Michael K. Brown

EMBEDDING THE COLOR LINE: The Accumulation of Racial Advantage and the Disaccumulation of Opportunity in Post-Civil Rights America

This article investigates why deeply entrenched racial inequality persists into the post-civil rights era in the United States. It challenges individual-level explanations that assume persistent racial inequality is the result of either White bigotry, which is diminishing, or the failure of Blacks to take advantage of the opportunities opened up by the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. We propose an alternative explanation for durable racial inequality. Contemporary color lines, we argue, result from the cumulative effect of racial discrimination and exclusion, a process in which Whites accumulate racial advantages to the detriment of African Americans and Latinos. These cumulative inequalities are produced and sustained by competition between racial groups to acquire and control jobs and other resources, and by institutional practices and public policies. Individual choice in the form of intentional racism has little to do with the persistence of racial inequality. Our analysis suggests that Americans current understanding of the concept of equality of opportunity is out of sync with the realities of durable racial inequality, and needs to be revised.

State Capacity and Political Choice: Interpreting the Failure of the Third New Deal

In what sense were the 1940s a turning point for the postwar development of the American state? This is an odd question since the decade is not usually considered a moment of lasting political transformation, as were the New Deal and the Great Society. Rather, it is more characteristically rendered as a period of political stalemate, memorably captured by Samuel Lubells description of Harry Truman as “The Man Who Bought Time.” Yet the choices of the 1940s have been recently characterized by Ira Katznelson and Bruce Pietrykowski as far more significant than hitherto understood. Out of the conflict and debate over the New Deal emerge, they argue, a rather “crisp choice … about the character of the national state,” one that decided between alternative models of state-economy relationships.

The Ambiguity of Reform in the New Deal

By the end of the 1940s, it was clear that New Deal liberalism had changed. Cabell Phillips, a journalist, wrote that the Fair Deal had abandoned a liberalism preoccupied with poverty and inequality and “focused on the creation and equitable distribution of abundance, which now loomed as an attainable reality.” Economic growth had become the talisman of liberal policies, both foreign and domestic. Fair Deal conservation policy, for example, abandoned the New Deals emphasis on resource planning and redistribution of economic power and reshaped federal land, water, and grazing programs into tools of economic expansion. Similarly, postwar America put production and efficiency at the center of international debates over foreign exchange and foreign aid to war-torn Europe. The place of economic growth in postwar liberalism is often understood to reflect the conservative turn in American politics that followed the war with Harry Trumans presidency and the cold wars onset.

Race and equality of opportunity in American political development

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. The Logic of Practice. Richard Nice, trans. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fredrickson, George. 1987. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan Press. Pascoe, Peggy. 2009. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Steedman, Marek. 2011. “‘Walk with Me in White:’ Autonomy in a Herrenvolk Democracy (Atlanta 1880– 1910).” DuBois Review 8: 329–357. Steedman, Marek. 2012. Jim Crow Citizenship: Liberalism and the Southern Defense of Racial Hierarchy. New York: Routledge.

Black and Multiracial Politics in America Edited by Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh and Lawrence J. Hanks. New York: New York University Press, 2000. 404p.

The waves of immigrants arriving in the United States over the last 20 years, largely from Latin America and Asia, have settled in a few states—mainly California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey—and in big cities in those states. Like the migration of African Americans to northern cities in the twentieth century and the suburbanization of whites, this demographic transformation is remaking urban politics. Black and Multiracial Politics in America, a collection of original essays, addresses the implications of this change for “the practice and process of black and multiracial politics in American society” (p. xiii). The authors seek to forge a new link between the study of black and the study of multiracial politics.

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Thirty-® ve years after the civil rights revolution, there remain seemingly unbridgeable disparities between blacks and whites in employment, wages, family income, and, importantly, wealth. Nor is racial inequality any longer a peculiarly American problem. Derek Leslie and his colleagues ® nd signi® cant racial gaps in employment and earnings in Britain. The unemployment ratio of nonwhites to whites has doubled over the last 20 years and the earnings ratios of nonwhites are four-® fths those of whites. While there are substantial differences between different British ethnic groupsÐ blacks, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis have the highest unemployment ratesÐ the resemblance to the United States is unmistakable. Yet the question of why racial inequality persists ranks as one of the most contentious in contemporary social science. This debate centers on the question of whether white racism explains enduring racial inequality after passage of civil rights laws and the dismantling of Jim Crow. Ever since William Julius Wilson announced the declining signi® cance of race many writers have argued that what is often understood as racial inequality is really the result of class inequality. These critics insist, one might say, that race is experienced as classÐ in America at least. Like many conservative writers, Wilson assumes that racial prejudice has greatly diminished, but unlike them he discerns in persistent black poverty structural changes in the economyÐ willful decisions by businessmen and investors to close down factories in big cities and shift their investments elsewhere creating a world where work has disappeared. The color of those left behind hardly matters to their plight, which is compounded by the growth in the number of female-headed families among blacks after 1960 and declining demand for unskilled and poorly educated workers. Past racism has little relevance for contemporary black poverty. Wilson’ s argument has never been very convincing to students of labor market discrimination who painstakingly argue that racial differences in unemployment, wages, occupation, or family income are due as much to discrimination as to economic changes. The wages of black workers, for example, have lagged behind those of whites for the last 60 years despite the ups and downs of the U.S. economy and the passage of civil rights laws. And black men of all social classes, not just the unskilled or poorly

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by policymakers and business interests in the present (p. 181). Camacho closes the book by arguing that a change in individual attitudes and behavior is necessary before deliberations begin . . . This will require strong moral action . . . [which includes]: (1) direct control of access to ecosystems; (2) economic influence over markets through (a) the levying of taxes, (b) the imposition of fines, (c) subsidies for specified forms of ecosystem usage, and (d) various price controls over market producers (pp. 210-22). If one adopts the perspective used by Camacho and his colleagues (described in the Introduction), then the evidence presented in the case studies leads inevitably to the conclusions stated by Camacho and reinforced throughout this book. What is sorely missing is any countervailing evidence that would call into serious question the claims made. Such evidence exists (see Christopher H. Foreman, The Promise and Peril of Environmental Justice, 1998; John A. Hird, Environmental Policy and Equity: The Case of Superfund, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 12 [Spring 1993]: 323-43; Douglas L. Anderton, Methodological Issues in the Spatiotemporal Analysis of Environmental Equity, Social Science Quarterly 77 [September 1996]: 508-15; Vicki Been, Analyzing Evidence of Environmental Justice, Journal of Land Use and Environmental Law 11 [Fall 1995]: 1-36; Susan Cutter, Race, Class, and Environmental Justice, Progress in Human Geography 19 [March 1995]: 107-18; James T. Hamilton, Testing for Environmental Racism: Prejudice, Profits, and Political Power, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 14 [Winter 1995]: 107-32), but the editor and his colleagues do not cite it. Such an approach is unfortunate because, as Christopher Foreman argues in his recent book, The Promise and Peril of Environmental Justice (1998, p. 117), the advocates of environmental justice pose a potentially serious . . . danger to the minority and low-income communities [they aspire] to help. By discouraging citizens from thinking in terms of health and risk priorities . . . environmental justice can deflect attention from serious hazards to less serious or perhaps trivial ones.