Race in america matthew desmond and mustafa emirbayer

Race in America

Race in America Matthew Desmond Harvard University

Mustafa Emirbayer University of Wisconsin-Madison

B� W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC. New York • London

W. W. Norton & Company has been independent since its founding in 1923, when William Warder Norton and Mary D. Herter Norton first published lectures delivered at the People’s Institute, the adult education division of New York City’s Cooper Union. The firm soon expanded its program beyond the Institute, publishing books by celebrated academics from America and abroad. By mid-century, the two major pillars of Norton’s publishing program—trade books and college texts—were firmly established. In the 1950s, the Norton family transferred control of the company to its employees, and today—with a staff of four hundred and a comparable number of trade, college, and professional titles published each year—W. W. Norton & Company stands as the largest and oldest publishing house owned wholly by its employees.

Copyright © 2016 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright © 2010 by Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer

Previous edition published under the title Racial Domination, Racial Progress: The Sociology of Race in America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Desmond, Matthew, author. [Racial domination, racial progress] Race in America / Matthew Desmond, Harvard University, Mustafa Emirbayer, University of Wisconsin-Madison. — [2015 edition]. pages cm Previous edition published under title: Racial domination, racial progress. New York : McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2010. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-393-93765-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. United States--Race relations. 2. Race. I. Emirbayer, Mustafa, author. II. Title. E184.A1D36 2015 305.800973--dc23 2015033574

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CONTENTS

Preface xv

CHAPTER 1: Race in the Twenty-First Century 2 A Cancer 3 American Racism in the Twenty-First Century 6

Five Fallacies about Racism 7 Racial Domination 10 Symbolic Violence 14 Intersectionality 16

A Biological Reality? 18 “Obvious” Physical Differences 19 Athletic Ability and IQ 21

Athletic Ability 21 Intellectual Ability 23

Whiteness 25 The Race That Need Not Speak Its Name 26 White Privilege 27 White Antiracists 30

Race Is a Social Reality 32 Symbolic Category 32 Phenotype or Ancestry 34 Social and Historical Contexts 35 Misrecognized as Natural 35

Ethnicity and Nationality 37 Thinking Like a Sociologist 42

CHAPTER 2: The Invention of Race 46 Modernity Rising 48

viii Contents

Colonization of the Americas 50 The Spanish Conquest 50 The English Conquest 53

The Invention of Whiteness and Blackness 55 Africans Enslaved 57

The Atlantic Slave Trade 57 The Rise of the Cotton Kingdom 61 The Horrors of Slavery 62 Resistance, Great and Small 65 From Emancipation to Jim Crow 67

Manifest Destiny 69 Conquering Mexico and the Invention of the Mexican American 69

“The Indian Problem” 72

Immigration from Asia and Europe 75 The Invention of the Asian American 75 Immigrants from the Old World 77

Racial Discourses of Modernity 79 America’s Racial Profile Today 82 We, The Past 86

CHAPTER 3: Politics 88 The Civil Rights Movement 90

The NAACP 93 SCLC and Church-Driven Direct Action 93 SNCC and Youth-Driven Direct Action 95 Freedom Summer 97 The Selma-to-Montgomery March 99 Other Ethnic Movements 102

Backlash 105 Partisanship and Representation 108

Partisanship and Racial Polarization 108 Political Representation 112 Gerrymandering 113

Voting 116 The Effects of Racial Attitudes on Voting Behavior 116 Principle-Implementation Gap 118 Voter Intimidation and Felon Disenfranchisement 119

Contents ix

Elections and Implicit Racial Appeals 122 The Longing for Color-Blind Politics 125

CHAPTER 4: Economics 128 Economic Racism from the New Deal to Reaganomics 130

When Affirmative Action was White 130 The End of Industrialization 133

Income and Wealth Disparities 134 Income Inequality 134 Wealth Inequality 136

Chasing the American Dream: Poverty and Affluence 139 The Causes of Poverty 140 Black Poverty, Black Affluence 142 American Indian Reservations 145 The Struggles of Immigrants 147

Labor Market Dynamics 152 Getting a Job 152 Racial Antagonism and Interracialism in a Split Labor Market 154 Power and Privilege in the Workplace 156

