report to Congress from the Department of Health and Human Services summarizes:

Unmarried mothers are less likely to obtain prenatal care and more likely to have a low birthweight baby. Young children in single-mother families tend to have lower scores on verbal and math achievement tests. In middle childhood, children raised by a single parent tend to receive lower grades, have more behavior problems, and have higher rates of chronic health and psychiatric disorders. Among adolescents and young adults, being raised in a single-mother family is associated with elevated risks of teenage childbearing, high school dropout, incarceration, and with being neither employed nor in school.31

According to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) show that children born out of wedlock to never-married mothers spend 51 percent of their childhood in poverty, compared with only 7 percent of children born to twoparent, married families. Such children spend 71 percent of their childhood receiving some form of welfare (AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, WIC, or SSI), compared with 12 percent for children born to two-parent, married families.32 The children of teenaged parents, especially if unmarried, have even more serious problems. For example: “Children of young teen mothers are almost three times as likely to be behind bars at some point in their adolescence or early 20s as are the children of mothers who delayed childbearing.” 33

Although the children in female-headed households tend to do less well on various measures, these are only correlations. Because family poverty and various other characteristics are such important determinants of a child’s well-being and life prospects, many children would not have fared well even if their parents had been married or had waited until their twenties to have children.34 In recent years, a number of researchers have attempted to disentangle the effects of marital breakdown, poverty, and other personal and contextual factors.35 Doing so substantially reduces the apparent effects of marital breakdown. For example, when Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur analyzed Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data, they found that young people from single-parent families did substantially worse on a variety of measures:

Compared with teenagers of who grow up with both parents at home, adolescents who have lived apart from one of their parents during some period of childhood are twice as likely to drop out of high school, twice as likely to have a child before age twenty, and one and a half times as likely to be “idle”—out of school and out of work—in their late teens and early twenties.36

Controlling for income cuts these differences in half. The negative effects of growing up in a single-parent family were still large—just not as large as some of our public rhetoric would suggest.37 Thus, it is important to maintain a balanced perspective on the consequences of “marital breakdown.” Although it is an extremely serious problem, it is not the sole determinant of a person’s success or happiness. In fact, as other contributors to this volume describe, on many macro indicators of social and economic well-being, African Americans are doing better than ever before. Gaps between whites and African Americans are getting smaller, and in some cases African Americans are making gains relative to whites. Most African Americans—including a majority of those who are unmarried, or divorced, or even born out of wedlock—get up in the morning and go to work or school, like everyone else. Marital breakdown makes things worse, not hopeless.

WORLD-WIDE TRENDS

As we have seen, on every measure of marital stability, African Americans do more poorly than whites and Hispanics. The weakness of African American marriages is, however, more accurately viewed as an exacerbated version of the decline in marriage across the entire postindustrial,Western world. Between 1960 to 1986, mostWestern societies saw divorce rates rise and total birthrates fall while unwed births rose (see Table 1).

The most broadly accepted explanations for marital breakdown are essentially race-blind: greater acceptance of nonmarital sex and unwed parenthood so that young people feel less need to marry, widespread affluence so that it is easier to leave an unhappy marriage, less emotional and economic gain from marriage so that there is less reason to get married, and welfare’s marriage penalties that discourage low-income couples from marrying.

Table 1 Worldwide Marital Weakness, 1960–1986/88

	divorce rate		birthrate		unwed births (%)
*Country*	*1960*	*1988*	*1960*	*1988*	*1960*	*1986*
United States	9.4	21.2	3.6	2.1	5.3	23.4
Canada	1.7	12.9	3.8	1.9	4.3	16.9
Austria	5.0	2.7	1.6	13.0	21.0
Denmark	6.0	12.8	2.5	1.6	7.8	43.9
Finland	4.1	2.7	1.7	4.1	15.0
France	2.8	8.5	2.7	2.0	6.1	24.0
Germany	3.4	8.3	2.4	1.4	6.3	9.6
Italy	1.1	2.4	1.4	2.4	5.6
Netherlands	2.2	8.7	3.1	1.7	1.3	8.8
Norway	2.8	2.9	2.0	7.0	24.0
Sweden	4.9	10.7	2.2	1.9	11.3	48.4
United Kingdom	2.2	12.9	2.7	2.0	5.4	21.0

Source: Sheila B. Kamerman, “Gender Role and Family Structure Changes in the Advanced IndustrializedWest:

Implications for Social Policy,” in Katherine McFate, Roger Lawson, and William Julius

Wilson, eds., Poverty, Inequality, and the Future of Social Policy:Western States in the NewWorld Order

(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995), pp. 231–56.

African Americans do seem especially vulnerable to these worldwide trends, however. As Figure 5 indicates, nonmarital birthrates vary from a high of 72 percent for American-born African Americans to a low of 4 percent for Korean Americans. What can it be about African Americans— or their more than three centuries living on this continent—that has made them so vulnerable to the forces that weaken families? A number of factors seem to be at work: the devastating effects of slavery and Jim Crow laws on black marriages; endemic poverty, which puts added stress on already weak families; even fewer gains from marriage, especially for women; too early sex that puts young girls at greater risk of unwanted pregnancy; and racial concentration that magnifies the impact of these conditions.38 This same set of explanations, with a few modifications, helps explain what is happening to Hispanic marriages, which are often included only as an afterthought in discussions about the family. Although separate data on Hispanic marriages span only the last thirty years, we do have enough information to make some preliminary conclusions.

Fig. 5. Nonmarital births by race-ethnicity, 1992–1997. Data for all ethnic groups except Koreans and South Pacific Islanders from Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, Births: Final Data for 1997, pp. 38–39, tables 13 and 14; data for Koreans and South Pacific Islanders from Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, Birth Characteristics for Asian or Pacific Islander Subgroups, 1992, by Joyce A. Martin, Monthly Vital Statistics Report, vol. 43, no. 10, supplement (Hyattsville, Md.: 1995), p. 5, table 4.

On most indicators, Hispanic marriages lie somewhere between those of whites and African Americans. This suggests that some of the same factors that affect African Americans, such as endemic poverty, too early sex, and residential concentration, also affect Hispanics. At the same time, the different cultural and historical background of Hispanics appears to ameliorate some of the forces that contribute to further marital weakness among African Americans.

The overriding point is simple: The forces that weaken marriage strike all families, albeit in different ways for different groups. The sooner we realize this reality, the sooner progress will be made in strengthening all American families, including African American families. This is not a message in black and white, but perhaps it is a message for blacks and whites (and browns).

Notes

1. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National

Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam, 1968), p. 1.

2. Bureau of the Census, Marital Status and Living Arrangements: March 1998, by

Terry A. Lugailia (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1999), p. 1,

table 1.

3. Andrew J. Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage, rev. and enlarged ed. (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 95. A similar estimate for Hispanic

women is not available.

4. Data for 1950 from Bureau of the Census, Census of the Population: 1950, vol.

1, General Population Characteristics (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing

Office, 1952), p. 182, table 104. Data for 1998 from Bureau of the Census, Marital

Status, p. 1, table 1.

5. Data for 1970 from Bureau of the Census, 1970 Census of the Population, vol.

1, General Population Characteristics (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing

Office, 1972), p. 688, table 216. Data for 1998 from Bureau of the Census, Marital

Status, p. 1, table 1.

6. Data for 1950 from Bureau of the Census, Census of the Population: 1950, p.

182, table 104. Data for 1998 from Bureau of the Census, Marital Status, p. 1, table 1.

7. Data for 1970 from Bureau of the Census, 1970 Census, p. 688, table 216. Data

for 1998 from Bureau of the Census, Marital Status, p. 1, table 1.

8. Data for 1950 from Bureau of the Census, Census of the Population: 1950, p.

182, table 104. Data for 1998 from Bureau of the Census, Marital Status, p. 1, table 1.

9. Marriage rates for Hispanic women have been declining since the 1970s, but

lacking data before 1970, we cannot determine when marriage rates among Hispanic

women began to decline.

10. The divorce rate presented here represents the number of currently divorced

women aged fifteen and older per thousand married, spouse-present women. This rate

is different from the standard rate used by the National Center for Health Statistics

(NCHS), which is equal to the number of divorces decreed in a given year per thousand

married women aged fifteen and over. There are three reasons for using the rate

presented here. (1) the NCHS divorce rate is not available by race over time; (2) the

NCHS rate does not control for the apparent higher rate of separation among African

American women; (3) the rate used here, by focusing on divorced women as opposed

to the number of divorces, avoids the problems (although admittedly small) created

by divorces among interracial marriages. Data for 1890 from Bureau of the Census,

Census Reports: Twelfth Census of the United States,Taken in the Year 1900(Washington,

D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1901), p. lxxxvii, table 49. Data for 1998 from

Bureau of the Census, Marital Status, p. 1, table 1.

11. The Census Bureau has recognized the problem in the recording of divorces

and has in many cases issued public statements cautioning that the number of divorced

persons is underreported. See, e.g., Samuel H. Preston and John McDonald, “The

Incidence of Divorce Within Cohorts of American Marriages Contracted Since the

CivilWar,” Demography 16 (February 1979): 1–25.

12. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1939), chaps. 5 and 18, cited in Samuel H. Preston, Suet Lim, and S.

Philip Morgan, “African-American Marriage in 1910: Beneath the Surface of Census

Data,” Demography 29 (February 1992): 10.

13. Data for Hispanics in 1970 from Bureau of the Census, 1970 Census, p. 688,

table 216; data for 1998 from Bureau of the Census, Marital Status, p. 1, table 1.

14. Data for 1998 from Bureau of the Census, Marital Status, p. 1, table 1.

15. See Preston, Lim, and Morgan for a discussion of how data recorded by the

Census Bureau may be inaccurate.

16. Dataon likelihood of nonmarital births from Departmentof Health andHuman

Services,National Center for Health Statistics, Births: Final Data for 1997, by Stephanie

J. Ventura et al., National Vital Statistics Report, vol. 47, no. 18 (Hyattsville, Md.:

National Center for Health Statistics, 1999), p. 42, table 17. Data on the number of

years a child can expect to live with two parents correspond to the number of years

between birth and age seventeen a child can expect to live in a home with two parents

(either married or cohabiting); from Larry Bumpass and Hsien-Hen Lu, “Trends in

Cohabitation and Implications for Children’s Family Contexts in the U.S.,” working

paper, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Center for Demography and Ecology, 1999,

p. 36, table 6.

17. Data for 1950 from Departmentof Health andHumanServices,National Center

for Health Statistics, Births to Unmarried Mothers in the United States, 1980–92, by

Stephanie J.Ventura, Vital and Health Statistics, series 12, no. 53 (Hyattsville, Md.:

National Center for Health Statistics, 1995), p. 40, table 5. Data for 1997 from Department

of Health and Human Services, Births: Final Data for 1997, pp. 22, 28, 45,

tables 1, 6, and 19.

18. Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One

Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 240; emphasis in original.

19. Authors’ calculations based on data from Department of Health and Human

Services, Births: Final Data for 1997, p. 22, table 1; and Department of Health and

Human Services, Births to Unmarried Mothers, p. 35, table 4.

20. Department of Health and Human Services, Births: Final Data for 1997, p. 39,

table 14.

21. Department of Health and Human Services, Declines in Teenage Birth Rates,

1991–97: National and State Patterns, by Stephanie J. Ventura, T. J. Mathews, and Sally

C. Curtin, National Vital Statistics Report, vol. 47, no. 12 (Hyattsville, Md.: National

Center for Health Statistics, 1999), p. 9, table 1.

22. Department of Health and Human Services, Births: Final Data for 1997, p. 34,

table 9.

23. Department of Health and Human Services, Declines in Teenage Birth Rates, p.

10, table 2.

24. Data for 1950 and 1980 from Kristin A. Moore et al., “Data on Teenage Childbearing

in the United States” (prepared by Child Trends, Inc., for the American Enterprise

Institute/White HouseWorking Seminar on Integrated Services for Children and

Families,Washington, D.C., January 1993), p. 11, table 5. Data for 1997 from Department

of Health and Human Services, Births: Final Data for 1997, p. 42, table 17.

25. Department of Health and Human Services, Births: Final Data for 1997, p. 43,

table 18.

26. See note 24.

27. Data for 1992 from Departmentof Health andHumanServices,National Center

for Health Statistics, Advance Report of Final Natality Statistics, 1992, by Stephanie J.

Ventura et al., Monthly Vital Statistics Report, vol. 43, no. 5, suppl. (Hyattsville, Md.:

National Center for Health Statistics, 1994), pp. 34, 41, tables 3 and 7. Data for 1997

from Department of Health and Human Services, Births: Final Data for 1997, pp. 24,

32, tables 3 and 8.

28. Departmentof Labor, Office of Planning andPolicy Research,The Negro Family:

The Case for National Action, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Washington, D.C.: U.S.

Government Printing Office, 1965), p. 75.

29. M. Belinda Tucker, “Family,” in New Directions: African-Americans in a Diversifying

Nation, ed. James S. Jackson (Washington, D.C.: National Policy Association,

forthcoming).

30. Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent: What

Hurts, What Helps (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).

31. Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics,

“Nonmarital Childbearing in the United States,” executive summary of Report to

Congress on Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing (Hyattsville, Md.:National Center for Health

Statistics, 1995), p. xiii.

32. Robert Rector, data presented at Welfare Reform Seminar Series sponsored by

the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.,

April 1999).

33. Rebecca A. Maynard, “The Study, the Context, and the Findings in Brief,” in

Kids Having Kids: Economic Costs and Social Consequences of Teen Pregnancy, ed.

Rebecca A. Maynard (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 1997), p. 16.

34. The impact of poverty is complex, however. As Susan Mayer of the University

of Chicago points out: “My review of the research suggests three major conclusions.

First, though the effect of parental income is nowhere near as large as many political

liberals imagine, neither is it zero, as many political conservatives seem to believe.

Second, though the effect of parental income on any one outcome measure appears to

be fairly small, higher income has some effect on most outcomes, so its cumulative

impact across all outcomes may be substantial. Third, one reason that parental income

is not more important to children’s outcomes is probably that government policies

have done a lot to ensure that poor children get basic necessities most of the time.”

What Money Can’t Buy: Family Income and Children’s Life Chances (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 143.

35. The first major work was Arline T. Geronimus and Sanders Korenman, “The

Socioeconomic Consequences of Teen Childbearing Reconsidered,” Quarterly Journal

of Economics 107 (November 1992): 1187–1214.

36. There was, for example, a 10 percentage point difference between the high

school graduation rates of children from two-parent families and children from singleparent

families, 15 percent vs. 25 percent. They also found a 17 percentage point

difference in teen birthrates, 14 percent for those from two-parent families compared

with 31 percent for young women from single-parent families. There was also a 15

percentage point difference in “idleness” rates for young women. About 26 percent of

young women from two-parent families were out of school and out of work, compared

with 41 percent of young women from single-parent families. Similarly, 19 percent of

young men from two-parent families were idle, compared with 29 percent of young

men from single-parent families. McLanahan and Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single

Parent, pp. 2, 41, 47, 50.

37. Ibid., p. 89, fig. 10.

38. This is not to say that other explanations have not been propounded. But such

explanations, such as the existence of extensive kin networks and differing male-female

expectations about marriage, do not appear strong enough to account for a substantial

share of African American–white differences.

==============================

Crime

JAMES Q. WILSON

A central problem—perhaps the central problem—in improving the relationship between white and black Americans is the difference in racial crime rates. No matter how innocent or guilty a stranger may be, he carries with him in public the burdens or benefits of his group identity. If you are walking down a street alone at night and you encounter two men in business suits, you are not frightened. If you encounter two teenage boys in blue jeans, you may become a bit nervous. And if you encounter two teenage boys wearing leather jackets and sporting Mohawk haircuts, you will probably be very nervous. You know in advance that the appearance of these six males is no sure guide to their behavior, but given the magnitude of the possible harm—perhaps a sudden assault, possibly a serious injury—you assign a high value to what little you can observe about them. And what you can observe is their group identity.

Estimating the crime rates of racial groups is, of course, difficult because we only know the arrest rate. If police are more (or less) likely to arrest a criminal of a given race, the arrest rate will overstate (or understate) the true crime rate. To examine this problem, researchers have compared the rate at which criminal victims report (in the National Crime Victimization Survey, or NCVS) the racial identity of whoever robbed or assaulted them with the rate at which the police arrest robbers or assaulters of different races. Regardless of whether the victim is black or white, there are no significant differences between victim reports and police arrests. This suggests that, though racism may exist in policing (as in all other aspects of American life), racism cannot explain the overall black arrest rate.1 The arrest rate, thus, is a reasonably good proxy for the crime rate.

Black men commit murders at a rate about eight times greater than that for white men. This disparity is not new; it has existed for well over a century. When historian Roger Lane studied murder rates in Philadelphia, he found that since 1839 the black rate has been much higher than the white rate.2 This gap existed long before the invention of television, the wide distribution of hand guns, or access to dangerous drugs (except for alcohol). America is a violent nation. The estimated homicide rate in this country, excluding all those committed by blacks, is over three times higher than the homicide rate for the other six major industrial nations.3 But whatever causes white Americans to kill other people, it causes black Americans to kill others at a much higher rate.

Of course the average African American male is not likely to kill anybody. During the 1980s and early 1990s, fewer than one out of every 2,000 black men would kill a person in any year, and most of their victims were other blacks. Though for young black men homicide is the leading cause of death, the chances of the average white person’s being killed by a black are very small. But the chances of being hit by lightning are also very small, and yet we leave high ground during a thunderstorm.

However low the absolute risk, the relative risk—relative, that is, to the chances of being killed by a white—is high, and this fact changes everything. When whites walk down the street, they are more nervous when they encounter a black man than when they encounter a white one. When blacks walk down the street, they are more likely than whites to be stopped and questioned by a police officer. It is important, of course, for whites to know that a chance encounter with a black creates little risk and for police officers to know that they should have more criteria than just skin color to decide who is worth questioning. Many whites and many police officers know this, but in spite of what people know, the racial tension persists. Countless white pedestrians have been worried by the sight of a young black male, and countless innocent black men have had their cars stopped or their walk interrupted by a suspicious cop. White pedestrians may be embarrassed by their own caution; certainly black pedestrians are upset by unwarranted police intrusions.

The differences in the racial rates for property crimes, though smaller than those for violent offenses, are still substantial. The estimated rate at which black men commit burglary is three times higher than it is for white men; for rape, it is five times higher.4

The difference between blacks and whites with respect to crime, and especially violent crime, has, I think, done more to impede racial amity than any other factor. Pure racism—that is, a visceral dislike of another person because of his skin color—has always existed. It is less common today than it once was, but it persists and no doubt explains part of our racial standoff. But pure racism once stigmatized other racial minorities who have today largely overcome that burden. When I grew up in California, the Chinese and Japanese were not only physically distinctive, but they were also viewed with deep suspicion by whites. For many decades, Chinese testimony was not accepted in California courts, an Alien Land Law discouraged Asian land purchases, the Chinese Exclusion Act (not repealed until 1943) prevented Chinese immigration, and a Gentlemen’s Agreement, signed in 1907, required Japan to cut back sharply on passports issued to Japanese who wished to emigrate to California. When World War II began, the Japanese were sent to relocation camps at great personal cost to them. Yet today Californians of Asian ancestry are viewed by Caucasians with comfort and even pride. In spite of their distinctive physical features, no one crosses the street to avoid a Chinese or Japanese youth. One obvious reason is that they have remarkably low crime rates.

The black murder rate, though it is much higher than the rate for whites or Asians, does not always change in the same way as the white rate. Between 1976 and 1991, the murder arrest rate for black males aged twenty-five and older fell dramatically even though the murder arrest rate for the nation as a whole did not change at all. Apparently, adult black men were becoming less violent.5 But in some years, such as 1965 to the early 1970s, the black murder rate increased much faster than the white rate. By the late 1960s the black rate was over eighteen times higher than the white one.

Then, beginning around 1975, the black rate declined while the white rate continued to increase, so that the ratio of black arrests to white arrests fell to around six to one. From 1980 until the present, the rate at which adult blacks and whites are arrested for murder dropped more or less steadily. By contrast, the rate at which black and white juveniles are arrested for murder increased sharply from 1985 to the early 1990s, with the white rate almost doubling and the black rate more than tripling. Starting in the mid-1990s, the juvenile rate fell again, almost down to the level it was at in 1985.6 In short, though the gap sometimes widens and sometimes narrows, white and black homicide rates tend to remain different.

What are we to make of all this? There are four possible responses. One is to deny the facts, but this makes no sense to any objective observer. The high black crime rate cannot be wished away by talk of racism, overarresting, excessive punishment, or whites having allegedly drugged or armed blacks. A second response is to admit the facts and say that people are behaving rationally.7 Of course whites avoid blacks; of course police officers stop and question blacks. What can you expect? Though it is true that this may be a rational response, it comes at a very high price. Whites are fearful of living amid large numbers of blacks and of sending their children to predominately black schools. Any hope of residential or school integration is dealt a powerful blow by high black crime rates. Moreover, blacks interpret the way they are treated on the streets by white strangers and by police officers as a sign that they can never make much social progress. “No matter what I do, I can never be regarded as innocent,” many embittered black men will say. “I cannot hail a cab as easily as a white, and I will be stopped and questioned by the police more than any white. Integration is a joke.” Race matters, and race is unchangeable; hence, race differences that put people at risk pose a difficult burden on almost everyone.

A third strategy, suggested by Professor Randall Kennedy, is to change police practices so that they do not single out blacks for undue attention. He directs our attention to a number of court cases that evaluate the legality of police behavior that uses race as a proxy for dangerousness. In his summary, “Most courts that have confronted the issue have authorized police to use race in making decisions to question, stop, or detain persons so long as doing so is reasonably related to efficient law enforcement and not deployed for purposes of racial harassment.”8 Some state and federal judges have dissented from this view, but it appears to be the leading one. Though in most areas of public policy, the use of a racial test must pass the tough standard of “strict scrutiny,” in police investigations a much lower standard is allowed.

