Thinking About Race Relations
Cottingham, Clement & Kilson, Martin
Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, W.E.B. DuBois argued that the color line would remain the distinguishing feature of American civilization. At the center of this observation was a...
...This is plain wrong...
...2 It is hardly surprising, then, that George Bush in 1991 (like his Republican predecessors Nixon and Reagan) is cynically trafficking in racist politics when he claims that the proposed 1992 Civil Rights Act is a "quota bill" —a term described in a New York Times editorial as a "scare word...
...Why, then, such a shallow intellectual posture toward America's racist heritage—a heritage steeped in violence, murder, and mayhem...
...and there are transracial black mayors now in Seattle, Los Angeles, Denver, and New Haven...
...Through a new middle class and stable working class, Afro-Americans have gained broad categories of skilled jobs and managerial jobs...
...Of course, a major omission in discourse on race is the failure (or refusal) to place America's racist legacy in historical context...
...680-681...
...Major reductions in school segregation would require the pooling of central city and suburban students, but Supreme Court decisions disallowing metropolitan desegregation plans in Detroit and Richmond have made this unlikely (Millikin v. Bradley 1974...
...Virginia has a transracial black governor...
...Contrasting Attitudes On Racial Equality A crucial feature of the integrationist role of mainstream Afro-American leadership is its insistence that elevating the status of the black poor must be an integral part of achieving racial equality generally...
...This study also compared blacks with Hispanics and Asian-Americans and found that "if the historically high 1970s pace of reduction in black-white index segregation were to persist, it would take about 60 years for the black-white index to fall to the values currently observed for Hispanic and Asian-Americans...
...His children must attend a segregated school...
...We dare say Epstein and other neoconservatives would not indulge in this unseemly wordplay regarding the vicious history of anti-Semitism in the West and the Holocaust...
...He cannot as a rule try on a hat or a pair of gloves in a white store...
...At the heart of Sleeper's book is a basic analytical flaw...
...The central city school districts of just two of these areas had a majority white enrollment in 1980: the countywide districts that included Jacksonville and Greensboro...
...Jonathan Rieder's book Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (1985) contributes to this erroneous view of a transracially minded bloc of white voters in the late 1960s and mid-1970s who were betrayed by insensitive FALL • 1991 • 525 Race Relations liberals (pushing too much integrated housing) and militant black ethnocentrists...
...The second condition for a racially integrated American society—black equality—is, of course, subject to debate...
...Police brutality remains extensive...
...Even today, in 1991, after nearly thirty years of change in the social condition of most Afro-Americans,' black homes in a suburban community or in a mainly white urban neighborhood are subject to violence...
...2 See Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1969...
...So, as twentieth-century America became industrialized, it was the racist stigmatizing of Afro-Americans (at all levels of American life) that gave white Americans an easily perceived status elevation...
...Liston Pope, Millhands and Preachers: A Study of Gastonia, N.C...
...64 percent of blacks and 35 percent whites say "more legislation is needed"), the basic ingredients of what we call a transitional integrationist ecology are now in place...
...Remarking on the life experiences of a typical middle-class southern black, Gunther writes: He is too proud to go to a Jim Crow theater...
...FALL • 1991 • 521 Race Relations is rooted in America's racist legacy continues to characterize race relations in America...
...This 526 • DISSENT Race Relations difficulty is rooted ultimately in America's racial-caste heritage, but it is also affected by the intricate character and scale of black poverty...
...But— and this is the main point—Hacker would not dare make a similar (and "logically analogous") comment suggesting that, given the dominant role of Italian-American males in organized crime, our banks, insurance companies, and retail firms would be acting "rationally" by limiting the hiring of Italians...
...Nor does Sleeper's analysis let us know that white ethnic neighborliness in New York was excluding blacks from housing stock, a good part of which was provided directly and indirectly through federal public policy...
...When they grow up, no state university in the South will receive them...
...It takes a curious mindset to deny to Afro-Americans their status as victims given America's racial-caste heritage...
...Conservative middle-class voters have favored politicians and presidents who scapegoated assistance programs for the white ethnic working class that came out of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations—especially policies relating to strikes and to trade unions...
...4 See Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990...
...As of 1980, in the United States as a whole, some 36 percent of black students were attending public schools with 90 percent or more minority students and 64 percent of black students were attending schools with 50 percent or more minority students...
...5 See Derek Bok and John Dunlop, Labor and The American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970...