Welfare 157 Why Is American Welfare the Size It Is? 157 Who’s on Welfare? 158 Does Welfare Lead to Dependency? 159

When Affirmative Action Wasn’t White 160 What is Affirmative Action? 161 Does Affirmative Action Help Those It Was Intended to Help? 162 Does Affirmative Action Hurt White Men? 164 Is Affirmative Action an Affront to American Meritocracy? 165

The Value of Inconvenient Facts 166

CHAPTER 5: Housing 168 Racial Struggles over Residence in Twentieth-Century America 169

The Racialization of Neighborhoods 170 Migration and Urbanization 170 The Origins of the Ghetto 173

x Contents

White Fight and White Flight 175 Urban Unrest 178

Racial Segregation 181 The Role of Economic Factors 183 The Role of Personal Choice 183 The Role of Housing Discrimination 185 The Costs of Segregation 186

The City 188 Unaffordable America 188 Advanced Marginality: The Ghetto 189 Ethnic Enclaves 190 Interracial Conflict: Blacks and Koreans 191

The Suburbs 192 Rural America 194

Colonias and Bordertowns 194 Life on the Reservation—and Environmental Racism 195 The Changing Face of Rural White America 198

Toward an Integrated America 200

CHAPTER 6: Crime and Punishment 202 The Rise of the American Prison 204

The Lynch Mob and the Prison Labor Camp 204 The Prison Boom 206 The Color of America’s Incarcerated 209 Severe Sentencing 210 The Rise of the “Law and Order” Politician 211 Repressing the Civil Rights Movement 213

Fear 214 Criminalizing Darkness 215 Do Immigrants Increase Crime? 217 The Arabization of Terrorism 220

Crime 223 Drug Trafficking 223 White-Collar Crime 224 Violence against Women 226 Homicide 228

Contents xi

Punishment 231 American Police State 231 Unjust Sentencing 235 The Many Costs of Mass Incarceration 237 Do Prisons Make Us safer? 239

Things Are Not What They Seem 241

CHAPTER 7: Education 244 “I Have a Right to Think!”: Racial Battles over Education, 1900–1970 245

The Colonizer’s Education: Indian Boarding Schools 246 “Spoiling Field Hands”: Early African American Education 248 “Separate Is Not Equal”: School Desegregation 251

Whiteness in Education 254 Whiteness in the Curriculum 254 Whiteness on College Campuses 257

Educational Inequality 259 The Role of the Family 261

Cultural Capital 261 Social Capital 264

The Role of Culture 265 Does Culture Help Explain Asian-American Educational

Achievement? 265 The Model Minority 266 Oppositional Culture 268 Stereotype Threat 269

The Role of Schools 271 Students Advantaged, Students Betrayed 271 Tracking 274

Combating Educational Inequality: The Case of Affirmative Action 275

How Does Affirmation Action in Education Work? 275 How Does Affirmative Action Affect Whites and Asians? 276 Is Affirmative Action the Most Effective Program? 277

The Benefits of a Multicultural Learning Environment 278

xii Contents

CHAPTER 8: Aesthetics 280 Race and Art in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America 282

The Reign of Minstrelsy 282 Voices from the Underground 284 The Rise of Multiculturalism 285

Racial Representation in Art 286 The White Aesthetic 287 The Racist Aesthetic 291 The Antiracist Aesthetic 295 The Promise and Pitfalls of Hip-Hop 298

The Racialization of Art Worlds 300 The Power of the White Gaze 300 The Racial Structures of the Aesthetic Sphere 303 Highbrow and Lowbrow Culture 305

Cultural Appropriation 308 Making Sense of Cultural Appropriation 309 Racist Appropriation 310 Antiracist Appropriation 312

The Sociology of Art, the Art of Sociology 314

CHAPTER 9: Associations 316 The Ordeal of Integration and the Rise of Ethnic Nationalism 318

The Segregated Community 319 Toward Integration: Associational Coalition Building 320 Away from Integration: The Case for Ethnic Nationalism 322

Civil Society in a Multiracial Democracy 325 Racial Variation in Civic Participation 325 Homophily in Associational Life 327 Racial Domination and the Decline of Social Capital 330 Identity Politics and the Fragmentation of Civil Society 332 What Is “Political Correctness”? 334