To deal with this problem, Kennedy proposes that the courts never, except in extraordinary cases, sustain the use of race as a clue. Because this might lead the police to ignore some forms of suspicious behavior, he suggests spending more money on law enforcement so that it can be an equal burden for whites and blacks. I am not entirely clear, however, how his proposal would work in practice. Should the police question blacks no more often than they now question whites? That raises the question of what, if any, would be the law enforcement losses from abandoning the race proxy. Would there be more crimes? Fewer arrests? Fewer solved crimes? We do not know; as far as I am aware, no information on this subject exists. As an alternative, should the police question whites as often as they now question blacks? How many more police would this require? Is there much chance of hiring them?

If these practical questions are resolved, more principled ones persist. Race is not the only proxy for crime. So also are age and sex, and, like race, neither can be changed by plan. If the courts impose their traditional strict scrutiny test on police questioning of blacks, should they impose a similar test on questioning young men (most of whom, like most blacks, are not offenders)?

Perhaps the courts should adopt a tougher posture on the use of race as a proxy. If a racial distinction is suspect and has to meet the test of strict scrutiny in employment and contracting, there is a case for its meeting that test in police behavior. But producing, by statute or court decision, this outcome will not be easy. And if it can be achieved, it is not obvious that it will change much behavior. Innocent people questioned by the police rarely go to court, and so their complaints would rarely be heard whatever view the courts took. Police practices might change little when the oversight mechanism is so weak. And many police officers can easily find justifications other than race alone to support street stops. (“A crime was reported in the neighborhood.” “The black man attempted to flee.” “The black man resembled known suspects.”) Moreover, restraining police behavior will have little effect, as Kennedy admits, on private behavior. Taxicab drivers may still ignore black customers, and people can still cross the street to avoid young black men. Neither residential nor educational integration will be hastened by tighter rules on police conduct. Schools and neighborhoods will still tend to become overwhelmingly white or black.

The fourth option is to find ways of driving down the high black crime rate. This is a far more difficult task than passing laws, altering court rules, or raising more money to support the police. Though there are programs that help reduce the crime rate of people exposed to them, they have generally been small demonstration programs that as yet have had no significant effect on society as a whole.9 (This may change if and when the programs become more generally applied.) The rate at which young black men were murdered tripled between 1960 and 1990, and all this in spite of the government’s having spent hundreds of billions of dollars on education, welfare, vocational training, food stamps, and crime prevention programs. It is not hard to think of reasons why many programs have failed to reduce crime. Character is formed by families and reinforced by schools. If, as is the case, families have become weaker and schools less effective, then no one should be surprised that whatever was spent on new schools and social welfare has done little to strengthen character.

Consider families. Though for many years, some sociologists urged us to believe that single-parent families were an “alternative” to two-parent ones, hardly anybody believes that any more. The evidence shows that single-parent families are a major source of misconduct. A federal survey of the families of sixty thousand American children found that at every income level except the highest (over $50,000 a year) and for whites, blacks, and Hispanics, children living with a never-married or a divorced mother were much worse off than those living in two-parent families.10 A survey of all the leading studies shows that both poverty and living in a singleparent family contribute to children’s problems.11 When William Comanor and Llad Phillips examined data in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), they found that “the most critical factor affecting the prospect that a male youth will encounter the criminal justice system is the presence of his father in the home.”12 Another look at the NLSY data suggests that African American boys without fathers were 68 percent more likely to be in jail than those with a father. Fatherless Latino boys were nearly three times as likely to be in jail than those with fathers; fatherless white Anglo boys were over four times as likely to be in jail than those with fathers.13

These facts suggest that any effort to change a boy’s prospects must somehow compensate for an absent father. Many of the crime-prevention programs that have been most rigorously evaluated contain some form of this compensation. Big Brothers–Big Sisters programs equip children with adult mentors, nurse home visitation programs instruct single mothers on how to cope with children, and multisystemic therapy programs try to improve family life. Not all successful programs have these elements, and no one can be certain what it is about any given program that makes it effective.

Compensating for an absent father is no easy task. Some programs, led by a dedicated, highly motivated staff, can make a difference. But whether what such talented staffs do for 100 or 500 children can also be done by ordinary staffs for 100,000 or 500,000 remains to be seen. Scaling up prevention programs so that they reach most of the families that can benefit from them is no easy matter. Happily, some of these efforts are now being tried on a wider scale, and in time we shall learn whether they can be effective on a broad scale.

But the problems that these programs must tackle are not of recent origin. Since the early 1960s there has been a dramatic increase in the number of children living in single-parent families. In 1960 only 6 percent of white children lived with one parent; by 1990 that number had more than tripled. For black Americans, matters are much worse. The proportion of black children living with only one parent rose from about 20 percent in 1960 to 53 percent in 1996. And among black children in single-parent families, those who were living with a mother who had never married rose from less than 10 percent in 1960 to nearly 58 percent in 1996.14

In 1965 Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out these worrisome trends and suggested that blacks suffered because so many of them were the product of single-parent families. He was immediately attacked for having been wrong on the facts and mistaken in their implications.15 Many writers said that blacks had had two-parent families until they experienced economic disadvantage, after which their families broke apart. In any event, single-parent families were resilient alternatives to two-parent ones. We now know, however, that these revisionist attacks on the Moynihan view were wrong.

Careful studies of census data now make it clear that at least back to 1880, and perhaps much earlier, black children were more than twice as likely to grow up in a mother-only family than were white children.16 These differences were not the product of blacks having suddenly moved from farms to cities or from the South to the North, for they existed in both urban and rural locations and in all geographical regions. The differences were universal, but their cause is not well understood. One possibility is that slavery, by denying to blacks the ordinary rites of marriage, destroyed the possibility of family life that had already been powerfully undermined by the African capture and transatlantic shipment of slaves. Another is that in Africa itself nuclear family ties were weak. A third is that the combined effect of slavery and postslavery racism produced this effect.

Whatever the explanation, in the early 1960s differences that had long existed suddenly exploded in magnitude. These new trends affected white as well as black families, though the latter were hardest hit. What caused these trends is a matter of dispute. Some believe the dramatic decline in family unity was the result of the expansion of welfare payments, others that it was caused by the decline in social stigma that attached to out-ofwedlock births, and still others that it was the result of the growing inability of some men, especially black men, to find jobs.

If crime is to a significant degree caused by weak character; if weak character is more likely among the children of unmarried mothers; if there are no fathers who will help raise their children, acquire jobs, and protect their neighborhoods; if boys become young men with no preparation for work; if school achievement is regarded as a sign of having “sold out” to a dominant white culture; if powerful gangs replace weak families—if all these things are true, then the chances of reducing by plan and in the near future the crime rate of low-income blacks are slim. In many cities there are programs, some public, many private, that improve matters for some people. But the possibility that these programs can overcome the immense burdens confronting poor, badly educated, fatherless children is remote.

What, then, is left? Only, I think, broad social and cultural changes as great as those that caused our problem in the first place. Crime is not, happily, the chief feature of African American life today. There has developed, along with a black underclass, a large and growing black working class and a black middle class. Black and white children now complete high school at the same rate. Birthrates among black women, including teenagers, have fallen dramatically. These changes are about what one would expect when the material condition of a people improves. The principles on which these changes have occurred are evident to most of the beneficiaries. They embody three old-fashioned rules: Work hard, get an education, and get married before you have children. These principles are so obvious to so many people that even American professors cannot talk people into ignoring them.

They are principles that most people learn from intuition and experience. They are reinforced by churches and required by life. In the decades ahead, I hope that the reach of these principles will grow and that more and more people learn that the opposite rules—have fun, ignore school, and get sex for free—are, for all but a few entertainers, recipes for disaster. But I also know that there will be reversals. In bad times or when the culture takes an odd spin, fun, drugs, gangs, and sex will appear more attractive. If my hope is correct, economic growth will stimulate the elemental forces that shape human society to reduce the size and power of any underclass, white or black. In many of our large cities, after all, matters were much worse at the end of the nineteenth century. Life in many parts of Chicago, New York, and San Francisco was dominated by criminal gangs, corrupt police, quick tempers, and floods of alcohol. At night you did not walk in the Five Points area of New York without guards. Crime data are not available in any systematic way for these periods, but the rates were, according to contemporaries, very high. Except for juvenile crime, matters are, I think, much better today.

If they continue to improve, the issue of police “profiling” black persons will slowly disappear. In the long run, I think they will improve, but I confess that my optimism rises and falls with changes in the crime rates. And in the short run, the tension that irritates so many whites and angers so many blacks will persist.

We can do one thing: adopt rules that constrain police freedom to stop and question people based on race alone. We can hope for another: the slow reduction in black crime rates. Doing the first is relatively easy, but it will have little effect. Achieving the second is harder and will take much longer, but it will have a large effect. For the foreseeable future, we must accept small changes with little results and hope for large changes with greater ones.

Notes

1. By estimated crime rate, I mean the racial differences in arrest rates. For nondrug

crimes, these arrest rates conform rather closely to the underlying crime rate as shown

by Alfred Blumstein, “On the Racial Disproportionality of U.S. Prison Populations,”

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 73 (1982): 1259–81, and Blumstein, “Racial

Disproportionality of U.S. Prison Populations Revisited,” University of Colorado Law

Review 64 (1993): 743–60.

2. Roger Lane, Violent Death in the City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 1979), p. 113.

3. Randall Kennedy, Race, Crime, and the Law (New York: Pantheon, 1997), p.

145.

4. These estimates are from Franklin E. Zimiring and Gordon Hawkins, Crime Is

Not the Problem (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 75.

5. Arnold Barnett and Jesse Goranson, “Misapplication Reviews: Good News Is

No News?” Interfaces 26 (May–June 1996): 35–39.

6. These data were kindly supplied to me by Professor Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie

Mellon University.

7. On the concept of “rational discrimination,” see Cass R. Sunstein, “Three Civil

Rights Fallacies,” California Law Review 79 (1991): 751–74; Edmund Phelps, “The

Statistical Theory of Racism and Sexism,” American Economic Review 62 (1972): 659–

61.

8. Kennedy, Race, Crime, and the Law, p. 141.

9. For lucid and scientifically careful summaries of the leading crime prevention

strategies, see Delbert S. Elliot, ed., Blueprints for Violence Prevention (Boulder: University

of Colorado Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, 1998). As of July

1998, ten effective programs have been described in these reports.

10. Deborah A. Dawson, “Family Structure and Children’s Health: United States,

1988,” Vital and Health Statistics, series 10, no. 178 ( June 1991).

11. Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up With a Single Parent: What

Hurts, What Helps (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).

12. William S. Comanor and Llad Phillips, “The Impact of Income and Family

Structure on Delinquency,” working paper in economics 7-95R, Department of Economics,

University of California at Santa Barbara.

13. This analysis of the NLSY data was done for me by Charles Murray (personal

communication).

14. 1998 Green Book, Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House of Representatives,

May 19, 1998, pp. 1252–53.

15. The Moynihan Report, as it was called, was The Negro Family: The Case for

National Action (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965). The

debate it engendered is analyzed in Lee Rainwaterand William L.Yancey, The Moynihan

Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967).

16. Steven Ruggles, “The Origins of the African-American Family Structure,”American

Sociological Review 59 (1994): 136–51; Ruggles, “The Transformation of American

Family Structure,” American Historical Review 99 (1994): 103–28; S. Philip Morgan et

al., “Racial Differences in Household and Family Structure at the Turn of the Century,”

American Journal of Sociology 98 (1993): 798–828.

==============================

Health and Medical Care

SALLY SATEL

The medical establishment is strongly supportive of racial preferences in admission to medical school. The most active proponent is the Association of American Medical Colleges; the American Medical Association, the federal Council on Graduate Medical Education, and health philanthropies like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation advocate racial preferences as well. Their goal is not necessarily to promote diversity for its own sake but to improve the health of minority patients. Support for affirmative action programs has indeed become a test of medical schools’ commitment to minority health. “This is not a quota born out of a sense of equity or distribution of justice, but a principle that the best health care may need to be delivered by those that fully understand a cultural tradition,” said George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader and the chairman of the Pew Health Professions Commission.1

It is now claimed that a mismatch in race between doctor and patient— especially when the doctor is white and the patient is not—may be enough to trigger subtle, or not so subtle, biases that result in second-rate medical treatment and poorer health. In 1999 the U.S. Civil Rights Commission informed Congress that “racism continues to infect” the health care system. 2 No less an authoritative voice than the American Medical Association’s official newspaper has claimed that “a growing body of research reports that racial discrepancy in health status can be explained, at least in part, by racism and discrimination in the health care system itself.”3 This is why, according to the Reverend Al Sharpton, health will become the “new civil rights battlefront,” a prediction echoed by other black leaders, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond.4 President Clinton himself has spoken of race and health. “Nowhere are the divisions of race and ethnicity more sharply drawn than in the health of our own people,” he said in a 1998 radio address delivered during Black History Month. It is indeed true that black Americans have higher infant mortality rates, more death from cancer, and lower life expectancies than whites and Asians. But it is far less certain that one of the possible explanations put forth by the president—”discrimination in the delivery of health care services”—is accurate.5

Given the history of systematic racial discrimination and segregation in the health care system, residual bias seems, at first, plausible. Indeed, medicine, like other institutions, once practiced overt discrimination. Black patients were treated on separate and inferior hospital wards—a policy that persisted among many hospitals in the Deep South until 1968. Black physicians were once routinely barred from joining hospital staffs and medical societies and started their own institutions to treat other blacks who were denied adequate care by the white-controlled medical facilities.6 A particularly frightening episode in medical research was the unethical Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

Decades later, however, accusations of medical bias still linger. According to Vanessa Northington Gamble, a physician and director of the Division of Community and Minority Programs at the Association of American Medical Colleges, “Tuskegee symbolizes for many African-Americans the racism that pervades American institutions, including the medical profession.”7

But the known facts suggest other interpretations of race-related differences (or “health disparities”), and I shall present some of them here.

This is not to minimize the facts of real discrepancies in access to care, certain medical procedures (even with insurance coverage), and in disease rates by race.8 But I intend to show that they cannot be convincingly traced to bias against minority patients. My second aim is to look critically at one program intended to help close the health gap: racial preferences in medical school admissions.

Do Physicians Treat Minority Patients Differently?

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1999 described differences in treatment of lung cancer between black and white patientswho were beneficiaries of Medicare insurance.9 In a careful analysis, Peter B. Bach and his colleagues at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City looked at records of more than 10,000 patients who received diagnoses of operable lung cancer. Seventy-seven percent of the white patients underwent surgery compared with 64 percent of the blacks. Five years after diagnosis, only one-quarter of black patients were still alive compred with one-third of whites.

What accounted for the different rates of surgery? Did doctors not suggest the treatment as often to their black patients, or did these patients more often choose to forgo the recommendation for surgery? Were the black patients more likely to have poor lung function, such as more carbon dioxide buildup, or other problems that would have prohibited surgery or contributed to earlier demise? Details like these would go a long way toward explaining why surgery was never offered and why death rates differed, but those were not the questions that Bach and his colleagues set out to answer.10 Indeed, the authors specifically said they could not offer an explanation based on the kinds of data they collected.

Other physicians, however, were ready with hypotheses. “Possibly, physicians are treating cancer patients not just based upon their illness and recommended treatment, but on the basis of their race,” suggested Dr. Hugh Stallworth of the American Cancer Society.11 Dr. Harold Freeman, a surgeon and president of North General Hospital in Harlem, wondered whether white doctors might have been more scrupulous in getting white patients to accept surgery. “If you [as a doctor] were dealing with somebody who looked exactly like you, would you take another step?” he asked.12 A more emphatic reaction greeted a report in the Annals of Emergency Medicine that found that 74 percent of white patients with fractures received pain medication compared with 57 percent of black patients.13 “I think it’s racism, flat out,” said Dr. Lewis Goldfrank, director of emergency services at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.14

Responses like these would not surprise John Landsverk of Children’s Hospital in San Diego. As he observed: “The usual implication of such disparities [in treatment rates] is that the health care system is biased against persons of the ethnic minority group and that the bias is likely to be found even in professional clinicians’ perceptions of clinical problems and [referrals for] clinical procedures.”15 In light of this, Landsverk was especially enthusiastic about a study by a group of doctors at the University of Pittsburgh that found no race-related differences in treatment of children with behavioral problems.16 Their report appeared in the journal Medical Care one month after Bach’s study, but it attracted no public attention. It should have; it was “an important non-finding,” as Landsverk noted in an accompanying editorial in the same journal. Not only did the Pittsburgh study include a very large sample—almost 15,000 children treated in clinics across the country and Canada—but also, most important, the researchers interviewed the parent and doctor of every patient. The results: race and ethnicity of the child had no relationship to clinician patterns in drug prescribing, referral, or diagnosis of behavioral problems. The clinicians also spent slightly more time with minority children than with their white counterparts.

This handful of studies is emblematic of the challenges inherent in interpreting health disparities research. First, the vast majority of treatment disparity studies are what scientists call “retrospective.” That is, the raw data already exist in hospital records, and researchers use them (in retrospect) when they want to explore a specific question (e.g., are there more visits to emergency rooms on nights with a full moon?). The disadvantage of this approach is that key questions cannot be asked directly of the very people being studied: for example, did subjects in the study want or refuse a specific treatment? Did physicians offer it, and if not, why? Second, as Landsverk’s reaction to the University of Pittsburgh study suggests, the absence of alleged racial bias does not make news. Consider the following example of a study that made a media splash the first time around.

A Misdiagnosed Case of Physician Bias

We know that black persons generally undergo cardiac catheterization less frequently than whites. Catheterization is a procedure used to discern whether there is blockage in the coronary arteries, the vessels that feed blood to the heart itself, and therefore whether the patient is at risk for a heart attack. The delicate process involves introducing a catheter into an artery in the leg and threading it upward toward the heart. When it reaches the point were the coronary arteries branch off, dye is squirted and the arterial patterns show up on a real-time X-ray. This is generally the first step in determining whether the vessels can be opened wider via a tiny balloon or whether some or all of the vessels must be replaced in a bypass operation.

Struck by the observation that black patients undergo catheterization less often than whites, Dr. Kevin A. Schulman and others at Georgetown University Medical Center wanted to examine how doctors made their decisions to refer patients for the procedure.17 The researchers recruited 720 general internists at medical conventions and asked them to participate in a study of clinical decision making. The internists were not told that a primary purpose of the study was to explore how the race and sex of the patient might affect those decisions, nor were they told that the researchers expected to find that African Americans (and women) would be referred for cardiac catheterization less frequently than white men.

The doctors watched videotapes of actors wearing dressing gowns and answering questions posed to them by an interviewer who elicited their complaints about chest pain and other relevant medical and personal history, including their insurance status. All the questions asked of the actors and their responses, down to the gestures used to describe the symptoms, were scripted to minimize inconsistencies. Overall, the doctors, who were mostly white, viewed 144 different videotapes, one for every possible combination of race, sex, and age and including differing clinical variables like the nature of the chest pain and the patient’s stress test and EKG results. The physicians were asked whether the patients’ complaints appeared to reflect heart disease or another kind of distress, such as indigestion, and to rate the likelihood that the pain was indeed heart-related. As it turned out, all eight groups received similar ratings, leading the authors to assume the doctors would also refer for catheterization at similar rates. Yet, according to Schulman, “women and blacks were significantly less likely to be referred for catheterization than white men.” About 9 percent of the white men were not referred versus 15 percent of the women and black patients. If representative of actual clinical outcomes, Schulman said, this would mean that blacks and women “were 40 percent less likely to be referred.” Schulman misspoke, however: what it really would have meant was that white men had a 40 percent lower chance of not being referred. Quite a difference.

These findings were presented in an article titled, “The Effect of Race and Sex on Physicians’ Recommendations for Cardiac Catheterization,” published in the New England Journal of Medicine in the winter of 1999. In the article Schulman and his associates speculated:

Our findings that the race and sex of the patient influence the recommendations of physicians independently of other factors may suggest bias on the part of the physicians. However, our study could not assess the form of bias. Bias may represent overt prejudice on the part of physicians, or, more likely, could be the result of subconscious perceptions rather than deliberate actions or thoughts. Subconscious bias occurs when a patient’s membership in a target group automatically activates a cultural stereotype in the physician’s memory regardless of the level of prejudice the physician has.18

The study was a media sensation. On ABC’sWorld News This Morning, Juju Chang told viewers: “How your doctor treats your heart may depend on the color of your skin. . . . The bias shows up in the diagnosis and doctors don’t even realize it.”19 Peter Jennings predicted that the study would make “political waves” because it showed that “prejudice among doctors causes a gap in the quality of health care between blacks and whites.”20 On Nightline, Ted Koppel set up the story like this: “Last night we told you how the town of Jasper, Texas, is coming to terms” with the racially motivated murder of a black man; “Tonight we will focus on [doctors] who would be shocked to learn that what they do routinely fits quite easily into the category of racist behavior.”21 Newspaper headlines echoed the theme: “Cardiac Testing: Study FindsWomen, Blacks Are Being Shortchanged,” the Chicago Tribune said.22 “Health Care: It’s Better If You’re White,” announced the Economist.23 The articles repeated Schulman’s statement that black patients were 40 percent less likely to be referred.

