Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliott Currie Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Shultz and David Wellman's Whitewashing Race
Reed, Adolph Jr.
WHITEWASHING RACE: THE MYTH OF A COLOR-BLIND SOCIETY By Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliott Currie, Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Shultz, and David Wellman University of...
...The authors do not address this question directly...
...They characterize the latter as "disaccumulation," that is, an accretion of disadvantages over time that result from a pattern of subordination and exclusion from social benefits and opportunities...
...They challenge what they describe as an emerging "racial realism," which claims that, as a result of the legislative victories of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, racism has been largely overcome as a significant determinant of black Americans' life chances...
...Similarly, in discussing the post—World War II GI Bill, the authors waffle between asserting that blacks were excluded and acknowledging that many black veterans were able to take advantage of the program and with lasting economic effect...
...And they undercut the framework of Thernstrom and others who attempt, by logical sleight-ofhand, to characterize current voting rights enforcement techniques as vehicles for ensuring affirmative action for minority candidates for office...
...Supreme Court, in Shelley v. Kramer in 1948, overturned racially restrictive housing covenants...
...The authors bring the discussion of affirmative action down from the ether of fairness or 92 n DISSENT / Summer 2004 equity as abstract principles...
...identify several proponents of this view, but Whitewashing Race homes in on Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom's massive America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible, which represents itself as the most systematic argument against color conscious public policy in contemporary political discourse...
...Even then, overt racial discrimination persisted in implementation of federal housing support programs...
...I suspect that the authors are preemptively skeptical about the possibilities for mobilizing popular political action in support of a racially egalitarian political agenda...
...Nonetheless, they argue that racial inequality "stems from a system of power and exclusion in which whites accumulate economic opportunities and advantages while disaccumulation of economic opportunity disempowers black and Latino communities...
...It is true that the National Labor Relations Act did not cover workers in the sectors in which most black people worked at the time of its passage, and it is also true that the NLRA did not extend civil rights protections to black workers on the job...
...Different mechanisms will be more or less appropriate in different local political cultures with different histories...
...There is an occupational hazard here...
...94 n DISSENT / Summer 2004...
...Alas...
...It should not be necessary to exert such intellectual labor to counter the same kinds of sophistries that have been around since Supreme Court Justice Joseph Bradley's 1883 opinion overturning the 1875 Civil Rights Act...
...ADOLPH REED JR...
...Among the book's contributions is its very clear, grounded discussion of the role of race in electoral apportionment, the area in which Abigail Thernstrom launched her attack on civil rights enforcement...
...In black studies, this tendency to focus on aggregate comparisons at the level of racial groups, ironically, has overwhelmed scholarly attention to the processes of differentiation that have been operating within the black American population over the last half-century...
...I reiterate that this book does an exemplary job of demonstrating that that fact is neither coincidental nor does it reflect limited motivation or capacity among the populations that systematically are disadvantaged...
...However, their discussion lacks what may be the most important consideration: how can we imagine constructing political alliances broad enough to win those policies and programs...
...Thus the Thernstroms and others who would justify manifest racial inequality twist themselves into knots to yoke their efforts to a language of color-blindness...
...Moreover, even when, as a result of discrimination at the hands of employers or white co-workers, blacks in industries covered by the NLRA were consigned to the lowest paid, least desirable employment, they remained covered by the law's benefits...
...However, its commitment to an interpretive approach that paints racial groups as monochromatic is also counterproductive for the book's political objectives...
...Whitewashing Race shows how racial exclusion in the past set in motion patterns of inequality that not only persist but worsen over time...
...Brown et al...
...is a professor of political science on the Graduate Faculty, New School University and member of the Interim National Council of the Labor Party...
...In the aggregate the characterization is correct...
...These notions represent whites as an unproblematically cohesive bloc committed to maintaining a regime of racial hierarchy...
...And Whitewashing Race is by and large cogently and consistently argued...
...For example, their claim that the "final version of the Wagner Act excluded black workers" is an unhelpful exaggeration...
...According to this view, inequalities in employment, wealth and income, education, or arrest and incarceration have more to do with blacks' own limitations than with discrimination or any systemic injustice...
...In this regard they stress that "simple models of individual discrimination do not adequately describe or explain changes in twentiethcentury labor market discrimination and exploitation...
...nor must they, because crafting a political strategy is not the principal concern of the book...
...Their account underscores the existence of a large gray area between overt discrimination and purely raceneutral hiring and promotion practices...
...After all, if all whites benefit from a regime of racial hierarchy and have an interest in maintaining it, where can nonwhites' allies be found...
...its virtue is that it conveys a sense of the general outcomes of the systemic inequalities...
...The authors bring that discussion down from platitudes about democracy and representation to argue that no cookiecutter style instruments can be applied to the issue of effective electoral representation...
...It is also engagingly written...
...and (3) policies to increase what economists call the 'social wage...
...The authors have meticulously developed a case against the most respectable, and therefore most insidious, arguments that currently attempt to justify manifest racial inequalities...
...In their conclusion the authors indicate three domains of policy intervention that they deem crucial for attacking racial inequality and advancing broadly egalitarian and democratic interests in the United States: "(1) stepped-up public investment in schools, jobs, and critical services...
...Second, even after that exclusion had abated, red-lining undercut black Americans' abilities to buy homes...
...WITHIN ITS COMPASS Whitewashing Race is a subtle, finely nuanced book...