Hate Groups 336 Organized Racism 336 Who Joins Hate Groups? 338

Contents xiii

Cyber Communities 340 The Digital Divide 340 Virtual Racism 341 Virtual Empowerment 343

Religious Associations 344 Religious Illiteracy and Intolerance 344 Racialization of the Religious Sphere 345 Explaining Racial Homophily in Religious Life 349 Religion and Racial and Ethnic Identity 350

American Promise 352

CHAPTER 10: Intimate Life 354 The Family since Colonialism and Slavery 355

The Black Family under Slavery 356 Brave New Families: The Emergence of Interracial and Same-Sex Unions 358

Race and the Family Today 362 Explaining Racial Differences in Marriage Rates 363 Interracial Marriage 366 Doing the (Racial) Work 369 Divorce 370 Out-of-Wedlock Births 371 The Consequences of Single Motherhood 375

The Self and Identity Formation 377 Interaction Troubles 377 Intersectional Identity 379 Racial Authenticity 382 What To Do with White Identity? 386

The Problem with “Identity” 388

CHAPTER 11: Toward Racial Democracy 392 What Are the Goals? 395

Color-Blindness 395 Multiculturalism and Cosmopolitanism 398

xiv Contents

Racial Democracy 403 What Are the Goals for Individual Transformation? 405

How Do We Bring About Change? 408 Change at the Individual Level 408 Change at the Interactional Level 413 Change at the Institutional Level 416 Change at the Level of Collective Action 418

We Who Believe in Freedom 421

Glossary A1 Notes A9 Credits A85 Index A89

xv

PREFACE

More than a generation after the Civil Rights Movement, we continue to be tongue- tied when it comes to race and, as a result, are constrained from fully understanding our society and fellow citizens.

Old ways of thinking about race and ethnicity no longer seem to apply in a society that has moved well beyond the struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, a society that now confronts problems of racial division in some ways far more complex and ambiguous than those of straightforward segregation or bigotry, persistent as those tendencies may still be in the present day. What is needed is a new way of thinking about race for a society itself quite new. This book addresses that pressing need. It is our hope that Race in America will provide a more effective language with which to think and talk about—and effectively to address—the problem of racial inequal- ity and injustice in today’s society. (An earlier version of this work, which now is significantly updated and revised, was published under the title Racial Domination, Racial Progress: The Sociology of Race in America.)

Race in America breaks with current textbooks in several ways. We rely on in- novative advances in modern social thought, advances taking place not only in so- ciology but also in philosophy, anthropology, political science, economics, history, and literary and art criticism—not to mention exciting developments in such liter- atures as whiteness studies, critical race theory, and cultural studies. We fuse this social thought with music, literature, poetry, and popular culture. In this book you can find the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu alongside spoken-word poetry; American pragmatist philosophy followed by country music lyrics; ideas from the likes of W. E. B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Alejandro Portes, Ella Baker, Edward Said, and Ruth Frankenberg (to list but a few)—applied to modern society. Race in America is steeped in up-to-date social-scientific research on race and ethnicity, as well as in examples from contemporary life, including youth culture. We have taken seriously American sociologist C. Wright Mills’s famous dictum that “data is everywhere” and have drawn on social science to illuminate racial dynamics in all areas of social life.

Race in America confronts some of today’s most controversial and misunderstood issues, including immigration, affirmative action, racial segregation, interracial relationships, political representation, racialized poverty and affluence, educational inequality, incarceration, terrorism, cultural appropriation, civil society, religion, marriage and divorce, and racial identity formation. Throughout, it treats racial in- equality not as some “hot topic” issue to be debated in loose, unsystematic fashion but as a complex sociological phenomenon properly understood only through crit- ical socioanalysis that arrives at conclusions after sifting carefully through the best available evidence.

xvi Preface

Race in America is uncompromisingly intersectional. It refuses artificially to sep- arate the sociology of race and ethnicity from those of class and gender. It highlights how racial division overlaps other forms of division based on economic standing and gender (as well as religion, nationality, and sexuality), and it does so because these bases of inequality are inextricably bound together.

