Achieving a More Integrated America

...Because of this public investment, groups like the southern Italians, who had posted weak school records to that point, were able to catch up to mainstream educational norms in just a few decades...

...Much of the mobility by minorities will not erase status differences with whites, even when minorities hold occupations that are nominally the same...

...State and municipal colleges and universities expanded rapidly in the quarter-century following the war...

...The roots of these disparities undoubtedly extend back into the early years of schooling...

...Given the numbers involved, it's implausible that they could meet the nation's expanding need for highly trained workers in the next quarter-century...

...But, unless the nation is willing to accept a degradation of its work force as a result of a net loss of its most educated workers, it will need to figure out how to make better use of a huge and underutilized human resource: its own minority citizens...

...U.S.-born blacks and Hispanics are most likely to benefit...

...For instance, young whites are already a highly educated group—more than 60 percent go to some form of college...

...the quieter social developments on the ground will have more impact than the noisy but fickle political winds...

...Demography alone will not rescue us from racial stratification...

...About one in three black and Hispanic children live below the poverty line...

...Asian Americans already outperform whites in schools and the labor market, and other minorities—including the poorest among them, Native Americans living on reservations—are relatively few in number...

...Research on school segregation, for example, reveals that black and Hispanic students are concentrated in largely minority schools, which typically have less demanding curricula, less qualified and less experienced teachers, and more safety problems...

...This group, born between 1946 and 1964, is disproportionately white and highly educated and occupies a huge patch of the most rewarding terrain in the labor market...

...The argument for investment is obvious...

...They must be willing to open the way for advancing blacks and Hispanics...

...This will produce a multiracial mainstream majority, including at a minimum many Asians and light-skinned Latinos, who along with whites will resist radical change...

...The statistics are dismal: the heaviest burdens of our staggering income inequalities continue to be borne by minorities (except for Asians...

...The private system contributed little to this growth...

...The number of students in institutions of post-secondary education literally quintupled between 1940 and 1970...

...Yet, as the number of white workers shrinks, it is inevitable that more and more minorities will appear in positions of authority, including those where they hold power over whites...

...Without appropriate public policies and bottom-up demands for more minority opportunity, the degree of change heralded by the new demographics will be limited...

...Richard Alba is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center...

...Though the details are different, the story is similar for the other alternative beneficiaries...

...The key to integration lies in the hands of whites, who remain the dominant group in American society...

...We can better understand what might happen by looking back to another period of profound social change: the mass assimilation of the so-called white ethnics— Irish Catholics and southern and eastern European Catholics and Jews—in the decades following the Second World War...

...His most recent book is Blurring the Color Line: The New Chance for a More Integrated America (Harvard University Press, 2009...

...The data on residential segregation indicate this, as do those on racial intermarriage...

...In addition, the mixed-race population will grow and blur ethno-racial distinctions...

...A rising number of good jobs held by immigrants, especially from Asia, is a part of the story, but so is a steep climb in the fraction held by blacks and Hispanics...

...This history is relevant because the main barrier in the way of large-scale black and Hispanic mobility into the good jobs that will become available lies in educational disparities...

...Data on the ethno-racial composition of the best-paid jobs demonstrates that this process is already going on, and the monopolistic grip of whites on these jobs is easing...

...educational research consistently links the academic skills of teachers to the amount of learning in classrooms...

...Non-whites will therefore have unprecedented opportunities...

...Put simply, under reasonable assumptions about who takes what sort of job, there will not be enough whites coming into the work force to replace the white baby boomers, let alone take the new jobs that will be created in the future...

...During the post-Second World War period, economic inequality reached a nadir described by economic historians as the "Great Compression...

...This is not to deny that they, too, will see increased opportunities because of the baby boomers' retirement...

...Of these, the quality of teaching might be the most critical...

...But among younger workers (in their late twenties at that time) whites held only 70 percent of such jobs...

...When it comes to race relations, the wound that most stubbornly resists healing, it is wise to keep in mind the well-known warning about the perfect being the enemy of the good...

...And the coming changes will certainly mean that more whites will work with blacks and Hispanics who are their equals in status...

...The turnover in the labor market will lead to "non-zero-sum" mobility: a period when minorities can advance economically without threatening the life chances that whites take for granted for themselves and their children...

...The competition among schools to attract the best teachers is all the more intense as a result, and the schools with mostly middle-class white students generally win out...