Some of the most intense—indeed, self-flagellating—reactions came from the medical profession itself. An editorial in The Lancet, Britain’s foremost medical journal, saw the findings as being “as close to a definition of institutionalized racism as doctors and health care providers may dare to get.”24 Aubrey Lewis, a Long Island cardiologist, warned on Nightline that “if this [physician bias] continues on, you’re looking at literally a decimation of the African-American population.”25

A Second Sober Look at Schulman’s Study

A revelation came six months after the Schulman study appeared when the New England Journal of Medicine, the same journal that had printed Schulman’s study, published a powerful rebuttal. This analysis was by Lisa M. Schwartz, Steven Woloshin, and M. Gilbert Welch, all physicians at the White River Junction Veterans Administration Hospital in Vermont, who reanalyzed Schulman’s data to show that the average referral rates for three of the four groups were in fact the same.26 White men, white women, and black men were all referred at the rate of 9 in 10; only black women, for unclear reasons, had a lower referral rate, about 8 in 10. Put another way, black women were 87 percent as likely as white women and men of both races to be referred for catheterization. And black men were treated just as aggressively as both white men and white women.

The doctors from White River Junction also expressed dismay at what might be called the statistical sleight-of-hand that supported the Schulman hypothesis of physician referral bias. “The probability of referral for blacks was 7 percent lower. . . . These exaggerations serve only to fuel anger and undermine the trust between physicians and their patients,” the White River Junction doctors wrote. They were not alone in expressing concern; the NEJM editors published a note in the very same issue regretting that they had not required the authors to use more straightforward statistical measures. “We take responsibility for the media’s over-interpretation of [this] article,” they admitted.27

Even after seeing how his findings had been interpreted by the press and used to goad racial resentments, Schulman would not budge. “Our study will . . . encourage the medical profession to seek ways to eliminate unconscious bias that may influence physicians’ clinical decisions,” he maintained.28 Also sticking with Schulman’ s interpretationwas Paul Douglass, a cardiologist at Morehouse School of Medicine. “You can argue with statistics all day,” he told USA Today; “we have to face the reality of our situation: There is a gender and racial bias.”29 Compared with the tidal wave of coverage triggered by the Schulman study, the article by Schwartz and her colleagues generated a mere trickle of media interest, as noted by columnist John Leo and the media magazine Brill’s Content.30

Alternative Explanations for Differences in Treatment

Accusations of bias make headlines. Less catchy are the mundane but meaningful explanations that are more faithful to the clinical situations that doctors and patients face every day. A judicious approach to the topic has been adopted by the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Even when differences persist, it should be noted that every differential in care is not necessarily a problem,” says a 1999 foundation report, “and that the level of care obtained by whites may not be the appropriate standard for comparison.”31

One reason, for example, that procedure rates differ is that medical problems do not necessarily occur with the same frequency across races. Consider: Uterine fibroid tumors, and thus hysterectomies, are more common in black women than in whites, while osteoporosis-related fractures, and thus hip replacement, are rarer. Limb amputation is more common among black patients because thicker atherosclerosis of the blood vessels in the leg makes it harder to perform limb-saving surgery.32 African Americans suffer stroke at many times the rate of whites, yet undergo a procedure to unclog arteries in the neck (endarterectomy) only one-fourth as often. Racism? Unlikely. It turns out that whites tend to have their obstructions in the large, superficial carotid arteries of the neck region that are readily accessible to surgery. Blacks tend to have their blockages in the branches of the carotids. These smaller branches run deeper and farther up into the head where the surgeon cannot reach them.33

Another consideration is the clinical condition of the patient. Does he have other medical problems that alter the risk-to-benefit ratio of a procedure, making it less favorable? The treatment of heart disease, for example, often needs to be modified in the presence of uncontrolled high blood pressure and diabetes—conditions more typical of black patients with heart disease than of white patients.34

Then there is the site of care itself. Some hospitals, for example, simply do not offer certain cardiac procedures. Dr. Lucian L. Leape and his colleagues at the Harvard Medical School found that about one-quarter of all patients needing cardiac procedures failed to get them, in large part because they were admitted to hospitals that did not offer them. Notably, Leape found that failure to undergo procedure occurred at equal rates across all groups of patients—black, white, and Hispanic.35

Conversely, under systems of available medical care in the United States (e.g., veterans’ affairs medical centers, the military services), some differences in treatment melt away. For example, patients with colorectal and prostate cancer treated in those systems showed no race-related differences in treatment availability, treatment methods, or survival rates. Yet in other instances, even with good health insurance coverage, African American patients may have a lower chance of receiving certain procedures.36 If money is not an issue in those instances, then the difference in treatment must represent bias on the part of the doctors, say those who are quick to charge bias when outcomes differ by race.

As we’ve seen, this charge makes very lively headlines. But a different interpretation is plausible: that the patients’ clinical needs rather than the doctors’ personal biases are dictating the care. After all, if not for concern about the patient, why wouldn’t physicians perform a reimburseable procedure? The factors discussed so far are only some of the determinants of whether patients undergo procedures. We must also consider patients’ attitudes toward care. For example, what is the nature of a person’s belief in his susceptibility to disease, the seriousness with which he perceives disease, and his confidence that treatment will work?37 Social scientists call this the health belief model. Culturally influenced ideas about illness also play a role in patients’ decisions to refuse or delay screening tests and interventions. Fatalistic attitudes toward the value of preventive care and the outcomes of disease as well as magical thinking (e.g., that the devil can cause cancer, that mammography machines cause breast cancer) and the use of folk remedies are more prevalent in minority groups.38

Says Lorna G. Canlas, a nurse with an East Harlem clinic that cares for a Latino population, “Most clients I encounter need to be persuaded of the validity and utility of modern medical practices.39 Other studies have documented a greater aversion to surgery among African American patients compared with whites, even when the white patients’ perceptions of current health state, level of education, and age were all taken into account.40

A Hasty Allegation of Bias

Kidney transplantation has come under scrutiny of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in its 1999 report as a case of “health care inequity,” in part because African American patients spend considerably more time on the waiting list for a new kidney than do white patients.41 This means that they spend more time on the dialysis machine—a thriceweekly, hours-long process that cleans the blood of toxic products. The ideal treatment is kidney transplantation, but the process is a complicated one. Before a patient can receive a kidney, there must be attempts to “match” the donor with the recipient so that the recipient’s immune system does not attack, or “reject,” the new kidney. The better the match of biological variables, the better the outcome. According to a report issued by the UNOS Histocompatibility Committee, black recipients wait longer owing to factors such as blood type, sensitization, and some antigens (immune proteins made by the cells).42

A technique called antigen matching is used to test for different combinations of six major antigens found on tissues. A perfect six-out-of-six match is the ideal condition for compatibility between donor and recipient. Unfortunately, a complete match is far less common in African American transplant candidates than in whites because they have more possible antigen combinations than whites and some of those antigens are very rare in the general population.

Scientists are still debating the precise physiology of organ rejection and the importance of near-perfect antigen matching. What they do know is that black transplant recipients are more likely to reject their new kidneys. Possible reasons include poor control of hypertension or a more vigorous immune response.43 Even well-matched transplants can be lost to rejection, suggesting that the standard antigen-matching system may be too simplistic. 44 Clearly, we need a better understanding of transplant immunology so that we can develop new and better medications to prevent rejection.45 Meanwhile, if the compatibility is marginal, it is sometimes most practical for the physician to have the patient stay on dialysis longer to wait for a better match. Losing scarce organs to rejection from mismatch actually makes the recipient more likely to reject future kidneys. Also, every rejected kidney means one less donor kidney available to the other people on the waiting list. This is a critical point because donor kidneys are among the nation’s scarcest resources. In 1996, for example, more than 70,000 Americans began dialysis for severe renal disease, but only 12,000 received transplants. 46

Most patients on dialysis, especially black persons, get their organs from donors that are deceased, so called cadaveric donors. Once on the waiting list, how do black patients fare in the allocation of kidneys from cadavers? In 1997 black patients represented one-third of the waiting list for cadaveric kidneys and, as a group, donated 11 percent of all cadaveric kidneys and received 27 percent of them. Thus, more than half of all kidneys received by black transplant recipients came from donors of other races (predominately white). Donation is a gift of life that transcends racial scorekeeping— but it is important to look closely at the numbers when bias in allocation of kidneys is alleged.

Rationale for Affirmative Action in Medical School

Whether the quality of health care for minority patients truly depends upon producing greater numbers of minority physicians is an unresolved empirical question. Nonetheless, proponents of racial preferences in medical school admissions contend that white physicians treat white patients better than minority patients, with whom, it is said, they have difficulty developing a rapport.47 To be sure, understanding a patient’s cultural tradition is important, but need one actually be a product of that tradition to be sufficiently sensitive to a patient? Virtually all the major medical organizations say yes.

Foremost among them is the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).48 When California and Texas were planning to dismantle racial preferences in 1996, the AAMC formed Health Professionals for Diversity, a coalition of major medical, health, and educational associations, to lobby for the preservation of preferences. By the time Initiative 200, the Washington State referendum to prohibit preferences by race, ethnicity, or gender in public institutions, was on the ballot in 1998, the coalition included fifty-one associations among its membership. According to an association vice president, the true message of race-neutral policy to minority students was: “We don’t want you.”49

Given the relatively small numbers of black, Hispanic, and Native American physicians (3 percent, 5 percent, and less than 1 percent of the nation’s medical workforce, respectively), compounded by the declining number of minority applicants in the late 1990s, many feel that medical schools need to rely on racial preferences if they are to boost these numbers in the next few years.50 (Asian Americans are not considered a minority because they are well represented among practicing physicians: 10 percent versus 4 percent of the general population.)

Racial preferences played a role in raising first-year enrollment to the point where, by 1999, it had reached 8 percent black and about 7 percent Hispanic, though it remains 1 percent Native American.51 But recruitment has been difficult. In 1995, when racial preferences in medical schools were nearly universal, only about 12 percent of first-year students were black, Hispanic, orNative American. The recruitment challenge was characterized by Robert G. Petersdorf, former president of the AAMC, as follows: “We cannot produce underrepresented minority medical students if there is an insufficient number who are applying to our schools, graduating from college, or even finishing high school with sufficient skills to enable them to survive a premedical course of study.”52 Nonetheless, by 2010 the AAMC hopes to attain racial and ethnic representation among physicians that is in proportion to the general population.

The impact of race-neutral policies in some states will make the 2010 parity goal even more elusive. Within two years after Proposition 209 passed in 1996, there was a 29 percent drop in applications by minorities to six public medical schools in California.53 This set alarm bells ringing throughout the medical establishment. “There is a national health need for physicians who, after the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, for example, are trusted by large segments of our population,” wrote Michael J. Scotti Jr. of the American Medical Association. “It would be deplorable,” he went on, “if medical schools were not permitted to consider the needs of patients when determining their criteria for selecting the best qualified applicants.”54 H. Jack Geiger, a professor of public health at the City University of New York, in an essay in the American Journal of Public Health, “Ethnic Cleansing in the Groves of Academe,” foresaw these “reversals in minority admissions [as] merely the leading edge of a potential public health disaster.”55 A public health disaster? Only if there is nothing more important to Americans about their doctors than race.

Caring Trumps Color

Only a handful of studies have been devoted to the question of whether patients’ outcomes are better if they and their doctors are of the same race. Many of these studies were conducted with psychiatric patients, and the majority show that the clinician’s race has very little to do with how black and white patients fare in their treatment and recovery.56

According to a 1994 Harris poll for the Commonwealth Fund called Health Care Services and Minority Groups, race does not play an especially large role in patients’ attitudes about their doctors. When asked to cite the “things that influence your choice of doctor,” the physician’s “nationality/ race/ethnicity” ranked twelfth out of thirteen possible options; just 5 percent of whites and 12 percent of minorities said it was important. A greater portion of Asians, 28 percent, rated race/ethnicity as important, probably because of language barriers. Even so, over 60 percent of white, black, and Hispanic respondents said they did not consider the doctor’s ability to speak their language particularly relevant to their choice of doctor.57 For the entire group of 4,000 respondents, factors such as ease of getting an appointment, the convenience of office location, and the doctor’s reputation were most influential, cited by about two-thirds of respondents.

When respondents who expressed dissatisfaction with their regular doctors were asked for details, only Asians claimed that race or ethnicity was the problem (and the percentage was small, only 8 percent of all Asian respondents). Among the subset of the entire sample who said they “did not feel welcome” at their doctors’ offices, a mere 2 percent of African Americans and Hispanics attributed the discomfort to racial/ethnic differences.58 The main complaint of almost all groups was “failure to spend enough time with me.” And of those who were so dissatisfied that they changed doctors, only 3 percent of Asians and 2 percent of blacks did so on the basis of the physician’s race or ethnicity. The most common complaints were “lack of communication,” “didn’t like him or her,” “couldn’t diagnose problem,” or “didn’t trust his or her judgment.” Less than one percent of people polled said that they felt limited in their options for care because of racial or ethnic discrimination.

Thus, in this era of managed care’s fifteen-minute doctor visit, what much of the research on attitude really tells us is that most patients attach more value to the amount of time they can spend with their doctors than they do to the doctor’s race or ethnicity. When patients see a different doctor each time they go to the clinic, as is often the case with municipal clinic patients and those whose HMOs have high turnover, it is even harder to establish comfort and trust.

Academic Performance and Racial Preferences

Acceptance rates for minority students to medical schools have long been higher than rates for white and Asian applicants with similar qualifications, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. In 1979, for example, a minority student with high grades and board scores had a 90 percent chance of being admitted to medical school, while a white applicant with comparable qualifications had a 62 percent chance. By 1991, the last year for which AAMC has published data, the figures were 90 percent versus 75 percent. And a low-scoring minority applicant had a 30 percent chance of admission, while a similarly low scoring white applicant had a 10 percent chance.

At the University of South Florida College of Medicine, for example, between 1995 and 1997, black applicants with a B+ grade-point average had a roughly 13 percent chance of admission, whereas white and Hispanic applicants with the same grade-point average had only a 4 to 5 percent chance.59 Even with the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996 in California, minority applicants to some of California’s public medical schools were two to almost three times as likely to be admitted as whites and Asians with considerably higher grades.60

Notwithstanding the clear race-based advantages in admission to medical schools, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights charged discrimination, noting a “persistent yet baffling denial of the social, economic, and historical realities depriving our profession of minority physicians.”61 True, many minority students have suffered unfairly in second-rate primary and secondary schools, but medical school seems a risky point in the academic pipeline at which to give an academic break.

Sadly, black and Hispanic applicants,who are favored in medical school admissions, also are overrepresented among students who encounter trouble in medical school. According to the AAMC, they are more likely than other students to repeat their first year or to drop out.62 Of the medical school class admitted in 1989, over 20 percent of minority students did not graduate four years later, as is typical, with the class of 1993; of white and Asian students in the same class, only 8 percent failed to graduate.63 In 1996 the picture worsened across the board: 39 percent of minority students were unable to keep pace compared with 15 percent of nonminority students. 64 A 1994 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that in 1988 51 percent of black medical students failed Part 1 of the National Medical Boards (taken after the second year of medical school), more than four times the 12 percent rate of white students. (Failure rates for Hispanic students were 34 percent, and for Asians, 16 percent.)65

The typical path for students after graduating from medical school is application to residency programs in a chosen specialty. At this level, too, there are different outcomes. “It has been documented consistently over the past decade that a higher proportion of underrepresented minority students failed to obtain first-year residency positions through [the standard process],” wrote Gang Xu of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia and colleagues.66 Moreover, for the period 1996–1999, the yearly dismissal rate for black residents in residency programs (14.4 percent) was almost double that for other groups (7.7 percent).67 Reasons for dismissal can include persistently unprofessional behavior, chronic absenteeism, and lack of aptitude or interest.

These problems encountered by black and Hispanic medical students are the result of admitting students who are underqualified. When black students were compared with whites who had similar academic credentials, the failure rates were similarly low.68 A 1987 study by the RAND Corporation found that only about half of black physicians obtained board certification compared with 80 percent of white physicians. Yet African Americans were more likely than white physicians to obtain “board certification” in a recognized medical specialty if their grades in college and on the Medical College Admissions Test were strong enough to get them admitted on a competitive basis in the first place.69

Though the subject deserves more research, a handful of studies have linked medical school performance with the quality of the physician produced. Robyn Tamblyn of McGill University and colleagues found that licensing examination scores were significant predictors of whether Canadian physicians sought consultations from specialists, prescribed appropriately, and ordered screening mammograms for female patients aged 50–69. Given Canada’s universal health insurance, these referral and medicating patterns were unlikely to have been influenced by patients’ ability to pay.70 Another study, among American doctors, found that passing grades on the test to become a specialist (e.g., a cardiac surgeon, a neurologist) and the scores received on the internal medical licensing exam correlated with ratings of performance in practice by fellow doctors.71

An Honest Debate

Instituting racial preferences toward the goal of diversity for its own sake or in the spirit of compensation for historical mistreatment are philosophical abstractions for debate in courtrooms, classrooms, and legislatures. But instituting preferences in order to enhance minority health is a practical proposition that can actually be tested using real-world data. Thus far, in my view, the case has yet to be made that improving minority health depends on having more minority doctors.

Racial preferences would seem, for several resons, to be an inefficient way to increase the number of minority doctors—and, thus, minority health. First, simply put, minority representation over the last decade has been fairly stagnant in spite of aggressive admissions policies. Second, minority recruitment has resulted in a two-tiered system of academic standards for admission that has created attendant problems of fairness to other potential medical students and of propelling some students into a career for which they are ill prepared. Third, we lack compelling evidence that same-race (minority) doctor-patient relationships result in better patient outcomes.

No matter who treats our nation’s poor and minority patients, we must recognize that they tend to have multiple, chronic medical conditions and are often clinically complicated. They need the best doctors they can get, regardless of race. Not enough doctors choose to work in rural community clinics and poor, inner-city neighborhoods; moreover, in a number of states such as Florida, Illinois, North Dakota, Texas, and New York graduates of foreign medical schools represent one-fourth to one-half of the physician workforce in underserved areas.72 California has approved legislation requiring its public medical schools to increase the number of training slots for primary-care physicians and to decrease slots for specialists.73 Other approaches use creative financial incentives (e.g., loan forgiveness, rent rebates, higher pay) to draw young doctors into rural and inner-city communities. We should be capitalizing on these strategies, not lowering standards for admission to medical school.74 As far as patient preferences are concerned, again it would make more sense to create mechanisms that ensure patient choice than to open the doors of medical schools to unprepared students.

Finally, we must not forget that the physician is part of a larger network of health care providers. For some preventive care (e.g., vaccinations for children and the elderly, prenatal care, routine infant checkups, and blood pressure surveillance), physicians are not even needed. Specially trained nurses can help provide after-hours medical appointments and give basic advice over the telephone; public health nurses or physician assistants cooperating with local churches and community organizations can deliver these services at least as effectively. Inner-city hospitals are now hiring health educators (ideally from within the community) to teach fellow residents about diet and exercise, smoking cessation, and screening for cancer, diabetes, and hypertension. These workers also participate in outreach efforts to get people into clinics for routine care—an important task because medically indigent people tend to underuse available care, show up in emergency rooms for minor problems, and receive diagnoses for conditions like cancer at an advanced stage.

While well-meaning groups like the AAMC advance the questionable belief that minority health is dependent on minority physicians, evidence points more vigorously toward the virtues of promoting health literacy, the formation of community–health organization partnerships, and the expansion of health coverage to the uninsured. What patients most seem to want is a qualified doctor who will spend unhurried time with them. The racial disparities in health are real, but data do not point convincingly to systematic racial bias as a determinant—nor to the need for racial preferences in medical school admissions as a remedy for health disparities.

Notes

1. Quoted in Laura Meckler, “Panel: Diversify Medical Workforce,” Associated

Press, December 9, 1998.

2. The Health Care Challenge: Acknowledging Disparity, Confronting Discrimination,

and Ensuring Equality, vol. 11, The Role of Federal Civil Rights Enforcement Efforts:

A Report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, September 1999, p. 14.

3. Deborah Shelton, “A Study in Black and White,” American Medical News, May

1, 2000, p. 22.

4. Curtis L. Taylor, “Mistakes in the Past, Fears in the Present: Wary of System,

Many Blacks Reluctant to Seek Timely Care in the Health Divide Series,” Newsday,

December 4, 1998.

5. Changing America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being by Race and

Hispanic Origin, prepared by the Council of Economic Advisors for the President’s

Initiative on Race, published by the National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for

Disease Control, 1998.

6. Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic

Books, 1982).

7. Vanessa Northington Gamble, “A Legacy of Distrust: African-Americans and

Medical Research,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 9, Suppl. (1993): 35–37.

8. See J. L. Escarce et al., “Racial Difference in the Elderly’s Use of Medical

Procedures and Diagnostic Tests,” American Journal of Public Health 83 (1993): 948–

54; E. A. Mort, J. S. Weissman, and A. M. Epstein, “Physician Discretion and Racial

Variation in the Use of Surgical Procedures,” Archives of Internal Medicine 154 (1994):

761–67; J. Z. Ayanian et al., “Racial Differences in the Use of Revascularization Procedures

After Coronary Angiography,” Journal of the American Medical Association 269

(1993): 2642–46; Risa B. Burns et al., “Black Women Receive Less Mammography

Even with Similar Use of Primary Care,” Annals of Internal Medicine 125 (1996): 173–

82; Jeff Whittle et al., “Do Patients’ Preferences Contribute to Racial Differences in

Cardiovascular Procedure Use?” Journal of General Internal Medicine 12 (1997): 267–

73; M. E. Gornick et al., “Effects of Race and Income on Mortality and Use of Services

Among Medicare Beneficiaries,” New England Journal of Medicine 335, no. 11 (1996):

791–99. A particularly elegant study by Johns Hopkins researchers, Daumit et al., found

that the gap between better-insured white patients and poorly covered black patients

disappeared after the black patients reached age 65 and began receiving health insurance

through Medicare: Gail L. Daumit et al., “Use of Cardiovascular Procedures Among

Black Persons and White Persons: A Seven-Year Nationwide Study in Patients with

Renal Disease, Annals of Internal Medicine 130 (1999): 173–82.