This book’s organization is nothing like that of previous-generation textbooks on race and ethnicity. Instead of proceeding, chapter by chapter, from one racial group to the next—which only naturalizes racial divisions and renders the sociology of race and ethnicity nothing more than a collection of isolated snapshots of dif- ferent groups—it pursues the analysis of racial dynamics into many of the different areas or fields of life of our society. Examining how race is a matter not of separate entities but of systems of social relations, it unpacks how race works in the politi- cal, economic, residential, legal, educational, aesthetic, associational, and intimate fields of social life. In each of these fields, it analyzes how white privilege is institu- tionalized and naturalized, such that it becomes invisible even to itself.

At bottom, this book is about the workings of race and ethnicity in contempo- rary America. It offers you a comprehensive overview of the causal mechanisms or processes whereby racial divisions are established, reproduced, and in some cases transformed. In doing so, it necessarily engages in a serious and sustained way with history. Here, historical processes are not relegated to a single introductory chapter but inform the entire work.

Race in America does not reduce one of today’s most sociologically complicated, emotionally charged, and politically frustrating topics to a collection of bold-faced terms and facts you memorize for the midterm. Rather, this non-textbook textbook seeks to connect with you, its readers, in a way that combines disciplined reasoning with a sense of engagement and passion, conveying sophisticated ideas in a clear and compelling fashion. Accordingly, the book works just as well in lower-division courses as it does in more advanced settings. Conventional textbooks on race and ethnicity stimulate a type of reading that can only be called contemplative, a reading that devotes academic interest to social problems without ever being touched by them or resonating deeply with them. By contrast, we seek to stimulate generative readings, which simultaneously engage the world you find intimately familiar and yet also effect a sharp rupture with that world, defamiliarizing the familiar and helping you to arrive at a deeper sociological understanding of your world, offering solutions and strategies so that we all can work toward racial justice.

We seek to offer you, in short, a way of thinking about race that you can apply to your everyday lives. More, we hope to cultivate in you a sociological imagination, one that rejects easy explanations and that takes into account social and historical forces that operate on an expansive scale. We are living in an age in which racial inequality and discrimination persists. But we also are living in an age when racism has come under serious and sustained attack. We are living in an age when multi- cultural coalitions have formed and all people, regardless of race, have taken stands

xviiPreface

against racial intolerance. And many of the most powerful and important antiracist movements have been led by young people. Considerable progress has been made, but considerable work also remains unfinished.

It is commonplace for students in a course on the sociology of race and ethnicity to think the course really is for someone else. A course such as this one, however, is meant for everyone.

We all have something to learn in this class—and we all have something to teach. This book is not just about “them” but about you. It seeks to educate—and unsettle—the righteous along with the disengaged, those who have long discussed matters of racism as well as those who are just now joining the conversation.

Let us begin a conversation, then. This conversation might make you feel uncomfortable, since topics as important and as personal as race are difficult to discuss. You might feel a bit unsteady and awkward, clumsy even. You might feel exposed and vulnerable. Your words might trip and stumble at times, and you might say things you later regret. Take courage in the fact that many of your classmates (and perhaps even your professors) feel the same way. And know, too, that we have to have this conversation, lest we allow racial inequality and injustice to poison the promising vitality of American society.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We relied on a number of scholars who read chapters of the manuscript and offered helpful suggestions: Clifford Brown, University of New Hampshire; Sarah Bruch, University of Iowa; Mindelyn Buford, Northeastern University; David Embrick, Loyola University Chicago; Meredith Greif, Johns Hopkins University; Aaron Gullickson, University of Oregon; Jennifer Jones, University of Notre Dame; Tiffany Joseph, Stony Brook University; David Leonard, Washington State University; Ana Liberato, University of Kentucky; Nancy Lopez, University of New Mexico; Jillian Powers, Brandeis University; Jacob Rugh, Brigham Young University; Kathryn Tillman, Florida State University; Milton Vickerman, University of Virginia.