...In "backlashing" the Civil Rights Act, 3 which is an attempt to close the mobility gap between blacks and whites, President Bush, and conservative politicians generally, are directing white voters to pay more attention to how blacks might benefit than to their own needs, such as declining housing opportunities, declining working-class and middle-class wages, massive job losses in manufacturing, and so on...
...and 81,000 earned more than $100,000...
...Though the print media and television have given disproportionate attention to leaders of the black disenchanted, the fact of the matter is that the politics of the black disenchanted form a minority strand—an ethnocentric subplot in the pragmatic electoral "mainplot" of AfroAmerican politics...
...And, last, in "getting managerial jobs," some 57 percent of blacks saw discrimination but only 22 percent of whites.I 2 Polls in 1989 yielded similar results...
...Press, 1991), p. 57...
...I° See Martin Kilson, "The Weakness of Black Politics," Dissent (Fall 1987...
...520 • DISSENT Race Relations Policies targeted toward Afro-Americans have been consistently attacked and disrupted...
...If he travels in a day coach he is herded like an animal into a villainously decrepit wooden car...
...And, as Kevin Phillips has persuasively argued, the conservative tilt in presidential electoral politics since the 1890s is closely linked to racist appeals...
...Many conservatives, however, do not see AfroAmericans as true victims of America's oppressive heritage because the civil rights policies enacted in the 1960s outlawed racialcaste practices and so ushered in a nonracist or colorblind epoch—a level playing field of mobility and opportunity for Afro-Americans...
...Some 58 percent of blacks replied "disagree" or "strongly disagree" to the statement: "Blacks should always vote for black candidates when they run...
...6 Compared with the white working class and farmers, AfroAmericans have possessed at best an uncertain legitimacy as a federally fostered constituency...
...Ethnic Chicago (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Co., 1984), p. 398...
...13 Gerald Jaynes and Robin Williams, Jr., A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989), p. 27...
...For instance, the political scientist Andrew Hacker made the following comment to a New York Times correspondent about the virtual absence of Afro-American doormen at New York's upper-middle class and elite apartment buildings and hotels...
...92,000 earned more than $70,000...
...In an evaluation of the overall status of school desegregation as of 1980, a study by the National Academy of Sciences observed that [t]he major achievements in school desegregation occurred between 1966 and 1973...
...What are you supposed to do," Epstein asks, "if someone blames you for slavery, a hideous institution, to be sure, but one defunct for more than a century...
...We know of no data on these and related ethnic-ingroup issues covering Jewish, Italian, WASP, and other white groups that report as strong a cosmopolitan or integrationist orientation...
...Because, for one thing, blacks in New York have a tradition of generating militant ethnocentric or black nationalist leaders, extending back to Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association in the early 1920s...
...Sleeper offers a keen evocation of the communal world of New York City's white ethnic neighborhoods—and others too— projecting them in nearly aesthetic terms as an intricate labyrinth of what might be called ethnic caring networks...
...It is," said Hacker, "what I sometimes hate to call rational racism in the sense that given the givens, there is some rationality behind it...
...Curiously, only the suburban homes of Jewish-Americans-despite their unmatchable upward mobility -are still, among white groups, targets of violence by other whites...
...12 Poll data are in Lee Sigelman and Susan Welch, Black Americans' Views of Racial Equality (New York: Cambridge Univ...
...Historically, urban white ethnic neighborhoods were not ethnically homogeneous but were made up of a mixture of ethnic proletarians—Mafia and gangs included—from the 1890s onward, as Theodore Hershberg's and Dennis Clark's data on Philadelphia show...
...Of 10,486,000 Afro-American households in 1989, some 264,000 earned between $50,000 and $54,999...
...Even so, this ethnocentric subplot does reinforce racial cleavages...
...black responses imply some, but not adequate, movement toward equal opportunity...
...New York: Harper Bros., 1947), pp...
...Justice Marshall was absolutely right...
...Another fascinating finding presented in the National Academy of Sciences' study of school desegregation is that, on balance, black pupils who had formative school years in desegregated schools had a more successful rate of mobility trajectory: Black pupils who begin to attend schools with whites in the first or second grade differ systematically from their randomly selected agemates who attend segregated schools...
...There are, however, some objective measures for judging these differences...
...Court decisions and demographic trends [white flight] since that time have limited or halted the desegregation of schools...
...Say you are sorry it ever happened...
...In reality, the power agendas of white ethnic neighborhoods in New York are contextual and changeable, that is, they are opportunistic, like everybody else's agendas...
...As V.O...
