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CHAPTER THREE
RACE IN AMERICA
James Q. Wilson
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In the 1950s, the civil rights revolution was about to get under way. As a
graduate student at the University of Chicago doing research in the black community,
I was acutely aware that change was coming,
but even from press accounts, one could see that monumental events were soon
to occur. I asked black leaders, other graduate students, and my professors
how blacks and whites should treat each other. Everybody gave the same answer:
we should treat every person as an individual. It was a view powerfully reinforced
by Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in which
he famously remarked that we should judge people not by the color of their skin
but by the content of their character. Race should be irrelevant.
These days, we live with the results of the civil rights revolution. Yet the
dramatic changes that that revolution has brought about in the laws, culture,
economics, and politics of our nation have had a complex effect: racism, though
it still exists, is less common; commentary on race, on the other hand, is more
widespread. Hardly anyone tries to exclude blacks from jobs, schools, hotels,
restaurants, or the housing market. Yet at the same time, almost everyone argues
about quotas, targets, and affirmative action and has views regarding the proper
role of race in distributing public goods and services, in the presentation
of media commentary, and in making political claims.
In the Supreme Court’s Bakke case, handed down in 1978, about the
time the Manhattan Institute was founded, Justice Harry Blackmun summed up the
contemporary state of race relations: “In order to get beyond racism, we
must first take account of race.” He made his meaning even clearer: “In
order to treat some persons equally, we must first treat them differently.”
In short, race is not irrelevant. Nowhere was this attitude on race more apparent
than in California in 1997. Voters amended the state constitution by referendum
to bar state government from discriminating against or granting preferential
treatment to any individual or group based on race or ethnicity—seemingly
expressing the old civil rights ideal. Those who supported the decision, however,
found themselves denounced as racists. The world was stood on its head: to support
a colorblind law meant that you were a sinister reactionary.
Defending the Original Civil Rights Ideal
Against the backdrop of extensive, often angry, public debate and discussion
about race, several authors who have written books for the Manhattan Institute
over the last two decades or so have argued for the continued importance of
the goal of making race and ethnicity irrelevant.
In his 1982 book, The State Against Blacks, Walter Williams explains
how free-market economics can help us achieve that goal. Market economies tend
to ignore race because one person’s dollar is as good as anyone else’s:
people get what they pay for. Politics, by contrast, gives people only what
a majority votes for, and this may explain, Williams suggested, why in a poor
neighborhood some people drove nice cars (the result of a market transaction)
but there were no good public schools (the result of a political transaction).
Similarly, Thomas Sowell, in 1981’s Markets and Minorities, acknowledged
that race makes a difference in group status, but determining how to deal with
that reality should be a matter of science and not opinion. It is true that
people differ and that these differences are sometimes associated with racial
and ethnic descent. And it is true, too, that race and ethnicity may, at the
group level, correlate with differences in economic status. But we can make
little progress in reducing these inequalities by awarding group preferences,
Sowell says, for the simple reason that the variation among individuals is vastly
greater than the average differences among groups. It makes little sense, for
example, to put under-qualified black students into elite universities and then
enroll them in remedial courses to make up for their deficiencies. It makes
far more sense to deal with such deficiencies early in life so that individual
qualifications need be the only criteria for admission to top-flight colleges.
Coincident with the increase in race-oriented commentary has been a remarkable
development: the rise in conservative support for race-neutral integration,
on the one hand, and in liberal backing for race-sensitive selectivity, on the
other. There are, of course, purely integrationist liberals and some racist
conservatives, but support for affirmative action and a race-based distribution
of goods and services has become a conspicuously liberal position—as the
celebration among liberal elites over the Supreme Court’s 2003 rulings
reaffirming the constitutionality of some racial preferences underscored.
Black Progress: Real, Yet Pessimism Grows
This shift in liberal thinking away from integration and toward racebased selectivity
explains in part the heated criticism that some reviewers directed at America
in Black and White, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom’s 1997 study of
race relations. In this powerful, incisive history, the authors show the real
progress that the U.S. has made toward making race less important. We have witnessed
a sharp improvement among blacks in economic status, in gaining positions of
trust and honor, in winning access to public and private facilities, and in
receiving an appropriate level of protection from law-enforcement agencies.
The Thernstroms, of course, recognize the serious problems that remain with
respect to black academic achievement, crime rates, and single-parent families.
Still, they suggest, race-centered activists frequently ignore the extraordinary
achievements and the lingering problems, resorting instead to angry denunciations—denunciations
that usually reject the value of racial neutrality. Despite racism being less
common by any measure in 2004 than it was in the 1950s, these advocates charge
that racism is as common as, perhaps even worse than, it once was. In their
view, whites are evil and blacks are good—and since whites have the power,
blacks can only make progress if whites are defeated.