9. P. B. Bach et al., “Racial Differences in the Treatment of Early Stage Lung

Cancer,” New England Journal of Medicine 341, no. 16 (1999): 1198–1205.

10. D. E. Campbell and E. R. Greenberg, letter to the editor, ibid., 342, no. 7 (2000): 517.

11. Quoted in Denise Grady, “Not a Simple Case of Health Racism: White Doctors,

Black Patients,” New York Times, October 17, 1999, Weekend p. 1; Denise Grady,

“Racial Discrepancy Is Reported in Surgery for Lung Cancer,” ibid., October 14, 1999,

p. A24.

12. Quoted in Grady, “Not a Simple Case.”

13. K. H. Todd et al., “Ethnicity and Analgesic Practice,” Annals of Emergency

Medicine 35 (2000): 11–16.

14. Quoted in Gabrielle Glaser, “In Treating Patients for Pain, A Racial Gap,” New

York Times, December 28, 1999, p. D8.

15. John Landsverk, “Patient Race and Ethnicity in Primary Management of Child

Behavior Problems: An Important Non-Finding,” Medical Care 37, no. 11 (1999):

1089–91.

16. Kelly J. Kelleher et al., “Patient Race and Ethnicity in Primary Care Management

of Child Behavior Problems: A Report from PROS and ASPN,” ibid., pp. 1092–1104.

17. K. A. Schulman et al., “The Effect of Race and Sex on Physicians’ Recommendations

for Cardiac Catheterization,” New England Journal of Medicine 340, no. 8

(1999): 618–26. See also: E. D. Peterson et al., “Racial Variation in the Use of Coronary

Revascularization Procedures: Are the Differences Real? Do They Matter?” ibid., 336

(1997): 480–86; M. Laouri et al., “Underuse of Cardiac Procedures: Application of

Clinical Method,” Journal of the American College of Cardiologists 29 (1997): 891–97.

18. Schulman et al., p. 624.

19. “Medical Treatment Based on Color of the Skin: Study Shows Doctors Have

Unconscious Bias,” ABC World News This Morning, February 25, 1999.

20. Peter Jennings, ABC World News Tonight, February 24, 1999, as reported in

Health Line, February 25, 1999, in story “Minority Health: Study Confirms Heart Test

Bias.”

21. “America in Black and White: Health Care, the Great Divide,” Nightline, February

24, 1999.

22. “Cardiac Testing: Study Finds Women, Blacks Are Being Shortchanged,” Chicago

Tribune, March 18, 1999, p. C7.

23. The Economist, February 27, 1999, pp. 28–29.

24. “Institutionalized Racism in Health Care” (editorial), The Lancet, no. 9155

(1999): 765.

25. “America in Black and White: Health Care, the Great Divide,” Nightline, February

24, 1999.

26. Lisa M. Schwartz, StevenWoloshin, and M. GilbertWelch, “Misunderstandings

About the Effects of Race and Sex on Physicians’ Referrals for Cardiac Catheterization,”

New England Journal of Medicine 341, no. 4 (1999): 279–83. Note: average referrals per

actor/patients: white male (55 yr.) referred by 91.1% of doctors; white male (70 yr.),

90%; black male (55 yr.), 91.1%; black male (70 yr.), 90%; white female (55 yr.), 92.2%;

white female (70 yr.), 88.9%; black female (55 yr.), 84.4%; black female (70 yr.), 73.3%.

It is the 70-year-old black female actor/patient, in particular, who garnered the noticeably

low rate of referrals. It is not clear why this was so. Because there was only one

actor/patient per category, it is possible that this woman was not very convincing in

her portrayal of a cardiac patient.

27. Gregory D. Curfman and Jerome P. Kassirer (editors’ note), New England

Journal of Medicine 341, no. 4 (1999): 287.

28. K. A. Schulman, J. A. Berlin, and J. J. Escarce (authors’ reply), ibid., p. 286.

29. Quoted in Kathleen Fackelmann, “Does Unequal Treatment Really Have Roots

in Racism?” USA Today, September 16, 1999, p. 10D.

30. John Leo, “Shocking But Not True,” U.S. News and World Report, November

22, 1999, p. 18; Jennifer Greenstein, “The Heart of the Matter,” Brill’s Content, October

1999, p. 40.

31. “Key Facts: Race, Ethnicity, and Medical Care,” Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation,

October 1999.

32. Edward Guadagnoli et al., “The Influence of Race on the Use of Surgical

Procedures for Treatment of Peripheral Vascular Disease in the Lower Extremities,”

Archives of General Surgery 130 (1995): 381–86.

33. Ronnie D. Horner, Eugene Z. Oddone, and David B. Matchar, “Theories Explaining

Racial Differences in the Utilization of Diagnostic and Therapeutic Procedures

for Cerebrovascular Disease,” Milbank Quarterly 73, no. 3 (1995): 443–62.

34. W. W. O’Neill, “Multivessel Balloon Angioplasty Should Be Abandoned in

Diabetic Patients,” Journal of the American College of Cardiology 31 (1998): 20–22; S.

G. Ellis and C. R. Narins, “Problem of Angioplasty in Diabetics,” Circulation 96 (1997):

1707–10.

35. Lucian L. Leape et al., “Underuse of Cardiac Procedures: Do Women, Ethnic

Minorities, and the Uninsured Fail to Receive Needed Revascularization?” Annals of

Internal Medicine 120 (1999): 183–92.

36. S. A. Optenberg et al., “Race, Treatment, and Long-Term Survival from Prostate

Cancer in an Equal-Access Medical Care Delivery System,” Journal of the American

Medical Association 274 (1995): 1599–1605; J. A. Dominitz et al., “Race, Treatment,

and Survival Among Colorectal Carcinoma Patients in an Equal-Access Medical System,”

Cancer 82 (1998): 2312–20; W. J. Mayer and W. P. McWhorter, “Black/White

Differences in Non-Treatment of Bladder Cancer Patients and Implications for Survival,”

American Journal of Public Health 79 (1989): 772–75.

37. J. A. Harrison, R. D. Mullen, and L. W. Green, “A Meto-Analysis of Studies of

the Health Belief Model with Adults,” Health Education Research 7 (1992): 107–16.

38. B. D. Powe, “Fatalism Among Elderly African Americans: Effects on Colorectal

Cancer Screening,” Cancer Nursing 18, no. 5 (1995): 385–92; C. Maynard et al., “Race

and Clinical Decision Making,” American Journal of Public Health (1986): 1446; P. A.

Johnson et al., “Effect of Race on the Presentation and Management of Patients with

Acute Chest Pain,” Annals of Internal Medicine 118 (1993): 593–601; D. R. Lannin et

al., “Influence of Socioeconomic and Cultural Factors on Racial Differences in Latestage

Presentation of Breast Cancer,” Journal of the American Medical Association 279,

no. 22 (1998): 1801–7; V. M. Taylor et al., “Mammography Use Among Women

Attending an Inner-City Clinic,” Journal of Cancer Education 13, no. 2 (1998): 96–101.

39. Lorna G. Canlas, “Issues of Health Care Mistrust in East Harlem,” Mount Sinai

Journal of Medicine 66, no. 4 (1999): 257–58.

40. B. J. McNeil, R. Weichselbaum, and S. G. Pauker, “Fallacy of the Five-Year

Survival in Lung Cancer,” New England Journal of Medicine 299 (1978): 1397–1401;

Eugene Z. Oddone et al., “Understanding Racial Variation in the Use of Carotid

Endarterectomy: The Role of Aversion to Surgery,” Journal of the National Medical

Association 90 (1998): 25–33.

41. U.S. Commissionon Civil Rights, The Health Care Challenge, vol. 11 (September

1999), p. 111.

42. UNOS Histocompatibility Committee, The National Kidney Distribution System:

Striving for Equitable Use of a Scarce Resource, UNOS Update, August 1995.

43. R. H. Kerman et al., “Possible Contribution of Pre-Transplant Immune Responder

Status to Renal Allograft Survival Difference of BlackVersus White Recipients,”

Transplantation 51 (1991): 338–42; S. Hariharan, T. J. Schroeder, and M. R. Frist,

“Effect of Race on Renal Transplant Outcome,” Clinical Transplantation 7 (1993): 235–

9; B. L. Kasiske et al., “The Effect of Race on Access and Outcome in Transplantation,”

New England Journal of Medicine 342 (1991): 302–7.

44. Glenn M. Chertow and Edgar L. Milford, “Poor Graft Survival in African-American Transplant Recipients Cannot be Explained byHLAMismatching,” Advances

in Renal Replacement Therapy 4 (1997): 40–45.

45. Starting in 1995 new immunosuppressants (drugs that help prevent rejection)

became available. This breakthrough may not only improve survival after transplantation

for black patients, but it may also obviate the need for tight antigen matching

and thus move blacks more quickly up the waiting list. In spite of the tremendous

promise of these drugs, the clinical verdict on their success will not be in for several

years because it takes at least two years after a transplant to be certain whether a kidney

will function over the long term (Clive O. Callender, August 9, 1999, personal communication).

46. Renal Data Systems. USRDS 1998 Annual Report. Bethesda, Md., National

Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases, April 1998.

47. Joel C. Cantor, Lois Bergeisen, and Laurence C. Baker, “Effect of Intensive

Educational Program for Minority College Students and Recent Graduates on the

Probability of Acceptance to Medical School,” Journal of the American Medical Association

280 (1998): 772–76.

48. In 1992 the AAMC introduced an initiative called Project 3000 by 2000 whose

goal was to see 3,000 underrepresented minority students enter medical school by the

year 2000.

49. Jeffrey Mervis, “Wanted: A BetterWay to Boost Numbers of Minority Ph.D.s,”

Science 28 (1998): 1268–70.

50. Randal C. Archibold, “Applications to Medical Schools Decline for Second

Straight Year,” New York Times, September 2, 1999, p. A23; Holcomb B. Noble, “Struggling

to Bolster Minorities in Medicine,” ibid., September 29, 1998, p. F7.

51. Barbara Barzansky, Harry S. Jonas, and Sylvia I. Etzel, “Educational Programs

in U.S. Medical Schools, 1998–1999,” Journal of the American Medical Association 282

(1999): 840–46.

52. Robert G. Petersdorf, “Not a Choice, An Obligation,” presented at the plenary

session of the 102nd meeting of the AAMC, Washington, D.C., November 10, 1991.

53. Kevin Grumbach, Elizabeth Mertz, and Janet Coffman, “Under-Represented

Minorities in Medical Education in California,” March 1999, California Center for

Health Workforce Studies at the University of California, San Francisco (report avail.

at ‹http://futurehealth.ucsf.edu›).Nationwide, minority applications dropped 13 percent

between 1996 and 1998. In large part, though not exclusively, this was due to the

California initiative and to the three states (Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) that in

the wake of the 1996 Hopwood case no longer considered race as a factor in medical

school admission. Even though minority applications again declined between 1998 and

1999, there is no evidence that the pool of potential minority applicants is shrinking.

The percentage of black and Hispanic students getting bachelor of science degrees has

remained constant, as have those races’ percentage of college graduates (personal

communication, Ella Cleveland, Division of Community and Minority Programs,

January 6, 2000). No one really understands why medical school is relatively unpopular

among these students. Perhaps some are discouraged by the high educational debt they

will assume or by the loss of physician autonomy in the world of managed care.

Interestingly,not all these developmentswere a result of Proposition 209 and Hopwood.

First, across the country, applications from whites have been going down as well; there

was a 6 percent drop in all applicants from 1998 to 1999, the third straight year of

decline. Second, the decline in minority applicants in California actually started two

years before passage of Proposition 209. Third, at California’s three private medical

schools, which were unaffected by the new law, there was also a large drop in minority

applications (25 percent) after its passage.

54. Michael J. Scotti Jr., “Medical School Admission Criteria: The Needs of Patients

Matter,” Journal of the American Medical Association 278 (1997): 1196–97.

55. H. Jack Geiger, “Ethnic Cleansing in the Groves of Academe,” American Journal

of Public Health 88 (1998): 1299–1300, quotation on p. 1299.

56. M. J. O’Sullivan et al., “Ethnic Populations: Community Mental Health Services

Ten Years Later,” American Journal of Community Psychology 17 (1989): 17–30; Robert

Rosenheck and Catherine L. Seibyl, “Participation and Outcome in a Residential Treatment

and Work Therapy Program for Addictive Disorders: The Effects of Race,”

American Journal of Psychiatry 155 (1998): 1029–34; S. Sue et al., “Community Mental

Health Services for Ethnic Minorities Groups: A Test of the Cultural Responsiveness

Hypothesis,” American Psychologist 59 (1991): 553–40; R. A. Rosenheck and A. F.

Fontana, “Race and Outcome of Treatment forVeterans SufferingFrom PTSD,” Journal

of Traumatic Stress 9 (1996): 343–51.

57. “Health Care Services and Minority Groups: A Comparative Survey of Whites,

African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans,” conducted for the Commonwealth Fund by Louis Harris and Associates, New York 1994 (study no. 932028), table

1-18, p. 34.

58. Ibid., table 3-27, p. 93.

59. Thomas R. Dye, Race as an Admissions Factor in Florida’s Public Law and Medical

Schools (Tallahassee: Lincoln Center, 1999).

60. ‹http://www.acusd.edu/e cook/›

61. U.S. Commissionon Civil Rights, The Health Care Challenge, vol. 11 (September

1999); p. 116.

62. As cited in Balancing the Scales of Opportunity: Ensuring Racial and Ethnic

Diversity in the Health Professions (Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 1994), p. 24.

63. H.W. Foster Jr., “Reaching Parity for Minority Medical Students: A Possibility

or a Pipe Dream?” Journal of the National Medical Association 88 (1996): 17–21.

64. Minority Students in Medical Education: Facts and Figures, IX (Washington,

D.C.: AAMC, 1998).

65. Beth Dawson et al., “Performance on the National Board of Medical Examiners

Part 1 Examination by Men and Women of Different Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of

the American Medical Association 272 (1994): 674–79.

66. G. Xu et al., “The Relationship Between Race/Ethnicity of Generalist Physicians

and Their Care for Underserved Populations,” American Journal of Public Health 87

(1997): 817–22.

67. Rebecca S. Miller, Marvin R. Dunn, and Thomas Richter, “Graduate Medical

Education, 1998–1999: A Closer Look,” Journal of the American Medical Association

282 (1999): 855–60.

68. Dawson et al., 1994.

69. S. N. Keith, R. M. Bell, and A. P. Williams, “Assessing the Outcome of Affirmative

Action in Medical School: A Study of the Class of 1975,” RAND Corporation

publication no. R-3481-CWF, August 1987.

70. Robyn Tamblyn et al., “Association Between Licensing Examination Scores and

Resource Use and Quality of Care in Primary Care Practice,” Journal of the American

Medical Association 280 (1998): 989–96.

71. P. G. Ramsey et al., “Predictive Validity of Certification by the American Board

of Internal Medicine,” Annals of Internal Medicine 110 (1989): 719–26.

72. Leonard D. Baer, Thomas C. Ricketts, Thomas R. Konrad, “International Medical

Graduates in Rural, Underserved Areas,” Findings Brief, Cecil G. Sheps Center for

Health Services Research, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, May 1998.

73. Jay Greene, “Primary Push,” American Medical News, March 13, 2000, pp. 10–

12.

74. T. P. Weil, “Attracting Qualified Physicians to Underserved Areas,” Physician

Executive 25 (1999): 53–63.

==============================

Supporting Black Churches

JOHN J. DIIULIO JR.

This essay was previously published under the title “Black Churches and the Inner-City Poor,” in Christopher H. Foreman Jr., editor, The African American Predicament (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1999), pp. 116–40. Ashorter version, entitled “Supporting Black Churches: Faith, Outreach, and the Inner-City Poor,” appeared in The Brookings Review, Spring 1999, pp. 42–45. It is reprinted here by permission of the Brookings Institution.

Under what, if any, conditions can the life prospects of today’s black inner-city poor be improved, and how, if at all, can we foster those conditions? My argument in this essay is that supporting black churches and other faith-based grassroots organizations that perform youth and community outreach functions in poor inner-city neighborhoods is a necessary and vital although insufficient condition for repairing the social fabric and restoring economic vitality in truly disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. The case for supporting black churches rests upon a certain constellation of ideas and findings concerning inner-city poverty, religiosity and volunteers, religious faith as a factor in ameliorating social problems, and the extent of church-anchored outreach in black urban neighborhoods.

Black Inner-City Poverty

Recent research by the editors of this book and others has clearly shown that black Americans have progressed economically over the last half century.1 Even analysts who have emphasized the persistence of black poverty and black-white income gaps have acknowledged that “there have been significant improvements since 1940 in the absolute and relative positions of blacks”; that black Americans represent a trillion-dollar-plus annual market larger than that of “most countries in the world”; that “the majority of working-class and middle-class black families have made some important gains”; and that since “the early 1990s, black family income has risen.”2 But as I have argued elsewhere, unless we propose to do nothing more than continue idle academic or ideological debates, the triumph of overall black economic progress neither can nor should obscure the tragedy of black poverty and joblessness.3

Black Americans made substantial economic progress in the 1960s, but each post-1970 recession exacted a disproportionate toll on blacks regardless of family structure; for example, Robert B. Hill estimated that the four recessions between 1970 and 1985 led to a tripling in the jobless rates among blacks in two-parent families as well as among blacks in motheronly households.4 As the national economy improved in the late 1980s, black men and women still had unemployment rates more than double those of whites. Even after the boom years of the 1990s, 40 percent of black children, concentrated heavily in central city neighborhoods, continued to live in below-the-poverty-line households.5

Some analysts deflect such concerns about black inner-city poverty by debating statistical measures of what it means to be poor, or by stressing that intra-group rates of poverty and other social ills among blacks have varied largely according to marital status and other conditions that reflect individual choices. There is, however, no genuine empirical or moral basis for denying that millions of black children, through absolutely no fault of their own, remain economically disadvantaged in neighborhoods where jobs are few and drugs, crime, and failed public schools are common.

Religiosity and Volunteers

How we approach black inner-city poverty is bound to be affected by religious ideals, influences, and institutions. “The United States,” observes George Gallup Jr., “is one of the most devout nations of the entire industrialized world, in terms of religious beliefs and practices.”6 Black Americans are in many ways the most religious people in America. Some 82 percent of blacks (versus 67 percent of whites) are church members; 82 percent of blacks (versus 55 percent of whites) say that religion is “very important in their life”; and 86 percent of blacks (versus 60 percent of whites) believe that religion “can answer all or most of today’s problems.” 7

As Father Andrew Greely has observed, both “frequency of church attendance and membership in church organizations correlate strongly with voluntary service. People who attend services once a week or more are approximately twice as likely to volunteer as those who attend rarely if ever.”8 The best available data suggest that religious organizations and “relationships related to their religion” are the major forces in mobilizing volunteers in America; even a third of purely secular volunteers (persons who did not volunteer for specifically religious activities) relate their service “to the influence of a relationship based in their religion.”9 Similarly, as Gallup has reported, “Churches and other religious bodies are the major supporters of voluntary services for neighborhoods and communities. Members of a church or synagogue . . . tend to be much more involved in charitable activity, particularly through organized groups.”10

Faith Factor Findings

But what, if any, social consequences for blacks and other Americans flow from religiosity and faith-based charitable, volunteer, and community-serving work? Is there any scientific evidence to justify the faith of most black Americans that religion can “answer all or most of today’s problems”?

James Q. Wilson has succinctly summarized the small but not insignificant body of credible evidence to date: “Religion, independent of social class, reduces deviance.”11 For example, consider the latest research of David B. Larson, the medical research scientist who pioneered the development of research on public health outcomes (physical health, mental health, addictions) that led to new training programs at Harvard and three dozen other medical schools.12 With criminologist Byron Johnson, Larson has reviewed some 400 juvenile delinquency studies published between 1980 and 1997. They report that “the better the study design and measurement methodology, the greater the likelihood the research will produce statistically significant and beneficial results associated with ‘the faith factor.’”13

In other words, the more scientific the study, the more optimistic are its findings about the extent to which “religion reduces deviance.” This conclusion squares with the results of another major review of the relevant research literature as it pertains to adult criminals: “Our research confirms that the religiosity and crime relationship for adults is neither spurious nor contingent. . . . Religion, as indicated by religious activities, had direct personal effects on adult criminality as measured by a broad range of criminal acts. Further, the relationship held even with the introduction of secular controls.”14 In other words, “religion matters” in reducing adult crime.

Beyond crime and delinquency, in a 1996 synopsis of faith factor research, Patrick Fagan of the Heritage Foundation summarized studies suggesting that religion enhances family stability (the family that prays together is indeed more likely to stay together), improves health, reduces adolescent sexual activities and teenage pregnancies, cuts alcohol and drug abuse, and reinforces other measures of “social stability.”15

In 1985, Harvard economist Richard Freeman reported that churchgoing, independent of other factors, made young black males from highpoverty neighborhoods substantially more likely to escape poverty, crime, and other social ills.16 In a forthcoming reanalysis and extension of Freeman’s work, Larson and Johnson mine national longitudinal data on urban black youth and find that religion is indeed a powerful predictor of escaping poverty, crime, and other social ills.17

Black Church Outreach Tradition

The black church has a unique and uniquely powerful youth and community outreach tradition. The black church’s historic role in providing education, social services, and a safe gathering place prefigured its historic role in the civil rights movement.

There are eight major historically black Christian churches: African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, Christian Methodist Episcopal, Church of God in Christ, National Baptist Convention of America, National Baptist Convention, USA, National Missionary Baptist Convention, and the Progressive National Baptist Convention. There are also scores of independent or quasi-independent black churches and at least nine certified religious training programs operated by accredited seminaries that are directed toward ministry in black churches and black faith communities. Together, the eight major black denominations alone encompass some 65,000 churches and about 20 million members.