...Adopted by three Republican administrations, articulated by numerous conservative intellectuals who are extensively aided by wealthy foundations (Olin, Heritage, Richardson Sciafe, American Enterprise, and so on), and propagated by many mainstream magazines (such as the Atlantic, Harper's, and Time), this level-playing field view of race relations serves to reduce attitudinal and voter support among white Americans for federal affirmative assistance policies that would close the black/white mobility gap...
...As Arnold Hirsch observed, these violent anti-black housing riots revealed a "liberal mixture of white 'ethnics' [who] seemed content to live in close proximity to each other, but not in similar proximity to blacks...
...The basic pattern of segregation in the South is unwavering and absolute, though minor modifications come from time to time...
...The political vacuum that remained was filled mainly by "client type" black politicians, who were primarily TABLE IV ATTITUDES TOWARD NEIGHBORHOOD RACIAL COMPOSITION Type of Neighborhood Whites Blacks Mostly Black 0% 8% Mostly White 33% 2% Half & Half 46% 68% SOURCE: Newsweek (March 7, 1988) p. 23...
...530 • DISSENT...
...Ron Dellums, Calif...
...II Arnold Hirsch, "The Black Struggle for Integrated Housing in Chicago," in Melvin Holli, ed...
...some 58 percent also replied "disagree" or "strongly disagree" to the statement: "Black women should not date white men...
...But suddenly, from the early 1960s onward, white enclaves mount a communal protectivistic neighborhoodness, so to speak, just when black proletarians (and even some bourgeois blacks) bid for entry...
...80...
...Yet the thrust of the new sociopolitical ecology of race relations does not add up to a racially integrated society...
...In due course, white politicians will increasingly combine their white voters' policy interests with the concerns of the black political class...
...seemed content to live in close proximity to each other, but not in similar proximity to blacks...
...6 For a vivid view of farmers' high popular image as beneficiaries of federal affirmative assistance policies, see John Gunther, Inside the U.S.A...
...Thus by 1960 there were about 65,000 black-white marriages, and in 1980 there were around 350,000—a significant increase, to be sure, but this represented less than 1 percent of Afro-American marriages...
...Justice The editors of Dissent join with many other Americans in paying tribute to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, intrepid fighter for civil rights, humane upholder of liberal values...
...After all, why did Italians, Jews, Irish, Poles, Germans, and so on, come to America if not to achieve ready-made status elevation...
...violent acts against the homes of blacks continue, as do verbal denigration and violent assaults against individual blacks...
...The strong need among many white Americans for psychocultural "status elevation" that TABLE I ETHNICITY OF ARRESTEES BY PERCENTAGE AND RIOT Ethnicity Fernwood Park 1947 (N = 113) Park Manor 1949 (N = 18) Englewood 1949 (N = 29) Trumbull Park 1953-4 (N = 109) Calumet Park 1957 (N = 51) Total (N = 320) Anglo 22.4 35.3 16.6 13.6 22.4 19.6 Irish 7.7 25.5 51.2 19.6 18.4 18.2 Slav 4.4 0.0 6.0 25.5 14.5 13.0 Italian 6.5 25.5 0.0 12.0 7.9 9.0 Polish 5.3 0.0 0.0 10.7 16.4 8.2 Southeastern Europe 6.2 0.0 1.2 6.9 4.6 5.5 Dutch 26.3 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 9.4 German 14.7 9.8 22.6 5.7 3.3 10.3 Scandinavian 5.6 0.0 0.0 0.3 0.0 2.1 Jewish 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.3 0.2 Spanish (surnamed) 0.0 3.9 2.4 4.7 10.5 3.7 Other 0.8 0.0 0.0 0.9 0.7 0.7 Total 99.9 100.0 100.0 99.9 100.0 99.9 SOURCE: Arnold Hirsch, "The Black Struggle for Integrated Housing in Chicago," in Melvin Holli and Peter Jones, eds...
...3 This act places the burden of proof in race and gender disputes over hiring practices on the shoulders of businesses, thereby overruling 1990 Supreme Court decisions that placed the burden on employees...
...The top figure of one hundred meant total segregation and zero meant that all people were randomly distributed...
...There has also been a significant black presence in activist and lobbying organizations relating to issues commonly considered of major concern to women—issues like child care and general well-being of children, abortion rights, and family planning...
...Of course, blacks, who once were not known to engage in racist violence, now participate in violence against whites...
...Black poverty involves, among other things, statistics like the following: • thirty-one percent of black households in poverty • high unemployment rate and low laborforce participation of the black working class (under 50 percent for males under age 30) • forty-two percent of prison inmates are black • sixty-three percent of black births are to unwed mothers • forty-two percent of black children live in poverty...