We’d like to thank everyone at Norton involved in publishing Race in America. In particular, we owe a large debt of gratitude to our editor, Karl Bakeman, for his vision and superb guidance. We’d also like to thank editorial assistant Mary Williams, project editor Diane Cipollone, and production manager Vanessa Nuttry, who handled every stage of the manuscript and worked together to produce this book. We would also like to thank Norton’s sales and marketing team, especially Julia Hall, the sociology marketing manager, and the social science sales specialists Jonathan Mason, Roy McClymont, and Julie Sindel. They have been enthusiastic advocates for the book throughout its development. Finally, we must thank our photo editors, Trish Marx and Julie Tesser, for providing such powerful visual images as well as Eileen Connell and the rest of the digital media team responsible for all the innovative video and electronic resources that accompany Race in America.

xviii Preface

RESOURCES FOR STUDENTS AND INSTRUCTORS InQuizitive inquizitive.wwnorton.com Paul Dean, Ohio Wesleyan

Norton’s formative, adaptive learning platform personalizes quiz questions and facilitates students’ understanding of important learning goals from the text in an engaging, game-like environment. The software is easy to use and can be accessed on a wide range of mobile devices, including tablets and smartphones.

Sociology in Practice: Thinking About Race and Ethnicity DVD Offering more than four hours of video clips from documentaries by independent filmmakers that explore the topic of race and ethnicity from various perspectives, this two-disc DVD is ideal for initiating classroom discussion and encouraging stu- dents to apply sociological concepts to real world issues.

Norton Coursepack wwnorton.com/coursepacks The free Norton Coursepack offers a variety of activities for self-assessment and review, including an optional ebook, 34 independent documentary film clips, inte- grated InQuizitive activities, chapter outlines and learning goals, key term flash- cards and matching quizzes, “Theory to Practice” activities found at the end of each chapter of the book, and gradable quizzes on select clips from the Sociology in Practice: Race and Ethnicity DVD.

http://www.inquizitive.wwnorton.com
http://www.wwnorton.com/coursepacks
xixPreface

Norton Ebook The ebook for Race in America provides students and instructors an enhanced read- ing experience at a fraction of the cost of a print textbook.

Test Bank The Test Bank conforms to Bloom’s taxonomy and includes 40 to 50 multi- ple-choice and 5 to 10 essay questions per chapter. Every question is tagged with difficulty level and metadata that places it in the context of the chapter, making it easy for instructors to construct meaningful and diagnostic tests.

Lecture and Art Slides All of the art from the book is available for classroom use. These visually engaging PowerPoint slides feature concept check questions and discussion questions as well as lecture outlines.

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Matthew Desmond is an associate professor of sociology and social science at Harvard University and co-director of the Justice and Poverty Project. A former member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, Desmond is the author of the award- winning book, On the Fireline, and editor of a collection of studies on severe deprivation in America. His work has been supported by the MacArthur, Ford, Russell Sage, and National Science Foundations, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.

Mustafa Emirbayer is a professor of sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published widely on sociological theory, the sociology of race and ethnicity, comparative-historical analysis, and cultural sociology. He is editor of Sociologi- cal Theory, a past chair of the Social Theory section of the American Sociological Association, and past winner of the Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda- Setting in Sociology.

Together, they are the authors of The Racial Order, a companion to this volume.

Race in America

Race in the Twenty- First Century

A Cancer 3

MAIN POINTS

• Explain why one should avoid the individualistic fallacy, the legalistic fallacy, the tokenistic fallacy, the ahistorical fallacy, and the fixed fallacy, when thinking about racism.

• Distinguish between institutional racism and interpersonal racism and understand how these types of racism often interpenetrate and inform one another.

• Understand how racism intersects with other forms of social division— those based on gender, class, sexuality, religion, nationhood, and ability.

• Understand what is meant by symbolic violence and explain its significance for the perpetuation of racial inequality.

• Learn why race is a symbolic category and understand why there is no biological foundation for race.

• Understand how whiteness is racial domination normalized, which produces and reproduces many privileges for white people.

• Recognize how race and ethnicity are overlapping symbolic categories and explain why they cannot be collapsed into one category.

A CANCER As we enter a promising new millennium, we continue to be confronted with a problem as old as America itself. That problem is the problem of the color line. It is the problem of racism, of inequality and privilege, of the suffering and oppression of some groups of people at the hands of another.