Until the 1990s, however, the richly religious lives of black Americans and the black church outreach tradition were given short shrift by both historians and social scientists, and not just by white historians and social scientists. Writing in 1994 in a special double edition of National Journal of Sociology, Andrew Billingsley, a dean of black family studies, noted that the subject was largely ignored even by leading black scholars who were keenly aware of “the social significance of the black church,” including many who “were actually members of a black church.”18

An empirically well-grounded perspective on contemporary black church outreach is provided by sociologist Harold Dean Trulear, an ordained black minister who taught for eight years at the New York Theological Seminary, has conducted extensive research on black clergy training, and is presently vice president for research on religion and at-risk youth at Public/Private Ventures in Philadelphia. “When it comes to youth and community outreach in the inner city,” Trulear cautions, “not all black urban churches are created equal”:

Naturally, it’s in part a function of high resident membership. Inner-city churches with high resident membership cater more to high-risk neighborhood youth than . . . black churches with inner-city addresses but increasingly or predominantly suburbanized or commuting congregations. [The high resident membership black churches] tend to cluster by size and evangelical orientation. . . . It’s the small- and medium-sized churches . . . [especially] the so-called . . . blessing stations and specialized youth chapels with their charismatic leader and their small, dedicated staff of adult volunteers [that] . . . do a disproportionate amount of the up-close and personal outreach work with the worst-off inner-city youth.”19

Surveys of Church-Based Outreach

When it comes to solving urban problems and the plight of the black inner-city poor, black churches cannot do it all (or do it alone), and not all black churches do it. But that reality should not obscure the black church outreach tradition and its many and powerful contemporary manifestations. The pathbreaking research of scholars such as Eric C. Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, combined with recent systematic research by Trulear and others, should persuade even a dedicated skeptic to take church-based outreach seriously, especially where the black community is concerned.

In a forthcoming study, P/PV’s Jeremy White and Mary de Marcellus report on the results of their intensive six-month field exploration of youthserving ministries in the District of Columbia.20 They interviewed leaders and volunteers in 129 of the city’s faith-based ministries, including on-site visits to 79 churches, faith-based nonprofit organizations, and schools, virtually all led by blacks and serving predominantly black populations. From this research, they concluded that “there is a critical mass of faithbased organizations inWashington, D.C., that work directly and intensively with at-risk youth.” The programs fell into “six major categories: after-school or tutoring programs; evangelization; gang violence prevention; youth groups; and mentoring.”21

None of the programs studied by White and de Marcellus required youth to be the children of a particular church, profess any particular religious beliefs, or agree to eventual “churching” as a condition for receiving services, entering church buildings, or otherwise benefiting from the programs. Also, almost none of the programs, even those that furnished children with material goods such as clothes or books, charged a fee. In the words of one of the outreach ministers quoted on the first page of their report, “The cost of real love is no charge.”22

The results of a survey of “faith-based service providers in the nation’s capital” were published in 1998 by the Urban Institute.23 The survey found that 95 percent of the congregations performed outreach services. The 226 religious congregations (out of 1,100 surveyed) that responded (67 of them in the District, the rest in Maryland or Virginia) provided a total of over 1,000 community services to over 250,000 individuals in 1996.

In the mid-1990s, a six-city survey of how over 100 randomly selected urban churches (and four synagogues) constructed in 1940 or earlier serve their communities was undertaken by Ram A. Cnnan of the University of Pennsylvania. The survey was commissioned and published by Partners for Sacred Places, a Philadelphia-based national nonprofit organization dedicated to the care and good use of older religious properties.24 Congregations were surveyed in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Indianapolis, Mobile, and the Bay Area (Oakland and San Francisco). Each church surveyed participated in a series of in-depth interviews. Among the Cnnan-Partners survey’s key findings were the following: 93 percent of the churches opened their doors to the larger community; on average, each church provided over 5,300 hours of volunteer support to its community programs (the equivalent of two and a half full-time volunteers stationed year-round at the church); on average, each church provided about $140,000 a year in community programs, or about sixteen times what it received from program beneficiaries; on average, each church supported four major programs and provided informal and impromptu services as well; and poor children who were not the sons or daughters of church members or otherwise affiliated with the church benefited from churchsupported programs more than any other single group.

The best known and still the most comprehensive survey focusing exclusively on black churches was published in 1990 by Lincoln and Mamiya. 25 In The Black Church in the African-American Experience, they reported on the results of surveys encompassing nearly 1,900 ministers and over 2,100 churches. Some 71 percent of black clergy reported that their churches engaged in many community outreach programs, including day care, job search, substance abuse prevention, and food and clothing distribution. 26 Black urban churches, they found, were generally more engaged in outreach than rural ones. Though many urban churches also engaged in quasi-political activities and organizing, few received government money, and most clergy expressed concerns about receiving government money; only about 8 percent of all the churches surveyed received any federal government funds.27

A number of site-specific and regional surveys of black churches followed the publication of Lincoln and Mamiya’s book. So far, they all have been broadly consistent with the Lincoln-Mamiya survey results on black church outreach. To cite just two examples, in a survey of 150 black churches in Atlanta, NaomiWard and her colleagues found that 131 of the churches were “actively engaged in extending themselves into the community.” 28 And a survey of 635 Northern black churches found that twothirds of the churches engaged in a wide range of “family-oriented community outreach programs,” including mentoring, drug abuse prevention, teenage pregnancy prevention, and other outreach efforts “directed at children and youth.”29

The data from the Lincoln-Mamiya surveys were reanalyzed in the course of a 1997 study of black theological education certificate programs (Bible institutes, denominational training programs, and seminary nondegree programs). The study was directed by Trulear in collaboration with Tony Carnes and commissioned by the Ford Foundation.30 Trulear and Carnes compared certain of the Lincoln-Mamiya survey results with data gathered in their own survey of 724 students representing twenty-eight theological certificate programs that focused on serving black students. Three-quarters of those surveyed by Trulear and Carnes reported that their church encouraged them “to be involved in my local community,” more than half said relevance to “my community’s needs” was of major importance to them in choosing a theological certificate program, and about half were already involved in certain types of charitable community work.31

Religious Racial Reconciliation

If black church outreach is so potent, why is it that inner-city poverty, crime, and other problems remain so severe? That is a fair question, but it can easily be turned around: How much worse would things be in Boston and Austin, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and other cities were it not for largely unsung faith-based youth and community outreach efforts? How much more would government or charitable organizations need to expend, and how many new volunteers would need to be mobilized, in the absence of church-anchored outreach? The answers are “much worse” and “lots.”

Citizenswho for whatever reasons are nervous about enhanced churchstate partnerships should be reassured by the consistent findings that faithbased outreach efforts benefit poor unchurched neighborhood children most of all, and that most outreach ministries receive no government money. If these churches are so willing to support “the least of these,” surely they deserve the support of the rest of us—corporations, foundations, and, where appropriate, government agencies.

Persons of all faiths and of no faith should support black church outreach efforts. At a minimum, the black church paramedics of inner-city America’s civil society deserve the support of Christian churches, both black and white, both urban and suburban.A genuine dialogue about racial reconciliation among Christians, accompanied by a Christ-centered commitment to help—or to help those who help—the inner-city minority poor, would light the way.

It is morally wrong and socially myopic to turn our heads and harden our hearts to the plight of the black inner-city poor. As Father Richard John Neuhaus has argued, rather than merely exposing “liberal fatuities about remedying the ‘root causes’ of poverty and crime . . . there must be another way. Just believing that is a prelude to doing something. The something in question is centered in religion that is both motive and means, and extends to public policy tasks that should claim the attention of all Americans.”32 Say amen.

Notes

1. Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One

Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

2. See: National Research Council, A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society

(Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989), p. 274; Marcus Alexis and

Geraldine R. Henderson, “The Economic Base of African-American Communities: A

Study of Consumption Patterns,” in National Urban League, The State of Black America

1994 (New York: National Urban League, January 1994), p. 81; Robert B. Hill et al.,

Research on the African-American Family: A Holistic Perspective (Westport, Conn.:

Auburn House, 1993), p. 2; Council of Economic Advisors, Changing America: Indicators

of Social and Economic Well-Being by Race and Hispanic Origin (Washington,

D.C.: President’s Initiative on Race, September 1998), p. 33.

3. John J. DiIulio Jr., “State of Grace,” National Review, December 22, 1997, pp.

62–66.

4. Robert B. Hill, “The Black Middle Class: Past, Present, and Future,” National

Urban League: The State of Black America 1986 (New York: National Urban League,

1986), pp. 43–64.

5. Council of Economic Advisors, Changing America, p. 38.

6. George Gallup Jr., Emerging Trends, Princeton Research Center 18 (March 1996):

5. See also Richard Morin, “Keeping the Faith: A Survey Shows the United States Has

the Most Churchgoing People in the Developed World,” Washington Post Weekly

Edition.

7. George Gallup Jr., “Religion in America: Will the Vitality of Churches Be the

Surprise of the Next Century?” Public Perspective, October–November 1995, p. 4.

8. Andrew Greely, “The Other Civic America: Religion and Social Capital,” American

Prospect 32 (May–June 1997): 70

9. Ibid., p. 72.

10. Gallup, “Religion in America,” p. 2.

11. James Q. Wilson, “Two Nations,” paper delivered as Francis Boyer Lecture,

American Enterprise Institute, December 4, 1997, p. 10.

12. See David B. Larson et al., Scientific Research on Spirituality and Health (Radnor,

Pa.: John M. Templeton Foundation, October 1, 1997).

13. David B. Larson and Byron Johnson, “Systematic Review of Delinquency Research,”

preliminary draft, 1998, and personal correspondence with Larson, September

1, 1998.

14. T. David Evans et al., “Religion and Crime Reexamined: The Impact of Religion,

Secular Controls, and Social Ecology on Adult Criminality,” Criminology 33, no. 2

(1995): 211–12.

15. Patrick Fagan, “Why Religion Matters: The Impact of Religious Practice on

Social Stability,” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, no. 164 ( January 25, 1996).

16. Richard B. Freeman, “Who Escapes? The Relation of Church-Going and Other

Background Factors to the Socio-Economic Performance of Black Male Youths from

Inner-City Poverty Tracts,” working paper no. 1656, National Bureau of Economic

Research, Cambridge, Mass., 1985.

17. David B. Larson and Byron Johnson, “Who Escapes? Revisited,” final draft,

1998, and personal correspondence with Larson, September 1, 1998.

18. Andrew Billingsley, “The Social Relevance of the Contemporary Black Church,”

National Journal of Sociology 8, nos. 1 and 2 (summer–winter 1994): 3.

19. Interview with the author, June 1998.

20. Jeremy White and Mary de Marcellus, draft of Faith-Based Outreach to At-Risk

Youth in Washington, D.C.: Report of the Partnership for Research on Religion and At-Risk Youth (Philadelphia: Public/Private Ventures, forthcoming).

21. Ibid., p. 4, 6.

22. Ibid., p. 1.

23. Tobi Jennifer Printz, Faith-Based Service Providers in the Nation’s Capital: Can

They Do More? (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, April 1998).

24. Diane Cohen and A. Robert Jaeger, Sacred Places at Risk (Philadelphia: Partners

for Sacred Places, 1998).

25. Eric C. Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990).

26. Ibid., p. 151.

27. Ibid., p. 15.

28. NaomiWard et al., “Black Churches in Atlanta Reach Out to the Community,”

National Journal of Sociology 8, nos. 1 and 2 (summer–winter 1994): 59.

29. Roger H. Rubin et al., “The Black Church and Adolescent Sexuality,” ibid., pp.

131, 138.

30. Harold Dean Trulear and Tony Carnes, A Study of the Social Service Dimension

of Theological Education Certificate Programs: The 1997 Theological Certificate Program

Survey, submitted to the Ford Foundation, November 1, 1997.

31. Ibid., pp. 34, 40–41.

32. Richard John Neuhaus, “The Public Square: A Continuing Survey of Religion

and Public Life,” First Things 81 (March 1998): 63–65.

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PART THREE — ECONOMICS

Discrimination, Economics, and Culture

THOMAS SOWELL

Racial discrimination is usually not very discriminating, in the sense in which a wine connoisseur is discriminating in being able to detect subtle differences in tastes, aromas, or vintages. When Marian Anderson was refused permission to sing in Washington’s Constitution Hall in 1939, it had nothing to do with her characteristics as a singer or as a person. She was black and that was it. Similarly in baseball, before Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947, no one cared what kind or quality of pitcher Satchel Paige was or how powerful a slugger Josh Gibson was. They were black and that was enough to keep them out.

If we are to examine discrimination and its consequences today, we cannot be as indiscriminate as the racists of the past or present. We must make distinctions—first as to some consistent meaning of the word “discrimination” and then in deriving criteria for determining when it applies. We must also distinguish discrimination from other social or cultural factors that produce economic and other differences in outcome for different individuals and groups.

Meanings of Discrimination

To many—perhaps most—Americans, there is racial discrimination when different rules and standards are applied to people who differ by race. To these Americans, there is “a level playing field” when the same rules and the same standards apply to everybody, regardless of race. As traditional as this meaning of discrimination has been, a radically different conception of discrimination has a strong hold on many in the media and the academic world today, as well as among political and legal elites. For them, differences in “life chances” define discrimination. If a black child does not have the same likelihood as a white child of growing up to become an executive or a scientist, then there is racial discrimination by this definition, even if the same rules and standards are applied to both in schools, the workplace, and everywhere else.

For those with this definition of discrimination, creating “a level playing field” means equalizing probabilities of success. Criteria which operate to prevent this are considered by them to be discriminatory in effect, even if not in intent.

Whatever definition—and accompanying set of policies—one believes in, a serious discussion of racial discrimination or of racial issues in general requires that we lay our cards face up on the table and not hide behind ambiguous and shifting words that render any attempt at dialog futile and ultimately poisonous.

For purposes of our discussion here, the definition of “discrimination” will be the traditional one. Other views behind other definitions will not be dismissed, however, but will in fact be examined closely.

Cause and Effect

Definitions are not chosen out of thin air. Underlying different definitions of racial discrimination are different beliefs about the way the world operates. So long as these beliefs confront each other only as opposing dogmas, there is no resolution other than by trying to shout each other down or prevail by force, whether political or physical. Many people believe that differences in life chances or differences in socioeconomic results are unusual, suspicious, and probably indicative of biased or malign social processes that operate to the detriment of particular racial and other groups.

While there have certainly been numerous examples of discrimination— in the traditional sense of applying different rules or standards to different groups—in the United States and in other countries around the world, that is very different from claiming the converse, that group differences in prospects or outcomes must derive from this source.

Intergroup differences have been the rule, not the exception, in countries around the world and throughout centuries of history.

Today, one need only turn on a television set and watch a professional basketball game to see that the races are not evenly or randomly represented in this sport and are not in proportion to their representation in the general population of the United States. Racially, the teams do not “look like America.”

Although not visible to the naked eye, neither do the beer companies that sponsor this and other athletic events. Most, if not all, of the leading beer-producing companies in the United States were founded by people of German ancestry. So were most of the leading piano manufacturers. Nor is German domination of these two industries limited to the United States. The kind of demographic over-representation in particular lines of work found among blacks in basketball or Germans in beer brewing and piano-making can also be found among Jews in the apparel industry—not just in contemporary New York but also in the history of medieval Spain, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, Brazil, Germany, and Chile. At one time, most of the clothing stores in Melbourne were owned by Jews, who have never been as much as one percent of the Australian population. Most of the people laying cable in Sydney, Australia, are of Irish ancestry. All the billionaires in Thailand and Indonesia are of Chinese ancestry. Four-fifths of the doughnut shops in California are owned by people of Cambodian ancestry. The list goes on and on.

It would be no feat to fill a book with statistical disparities that have nothing to do with discrimination.1 What would be a real feat would be to get people to realize that correlation is not causation—especially when the numbers fit their preconceptions.

Very often the groups predominating in a particular field have no power to keep others out, except by excelling in the particular activity. Blacks cannot discriminate against whites in basketball, where the franchises are owned by whites. The Chinese minority in Malaysia or Indonesia cannot stop Malaysians or Indonesians from opening businesses, though historically most of the major domestic enterprises in both countries were created by people of Chinese ancestry. Nor could immigrants from India stop either blacks or whites from opening businesses in Kenya, though Indian entrepreneurs were once so predominant in Kenya and other parts of East Africa that the rupee became the predominant currency in that region.

Some statistical disparities are of course caused by discrimination, just as some deaths are caused by cancer. But one cannot infer discrimination from statistics any more than one can infer cancer whenever someone dies. The absence of corroborating evidence of discrimination has forced some into claiming that the discrimination has been so “subtle,” “covert,” or “unconscious” as to leave no tangible evidence. But this method of arguing— where both the presence and the absence of empirical evidence prove the same thing—would prove anything about anything, anywhere and any time.

Sources of Differences

Perhaps the most sweeping explanation of intergroup differences is that people are innately, genetically different and that these differences permeate everything they do. As Madison Grant put it in his best-selling book The Passing of the Great Race in the early twentieth century, “race is everything.”

Virtually no one believes that any more and the Nazis revolted the world by showing where such doctrines can lead. However, the innate inferiority doctrine remains important socially and politically because it is an ominous presence in the background of discussions about other immediate practical issues. Much of the tone and substance of what is said today reflects a desire of many whites to escape the charge of racism and of many blacks to escape the charge of inferiority. A whole range of current trends, from cultural relativism to bombastic Afrocentrism, are hard to explain on their own intrinsic merits, without reference to the ominous racial doctrines that they are seeking to exorcise.

Without getting into the IQ controversy that I have dealt with elsewhere, 2 history alone makes it hard to believe in fixed or innate superiority or inferiority among the peoples of the world. A thousand years ago, the Chinese were clearly far more advanced than the Europeans, whether technologically, organizationally, or economically. Equally clearly, that relationship has reversed in recent centuries—without any corresponding changes in the genetic makeup of either the Chinese or the Europeans. Within a much shorter period of time, Eastern European Jews in the United States went from having below-average scores on intelligence tests during the First World War to having above-average scores on such tests within one generation afterward.

The enormous variety of geographic, cultural, demographic, and other variables makes an even, random, or equal distribution of skills, values, and performances virtually impossible. How could mountain peoples be expected to have seafaring skills? How could an industrial revolution have occurred in the Balkans, where there are neither the natural resources required for it nor any economically feasible way of transporting those resources there? How could the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere have transported the large loads that were transported overland for great distances in Europe and Asia, when theWestern Hemisphere had no horses, oxen, camels or other comparable beasts of burden?

Add to this great differences in the flora, fauna, climate, disease environments, topography and fertility of land from one region of the world to another, among other variables, and the prospects of equal achievements among peoples whose cultures evolved in very different settings shrinks to the vanishing point, even if every individual in the world had identical genetic endowments at the moment of conception.

Nor are the effects of these environmental factors likely to vanish immediately when people from a given culture in a given environment move to another culture in another environment. Particular skills and general attitudes may follow the same people around the world. Given that Germans were brewing beer in the days of the Roman Empire, there is no reason to be surprised that they continued to brew beer in Milwaukee, St. Louis, Buenos Aires, and Australia’s Barossa Valley. Even when two groups begin to acquire skills initially foreign to both, they may do so making different choices and applying themselves to different things. During the decade of the 1960s, the Chinese minority in Malaysia earned more than four hundred engineering degrees, while the Malay majority earned just four. Nor can such differences be reduced to external differences in the immediate environment, for the Malays had preferential access to financial aid for higher education. But they came from a culture very different from that of the Chinese.

Just a superficial glance like this suggests something of the innumerable factors operating against the even or random distribution of peoples in different activities and institutions that is assumed as a baseline for measuring discrimination statistically. In some cases we can trace through history the particular skills that led to the dominance of one group or another in particular industries or occupations. But in other cases we cannot. In no case can we presuppose that the distribution would be random in the absence of discrimination.

Empirical Evidence

If we cannot rely on simple statistical differences, presuppositions, or definitions to determine how much discrimination exists, much less its actual effects on end results, then we must depend on corroborating empirical evidence. How much income difference, for example, is there between blacks and whites with the same objective qualifications? Do these qualifications predict future performances of each group equally or for either group validly? What of cultural bias in these criteria?

If our purpose is to weigh beliefs against facts, rather than simply to generate plausible-sounding propaganda, then we must consider whether the inputs or the output that we are measuring are really the same. Family income data, for example, can be wholly misleading if the families differ in size from group to group and from one time period to another.

American families and households have been declining in size over the years, as parents have fewer children and children are better able to afford their own living quarters in early adulthood. Black families are smaller than white families, due to more breakups of marriage and more failures to get married in the first place. Moreover, higher income families average substantially more people per household.

An individual, however, always means one person, regardless of race or income, so per capita income data can present a very different picture from that deriving from family or household income data. Real income per black household rose only 7 percent from 1967 to 1988, but real income per black person rose 81 percent over the same span. On a household basis, blacks’ average income was a lower percentage of whites’ average income at the end of this period than at the beginning but, on a per person basis, blacks were earning a significantly higher percentage of what whites were earning in 1988 than in 1967.3 Needless to say, those who deal in politicized indignation prefer to cite family or household data. But if we are talking about job discrimination,we are talking about what happens to individuals. Employers do not employ households.