...When asked, after his resignation from the Court, what kind of person should replace him, he answered, "Me...
...We can also assume that, as coping-strata AfroAmericans expand their influence through the emerging black political class (now comprising nearly 8,000 elected officials), white Americans will slowly but in increasing numbers interact with an expanding black influence...
...Conservative analysts tend to divide the structure of opportunity from the structure of integration, while liberal and leftist analysts see these as closely intertwined...
...and, finally, some 56 percent of blacks replied "disagree" or "strongly disagree" to the statement: "Black men should not date white women...
...dependent upon white politicians for their resources, not upon forging viable black voter and interest-group constituencies.'° But this political vacuum was both too extensive and lasted much too long—a couple of generations...
...The main result of a transitional integrationist milieu has been the growth of a sizable Afro-American middle class...
...14 Jaynes and Williams, A Common Destiny, pp...
...FALL • 1991 • 527 Race Relations cant movement toward equality of opportunity for blacks...
...There has emerged a kind of explanatory standoff between blacks and whites regarding race relations...
...Concluding Note Conservative elements in the media have inordinately highlighted events associated with militant ethnocentrists or racialists among black intellectuals and students, implying that this aggressively antiwhite group reflects mainstream Afro-American patterns...
...That some two-thirds of Afro-American families fall occupationally within the "copingstrata" is still not fully recognized...
...This potential is suggested by survey data from a Newsweek poll (April 1991 and reported in the May 6, 1991 issue...
...When we add to this middle class the stable Afro-American working class, there is now in place in black society a majority of families inhabiting what we call the "coping-strata...
...Consider, too, the event in June 1991 in the Atlantic Beach section of New York-a baseball-bat assault, with murderous intent, on a black high-school student (a football captain) who was talking to a neighborhood white girl...
...In "getting skilled jobs," some 56 percent of blacks saw discrimination but only 19 percent whites...
...Transracial or crossover black congressmen already exist (for example, Allan Wheat, Mo...
...New York City has produced more figures like these two militant ethnocentric Afro-American leaders than any other major city...
...So the Rev...
...Do you think the differences are: Blacks 1981 Blacks 1986 Blacks 1989 Whites 1981 Whites 1989 Mainly due to discrimination...
...Its organization is sporadic, crisis driven, lacking a viable voter base among blacks...
...In short, the white power structures treated blacks with "benign neglect...
...would enable the white working class and lower middle class in Howard Beach, Canarsie, Bensonhurst, Atlantic Beach, and so on, to arrive at his presumed symbiotic interplay with black New York...
...Data from ABC News/Washington Post polls covering 19811989 show that in 1981 only 6 percent of whites said that Afro-Americans are discriminated against in "getting an education" compared to 35 percent of blacks who said discrimination (racism) prevailed...
...The Sleeper argument, in short, is both mistaken and naive, and certainly not progressive...
...He offers not a clue as to what intervening structural or normative variables (a Christian crusade perhaps...
...13 Data on patterns in school desegregation, like data on housing patterns, suggest that the civil rights legislation of the 1960s has had a less than adequate outcome...
...TABLE III SOCIAL-CLASS STRUCTURE OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN FAMILIES, 1969-1986 1969 1983 1986 Families % Families Families % Upper Class 143,000 3 267,000 4 624,000 9 Middle Class 1,100,000 25 1 ,500 ,000 25 1,910,000 27 Working Class Nonpoor 2,100,000 44 2,400,000 36 2,420,000 34 Working Class Poor 688,000 14 963,000 14 Underclass Nonworking Poor 716,000 14 1,500,000 23 2,142,000 30 SOURCE: Andrew Billingsley, "Understanding African -American Family Diversity," in The State of Black America 1990 (National Urban League, New York, 1990...
...By 1980, whites made up only 4 percent of the public school enrollment in Washington, 8 percent in Atlanta, 9 percent in Newark, and 12 percent in Detroit...
...It should also be noted that all white groups-in varying degrees-have contributed throughout this century to explicitly extrademocratic methods of reinforcing their psychocultural investment in the racial-caste marginalization of Afro-Americans...
...Also, some 63 percent of blacks report they "socialize regularly with members of another race...
...Italian, Jewish, and Irish youth participated in this assault...
...The Sharpton-type subplot is a sideshow—a variant of what Daniel Boorstin has called pseudo-event politics (that is, media-hyped politics...