...The diversity in the middle and above will grow substantially if minorities can take full advantage of the impending non-zero-sum mobility, but it will increase incrementally, no matter what...

...The ethnics benefited also from public investment in education...

...Too much is different about America today...

...Most whites now live with a percentage of minorities that guarantees, at a minimum, their visibility in public places and institutions...

...By 1970, however, the lines of division were fading rapidly...

...Both survey data and anecdotes indicate that the enthusiasm of young whites for a mixed-race candidate far exceeded that of their elders...

...Yet, if race will not disappear, its significance will almost certainly be different from what it is today...

...The same trick of perception can be applied to other minorities whom whites see as otherwise like themselves...

...The changes already occurring in U.S...

...Intermarriage appears much less frequent for the white population (a mathematical necessity because of its larger size), but the rate for whites is increasing...

...According to the most commonly used index of residential segregation, integration has risen only slowly in recent decades...

...And yet, an unusual opportunity lies ahead to advance the racial integration of American society...

...Increasingly, even if they want to, whites cannot avoid minority neighbors...

...Blacks still have much lower intermarriage rates than do other minorities, and even more disturbing, their intermarriage rate does not rise with higher education, contrary to what occurs among Hispanics...

...One of the most firmly established principles to emerge from the statistical analysis of marriage patterns is that these reflect the composition of the "pool of eligibles"—the relative size of groups of unmarried individuals in the same age bracket...

...A modest rise in this percentage would lead to only a small number of additional whites qualifying for good jobs...

...his children learned of their mixed heritage only after his death in 1990...

...Estimates by the demographer Joshua Goldstein suggest very high multiplier effects for intermarriage on the diversity within close kin groups—as high as 14:1 among whites...

...It will take a large national investment to make teaching more appealing as a profession...

...But there has been a demonstrated decline in the academic abilities of young people entering the teaching profession...

...It is frequent also for U.S.-born Hispanics, close to a third of whom marry outside the Hispanic population...

...Non-zero-sum mobility will not meet all the ethno-racial challenges, but it could produce a fluidity of racial boundaries that will leave minorities much more space to determine their own lives...

...Post-war suburbanization and other factors also fostered social integration among whites from different backgrounds...

...That leaves an obvious question: won't others—working-class whites, new immigrants from Asia, white women—fill the vacuum...

...Recent Census Bureau data demonstrate what we could have guessed from past economic downturns: African Americans and Hispanics have suffered far more than whites...

...The most plausible explanation is that, because of demographic change, young whites have had more contact, and more friendships, with non-whites, than their parents...

...So this is the likely paradox of the near future: growing ethno-racial diversity in the middle, and even upper, strata of society combined with a stark overrepresentation of minorities in the lower strata...

...It is most common for Asians: according to 2000 Census data, about half of young, U.S.-born Asians have married non-Asians...

...Currently, the college graduation rates of these groups are only half those of whites...

...The changes took place during a period of massive non-zero-sum mobility: an extraordinary period of prosperity opened the sluices of mobility for working-class, ethnic whites without washing away the perches of advantaged white Protestants...

...The situation of minority children is especially dire...

...It is certain that, in the future, more and more whites will have non-white relatives who show up at family events and whose presence constrains the overt expression of prejudice, if it doesn't alter attitudes and beliefs directly...

...Consider two very different experiences, separated by just a few decades...

...The Gilded Age inequalities of the present period condemn a large number of Americans to poverty and economic margin-ality, and racial stratification functions to push many non-whites to the bottom or keep them from being able to rise above it...

...In 2005-2006, among older workers, for example, whites hogged nearly 90 percent of the best-paid quarter of the work force...

...Only enlightened public policy can address the large educational gaps that will leave larger and larger proportions of young people behind...

...Moreover, blacks appear to be less socially acceptable to whites than Hispanics are...

...How much darker turns out to be a subjective perception: A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (by Eugene Caruso, Nicole Mead, and Emily Balcetis) shows that the whites who like Obama see his skin as lighter—more like their own— than do those who dislike him...

...Fewer whites will mean that minorities will appear in more and more places where they have been scarce or absent before...

...It will help meet the political challenges if we can see investment as a necessity for protecting the long-range economic position of the United States...

...One shouldn't put too much stock in the racist tones evident in the furious resistance of Tea Party adherents to the Obama administration...