As far back as 1969, black males who came from homes where there were newspapers, magazines, and library cards had the same incomes as white males from similar homes and with the same number of years of schooling.4 In the 1970s, black husband-and-wife families outside the South earned as much as white husband-and-wife families outside the South.5 By 1981, for the country as a whole, black husband-wife families where both were college educated and both working earned slightly more than white families of the same description.6 By 1989, black, white, and Hispanic males of the same age (29) with the same IQ (100) who worked year-around all averaged between $25,000 and $26,000 in annual income.7

In various ways, these data all tell the same story—that similar cultural inputs lead to similar economic outputs across racial lines. Note, however, that these inputs are somewhat more sharply defined here than in most intergroup comparisons, such as all black high school graduates versus all white high school graduates or all blacks with bachelor’s degrees or Ph.D.s versus all whites with high school diplomas, bachelor’s degrees or Ph.D.s. On average, the pre-college educations of blacks and whites have never been equal. During the Jim Crow era in the South, blacks did not even go to school as many days in a year as whites, so that a black individual with 9 years of education might have been in school no more days than a white individual with 6 years of education. Even after the numbers of days in school were brought into line, the resources put into the schools were not the same and, after that had been remedied to some extent, large differences in test scores showed that the two groups of students were not learning the same, for whatever reasons.

At both the college and postgraduate levels, black and white degrees do not mean the same. First of all, they differ in the fields in which the students specialize—as do various groups in other countries around the world. Regardless of how much of these differences are due to discriminatory provision of education by government, or to differences in cultural values or other causes, when we are measuring education as an input that contributes to economic output, we are comparing apples and oranges if our comparisons of blacks and whites does not go beyond paper credentials.

In those cases where the statistics permit a finer breakdown that includes qualitative measures, the racial gap shrinks or disappears. We have already seen that with black, white, and Hispanic year-around workers with the same IQs. An earlier (1975) study of black, white, and Asian professors with Ph.D.s from departments of the same quality ranking and with similar numbers of publications showed the blacks generally earning at least as much as the whites and usually more than Asians with the same qualifications. 8

If our definition of a level playing field is applying the same rules, standards, and rewards, regardless of race, that was approximated years ago. But if our definition is equal prospects of success, then none of these data indicate that, for different proportions of different groups come from homes with library cards or from good quality schools and different proportions of them are in different regions of the IQ distribution. All these are serious social problems but they are not employer discrimination— and talking as if they are only distracts attention from the real causes that need attention.

In many other areas as well, discrimination has been claimed on the basis of statistics which treat people as comparable who are not in fact comparable. For example, the fact that black applicants for mortgage loans are turned down at a higher rate than white applicants has been widely cited as proof of racism among lending institutions. The Washington Post, for example, reported that a “racially biased system of home lending exists”9 and Jesse Jackson called it “criminal activity” that banks “routinely and systematically discriminate against African-Americans and Latinos in making mortgage loans.”10 But the very same data also showed that whites were turned down at a higher rate than Asian Americans.11 Was that proof of racism against whites, and in favor of Asians? Of course not.

A widely-cited Federal Reserve study of racial disparities in mortgage loan approval rates did not control for net worth, nor take into account the loan applicants’ credit histories or their existing debts.12 Nor was “the adequacy of collateral” included.13 When a more detailed follow-up study was done for the Boston area by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, it was discovered that in fact black and Hispanic applicants for mortgage loans had greater debt burdens, poorer credit histories, sought loans covering a higher percentage of the value of the properties in question, and were also more likely to seek to finance multiple-dwelling units rather than singlefamily homes.14 Loan applications for multiple-dwelling units were turned down more often among both white and minority applicants but obviously affect the rejection rate more so among the latter, since they applied more often for loans for such units.15 Even among those applicants whose loans were approved—and the majority of both minority and white applicants had their loans approved—minority borrowers had incomes only about three-quarters as high as whites and assets worth less than half the value of the assets of the white borrowers.16

None of this implies that subjective prejudice has vanished. But a whole field of the economics of discrimination has been created by Nobel Prizewinning economist Gary Becker to show how the translation of subjective prejudice into actual discrimination can be very costly to the discriminator. One need only imagine a basketball franchise owner who refuses to hire blacks to see how financially ruinous it can be.

Nothing is easier than to find statistical disparities between groups. They exist in countries around the world, with and without discrimination, and many of these intergroup disparities in income, education, and other factors are greater than black-white differences in the United States. Merely parading these disparities may be sufficient for political purposes. But, if the purpose is to improve the condition of the less fortunate, then discrimination must be investigated in a more discriminating manner and other causes dealt with when they turn out to be more salient.

None of this means that prejudice and discrimination are things of the past. What it does mean is that their actual socioeconomic effects are an empirical question, not a foregone conclusion. Few would doubt that there has been more prejudice and discrimination against blacks in the United States than in Brazil. Yet black Americans have achieved higher incomes, both absolutely and relative to white incomes, than is the case in Brazil.17 Discrimination is just one factor among many and cannot be automatically presupposed to be the most powerful factor, however politically convenient that assumption might be.

In practical terms, there is neither unlimited time nor unlimited resources available for dealing with racial issues. In order to maximize the impact of those resources, we must first decide whether our top priority is to smite the wicked or to help the less fortunate.

Implications

No one can be happy when life chances are so radically different among racial or other groups, especially when this means that serious prospects of rising out of poverty may be gone before a child’s age reaches double digits. If we mean to improve this situation substantially, then we cannot simply “round up the usual suspects,” such as discrimination. Nor can we let the ghost of Madison Grant or of Adolf Hitler paralyze us from recognizing factors internal to various groups themselves. If Asian children are more likely to catch grief from their parents when they bring home report cards with Bs than black children are when they bring home report cards with Cs, then do not be surprised if Asian youngsters end up with higher grade point averages in school and higher test scores after years of such differences. It would be astonishing if it were otherwise.

Preoccupation with discrimination also distracts from achievements from within the black community, even in the face of racial discrimination. For example, in 1899 there were four academic high schools in Washington— three white and one black. In standardized tests given that year, the black high school scored higher than two of the three white academic high schools. Yet, nearly a century later, it would be considered utopian, by almost anyone, to set as a goal that black high schools score higher on standardized tests than most white high schools in the same city—especially if that city isWashington, D. C.18 Nor was this a one-time fluke. That same school repeatedly met or exceeded the national average in IQs for decades and sent more of its graduates on to college than most white high schools around the country.19

We need not speculate on what can be done or assume that only esoteric programs can succeed. Success has already been achieved in many black schools and in many black families, usually by doing the same kinds of things that have brought success to white or Asian schools and white or Asian families.

Aword may be in order about “cultural bias” and the quest for “culturefree” tests. If cultural bias means that a given criterion will not predict either academic success or career success as accurately for one group as for another, then that is a purely empirical proposition that can be and has been tested innumerable times—and it has been found to be wrong innumerable times, not only as regards blacks in the United States but also as regards Indonesians halfway around the world.20

As for “culture-free” tests, they would be relevant only in a culturefree society—and there is no such society anywhere. Even the most primitive societies in the world today contain a wealth of skills that an outsider would be hard-pressed to master.

Any success or failure, anywhere in the world, is going to take place in a given culture. We need not question whether blacks can succeed in the current American culture because there is no way to declare impossible what has already happened, often despite considerable opposition. The question is whether increasing the odds of more success can take precedence over the politically more tempting goal of rounding up the usual suspects and sounding the usual rhetoric.

Notes

1. Numerous, documented examples can be found in just two recent books of

mine: Conquests and Cultures (Basic Books, 1998), pp. 43, 124, 125, 168, 221–222;

Migrations and Cultures (Basic Books, 1996), pp. 4, 17, 30, 31, 567, 118, 121, 122–123,

126, 130, 135, 152, 154, 157, 158, 162, 164, 167, 176, 177, 179, 182, 193, 196, 201, 211,

212, 213, 215, 224, 226, 251, 258, 264, 265, 275, 277, 278, 289, 290, 297, 298, 300, 305,

306, 310, 313, 314, 318, 320, 323–324, 337, 342, 345, 353–354, 354–355, 355, 356, 358,

363, 366, 372–373. Extending the search for intergroup statistical disparities to the

writings of others would of course increase the number of examples exponentially,

even when leaving out those cases where discrimination might be a plausible cause of

the disparities.

2. “New Light on Black IQ,” New York Times, March 27, 1977, pp. 15 ff; “Ability

and Biology,” Newsweek, September 8, 1997, p. 14; Race and Culture, chap. 6.

3. Compare U. S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Series P-60,

No. 167, pp. 9, 68.

4. Richard B. Freeman, Black Elite (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), chap. 4.

5. U. S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Series P-23, No. 80

(Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office, no date), p. 44.

6. U. S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Series P-20, No. 366

(Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1981), pp. 182, 184.

7. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class

Structure in American Life (New York: The Free Press, 1994), p. 323.

8. American Council on Education data are tabulated and presented in Thomas

Sowell, “Affirmative Action in Faculty Hiring,” Education: Assumptions versus History

(Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), pp. 85–87.

9. Joel Glenn Brenner, “A Pattern of Bias in Mortgage Loans,” Washington Post,

June 6, 1993, p. A 1.

10. Jesse Jackson, “Racism is the Bottom Line in Home Loans,” Los Angeles Times,

October 20, 1991, p. B 5.

11. See, for example, Paulette Thomas, “Blacks Can Face a Host of Trying Conditions

in Getting Mortgages,”Wall Street Journal, November 30, 1992, p. A 8.

12. Paulette Thomas, “Behind the Figures: Federal Reserve Detail Pervasive Racial

Gap in Mortgage Lending,”Wall Street Journal, March 31, 1992, p. A 1.

13. Glenn B. Canner, “Expanded HMDA Data on Residential Lending: One Year

Late,” Federal Reserve Bulletin, November 1992, p. 801.

14. Alicia H. Munnell, Mortgage Lending in Boston: Interpreting HMDA Data,

Working Paper No. 92-7, October 1992, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, pp. 2, 24, 25.

15. Ibid., p. 25.

16. Ibid., p. 24. Some further problems of the study are discussed in Peter Brimelow

and Leslie Spencer, “The Hidden Clue, Forbes, January 4, 1993, p. 48.

17. See data and sources in ThomasSowell, Conquests and Cultures:AnInternational

History (New York: Basic Books, 1998), p. 168.

18. Henry S. Robinson, “The M Street High School, 1891–1916,” Records of the

Columbia Historical Society of Washington, D. C., Vol. LI (1984), p. 122.

19. TheMStreet School was subsequentlyrenamed Dunbar High School. Its history

has been sketched in Thomas Sowell, “Black Excellence: The Case of Dunbar High

School,” The Public Interest, Spring 1974, pp. 3–21. See also Mary Gibson Hundley,

The Dunbar Story (New York: Vantage Press, 1965).

20. Numerousstudies can be found cited in Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures,

p. 474 (footnote 99).

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Half Full or Half Empty? The Changing Economic Status of African Americans, 1967–1996

FINIS WELCH

We hear so much about crime, drugs, school dropouts, low-quality schools, low wages, unemployment, teen pregnancy, children in single-parent homes, etc., among African Americans that it is hard to imagine that things are getting better. And, even if they are, the part of us that demands social justice wonders whether a sorry past excuses a sorry present. But every student of change understands that lasting improvement occurs slowly and that anyone with an eye to the future needs to examine the past. Half full is half empty, but half full and filling is better than half empty and emptying.

This essay offers a brief history of change in the labor market status of African Americans over the past three decades. Beginning with the good news, I examine trends in wages, education, occupations, and industry. Although I conclude on a pessimistic note concerning employment, I believe the gains have been so impressive that they deserve much greater recognition and appreciation than they have generally received.

Most of the numbers reported here are calculated from the March Annual Demographic Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS), 1968–1997. The Survey is collected by the U.S. Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics and usually includes responses for individuals in 50,000–60,000 households. The wage and employment levels are for the year preceding each Survey, so the analysis spans the thirty years 1967– 1996.

Growing Inequality in the Structure of Wages

The past three decades have brought remarkable changes in the structure of wages.Wage gaps have widened in the aggregate as well as in several narrowly focused dimensions. In particular, the wages of those with more education have increased sharply in comparison with wages of those with less.

Table 1 describes educational differentials in weekly wages for black and white men. Look first at the figures in the bottom panel of the table. During the first five-year period, 1967–1971, young white male college graduates earned 40.5 percent more on average than white males with no more than a high school diploma. The corresponding differential for black men was 51.9 percent. The higher premium for black college graduates, it is important to note, was a recent development. At the time of the 1960 U.S. Census, schooling paid black men far less than it paid white men. But since the mid-1960s, the economic incentives for staying in school as long as possible have been pretty much the same for blacks and whites. That does not mean that African American men had the same average earnings as whites; as we shall see shortly, that was far from the case. But the advantage that blacks with a lot of schooling had over their brethren with little schooling was actually a little greater than it was for whites.

Table 1 Percentage Differences in Average Weekly Wages Between Men with the Indicated Levels of Education and Wages of High School Graduates Less than 10 Years Out of School

*Years*	*White*	*Black*
high school dropout
1967–71	-18.1	-20.8
1972–76	-21.6	-26.2
1977–81	-22.7	-25.9
1982–86	-26.9	-28.8
1987–91	-26.8	-29.6
1992–96	-30.1	-27.4
some college
1967–71	19.2	22.0
1972–76	19.8	19.4
1977–81	18.7	25.6
1982–86	27.5	33.2
1987–91	33.5	38.9
1992–96	35.0	50.8
college graduates
1967–71	40.5	51.9
1972–76	41.7	45.5
1977–81	40.3	57.1
1982–86	63.3	86.5
1987–91	83.2	83.9
1992–96	96.1	97.4

Note: Wages are imputed for those who did not work 40+ weeks or 35+ hours. The imputation includes the usual demographic factors—age, race, education—as well as weeks worked and usual hours per week (bottom coded at 35). To preserve dispersion, the imputation also includes a randomly selected empirical residual from the full-time/full-year sample used to generate the fitted values. College graduates include those with postgraduate education. The wage used for college graduates is a fixedweight average of the average for those with exactly 16 years of schooling and the average for those with more.

Over the past thirty years, Table 1 reveals, the rewards of being well educated have grown strikingly. The differentials of the 1990s are far greater than in the 1960s. This is true whether we examine the wage disadvantage experienced by high school dropouts (shown in the top panel of Table 1), the advantage those with some college (the center panel) had over high school graduates, or the advantage enjoyed by college graduates (bottom panel). After a brief and slight decline in the mid-to-late 1970s, the college wage premium for men has continued to grow and is now at the highest level at any time in the entire postwar period. In their first decade out of school, young male college graduates currently earn roughly twice as much as high school graduates, a premium almost double that of three decades earlier, and one as great for blacks as for whites.

Table 2 Ratios of Weekly Wages, 90th Percentile/10th Percentile (Ratios are measured relative to the 1967 value, 3.38, for white men)

	men		women
*Years*	*White*	*Black*	*White*	*Black*
1967–71	1.00	1.16	0.99	1.51
1972–76	1.13	1.17	0.96	1.10
1977–81	1.29	1.28	0.96	0.99
1982–86	1.56	1.53	1.09	1.06
1987–91	1.61	1.62	1.21	1.17
1992–96	1.75	1.72	1.30	1.24

Note: As in Table 1, wages are imputed for those men not full-time/full-year. However, observations for women are restricted to full-time/full-year. The centile location is 100n/(N+1). The average for centiles 5.5 - 14.5 is the first decile wage; the average for centiles 85.5 - 94.5 is the ninth decile wage.

While the wages of college graduates were rising relative to those of high school graduates, the wages of high school dropouts were falling relative to those of high school graduates. Again, there are no major racial differences in the pattern. Education is paying ever larger dividends in the labor market.

These figures are averages. A more refined way of looking at recent trends in wage inequality is provided in Table 2. In the years 1967–1971, white men at the 90th centile (at the bottom of the top tenth of the wage distribution, that is) earned 3.38 times as much per week as white men at the 10th centile (at the top of the bottom tenth of the distribution). Black men near the top of the earnings distribution had an even bigger advantage over those close to the bottom than the 3.38 figure for whites; the wage difference between black males at the 10th and 90th centiles was 16 percent higher than it was for whites.

What has changed since the 1960s? The phenomenal growth in wage inequality among men over the next three decades is the most important trend visible in Table 2. By the 1990s, the spread between the 10th and the 90th centiles was approximately 75 percent greater than it had been 25–30 years earlier for both white and black men.

This increase in the dispersion of wages means that wages that were below the mean were falling relative to the mean, while wages above the mean were rising relative to the mean; the lower the wage, the greater the relative decline, and the higher the wage, the greater the relative increase. If the increased dispersion of wages shown in Table 2 was equally the result of rising real wages for those at the top and falling real wages for those at the bottom—probably not far from the truth—it would mean that the purchasing power of the 90th centile wage increased 37.5 percent, while the 10th centile wage fell 37.5 percent between the late 1960s and the mid-1990s.

The trend toward increased inequality was much less pronounced for female workers. The increase in wage dispersion was 30 percent for white women, well under half of that for men of both races. Among black women, somewhat puzzlingly, inequality was at its greatest at the beginning of the period studied, in 1967–1971.1 It then fell to the same level as that for white women and grew thereafter at the same slow pace as among white women.

Racial Differences in Wages

In an earlier paper, James P. Smith and I compared the wage position of black men relative to white men using the 1940–1980 decennial U.S. Censuses. Comparing ratios of average wages, we found remarkable progress for black men during the 1940s, followed by a distinct slowing in the 1950s. In the 1960s, the wages of blackmen again increased substantially more than those of whites.

Table 3 Median Weekly Wages of Full-Time Year-Round Workers

(Wages are PCE deflated and measured relative to 1967 values for white men)

	men		women
*Years*	*White*	*Black*	*White*	*Black*
1967–71	106.1	71.5	58.9	46.6
1972–76	109.2	76.0	63.3	56.7
1977–81	104.6	73.0	63.9	60.4
1982–86	98.4	65.1	67.7	63.5
1987–91	97.6	66.6	71.0	65.7
1992–96	92.9	66.1	72.8	65.5

Note: Wages are imputed for men who were not full-time (usual hours less than 35 per week) or fullyear (less than 40 weeks worked). Observations for women are restricted to those who were full-time/ full-year.

What has happened since? In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the sharp growth in wage dispersion would lead us to expect that the black/white ratio of average wages would fall because wages were becoming more disperse and the average wage of blacks was below that of whites. This gloomy scenario has not come about. Black males have not fallen further behind whites; they have made further gains, though not large ones. And black women have improved their economic position quite spectacularly.

Table 3 sets forth the evidence on median wages indexed to 1967 values for white men (i.e., the 1967 average wage for them is 100.0). For white men, the 1967–1971 average of 106.1 had fallen to 92.9 by 1992–1996. This represents a 12.4 percent drop in real wages over this thirty-year period.2

The 1967–1971 median wage earned by black men was 71.5 percent of that of white males in 1967, and it fell to 66.1 percent for the most recent interval, a decline of 7.6 percent. Over the three decades, the median wages of black and white men moved on approximate parallel paths. Both were declining somewhat, though the drop was a bit less for black men than for white men.

The picture for women, white and black, is much brighter. Instead of declining or remaining stagnant, the median wage of black women compared with that of white males in 1967 increased by a remarkable 40.6 percent over the next three decades. For white women, the gain over the same period was a healthy 23.6 percent.

These are significant facts, but no single measure of black/white wage differentials (“the” gap) is adequate. Table 4 uses an alternative, more complex method for comparing wages of black men and black and white women to the wages of white men. Table 4 is divided into four panels. Panel A compares wages of all black men with those of white men. In panel B, the wages of black men are matched to those of white men of the same age and education. Panels C and D compare black women and white women, respectively, with white men.

The top row of each of panel gives as a reference the position of white men in their own wage distribution. If, for example, we assign each man a wage centile, analogous to a test score percentile, then because there would be equal numbers at each centile from 0 to 100, the average would be 50. The next three measures provide, respectively, population percentages exceeding the three wage quartiles, the 25th, 50th, and 75th centiles. In the referenced distribution, 75 percent of white men have wages above the first quartile simply because that defines the first quartile. Similarly, 50 percent exceed the median or second quartile, and 25 percent exceed the third quartile.

The first point of comparison is the average centile location of the wages of other groups in the wage distribution of white men. In 1967– 1971, the average centile location of black men in the distribution of white men’s wages was 27.2. That means that if we were to select a number of white men at random for comparison with an equal number of randomly selected black men in those years, the black man has the higher wage in only 27.2 percent of the pairs. Conversely, in 72.8 percent of the pairs the white man would come out on top.

Table 4 Comparisons with Weekly Wages of White Men: Centile Averages and Percentages Exceeding Indicated Quartiles in the Wage Distribution of White Men

		quartile
*Years*	*Average centile*	*First*	*Second*	*Third*
a. all black men, uncorrected for age and education
Reference	50.0	75.0	50.0	25.0
1967–71	27.2	41.8	19.7	7.0
1972–76	30.4	48.1	22.7	7.3
1977–81	33.3	52.8	26.4	8.9
1982–86	33.3	53.0	25.8	8.9
1987–91	34.7	54.9	28.4	10.4
1992–96	36.5	58.0	30.8	11.3
b. all black men, matched on age and education
Reference	50.0	75.0	50.0	25.0
1967–71	31.4	47.6	24.9	10.2
1972–76	34.5	53.8	28.1	11.1
1977–81	36.5	57.5	30.6	11.4
1982–86	35.8	57.0	28.6	10.5
1987–91	37.2	58.4	31.4	12.5
1992–96	38.8	59.8	34.3	14.2
c. full-time/year-round black women
Reference	50.0	75.0	50.0	25.0
1967–71	11.9	15.1	4.7	0.7
1972–76	18.0	26.0	7.3	1.6
1977–81	24.0	38.5	11.9	2.4
1982–86	30.4	51.7	18.2	3.8
1987–91	32.2	54.4	22.2	5.0
1992–96	35.2	60.2	26.4	7.5
d. full-time/year-round white women
Reference	50.0	75.0	50.0	25.0
1967–71	17.7	23.8	7.9	2.2
1972–76	21.6	31.9	10.1	2.5
1977–81	26.1	42.7	13.5	3.3
1982–86	33.2	56.7	22.2	5.6
1987–91	35.8	59.9	27.6	8.1
1992–96	39.5	66.7	33.1	10.9

note: The reference line shows corresponding comparisons of white men with themselves.