...Functionally speaking, they cater to the cluster of left-out working-class and poor blacks (some in the middle-class, too) best described as the disenchanted...
...Forty-four years ago, in Inside U.S.A., John Gunther did what so few commentators do...
...Ethnic Chicago (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Co., 1984), p. 398...
...The number and proportion of black families that now make up the majority of Afro-American households falling within the "coping-strata" (middle class and stable working class) are shown in Table III...
...Pitfalls of Integration If one derived one's understanding of obstacles to integration from the print and television media, the names of Rev...
...Should you clear your throat and announce that there are historical reasons for some of these things...
...Press, 1942...
...This translates into an aggressively pro-black and anti-white (often anti-Jewish, too) political concoction...
...Although this system was formally outlawed in the late 1960s, it is impossible to believe that in just a few decades we could see a colorblind society, a level playing field...
...He is expected to give the right of way to whites on the sidewalk, and he will almost never see the picture of a fellow Negro in a [white] newspaper, unless of a criminal...
...And, finally, a 1988 Harris Poll (reported in Business Week, March 14, 1988) asked a sample of 531 Afro-Americans, "Do you think that during the 1980s American society has become more or less racist...
...Above all, this racist attitude toward blacks offers a convenient yardstick by which any white group, regardless of its class position, could experience a ready-made "status elevation" within American society...
...As Arnold Hirsch has observed apropos Chicago during this same period, "White ethnics...
...Consider, for instance, the assaults within the last couple of years by Italian youth against black males in New York City's Howard Beach and Bensonhurst sections...
...As shown in Table V, a series of ABC NewslWashington Post polls between 1981 and 1989 revealed Afro-Americans overwhelmingly using two variants of a racial-caste heritage explanation for the differential in black/white social mobility...
...John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana: Univ...
...For example, an Afro-American woman, Marian Wright Edelman, heads the Children's Defense Fund, the major children's lobby in the country, and Faye Wattleton, also an AfroAmerican, heads Planned Parenthood...
...Nonetheless, even as we discount the level-playing field view of race relations, we believe that federal legislation outlawing racialcaste practices and federal affirmative assistance policies for promoting Afro-American social mobility have ushered in a transitional integrationist sociopolitical ecology...
...Al Sharpton (a black Pentecostal clergyman in New York) and Minister Louis Farrakhan (a Black Muslim leader) would loom large...
...Nevertheless, the structure of race relations— what we call its sociopolitical ecology—is different today from two generations ago...
...The main political appeal directed to the black disenchanted sector is militant ethnocentrism or black nationalism...
...Faced with white enclaves' communal protectivist neighborhoodness, Sleeper's preferred politics is not liberal or progressive opposition but a neighborhood-based black uplift politicization, some of which went on in Brooklyn...
...As the reporter explained, by the term "givens" Professor Hacker was referring to how whites perceive the impact on their property value of doormen from a group associated with high rates of crime...
...When asked whether blacks' interactions with whites should be lessened in order "to improve their situation," some 61 percent of blacks said no...
...It is a rather 528 • DISSENT Race Relations cynical attempt to smear the mainstream black leadership with an extremist characterization, thereby weakening its image and integrationist role...
...But these ethnic neighborhoods so deftly portrayed also have hidden agendas, which is to say social and political purposes...
...Using 1970 data as a baseline, the census analysis revealed a black average segregation index of eighty, which was some six points lower than the 1970 index, a decline that was notable historically but still meant a high segregation of Afro-Americans...
...q TABLE VI BLACK ATTITUDES ON GROUP BONDS AND TRANS-RACIAL TIES (Percent) Question Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Strongly Disagree Don't Care Black parents should give their children African names 3 17 56 10 14 Black children should study an African language 14 42 29 6 9 Black people should shop in black-owned stores whenever possible 16 47 30 4 3 Blacks should always vote for black candidates when they run 13 26 51 7 3 Black women should not date white men 13 26 51 7 3 Black men should not date white women 13 18 48 8 13 SOURCE: Gerald Jaynes and Robin Williams, A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (Washington, D.C., National Academy Press, 1989), p. 199...
...These data imply a continuing reluctance by whites to marry Afro-Americans...
...Progressive analysts favor governmental and private-sector affirmative assistance policies in order to expand and strengthen Afro-American opportunity...
...Some 84 percent of blacks report that they "work with many members of another race" (51 percent whites report the same), and only 17 percent of blacks say they are "uncomfortable working with members of another race...