...Research recently published by Kevin Stainback and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey establishes that not all "managers" are equal: black and Hispanic managers are mainly placed in positions where they supervise workers with the same ethno-racial origins...

...Eradicating racial inequalities is more utopian hope than practical goal...

...Why did the ethnics become acceptable to white Protestants, who during the first half of the century feared growing Catholic political power as well as the social and economic challenges posed by rapid Jewish mobility...

...If these patterns are maintained, the rate for whites will continue to increase as their relative share of the population declines...

...The exodus of the baby boomers from the labor market will provide the opening...

...They are not, however, a cross-section of the non-white population: Asians and Hispanics predominate, blacks are much less present...

...Without that mobility, social integration, epitomized by much higher rates of marriage across ethnic and religious lines, could not have occurred...

...In other words, each time that a non-white person is introduced by marriage into a white family, fourteen family members gain a cross-racial kinship relationship...

...A period of large-scale minority mobility will have many ramifications, some of them impossible to anticipate...

...As the baby boomers leave the work force between now and the early 2030s, when the youngest of them turn seventy, the young Americans entering the labor market will be much more diverse in ethno-racial terms than the old Americans exiting it...

...Even now, whites accept mixed racial ancestry more than ever before...

...The economic health of the nation will depend on how it meets the challenge of replenishing the highly educated sectors of the work force as the baby boomers retire...

...Skepticism about the prospects of their assimilation was prevalent, and their religions had long been suspect to white Protestants...

...One of the risks of the coming period of integration is that more recent immigrant minorities will benefit much more than citizens whose ancestors came as slaves...

...That they might be willing to do so is suggested by the support for the election of Barack Obama among young white adults...

...Even small increases in intermarriage will have a pronounced impact on integration within whites' family circles...

...Achieving a More Integrated America RICHARD ALBA Despite the black family in the White House, this seems an odd moment to think about the possibilities for minority mobility and ethno-racial integration...

...But I must avoid painting the possible changes only in glowing colors—whites are, and will remain, privileged in many respects...

...Barack Obama, raised by his white mother and her parents, identified nevertheless, by marriage and choice of church, as black...

...The nation has tolerated enormous inequalities among schools at all levels, with obvious consequences for the quality of the education that students of different backgrounds receive...

...The vague anticipation that a future majority made up of minorities will, in a democratic society, find a way to overturn the existing racial order doesn't take into account the ongoing process of assimilation...

...How do such profound changes happen in so short a span...

...But non-zero-sum mobility was the catalyst for the others...

...rarely are they placed over white workers...

...On the eve of the war, these ethnics were confined to the margins of the mainstream—"here under sufferance" and subordinated to white Protestant leadership, as President Franklin Roosevelt put it bluntly to a confidante during a conversation in 1942...

...Only with affirmative action in some form can we hope to keep African Americans from slipping—yet again—behind the children of more recent immigrants...

...According to the research of the urban sociologist Samantha Friedman, the majority of whites in large metropolitan areas reside in neighborhoods where minorities form at least a fifth of the population...

...Interracial marriage between whites and others is becoming more common...

...neighborhoods are a sign of how integration may proceed...

...Greater contact between young whites and minorities in neighborhoods and schools and at work means more close relationships, including romantic relationships that cross ethno-racial lines...

...Although both U.S.-born blacks and Hispanics are more disad-vantaged in the labor market than whites— obtaining, for example, lower occupational placements for the same levels of education and lower earnings for the same nominal occupational placement—blacks are the more disad-vantaged of the two...

...This is probably an underestimate, because the official poverty line is not a realistic threshold...

...They are much more likely to experience unemployment and poverty...

...His campaign, however, was successful because he was able to make many whites feel that he was just like them, only with somewhat darker skin...

...We can learn from the earlier incorporation of groups, but we shouldn't expect to replicate the mass assimilation of 1945-1970 in the coming quarter-century—even under the most favorable conditions (which we are unlikely to see...

...They make up, for example, about 70 percent of engineering managers and two-thirds of registered nurses...

...But because the index offers a blinkered perspective, important but unheralded changes are going on behind this statistical façade...

...How many more might plausibly be enticed to do so...

...The literary critic Anatole Broyard, who came from a mixed-race milieu in Louisiana, rose within the New York arts scene of the 1950s and 1960s while passing as white...