Things have changed modestly for the better in the years since. The probability of being the higher-paid worker increased for black men from 27.2 percent to 36.5 percent by 1992–1996. This was a gain of more than a third during a comparatively short period.

In addition to the average centile, the table provides three other measures, showing, respectively, the percentages of each group whose wages exceed the three quartiles of the reference, white men’s wage distribution. Among black men in the initial 1967–1971 period, 41.8 percent had wages in excess of the first-quartile wage for white men. Thus, a substantial majority of black men (100.0 - 41.8 = 58.2 percent) had wages no higher than those of white males in the bottom quarter. Only 19.7 percent of black men had wages above the median (which is the second quartile) for white men, and a mere 7.0 percent had wages in the top quarter of the white male distribution.

Over the following three decades, black men made impressive progress. The proportion with wages in the lowest one-fourth of the white men’s distribution fell from 58 percent to 42 percent. The fraction of black men with wages above the median for white men jumped from 19.7 percent to 30.8 percent, an increase of more than 50 percent. The proportion of black men whose wages put them in the top quarter of the white male distribution rose by 61 percent, from 7.0 to 11.3 percent.

Panel B of Table 4 refines the comparison by considering black and white men of the same age and education. The first point to notice is that the convergence of black and white wages within the age-education matched populations suggests that the gains just noted are not exclusively a matter of blacks “catching up” in the amount of schooling they acquired. They remain even after the effects of education on wages are removed from consideration. By 1992–1996, controlling for age and education made little difference to the results, suggesting that the gains resulting from the increase in schooling received by the average black male worker have been largely exhausted.

The matched age-education comparisons continue to reveal large black/white differences in male wages. We can look to the past and be proud of the obvious gains that have been achieved. With respect to racial differences in wages, the United States of today bears only scant resemblance to the U.S. portrayed in Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 classic, An American Dilemma. But in spite of enormous progress, the existing differentials among men are so large that it is inconceivable that we have achieved anything approximating full equality of opportunity.

If the economic progress made by black men in postwar America can be considered rapid, then the gains for women revealed in the two lower panels of Table 4 can only be described as spectacular. The proportion of African American women with wages in the top quartile has multiplied tenfold in only thirty years (the figure jumped from 0.7 to 7.5)! The average black woman worker was at the 12th centile of the white male distribution just a generation ago; now she is at the 35th centile. Equally striking, just 15.1 percent of working black women had wages above the bottom quartile for white males; by the mid-1990s, fully six out of ten were above that line. In the late 1960s, African American women were far behind not only white men but also black men in the wage competition. By now they have narrowed the gap between them and white men, and have just about caught up with African American men; their average centile in the 1990s was 35.2, only trivially different from the 36.5 for black men.

White women have also moved upward very rapidly. The rate of increase has been a little slower than the spectacular gains of their black sisters, but they started out ahead of them and are still a little ahead in wages. The differences are small, however, and would be smaller still if the higher average educational levels of white women were taken into account.3

Educational and Occupational Progress

Table 5 Changes, 1967–1971 to 1992–1996, in the Representation of Black Men, Black Women, and White Women

Percentages representation in the white men weeks wage distribution

	quartile
*Group/period*	*First*	*Second*	*Third*	*Fourth*
a. all black men, uncorrected for age and education
1992–96	42.0	27.2	19.5	11.3
1967–71	58.2	22.1	12.7	7.0
Change	-16.2	5.1	6.8	4.3
b. all black men, matched on age and education
1992–96	40.2	25.5	20.1	14.2
1967–71	52.4	22.7	14.7	10.2
Change	-12.2	2.8	5.4	4.0
c. full-time/year-round black women
1992–96	39.8	33.8	18.9	37.5
1967–71	84.9	10.4	4.0	0.7
Change	-45.1	23.4	14.9	6.8
d. full-time/year-round white women
1992–96	33.3	33.6	22.2	10.9
1967–71	76.2	15.9	5.7	2.2
Change	-42.9	17.7	16.5	8.7

source: Table 4.

The advances that black men and women (especially the latter) have made toward parity in wages would not have been possible had they not made strong gains in education. Table 5 shows how full-time school enrollment rates for young men and women aged 16–24 have changed in recent decades. The enrollment data show smooth upward trends for black men and women and for white women as well, with all three groups narrowing or eliminating the large gap between them and white men that existed at the end of the 1960s. White men aged 16–24 were then considerably more likely than members of the other three groups to be attending school full time. Three decades later, the school enrollment rate for white men was one point lower than it had been a generation earlier. The rate for black men rose by 5 points in the period, that for white women by 8.3 points, and that for black women by a striking 11.1 points. By this measure, only black men are now significantly behind white men, and the gap between the two groups has been cut in half.

Table 6 Trends and Gender Differences in Post–High School Education

	percentages of degrees awarded to African Aamericans a		number of female/male recipients
*Degrees awarded*	*Men*	*Women*	*Black*	*White*
1976–1977 academic year
Associates	7.3	9.1	1.16	0.92
Bachelor’s	5.1	7.9	1.33	0.84
Master’s	4.6	8.9	1.70	0.91
Ph.D.	3.1	6.0	0.63	0.34
Professional	3.4	6.5	0.44	0.22
1995–1996 academic year
Associates	8.2	10.1	1.89	1.51
Bachelor’s	6.3	9.1	1.77	1.21
Master’s	4.7	7.7	2.05	1.38
Ph.D.	2.7	5.1	1.24	0.83
Professional	4.7	9.1	1.38	0.66

note: According to the CPS, African American men represented 10.9 and 13.0 percent of all men aged 24 years in 1976 and 1995, respectively; African American women represented 12.3 and 15.1 present of all women in the two respective years.

a Numbers refer to percentages within gender.

Table 6 shows the percentages of college and professional degrees that were awarded to African American men and women in the most recent year (1995–1996) and the earliest year that such data are available (1975– 1976), and also examines the gender balance among both black and white degree recipients.

In each category, from associates (i.e., two-year college degrees) to Ph.D.s and degrees from professional schools (law, medicine, business, architecture, etc.), the proportion of African Americans rose in almost every category over this period of a little less than two decades. However, the black share of the population was increasing at roughly the same rate, and the increase was largely due to that fact.

Table 7 Changes in Fields of Concentration Among African American College and Professional Degree Recipients

	men		women
Major field	Percent of 1981 graduates	Ratio 1996/1981 graduates	Percent of 1981 graduates	Ratio 1996/1981 graduates
*Bachelor’s degree*
Business	26.5	1.19	19.1	1.81
Education	10.6	0.72	19.1	0.77
Engineering	8.2	1.51	1.2	3.15
*Master’s degree*
Business	25.2	1.68	7.3	3.90
Education	33.5	0.97	60.0	1.00
Engineering	3.6	2.38	0.3	6.26
*First professional degree*
Medicine (M.D.)	25.1	0.87	28.0	1.85
Law (L.L.B. or J.D.)	51.1	1.28	57.9	2.50

Note: According to the CPS, the number of African American men aged 24 increased by 37 percent between 1981 and 1996, while the number of women increased by 35 percent.

What stands out is that women, black and white, were catching up with and indeed passing men in most of these categories. In 1976–1977, black women were already earning more associate, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees than were black males. By 1995–1996, they were far ahead of them in every category, earning 77 percent more bachelor’s, for example, and more than twice as many master’s degrees. This obviously is a major reason why African American females have made such impressive wage gains. It is also striking that white females are now collecting 51 percent more associate degrees, 21 percent more bachelor’s degrees, and 38 percent more master’s than are their male counterparts. Again, this is clearly reflected in the higher paychecks they have been collecting.

Table 8. K–12 School Teachers as a Percentage of Total Employment of College Graduates

	men		women
*Years*	*White*	*Black*	*White*	*Black*
1967–71	9.8	23.1	48.2	59.0
1972–76	9.0	20.1	42.7	50.4
1977–81	7.3	10.2	31.3	37.1
1982–86	6.0	11.1	25.5	31.2
1987–91	5.3	8.7	21.5	24.0
1992–96	5.0	6.7	20.9	19.6

Note: Percentages refer to fractions of aggregate annual hours reported by those college graduates whose occupation is teacher.

Table 7 provides evidence on changes in fields of concentration for black students in higher education between 1981 and 1996, the earliest and most recent years for which such data are available. It also shows the growth between 1981 and 1996 in the number of degrees collected by African Americans in these fields. The most striking change evident here is the shift of black students out of education into more remunerative fields. The biggest gains, again, were made by African American women.

More detail on this shift out of education is supplied in Table 8. In the period 1967–1971, almost a quarter of all black male college graduates were employed as elementary or secondary school teachers, and a stunning six out of ten black females with a college education. The proportions have plunged since then, dropping to just 6.7 percent for black men and 19.6 percent for black women.

Perhaps the most outstanding indication of expanding opportunities is the reduction in the proportion of blackwomen employed in occupations that the Census Bureau classifies as devoted to “personal service.” In the 1967–1971 period, 24.1 percent of all hours worked by African American women were in personal service (17.0 percent in private households). By 1992–1996, the concentration of black women in personal service work had plunged by three-quarters, to a mere 5.6 percent.

Although there was no similar concentration of black men in one sector of employment in the 1960s, the three decades since have seen a parallel story of occupational movement on their part away from traditionally lowpaying jobs (agriculture, personal services, service stations) into jobs more representative of the distribution of jobs for all men.

Table 9 Full-Time Employment Rates, Ages 16–24 and 30–44

Percent employed full-time

	men		women
*Years*	*White*	*Black*	*White*	*Black*
	ages 16–24
1967–71	45.4	43.4	34.7	29.6
1972–76	48.2	38.4	36.7	26.3
1977–81	49.6	34.2	39.0	25.2
1982–86	45.0	29.9	37.8	23.3
1987–91	47.5	34.3	39.4	27.9
1992–96	45.3	31.6	36.9	27.0
	ages 30–44
1967–71	91.1	85.0	37.1	50.8
1972–76	89.1	79.7	40.7	51.2
1977–81	88.3	77.9	48.6	56.8
1982–86	85.8	72.9	54.8	60.1
1987–91	87.7	76.3	60.6	64.0
1992–96	87.2	75.2	61.6	62.9

note: Numbers are simple averages of single-year-of-age-specific full-time-equivalent (FTE) employment rates. The individual FTE is weeks worked/52 for those who usually worked at least 35 hours. For those who usually worked less, weeks worked are each counted as one-half.

Half Full

Having gone to great lengths to illustrate the positive, and I absolutely believe it dominates, I close on a negative note. Table 9 indicates trends and levels of full-time equivalent employment rates for men and women aged 16–24 and 30–44. In the late 1960s, black males aged 16–24 and 30–44 were only a bit less likely than their white counterparts to have full-time jobs. In the three decades since then, a substantial gap has widened for both age groups. The percentage point difference among the younger group has grown from 2 to almost 14 points, and for the older group, from 6 to 12 points. One reason for this disturbing development is the continuing concentration of large numbers of African Americans in decaying innercity neighborhoods from which businesses have fled. This is a serious problem for society.

Black women have not been affected nearly as much by this trend, perhaps because more of them have been staying at home and developing skills that are in demand. The employment rate for black females aged 16– 24 has dropped only 2.6 points over the period, and for black women in their thirties and early forties it has climbed by a dozen points.

How much of the change described above can be attributed by affirmative action employment policies? I personally believe that Bound, Freeman, and others have placed too much weight on such policies, both in terms of the 1960s gains for African Americans and the mixed picture for black males since then. James P. Smith and I have written extensively on this subject. Though it is difficult to be precise, there are excellent reasons to believe that, aside from a short-run blip in the relative wages of young male college graduates in the early 1970s, affirmative action operated more to consolidate gains in the economic status of black Americans and to maintain long-established trends, trends firmly founded in cohort improvements in the quality and quantity of schooling, than to abruptly change underlying relations.

Where does this leave us? I suppose the first and most obvious point is that the progress we have seen in the relative economic status of black Americans was well under way before the modern antidiscrimination legislation and the various forms of enforcement were introduced.

School desegregation was prohibited with the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954. Even so, many desegregation plans were not introduced until the 1970s (Light and Welch 1987), and states like South Carolina and Mississippi regularly compiled and published “Statistics of Negro Schools” until well into the 1960s. It usually takes a long time for the effect of a court decision or of new legislation to percolate through the system.

Many of us believe that the primary effect of social legislation, including interpretations of earlier legislation by the courts, is to consolidate and tie up the loose ends of changes that have already been realized. The clearest example that I know is a study by Landes and Solmon (1972) of compulsory schooling legislation. This legislation took almost a full century to spread among the U.S. states, and the best predictor of the timing of adoption of a law that required attendance in school up to a given age was the date that voluntary attendance in the state reached 90 percent. In effect, the laws forced the relatively small trailing minority to adopt the behavior of the much larger majority.

I believe that a similar argument can be made for the school desegregation decision. It clearly did not take the ninety years from emancipation to the Brown decision for desegregation to be challenged. Why 1954 and not 1864? Actually, following the prohibition of slavery in 1863, there is some evidence of a trend toward improvement in the quality of the separate and unequal black schools. This trend ended, and the quality of Southern schools attended by America’s black children reached a nadir over a couple of decades following the Supreme Court’s “Slaughterhouse” decisions holding that the enforcement of civil rights was the purview of the individual states. Then, inexplicably except for the steady stream of litigation from the NAACP, things got better. As measured by such nominal characteristics as teacher salaries, students per teacher, the number of school days each year, attendance rates, expenditures per pupil, etc., segregated schools for blacks and whites were more equal in 1954 than at any earlier time in the twentieth century (Welch 1974).

Regarding the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Title VII of that Act, which prohibited discrimination by employers on the basis of race, national origin, and gender, similar observations hold for the relative economic status of African Americans (Smith 1984). We saw changes that, by historical standards, should be regarded as remarkable before the legislation could have had much effect. In fact, we now know that at the time Myrdal’s dire warnings were written, black/white income ratios were rapidly increasing.

The ingredients of progress were partly the rural-to-urban migration that followed the growing divergence between labor productivity on- versus off-the-farm. There was also convergence in schooling levels. Over four decades, the gap among young men entering the job market fell from five to less than two years. The cause of the convergence seems to be convergence in the quality of schooling—the resources poured into the schools— that flowed through to the wage premium associated from added schooling. Even “free” schooling is expensive because there are alternative uses of time.We learned from the 1960 Census that, among those schooled in the 1920s and 1930s, an extra year of schooling was worth about 20 percent as much for a black man as for a white man (Welch 1976). By 1970, we saw that those entering the job market in the 1960s with newer and, presumably, more equal quality of schooling received approximately equal returns. Over a short time, added schooling became an important route to higher income, and the response, in terms of years in school, was dramatic.

At this point I should reveal a bias that I have had since I first began trying to understand the phenomena of racial discrimination and of race differences in income. It is trivial to understand how we can use the body politic to discriminate with publicly provided services. Anyone with a scintilla of concern who reads the historical record of the resources provided, including monitoring, to segregated schools cannot doubt that the instrument is blunt and effective. Discrimination in employment is harder to understand.

A dollar earned does not change its color depending on the color of the employees who assist in earning it.

This brings me back to the beginning of this section; the first and most obvious point is that the progress we have seen in the relative economic status of black Americans was well under way before the modern antidiscrimination legislation and the various forms of enforcement were introduced. Since the introduction of the new legislation, the trends have been more or less what had previously been established. On this basis, I believe that it is hard to argue for a major role of the legislation regarding employment discrimination. I am personally an advocate of such legislation, but I think its role has been more that of consolidation than a source of fundamental change. I should like to believe that the gains we have seen in the relative economic status of black Americans have resulted from positive responses to more equal opportunity.

Half empty? Of course! There is no shortage of problems to occupy all advocates of social justice. But, half full as well. All is not bleak; there is reason for pride. We are a diverse people, but differences between demographically distinct groups tend to erode over time.

Notes

1. Recall that the CPS data underlying these calculations are samples and are subject to luck-of-the-draw sampling noise. There is no reason of which I am aware to believe that the initial observation reflects a fundamental differential.

2. Wages are deflated by the Gross National Product deflation for consumer expenditures (all goods). See the Economic Report of the President, 1998.

3. Caution may be in order for the gender comparisons, however. The wage distributions for men refer to average weekly wages for men working full time. Men who work a greater number of weeks each year typically earn higher wages than do those who work fewer weeks, and I have used this fact to impute wages for men who either do not work or work part time (less than 35 hours per week). The distributions summarized in Table 4 include all men with observed wages for those working full time and estimated wages for others. It is less clear that women who work either part year or part time would earn less than their full-time/full-year peers. I restrict the observations of women’s wages to those who were full time and full year (at least 40 weeks worked).

References

Bound, John, and Richard Freeman. “WhatWent Wrong?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 107, no. 1 (February 1992): 201–32.

Council of Economic Advisors, Economic Report of the President.Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998.

Juhn, Chinhui, Kevin M. Murphy, and Brooks Pierce. “Accounting for the Slowdown in Black-White Wage Convergence.” In Marvin Kosters, ed., Workers and Their Wages (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1991).

Landes, William M., and Lewis C. Solmon. “Compulsory Schooling Legislation: An Economic Analysis of Law and Social Change in the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Economic History 32, no. 1 (March 1972): 54–91.

Light, Audrey, and Finis Welch. New Evidence on School Desegregation. Prepared for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Clearinghouse Publication 92. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, December 1987.

Smith, James P. “Race and Human Capital.” American Economic Review 74, no. 4 (September 1984): 685–98.

Smith, James P., and Finis Welch. “Black Economic Progress After Myrdal.” Journal of Economic Literature 27, no. 2 ( June 1989): 519–64. Reprinted in Orley Ashenfelter and Kevin Hallock, eds., Labor Economics (London: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1994).

———. “Racial Discrimination: A Human Capital Perspective.” In G. Mangum and P. Philips, eds., Three Worlds of Labor Economics (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1988). U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Digest of Education Statistics,Washington, D.C., 1976–1998.

Welch, Finis. “Education and Racial Discrimination.” In O. Ashenfelter and A. Rees, eds., Discrimination in Labor Markets (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974).

———. “Employment Quotas for Minorities.” Journal of Political Economy 84, no. 4 (August 1976): S105–S139.

==============================

Discrimination in Public Contracting

GEORGE R. LA NOUE

How much discrimination is there in contemporary public contracting in the United States? Because these contracts cover almost everything available in commercial markets and because virtually all governments need to make purchases and have the authority to do so, no definitive answer can be given to a question of such scope and complexity. Nevertheless, forming a reliable estimate is essential for at least two reasons.

First, public purchasing is one of government’s most important functions. Its effective use or potential abuse can have a substantial impact on governmental efficiency, the income of particular companies and communities, and the financial burden on taxpayers. Current purchases by the federal government are about $180 billion a year, while state and local governments purchase about $465 billion more. It would be intolerable if governments used this formidable economic power to discriminate against businesses because of the race, ethnicity, or gender of their owners.

Second, in recent years public purchasing practices have undergone enormous scrutiny to determine whether or not discrimination exists. There may be more publicly accessible information measuring discrimination in this area of public life than in any other. A multitude of studies about federal, state, and local public contracting have been completed that permit not only an assessment of their conclusions but also an evaluation of the political context of accusations and denials regarding discrimination.

The Development and Defense of MBE Programs

The source of the recent attention paid to discrimination in public contracting is the 1989 Supreme Court’s decision in City of Richmond v. Croson.1 In that case, the Court confronted one example of the hundreds of state and local minority business enterprise (MBE) programs that had been developed in the preceding decade. These programs sought to place firms that were certified as being owned by designated minorities (usually African American, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American) in favored positions for public contracts. Some programs included womenowned businesses (WBEs) as well.

A variety of preferential techniques have been used. Certain contracts were set aside for MBE firms or were given price preferences in bidding against non-MBE firms. Often non-MBE prime contractors were required to hire a certain percentage of MBEsubcontractors to meet a goal necessary for contract award.

In addition, since 1976, a number of federal MBE programs have been established.2 The oldest is the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) program, which sets aside about $4 billion of federal contracts a year for MBEs. There are also 10 percent MBE goal requirements in a wide variety of federal programs, including the $210 billion 1998 highway program. In October 1998, the Clinton administration also began a program of 10 percent price preferences for MBE bidders on contracts covering about 76 percent of all federal purchases.3

Sometimes these MBE programs were seen by their sponsors as economic development stimuli for minority communities, sometimes as remedies for general racial injustices, and sometimes as payoffs to emerging political power in minority communities. The policies usually reflected symbolic or redistributive politics and rarely were designed to respond to clearly identified problems. There was very little scholarly analysis of them, and bureaucratic reports covering them were often self-serving or incomplete. The consequences of altering conventional public purchasing programs by MBE programs were almost never evaluated. Which firms were helped, which were hurt, and how much these programs cost were questions almost never asked.