...Yes 67 64 69 38 46 No 27 31 29 58 52 Don't know/no opinion 6 5 4 2 No answer/refused 0 1 0 0 0 Black people are not achieving equality as fast as they could because many whites don't want them to get ahead Agree 74 76 75 46 43 Disagree 20 18 20 47 52 Don't know/no opinion 6 5 5 7 5 No answer/refused 0 1 0 1 0 SOURCE: Lee Sigelman and Susan Welch, Black Americans' Views of Racial Equality (Cambridge Univ...
...The effort by neoconservative analysts to equate the Sharpton-type strain in Afro-American politics with the black leadership mainstream is analytically cockeyed and intellectually dishonest...
...Also, as adults, they were less likely to be involved in police incidents, less likely to perceive discrimination, more likely to live in non-segregated residential areas, and more likely to have frequent social contacts with whites (p...
...Indeed, it is a sign of our neoconservative times that there is a lot of this twisted comment on matters of Afro-American concern...
...8 Now, this comment—from a prominent intellectual—with its implication that the criminality of a minority of black males can be construed as representing Afro-American behavior generally, is outright defamation...
...It is also politically difficult...
...Indeed, the overall high level of black leadership representation throughout feminist-oriented organizations and the assertive orientation of feminist organizations in behalf of blackrelated issues, constitutes one of the strongest areas of integration in American life...
...According to Census Bureau data, this trend continued to expand in the late 1980s...
...Thus, with over two-thirds of Afro-American households marked by some bourgeois societal patterns and with about two-thirds of black families having political participation rates comparable to middle-class white voters, one can say that important possibilities for integrationist race relations are evolving...
...Jim Sleeper's The Closest of Strangers (1990) also argues this view of a sizable urban white working-class (and middle-class) voter bloc ready for transracial coalitions but betrayed by liberals and black ethnocentrists...
...New Haven: Yale Univ...
...This, alas, is the mythical essence of the "American Dream...
...We question this argument...
...Thus the politics of whites was invested heavily in sustaining the psychocultural benefits that rested on a racist foundation...
...Although incidence of antiblack violence has changed fundamentally from one or two generations ago, the forms have not...
...Had this happened more broadly, Sleeper suggests, the white ethnic neighborhoods (those caring networks), automatically wellintentioned toward black folk, would have slowly but surely worked out a coalescing symbiosis with black New York...
...Second, the white power structures in New York City—especially the Democratic and Republican parties—extended their resources for the political incorporation of white ethnic groups (like Italians and Jews) some forty years earlier than they did for Afro-Americans...
...And at a bus terminal or similar point he will, of course, have to use the "colored" toilet, and drink from a separate water fountain...
...The growth (1940-1980) in upper and middle occupations TABLE II SELECTED WHITE-COLLAR OCCUPATIONS FILLED BY BLACKS, 1940-1980 Occupation Number (Percent) 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 Managerial 62,220 (33.2) 112,020 (37.5) 121,762 (25.7) 170,035 (21.8) 487,432 (31.1) Self-employed 49,760 (26.5) 73,560 (24.6) 63,357 (13.4) 34,893 (4.5) 21,781 (1.4) Private salary 10,940 (5.8) 32,580 (10.9) 44,318 (9.3) 87,765 (11.2) 282,488 (18.1) Government 1,240 (0.7) 5,250 (1.8) 12,282 (2.6) 46,388 (5.9) 181,847 (11.6) Professional and technical 125,300 (66.8) 186,930 (62.5) 352,298 (74.3) 611,334 (78.2) 1,077,482 (68.9) Clergy 17,290 (9.6) 19,110 (6.4) 14,530 (3.1) 12,850 (1.6) 16,195 (1.0) Engineers 300 (0.2) 2,730 (0.9) 12,049 (2.5) 13,679 (1.8) 36,019 (2.3) Lawyers and judges 1,000 (0.5) 1,530 (0.5) 2,970 (0.6) 3,728 (0.5) 15,277 (1.0) Physicians 4,160 (2.2) 4,500 (1.5) 9,983 (2.1) 6,106 (0.8) 13,509 (0.9) Social workers 2,720 (1.5) 6,750 (2.3) 15,345 (3.2) 40,791 (5.2) 88,512 (5.6) Teachers 67,660 (36.0) 90,180 (30.2) 150,743 (31.8) 240,073 (30.7) 424,755 (27.1) Total 187,520 (100.0) 298,950 (100.0) 474,060 (100.0) 781,369 (100.0) 1,564,914 (100.0) SOURCE: Gerald Jaynes and Robin Williams, A Common Destiny: Blacks And American Society (Washington, 1989), p. 170...