Passionate racial advocates aren’t alone in holding such views: a significant
fraction of ordinary black Americans also share them. Fewer blacks today believe
in the likelihood of racial progress than they did a year before the passage
of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Thernstroms, convinced by their evidence
of the remarkable improvement in white attitudes toward blacks, look for possible
explanations of this pessimism among blacks. One is that the militant activists
have won a large following, however wrong or exaggerated their assertions. Another
is that ordinary blacks, because of the kinds of jobs they hold, tend to meet
racist whites instead of tolerant ones. A third is the possibility that African
Americans who are struggling with the remaining educational and family problems
faced by the black community are driven to embrace racist explanations for those
problems because no other account seems plausible to them. And a fourth is that,
for reasons no one quite understands, a college education makes black Americans
more likely than black highschool graduates to believe that the government “deliberately”
makes certain that drugs are “easily available” in black neighborhoods—and
so as more blacks get college degrees, such conspiratorial notions become more
prominent.
Hispanics: Assimilation or Separatism?
These developments in relations between blacks and whites find an echo to some
degree in the struggle over how our society deals with ethnicity—especially
with respect to Hispanics. Linda Chavez, in her
1991 book, Out of the Barrio, describes the conflict over what “Hispanic”
should mean. In the long perspective of immigration to America, it is possible
to view Hispanics as comparable to Italians and Jews: people who can and should
assimilate, just as did their predecessors. The new emphasis on race and its
burdens (both real and imaginary), however, has led some advocates to insist
that Hispanics—Mexican Americans in particular—should remain outside
the majority culture. To justify this cultural separatism, the advocates have
argued that Hispanics have made little or no progress and thus, like blacks,
need special programs aimed at them as a disadvantaged group.
Determining whether Mexican Americans have made progress isn’t easy, given
the rapidly changing composition of this group. In 1959, 85 percent of all Mexican
Americans were born in the U.S.; by 1990, only two-thirds were born here—and
among adults, the proportion of nativeborn was only half. As Chavez notes, about
50 percent of the increase in the Hispanic population between 1980 and 1990
resulted from immigration. Many of these newcomers were poor and spoke little
or no English. It is no surprise, then, that the socioeconomic standing of Hispanics
and Mexican Americans might seem stagnant: progress among those who have been
here for a while gets obscured by the struggles of those who just arrived. But
this is not the whole story. Some Mexican Americans have lived
for generations in certain barrios where educational and economic progress was
slow, even for those born here, while others lived in less confined quarters
in big cities, where personal advancement took place more rapidly. We have measures
of educational progress among Mexican Americans with an eye on nativity: by
1990, about 18 percent of first-generation Mexican males living here had finished
high school, while 43 percent of the third generation had finished.
None of these crucial distinctions seems to have entered the worldview or rhetoric
of many advocates. It has seemed more important for them to describe Hispanics
as the “poorest of the poor” because a racist society has segregated
them, thus justifying Hispanic participation in affirmative-action programs.
The Advocates Against Integration
In her splendid 1998 study, Someone Else’s House, Tamar Jacoby
describes how racial advocacy in politics and culture has often trumped the
goals of assimilation and integration. She looks at racial politics in Atlanta,
Detroit, and New York, where, decades ago, three sets of leaders used dissimilar
strategies to manage race relations. In New York, Mayor John Lindsay supported
“community control” of the public schools (actually, radical activist
control); Detroit mayor Coleman Young was an enthusiast of black power; and
Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson created a system of racial preferences in jobs
and contracts that conferred real benefits on only a few privileged people.
Over time, there were changes: Rudy Giuliani came to New York, Dennis Archer
to Detroit, and Andrew Young to Atlanta. All
three tried to restore something like the integrationist goal.
The core racial problems in these three cities, Jacoby shows, grew not simply
because there were radical black activists seeking power but also because guilty
white elites were eager to listen to them. Many white business and political
leaders thought it a good idea to let black leaders “ventilate.” Some
of that ventilation was helpful, since there were indeed racial difficulties
that needed addressing. But some of it was empty bluster, more about securing
patronage for jobs and contracts, whatever the merits of the claimants, than
righting any injustice.
Is Integration Possible?
Taken together, the Manhattan Institute’s books on race and ethnicity
raise a question for which, so far, we have no generally accepted answer: Can
people live together decently without regard to skin color or ethnic background?
As the Thernstroms note, America has made great progress in the direction of
racial and ethnic comity. Race has assuredly become less important in private
relationships (there has been a sharp increase in the proportion of blacks and
whites who live near, work with, or have friends of the other race). It is progress
that one can scarcely detect, however, if one focuses only on the sayings and
writings of celebrated spokespersons like Derrick Bell, Ellis Cose, and a host
of other journalists and professors, as the Manhattan Institute’s John
McWhorter explains in his book Authentically Black, a collection of essays
drawn from the institute’s quarterly City Journal and other publications.