...They argue, therefore, that racism "is related not only to actual privilege...
...They elide an important distinction between the fact that whites in general and on the average have derived benefits from that regime and the presumption that they cohere around a political interest in maintaining it...
...First, it leads the authors occasionally to interpretations that are simplistic to the point of inaccuracy...
...Instead "discrimination is better understood as a group phenomenon or as opportunity hoarding by one group to the detriment of others...
...Nevertheless, those black people who worked in the sectors covered under the Act were also covered by its protections...
...For one thing, it is easy to slide from a language of relative differences to formulations that reify those differences as racial absolutes...
...This narrative choice makes sense both because of the Thernstroms' pretensions toward empirical and historical thoroughness and because focusing on a single text helps sustain coherence of style and argument across the multiple-author volume...
...Federal housing support policy was not even officially race-neutral, however, until after the U.S...
...What matters is the magnitude or degree of difference that white Americans have learned to express and maintain in relationship to people of color...
...What they are left with, though, is an ambiguity about the audience they wish to address, those whom they wish to stir to action...
...This is correct but simplistic...
...The modal white person has derived greater advantages from the prevailing policy and economic regime than has the modal black person, and that difference originates in explicit racial subordination and exclusion...
...First, blacks were excluded from access to federally subsidized mortgage loans for at least a generation...
...The imperative to stress the persistence of group inequality sometimes puts scholars in an unnecessarily awkward position with respect to assessing the impact of policy interventions that simultaneously assist a significant cohort of black people while providing relatively greater benefits to whites...
...It also entails a commitment to maintain relative group status...
...The authors of Whitewashing Race are sensitive to this problem...
...As they argue forcefully, in providing different levels of benefits and protections, this segmentation gave the beneficiaries of the higher tier programs, who were disproportionately white and male, both a higher level of economic security and much greater capacity to accumulate wealth...
...2) strategies that will create wealth in minority communities...
...Taking Supreme Court rulings from Griggs v. Duke Power to Croson v. Richmond as a frame, they examine the generic polarities that shape the debate around racial "preferences...
...THIS ACCOUNT sets up an element of the authors' defense of affirmative action policy, which in some ways may be the book's conceptual and programmatic center...
...The authors tell the story, already told in detail in Brown's Race, Money and the American Welfare State and elsewhere, of the longterm consequences of the New Deal's partial social wage system, which was initially segDISSENT / Summer 2004 n 91 BOOKS mented hierarchically by race and gender, even though it was for the most part officially raceneutral...
...Moreover, as the authors demonstrate, there is no shortage in our time of persistent overt racial discrimination...
...A similar pattern obtains in employment, originating in labor market segmentation by race as well as overt discrimination by employers and unions...
...scholars challenging "racial realism" are primed conceptually to identify and emphasize aggregate racial disparities...
...They acknowledge that not all whites benefit equally, or at all, from the system of racialized social and economic hierarchy...
...Whitewashing Race insists that these techniques—including construction of districts with super-majorities of minority citizens—ensure not that minority candidates can win office but that minority voters' interests can be expressed effectively...
...That view has gathered steam during the last two decades, and the authors of Whitewashing Race provide an important public service in countering it...
...The authors lay out the subtle ways that racial BOOKS disadvantage can be reproduced without conscious prejudice or actively racist attitudes...
...Whitewashing Race's discussion of the NLRA is such a case...
...Recalling that Justice Bradley contended then that blacks no longer needed to be "special favorite of the laws" should give pause to those who maintain that positive antidiscrimination initiatives give blacks unfair advantage...
...Although much of the inequality in contemporary life does not derive immediately from overtly racist attitudes or intentions, significant socio-economic inequalities are distributed unevenly—sometimes quite sharply so—across racially defined populations in American society...
...For instance, to the extent that home ownership is the key asset that provides most Americans access to the quasi-private system of social security, black Americans are systematically disadvantaged in three distinct ways...
...Third, in favoring suburban over central city construction, postwar housing policy was sharply skewed to benefit whites over blacks because suburbs were more likely to exclude blacks...
...Like the notions of "group hoarding" of opportunities and a "posDISSENT / Summer 2004 • 93 BOOKS sessive investment in whiteness," this formulation is more useful as an affective device than an explanatory one...
...This general framework, as well as the specific proposals they make in each domain, are for the most part sensible, practical, and very likely to be effective...
...But using racism as a generic rubric for the various forms of directly racialized patterns of inequality may not be as helpful as the authors apparently assume...
...As access to opportunities has been built on the foundation of participation in the primary labor market and its extension in the higher tier system of public-private social welfare, patterns of racial inequality persist and may intensify without evidence of overt discrimination or discriminatory intent...
...In the absence of a clearly defined audience and clearly identified source of potential agency, what remains is to appeal to the dwindling liberal-elite-bargaining regime that has brokered the inadequate compromises of the last two-thirds of a century or more...
...This elision is counterproductive in two respects...
...WHITEWASHING RACE: THE MYTH OF A COLOR-BLIND SOCIETY By Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliott Currie, Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Shultz, and David Wellman University of California Press, 2003 349 pp $27.50 UNFORTUNATELY, this is a very useful book...
...And it remains appealing rhetorically to define these forms of injustice as racism, partly because racial bigotry is still negatively sanctioned in American political culture and because legal remedies exist for racial discrimination...
Vol. 51 • July 2004 • No. 3