...At the center of this observation was a proposition about the character of modern American society —namely, that American whites (regardless of religious and ethnic attributes) have a psychocultural investment in the racial-caste demarcation between themselves and Afro-Americans...
...FALL • 1991 • 529 Race Relations Notes I See, for instance, John Buenker, Urban Liberalism And Progressive Reform (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), esp...
...Press, 1991), p. 91...
...Through a new black political class, Afro-Americans have likewise penetrated to politically powerful positions in American cities, counties, states, and the federal government...
...Key demonstrated in Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949), racebaiting and race-scapegoating have been prominent in twentieth-century electoral politics...
...The black congressional delegation now has a high seniority index, which translates into enormous legislative clout...
...Though it is common for white Americans who oppose affirmative assistance for Afro-Americans to protest that their ethnic group did not participate in racial-caste oppression, data in Table 1 puts the lie to this argument...
...These conservative proclivities among white working-class voters antedated the rise of Sharpton-type ethnocentric politics...
...In short, for Sleeper the purposes of white ethnic neighborhoods (caring networks) are a kind of timeless gestalt...
...If he visits a friend in a suburb, he will find that the water, 522 • DISSENT Race Relations electricity, and gas may literally stop where the segregated quarter begins...
...To claim that discrimination has ended is sheer distortion: it confuses and disorients...
...76-80...
...In an article in the New York Times Magazine (July 2, 1989) titled "The Joys of Victimhood," Epstein mocks the notion of blacks-as-victims...
...Chapter 2 on "Bread and Butter Liberalism: Launching the Welfare State...
...5 Some policies for farmers have occasionally fallen prey to backlashes, too, though it is a fascinating feature of American political culture that from, say, Woodrow Wilson's farm programs to today's, no other constituency has benefited as much as farmers from federal assistance...
...7 For Afro-Americans' new social mobility, see Martin Kilson, "Problems of Black Politics," Dissent (Fall 1989...
...Thirty-seven per cent of blacks said "more racist," but 54 percent of blacks said "less racist" (70 percent of whites said "the same...
...Sharpton and Minister Farrakhan picked up the leadership slack...
...Sleeper seems to have forgotten the Wallaceite movement's massive appeal to these ethnic neighborhoods in the late 1960s through early 1970s and later Nixon's equally race-baiting, backlash appeal...
...This seriously misguided viewpoint is prominently articulated by neoconservative observer Joseph Epstein, editor of The American Scholar...
...Sleeper would have his readers believe these are intrinsically valid, that they provide their own internal rationale and cannot be gauged by mundane yardsticks brought in by outsiders called liberal intellectuals, liberal Democratic politicians, social engineers, civil rights leaders, and so on...
...New York: Basic Books, 1984...
...Residential segregation was high in the 29 metropolitan areas that contained one-half of the country's black population in 1980...
...FALL • 1991 • 523 Race Relations is shown in Table II...
...Survey data do not support these neoconservative claims Data from a National Academy of Science 1980 survey shown in Table VI suggest a reasonably moderate and pragmatic level of problack orientations...
...Have New Right intellectuals lost all sense of decency when treating Afro-Americans' concerns...
...9 John Gunther, Inside the U.S.A...
...therefore he can scarcely ever see a first-run movie, or go to a concert...
...There is a new deghettoized black bourgeoisie...
...and some 62 percent of black children in female-headed households are poor • fifty-seven percent of black families are female-headed and the majority of these families are poor • sixteen percent of blacks aged sixteen to twenty-four drop out of school (27 percent for Hispanics) • inner-city black areas have the highest crime rates and highest homicide rate, with young males dying at rates higher than in the Vietnam War Many Afro-Americans explain both black poverty and the black/white social differential in terms of the racial-caste heritage...
...Thus we question Sleeper's attack on liberal intellectuals, social engineers, Democratic politicians, and civil rights leaders who seek to resist and reverse this patently racist exclusion of Afro-Americans from white ethnic neighborhoods in the 1960s-1980s era and today too...
...The housing was rated on a scale of zero to a hundred...
...White responses imply signifiTABLE V PERCEPTIONS OF BLACK/WHITE MOBILITY GAP 1981-1989 Question: Most people agree that on the average blacks have worse jobs, income, and housing than whites...
...and in another poll well over 70 percent explained that "many whites don't want them to get ahead...
...New York: Harper Bros., 1947), Chapters 16-21...
...After all, when mainstream black leaders were seeking to extend the benefits of the mid-1960s civil rights legislation, the white working-class in metropolitan areas did not welcome this opportunity to forge transracial coalitions...