One of the most interesting tables in the Thernstroms’ book shows the
proportion of people in various countries who tell pollsters that they have
unfavorable opinions of an ethnic group in their country. In almost every European
country, about four out of ten people say that they dislike a prominent minority
group: Bulgarians and Germans dislike Turks, the French dislike North Africans,
Poles dislike Ukrainians, Russians dislike Azerbaijanis, and so on. In the United
States, by contrast, only one out of every eight Americans dislikes blacks.
Even if we assume that Americans have understated their dislike by 50 percent,
they are still less than half as likely as Europeans to say they disapprove
of a minority group.
Yet though America has made progress, the goal of a race-irrelevant society
remains distant and is perhaps unattainable. Middle-income blacks will sometimes
feel that race explains why they are less likely to be judged as individuals
and more likely to be judged as affirmative-action symbols; for lower-income
blacks, especially young ones, race can explain to them why they have not done
as well as they would like; both middle- and lower-income blacks may think that
any police officer who stops them is engaging in unjustified racial profiling.
True or false, these beliefs remind us that, as W. E. B. DuBois put it, blacks
feel a “two-ness”: they are American and they are black, and so have
“two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals
in one dark body.”
In general, for Hispanics, set apart by no obvious racial features, prospects
may be very different—unless, of course, their leaders insist that they
think of themselves as a would-be race, with all of the entitlements that government
patronage can confer. It is too early to tell if Hispanics will take this route
or avoid it.
The progress that America has made in the treatment of racial and ethnic groups
ought to be a source of self-congratulation. But there is very little self-congratulation
going on. When I was doing research on the politics of black Americans during
the 1950s, race wasn’t generally a topic of conversation, even though there
was much that cried out for debate. At the time, blacks found themselves residentially
segregated, economically deprived, and politically manipulated to a far greater
extent than they do now. These days, when things are so much better, we sometimes
talk about race as if the nation were stuck in a dark period of unbridled racism.
Indeed, despite the research that the Manhattan Institute has sponsored and
encouraged, many American leaders go to great lengths to deny the integrationist
dream. In Al Sharpton’s words, “confrontation works,” and so
confrontation occurs.
The fundamental flaw of this strategy of antagonism is that, by blaming all
black problems on white society, white society can then take credit for all
black progress—and, as Orlando Patterson has pointed out, that is absurd.
Today no group can impose its will on another group so completely. The advocates
deny to successful black and Hispanic Americans the credit they deserve for
having relied on education, hard work, and personal responsibility to achieve
so much.
A More Realistic Ideal
In time, I think (actually, I hope) that we shall come to something like the
following position. We will abandon the purely integrationist ideal, in which
race and ethnicity do not matter, as hopelessly idealistic. Of course, race
matters. Human beings, with their limited capacity for extended sociability
and their ingrained preference for people like themselves, rarely extend equal
consideration to all people. Fifteen-year-olds dislike thirteen-year-olds, Red
Sox fans hate Yankee fans (more so now than ever), men make jokes about women
and women about men, and most of us prefer to live next door to people who are,
in some sense, “like us.” Because of this preference for the similar,
we will always find neighborhoods that are distinctively Jewish or Italian or
black or Vietnamese or Chinese—even though all Jews, Italians, blacks,
Vietnamese, and Chinese enjoy a legal right to live anywhere they can afford
a house.
Such natural preference for the similar need not entail second-class citizenship
for any group. Chinese and Japanese Americans once had second-class citizenship.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, California courts would not
accept Chinese testimony, and laws prevented Chinese immigration into this country
and discouraged land purchases by Asians. A gentleman’s agreement required
Japan to reduce sharply the number of passports issued to Japanese who wished
to emigrate to this country. When World War II began, Japanese Americans wound
up in relocation centers in the bleakest part of the California deserts. Today,
matters for Chinese and Japanese Americans could not be more different —in
large measure, I think, because Chinese and Japanese Americans have made extraordinary
advances in music, art, science, and business, and because they have so low
a crime rate. Hardly anyone moves out of a neighborhood because a Chinese or
Japanese family has moved in.
A central problem facing black Americans is that their crime rate, especially
for violent offenses, is higher than that of whites and vastly higher than that
of Chinese or Japanese Americans. Hispanics also have offense rates higher than
whites, though not as high as among blacks. If those high rates fell so that
they were lower than white rates, much of the remaining resistance to blacks
moving into neighborhoods and most of what passes for racial profiling would
disappear.
But whatever one’s personal preferences about race or ethnicity and however
circumstances may modify them, the legal and moral system of a country must,
as the Manhattan Institute’s writings on race and ethnicity have argued
time and again, be universal, recognizing no racial and ethnic distinctions
and making it perfectly clear that whatever preferences people have, everyone
must be treated as equal under the law. Identity may govern where we live or
what we eat or whom we see, but it must not govern the distribution of public
goods and services. So many blacks and Hispanics have taken good advantage of
these principles that to undercut them now by official favoritism is an insult
to their accomplishments.
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