Croson, which covered state and local programs, and Adarand v. Pen˜a in 1995, which applied the constitutional standard of strict scrutiny to federal MBE programs, changed all that.4 In Croson, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor stated that before a local jurisdiction could use racial classifications it was necessary to make

proper findings . . . to define the scope of the injury and the extent of the remedy necessary to cure its effects. Such findings also serve to assure all citizens that the deviation from the norm of equal treatment of all racial and ethnic groups is a temporary matter, a measure taken in the service of the goal of equality itself.5

Justice O’Connor further noted that the judiciary would have a responsibility to examine those findings:

Absent searching judicial inquiry into the justification for such race-based measures, there is simply no way of determining what classifications are “benign” or “remedial” and what classifications are in fact motivated by illegitimate notions of racial inferiority or simple racial politics.6

Since the Croson decision, more than 145 state and local jurisdictions have commissioned so-called “disparity studies” to determine whether they had a sufficient evidentiary basis to initiate, maintain, or expand MBE programs. At least $65 million has been spent on this activity.7 Unfortunately, many of these studies do not meet federal court standards. For example, Judge James Graham of the Southern District of Ohio, Eastern Division, held:

A municipality which is considering the enactment of legislation which creates race-based and gender-based preferences in the award of public contracts must, in fairness to all of its citizens, fairly and fully investigate the issue of whether or not discrimination has actually occurred in the employment of minorities and females in the construction industry in its community and whether such discrimination has actually occurred in its award of contracts and in the award of subcontracts by the prime contractors it has employed. Only if a thorough and impartial investigation of the facts supports a finding that discrimination has occurred is the municipality justified in considering a scheme in which some of its citizens and firms are excluded from competing for a portion of its total contract dollars.8

Many disparity studies are neither “thorough” nor “impartial.”

Flawed Conclusions

At first glance the disparity studies’ consensus about discrimination in public contracting seems virtually unanimous and quite damning. The New York City study concluded: “In our view, the cumulative effects of discrimination by banks, bonding companies, general contractors, private companies, and public agencies is responsible for the gross underrepresentation of businesses operated by minorities and women in construction, services, and commodities.”9 But one might be a little suspicious about this sweeping conclusion because the identical language appears in at least two other studies completed by the same consultants regarding very different jurisdictions (San Antonio, Texas, and Hayward County, California.) 10

The federal government has made similar conclusions. At the behest of the Justice Department, the Urban Institute analyzed 58 disparity studies and concluded that MBEs received only 57 cents for every public contracting dollar they were expected to receive.11 When the United States Commerce Department analyzed federal procurement, they found DBEs underutilized in 51 of 74 Standard Industrial Codes.12

But on closer analysis, these statistical conclusions appear to be deeply flawed. Every time disparity studies have been challenged at trial, judges have found them unreliable, and a number of jurisdictions have settled cases rather than subject their studies to judicial scrutiny.13 In Croson, the Court provided guidelines for an appropriate statistical analysis by stating:

Where there is a significant statistical disparity between the number of qualified minority contractors willing and able to perform a particular service and the number of such contractors actually engaged by the locality or the locality’s prime contractors, an inference of discriminatory exclusion could arise.14 (emphasis added)

In short, to infer discrimination, the statistical comparison must be between comparable contractors—an apples-to-apples comparison of qualified, willing, and able firms. Partly because of a substantial growth rate in recent years, MBEs are in general smaller and newer businesses. To assume that utilization in government contracts of MBEs and non-MBEs, which include large stockholder-owned corporations, should be the same may create a false inference of discrimination when statistical analysis based on headcounts of firms is carried out. Indeed, the Urban Institute acknowledged that probability in a private report to the Justice Department and then ignored its own conclusion in its public report.15

Anecdotal Research

In addition to statistics, most disparity studies collect anecdotes about discrimination. Properly done, anecdotes could be helpful in understanding the statistics and in pinpointing where, if at all, the discrimination exists. In practice, the anecdotal sections of most disparity studies reach conclusions of discrimination that are almost inevitable given the flawed methods used but that nevertheless serve to buttress MBE programs.

Generally two methods are used to gather anecdotal information: surveys and interviews. The disparity study surveys have been plagued with low response rates and poorly designed questions. Rarely have the surveys had a 20 percent response rate. When 80 percent of potential respondents throw the survey into the wastebasket, there is always the possibility that the tiny minority that does respond may be atypical. One federal court described the problem this way:

First, whether discrimination has occurred is often complex and requires a knowledge of the perspectives of both parties involved in an incident as well as knowledge about how comparably placed persons of other races, ethnicities, and gender have been treated. Persons providing anecdotes rarely have such information. What looks like discrimination may involve nothing more than aggressive business behavior to overcome barriers faced by all new or small businesses.

Second, when the respondent is made aware of the political purpose of questions or when questions are worded in such a way as to suggest the answers the inquirer wishes to receive, “interviewer bias” can occur. In addition, “response bias” may be a problem. The persons most likely to answer the survey are those who feel the most strongly about a problem, even though they may not be representative of the larger group. Third, individuals who have a vested interest in preserving a benefit or entitlement may be motivated to view events in a manner that justifies the policy. Consequently, it is important that both sides are heard and that there are other measures of the accuracy of the claims. Attempts to investigate and verify the anecdotal evidence should be made.16

The most important question is whether the anecdotes about discrimination are true. Some may be, while others are perhaps the consequence of honest misunderstanding or the result of purposeful exaggeration. Almost no disparity study has ever discussed whether the incidents it reported were factually correct, although they are usually described not just as feelings or perceptions but as facts that characterize the universe of business transactions in which discrimination is rampant. The DJ Miller company, which has completed scores of disparity studies, at least mentions that its anecdotes are “unsubstantiated” because “time did not permit a full investigation of these perceptions of discrimination during the study period time frame.”17 Asked whether the anecdotal information contained in the $600,000 Memphis–Shelby County study was true, the project manager testified that he didn’t know that it was “untrue.”18 The chief architect of millions of dollars of disparity studies completed by the National Economic Research Associates was even more succinct. He testified:

Q. Did NERA follow up the information in the surveys to determine if any of the allegations of discrimination in the survey are true?
A. No.
Q. Do you know if any of them are true?
A. No.
Q. Do you know if any of the anecdotes in any of the Denver-related studies are true?
A. No.
Q. Do you know if any of the anecdotes in any NERA study with which you have been connected is true?
A. No.19

Some allegations of discrimination cannot be verified because they are “he said–she said” incidents. But when a company claims it was the low bidder on a public contract or could not get on a vendor list, that can be verified. Yet the disparity consultants do not check their facts, and the governments often cannot. Most studies regard the sources of anecdotal information as confidential and will not turn over transcripts or interview notes, even with names deleted, to the public sponsors that paid for the study. Therefore, cities or other governmental authorities involved usually know very little about the reputation of the person making the charge of discrimination or its context. Nevertheless, as sponsors of the disparity study, they will act as though all the complaints are true.

The use of anecdotal evidence is strange and alarming. On what other subject would governments consistently commission “research” that consists of rumors or is based on unverified sources? In what other area of public life would millions of dollars of tax funds be used to subsidize the gathering and publication of damaging allegations by one racial or ethnic group about another with so little concern for whether these complaints are factually accurate?

The willingness of governments and consultants to engage in this activity is a telling sign that most of these studies are results oriented—that is, they are designed to support a predetermined conclusion.20 Finding discrimination is a prerequisite to maintaining or expanding an MBE program, and that is what many of these studies are designed to do. As the Eleventh Circuit found, after reviewing the context and conclusions of the Dade County disparity studies: “It is clear as window glass that the County gave not the slightest consideration to any alternative to a Hispanic affirmative action program. Awarding construction contracts is what the County wanted to do, and all it considered doing, insofar as Hispanics were concerned.”21

Judges regularly assess the reliability of evidence, and fortunately they have been highly skeptical of the anecdotal information before them. In AGC v. Columbus, the federal district court established “Standards for the Collection of Anecdotal Evidence of Discrimination” and excoriated the consultants for bias in gathering anecdotes.22 Similarly, in a Dade County case, the judge complained:

Without corroboration, the Court cannot distinguish between allegations that in fact represent an objective assessment of the situation, and those that are fraught with heartfelt, but erroneous, interpretations of events and circumstances. The costs associated with the imposition of race, ethnicity, and gender preferences are simply too high to sustain a patently discriminatory program on such weak evidence.23

In a May 1998 decision, a court dismissed the anecdotes in the State of Florida’s disparity study and stated:

Individuals responding to FDOT’s telephone survey have described their perceptions about barriers to FDOT’s bidding procedures. But FDOT has presented no evidence to establish who, if anyone, in fact engaged in discriminatory acts against Black and Hispanic businesses. The record at best establishes nothing more than some ill-defined wrong caused by some unidentified wrongdoers; and under City of Richmond [Croson] that is not enough.24

The Future of MWBE Programs

The growth of minority- and women-owned businesses, propelled by basic demographic and economic factors, will continue regardless of the fate of MWBE programs. Between 1982 and 1992, according to the Census Bureau, the number of black-owned firms grew by 67 percent, Hispanic-owned firms by 189 percent, Asian-owned firms by 177 percent, women-owned firms by 162 percent, and non-MWBE firms by 24 percent. Perhaps MBE programs had an impact, but most firms market themselves in the private economy unaffected by public contracting programs.

Although firms owned by African Americans are the principal intended beneficiary of MWBE programs, those companies had the slowest growth rate of any MWBE group. There are now more than four times as many firms owned by Hispanics and Asian Americans and thirteen times as many owned by women than by blacks, which means that black firms will get decreasing shares of the benefits of MWBE programs in the future.

More time and money may have been spent in disparity studies investigating public contracting discrimination than in any other area of social research in our nation’s history. And yet after this enormous public expenditure, the studies have documented no pattern of discrimination against MBEs by government purchasing procedures, by prime contractors against subcontractors, or by professional and trade organizations. Indeed, the studies have almost never identified any agency, procurement officer, or private firms where discrimination took place. This does not mean that such problems will not be found in the future or that we as a society are discrimination-free any more than we are crime-free or pollution-free. Nevertheless, the news about public contracting is basically good.25 The procedures and ethics in the public procurement process are basically fair, in spite of sweeping politically motivated claims to the contrary.

The coalition politics that support MBE programs are not hard to understand, but what is not generally known is how few firms actually benefit from these policies.26 Disparity studies do not discuss this issue. Nevertheless, some data exist. For example, in Cincinnati, of the 682 identified MWBEs in City vendor lists, thirteen firms received 62 percent of all the contracts and 83 percent of the dollars going to MWBEs.27 Nationally there are over 2.2 million minority-owned businesses in the United States, but there are only about 6,000 8(a) certified firms—about 0.0025 percent of the total number of MBEs.28 As administered by the SBA, the 8(a) program functions to give very well-established minority-owned firms privileged access to large amounts of federal contracts. In 1995, in a report to Senator Sam Nunn (D-Georgia), the General Accounting Office stated:

As the value and number of 8(a) contracts continues to grow, the distribution of those contracts remains concentrated among a very small percentage of participating 8(a) firms, while a large percentage get no awards at all. This is a long-standing problem. For example, in fiscal year 1990, 50 firms representing fewer than 2 percent of all program participants obtained about 40 percent, or 1.5 billion, of the total of $4 billion awarded. Of additional concern is that, of the approximately 8,300 8(a) contracts awarded in fiscal 1990 and 1991 combined, 67 contracts were awarded competitively. In fiscal year 1994, the top 50 firms represented 1 percent of the program participants and obtained 25 percent or $1.1 billion, of the $4.37 billion awarded, while 56 percent of the firms got no awards.29

Further, in the 8(a) program, only a small percentage of these favored firms have ever graduated to be market competitive.

Even though litigation has exposed the statistical and anecdotal flaws in the disparity studies, the judicial process is arduous, expensive, and piecemeal. In the meantime, disparity studies with flaws equal to or greater than the ones found unreliable still serve as the basis for allocating billions of dollars in public contracts on the basis of the race and ethnicity of favored owners.

The problem with existing disparity studies is not just that most of them are technically defective. The more important issue is that they so often have made exaggerated claims of discrimination and failed to identify the forms of bias that might exist. They have supported preferential programs based on race and ethnicity and have rarely treated race-neutral solutions seriously. This is harmful to society in a number of ways. The wounds caused by racial and ethnic conflict are very deep in America. The healing process is difficult and uncertain but absolutely essential if we are to survive as a pluralistic society. Unfounded accusations of discrimination and thoughtless denials are both damaging.

Conclusions

Preference programs for MBEs have the potential to undermine the general safeguards built into the public purchasing process and to create a return to the era of contract patronage, this time built on racial connections. Politicians who believe that it is appropriate to set aside contracts for particular racial groups may be tempted to steer them to particular companies as well.

Assertions of generalized marketplace discrimination, “old boy networks,” and other nebulous forms of bias may actually retard the formation of minority businesses, especially among African Americans. Who would want to make the investment of capital and labor that a new business requires if they were convinced that discrimination was so prevalent that success was highly unlikely?

Further, if discrimination is everywhere, committed by everyone, then it may seem futile to try to eradicate it. Indeed, this is the argument of many MBE program advocates, who believe the appropriate response to allegations of discrimination by whites is preferences for nonwhites rather than enforcement of antidiscrimination laws. Where do such assumptions and policy responses lead in the long run? Can our country endure built on a premise that there is such widespread discrimination by whites that it can only be countered by broad preferences for nonwhites?

Reckless allegations of discrimination tend to produce blanket denials by those accused. Most whites believe that the overt forms of discrimination that characterized American institutions in the past have disappeared. In their place, procedures based on subtle subjective decisions that sometimes reflect biased assumptions often coexist institutionally with affirmative action policies that clearly discriminate against nonfavored classes. Disparity studies generally have failed to document either overt or subtle forms of discrimination and have ignored the effects of MBE preferences. Unless our society is prepared to require the most careful documentation of where discrimination actually exists and to evaluate the effects of preferential programs, we cannot construct the interracial coalitions necessary to enforce antidiscrimination laws vigorously and improve access and overcome disadvantages in public contracting or anywhere else.

Viewed from this perspective, the Supreme Court in Croson sent the right message by emphasizing the dangers of racial politics and stereotyped assumptions and by insisting on analyzing the appropriate data and remedying identified discrimination. Unless that is done, as Justice O’Connor declared, “The dream of a Nation of equal citizens where race is irrelevant to personal opportunity and achievement would be lost in a mosaic of shifting preferences based on unmeasurable claims of past wrongs.”30 That is not an appropriate fate for public contracting or any other area of American life.

Notes

1. 488 U.S. 469 (1989).

2. Federal programs often define the beneficiaries as Disadvantaged Businesses

(DBEs), but the definition of social disadvantage is based on identification with a

particular racial and ethnic minority. All persons identified with the following groups

are presumed to be disadvantaged: Black (a person having origins in any of the original

racial groups of Africa; Hispanic (a person of Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban,

Central or South American, or other Spanish or Portuguese origin or culture, regardless

of race); Native American (an American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, or Native Hawaiian);

Asian American, including Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei,

Japan, China, Taiwan, Laos, Cambodia (Kampuchea), Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines,

U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Republic of Palau), Republic of the Marshall

Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana

Islands, Guam, Samoa, Macao, Hong Kong, Fiji, Tonga, Kiribati, Tuvalu,Nauru, India,

Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, the Maldives Islands and Nepal. For a discussion

of these presumptions, see George R. La Noue and John C. Sullivan, “Presumptions

for Preferences: The Small Business Administration’s Decisions on Groups

Entitled to Affirmative Action,” Journal of Policy History 6, no.4 (fall 1994).

Three federal district courts have found unconstitutional the concept of presuming

that all members of particular racial and ethnic groups are disadvantaged or discriminated against for the purpose of awarding public contracts. Nevertheless, the concept

is still at the heart of almost every MBE program. See Adarand v. Pen˜a, 965 F. Supp.

1556, 1580 (D. Colo. 1997); Houston Contractors Association v. Metro Transit Authority,

954 F. Supp. 1013 (S.D. Tex. 1996); and In re Sherbrooke, 17 F. Supp. 2d 1026 (D. Minn.

1998). For a discussion of the issue of which group should receive preferences, see

George R. La Noue and John C. Sullivan, “Gross Presumptions: Determining Group

Eligibility for Federal Procurement Preferences,” Santa Clara Law Review 41 (winter 2000).

3. John Sullivan and Roger Clegg, “More Preferences for Minority Businesses,”

Wall Street Journal, August 24, 1998, p. A13.

4. 515 U.S. 200 (1995).

5. Croson, 488 U.S. at 510.

6. Ibid., at 493.

7. See two works by George R. La Noue, Local Officials Guide to Minority Business

Programs and Disparity Studies (National League of Cities, 1994), and “Social Sciences

and Minority Set-Asides,” Public Interest, Winter 1993.

8. Associated General Contractors of America v. City of Columbus, Order June 20,

1990, p. 10.

9. “The Utilization of Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprises by the

City of New York,” NERA, 1994, p. 129.

10. “The Utilization of Minority andWoman-Owned Business Enterprises in Bexar

County” (San Antonio), NERA, 1992, p. 155, and “The Utilization of Minority and

Woman-Owned Business Enterprises by The City of Hayward (California),” NERA,

1993, p. 8-5.

11. “Do Minority-Owned Businesses Get a Fair Share of Government Contracts?”

Urban Institute, October 1996.

12. Jeffrey L. Meyer, “Price Evaluations Adjustments and Benchmarking Methodology,”

U.S. Department of Commerce, June 23, 1998. Commerce has not released

enough information for one to be certain how these calculations were completed, but

apparently MBEs were counted as available whether or not they actually bid on federal

contracts, while for non-MBEs only bidders were counted as available.

13. See, e.g., Contractors Association of Eastern Pennsylvania v. Philadelphia, 893 F.

Supp. 419 (E.D. Pa. 1995), affirmed 91 F. 3d 586 (3d. Cir. 1996); Associated General

Contractors v. Columbus, 936 F. Supp. 1363 (S.D. Ohio 1996); Buddie v. Cleveland, 1995

(settled); Prior Tire Company v. Atlanta Public Schools (No. 1-95-CV-825-JEC, 1997);

Houston Contractors Association v. Metro Transit Authority, 954 F. Supp. 1013, 1018

(S.D. Tex. 1996); Engineering Contractors Association of South Florida, Inc. v. Metropolitan

Dade County, 943 F. Supp. 1546 (S.D. Fla. 1996), affirmed 122 F.3d 922 (11th

Cir. 1997); Phillips and Jordan v. Watts, 13 F. Supp. 1308, 1314 (N.D. Fla. 1998); Ohio

Contractors Association v. Cincinnati, C-1-98-447, 1998; Kossman v. TxDOT, C.A. No.

H-99-0637 (S.D. Tex. 2000); ConcreteWorks v. City and County of Denver, 86 F. Supp.

2d. 1042 (D. Colo. 2000); Scott v. Jackson, No. 3: 97CV719BN, affirmed 199 F.3d 206

(5th Cir. 2000); Association for Fairness in Business v. New Jersey, 82 F. Supp. 353 (D.

N.J. 2000); Webster v. Fulton County, 82 F. Supp. 1375 (N.D. Ga. 2000); Associated

Utility Contractors of Maryland, Inc. v. The Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, 83 F.

Supp. 2d 613 (D. Md. 2000); Associated General Contractors v. Drabik, 50 F. Supp. 2d

741 (S.D. Ohio 1999), affirmed 6th Cir. 2000.

14. Croson, 488 U.S. at 509.

15. In “Evaluation of Disparity Study Methodology,” pp. 3–4, the Urban Institute

authors stated: “A study that uses a measure of availability that includes only firms that

are ready, willing and able to perform government contract work is stronger than a

study that includes all firms without trying to control for whether they are available or

have the requisite ability. This is because including all M/WBEs may overstate the true

availability of these firms, and bias results towards finding a disparity even when there

is none.”

16. Engineering Contractors Association of South Florida, Inc. v. Metropolitan Dade

County, 943 F. Supp. 1546, 1579 (S.D. Fla. 1996).

17. A Disparity Study for Memphis–Shelby County Consortium, VII, p. 4.

18. Deposition of David J. Miller in Associated General Contractors v. Shelby County,

May 27, 1988, p. 172.

19. Deposition of David Evans, July 30, 1998, in Concrete Works v. Denver, p. 66.

20. In AGC v. Columbus, the Court referred to the City’s study as “examples of

results-driven research” in which the outcome is politically predetermined (936 F.

Supp. at 1431).

21. Engineering Contractors Association of South Florida v. Metropolitan Dade

County, 122 F.3d 922, 936 (11th Cir. 1997).

22. 936 F. Supp. 1363, 1426 (S.D. Ohio 1996).

23. 943 F. Supp. 1546, 1584 (S.D. Fla. 1996).

24. Phillips and Jordan v. Watts, 13 F. Supp. 1308, 1314 (N.D. Fla. 1998).

25. As one of the most sophisticated and prolific authors of disparity studies has

finally conceded: “First, it is virtually impossible for the type of discrimination described

above to exist in construction prime contracting for government entities that follow

normal public contracting procedures. City construction projects are publicly advertised.

They are awarded to the lowest bidder. Almost by definition, construction contracts

are awarded to the most qualified of the willing and able firms so there can be

no discrimination under this extremelynarrow view.” Dr. David Evans, Rebuttal report,

Concrete Works v. City and County of Denver, pp. 3–4.

26. The best description of local MBE politics and the few firms that benefit can be

found in the chapters on Atlanta in Tamar Jacoby’s Someone Else’s House (New York:

Free Press, 1998).

27. These data were produced for “City of Cincinnati Croson Study,” Institute of

Policy Research, 1992, but were not published.

28. 1992 Summary volume, Survey of Women and Minority-Owned Businesses.

29. General Accounting Office, “Small Business Administration—8(a) Is Vulnerable

to Program and Contractor Abuse.” Report to the Ranking Minority Member,

Permanent Subcommitteeon Investigations,Committeeon GovernmentalAffairs, U.S.

Senate, September 1995, pp. 3–4. See also, GAO “Small Business; Problems Continue

with SBA’s Minority Business Development Program” (GAO/RCED-93-145), September

17, 1993.

30. Croson, 488 U.S. at 505–6.

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