...4 Of course, policy benefits for Afro-Americans are not the only victims of the assault on federal assistance...
...Though the federal affirmative assistance policies have been significantly reduced during the ReaganBush years (a recent Newsweek poll shows 53 percent of whites saying there is "enough legislation...
...These include cultural denigration and violence, which were pervasive throughout the first half of the twentieth century, resulting in thousands of deaths, maiming, and-perhaps as bad or worse-the psychological trauma inflicted on millions...
...Gary Franks, Conn...
...Segregation] has manifestations all the way from the laws prohibiting intermarriage to such taboos as that which commonly forbids a Negro to argue with a white man.9 Clearly, the racial-caste heritage was massive, extensive, and intricately intertwined at virtually every societal level...
...We do think the goal is both worthwhile and feasible and that liberals and progressives—the left—must stay the course...
...Richard Freeman and James Medoff, What Do Unions Do...
...A New Sociopolitical Ecology of Race The structure of race relations today is defined by new social formations, political patterns, and attitudes...
...In 1981 some forty-two percent of blacks saw discrimination in "getting decent housing," but only 16 percent of whites...
...Some 68 percent of Afro-Americans favor a racially mixed neighborhood, while only 8 percent prefer a mostly black pattern...
...The findings relating to greater mobility and greater transracial patterns for integrated AfroAmerican school children contrast sharply with transracial marital data...
...The readiness of "coping-strata" AfroAmericans for integration is also suggested in a 1988 Newsweek poll (reported March 7, 1988) on racial attitudes...
...It should also be noted that differences within the black political class are producing a slow but steady metamorphosis of what might be called transracial black politicians, that is, politicians who are black but owe their election to white voters (a variant, in effect, of transethnic white politicians, like Jewish politicians who owe election to Gentile voters...
...In one poll, between 1981 and 1989 well over 60 percent consistently explained this as "mostly due to discrimination...
...524 • DISSENT Race Relations An even stronger indication of readiness among "coping-strata" Afro-Americans for expanding integration can be gleaned from data shown in Table IV...
...Such acts virtually never happen to the homes of Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, or PolishAmericans...
...The Sharpton-type leadership among blacks did not cause the race-baiting conservatism among white ethnics...
...8 The New York Times (May 6, 1991...
...it merely offered a reinforcing rational to an already established conservatism among white voters in New York (and elsewhere too)—voters still not ready by the late 1960s and early 1970s for moderate advances in integration...
...Because (1) the overall range and caliber of black/white societal interaction is not sufficient and (2) the extent of equality for AfroAmericans is inadequate...
...The fact remains that white violence against blacks has a systemic aura about it...
...At the center of the black political class is a congressional delegation of twenty-four AfroAmericans...
...From a liberal and progressive perspective, this goal is morally correct...
...Typically there is a sharp discrepancy between black and white views on race-related causes of the mobility gap...
...This poll also revealed that 48 percent of blacks believed that black children did "better" in "racially mixed schools," while only 6 percent felt they did "worse" (41 percent said "no difference...
...An extensive longitudinal study in Hartford, Connecticut (begun in 1966), found that students who had the interracial experience, in comparison with those who remained in segregated schools, have higher test scores and high school graduate rates, are more likely to attend predominantly white colleges and are more likely to graduate from college...
...What is crucial about the role of copingstrata blacks in a transitional integrationist milieu is that, given whites' deep-rooted anxiety in regard to black/white relationships, it is logical to assume that bourgeois and stable blue-collar Afro-Americans possess societal attributes that should reduce this anxiety...
...We suggest that the state of race relations over the past thirty years has evolved beyond the rigid marginalization of Afro-Americans that prevailed before the 1960s civil rights legislation...
...For example, we get some insight from a 1980 census study of housing patterns in sixteen metropolitan areas with the largest Afro-American populations...
...Yet, although there is room for debate in gauging this development, we do not think America has yet achieved an integrated society...
...of Illinois Press, 1980...
...Or, rather, it offers white voters who are already indifferent to serious transracial electoral coalitions with blacks a basis for New Right political inclinations...
...This increase in status, when measured in terms of living and working standards, remained elusive for the vast majority of whites (whether "redneck" WASPs or Catholic proletarians) from the 1880s through the Second World War.' However ephemeral it was, this perceived status elevation was psychoculturally very real...
...In our conservative era, it is open season on black folks, even among decent people...
Vol. 38 • September 1991 • No. 4