Some have argued that in these modern times there is no problem at all. A grow- ing number of commentators, from political leaders to radio talk-show hosts, have suggested that race no longer matters.1 They have boasted that we have, a mere for- ty years after the Civil Rights Movement, “reached the promised land” that Martin Luther King, Jr., so eloquently described in one of the most famous speeches of the last century: the “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on August 28, 1963. We have arrived, they say, at true racial democracy. We are living in a so-called color-blind society, in which people are judged, in King’s words, “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Does such an optimistic idea truly reflect the state of America today?

In some respects, we have good reason to be optimistic. Thanks to the brave activists of the Civil Rights Movement, the United States no longer upholds legally enforced residential, educational, and economic segregation. Most of us will not experience grotesque acts of racial violence that many people of color experienced fifty years ago. A number of social institutions, moreover, have been thoroughly integrated, most notably the American military. The black middle class and the Hispanic middle class have grown; American Indian nations have developed effective economic development strategies based on the principle of tribal sovereignty; Asian Americans have made impressive inroads into positions

4 Chapter 1 | Race in the Twenty-First Century

of influence in politics, science, business, and the arts. There are other encouraging trends as well—in religion, sports, the mass media, voluntary associa- tions, and other significant areas in American life. In politics, one need only say the name “Barack Obama.” And in the social and cultural order, Americans are beginning to appreciate the inherent value and dig- nity of all persons, regardless of origins or skin color. This is especially true of the youth, who in terms of their racial and ethnic attitudes probably are the most open-minded and tolerant generation in U.S. history. And today, many corporations, universities, organizations, and congregations consider racial and ethnic diversity an asset to be fostered and sought after, not a problem to be avoided. To say that noth- ing has gotten better certainly would be inaccurate.

But has racism been completely vanquished? Let’s take a glance at race relations in the United States to find out.

• The FBI tallied 6,933 incidents of hate crime that took place in 2013 alone. That’s 19 hate crimes a day. (This number is underestimated, because it accounts only for those crimes reported to the FBI by participating law enforcement agencies.) These offenses included intimidation, destruction of property and vandalism, assault, burglary, murder, and rape. Race-based hate crimes accounted for almost half the total number of offenses, and religion- based crimes accounted for 17 percent. Sixty-six percent of the race-based hate crimes were committed against black people.2

• America is unmatched among developed democracies for the depths of its poverty. In 2014, almost 50 million Americans lived below the poverty line. That’s more people than the entire population of Spain. With poverty rates of around 26 percent, Native Americans and African Americans were the poorest racial groups in the nation. Twenty-two percent of Hispanic Americans lived in poverty. Only 11 percent of Asian Americans and white Americans lived under similarly harsh economic conditions.3 Since 1940, the unemployment rate of African Americans has been nearly twice that of whites. And over half of the Native Americans living on some reservations are unemployed. Despite these vast inequalities, 50 percent of whites recently surveyed believe that the average African American and the average white person are equally well off.4

• Today, nearly 7 million people are serving time in prison, being held in jails, awaiting trail, or under probation or parole supervision. Almost 6 million Americans either are in prison or have been locked up at some point in their lives; this amounts to one in thirty-seven Americans. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Severe racial inequalities are at work within the criminal justice system. African Americans are eight times more likely to be incarcerated than whites. Among black men born

Anti-Muslim graffiti defaces a Shi’ite mosque at the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Michigan.

A Cancer 5

in the late 1960s who did not earn a high school diploma, 60 percent had prison records by the time they reached the age of thirty-five. Sociologists and criminologists have demonstrated that racial inequalities in the justice system are largely accounted for by examining how racial exclusion has resulted in high concentrations of poor African Americans and Latinos living in inner-city areas that offer little to no opportunity for economic advancement or survival.5

Given these facts—facts that barely scratch the surface of the problem—can we confidently conclude that race does not matter today? Would such logic be acceptable when considering other types of problems? Consider, for example, cancer. What if a group of citizens suddenly declared that cancer is not a problem anymore? “We solved cancer years ago,” they might say. Surely upon hearing such a bold proclamation we would examine the facts, which overwhelmingly would dispute the claim. We would point to the 10 million Americans with a history of cancer as well as the 1 million Americans expected to be victims of cancer this year. We would identify the symptoms of cancer manifest in fever, fatigue, pain, sores, bleeding, lumps, and so forth. We would consult doctors and epidemiol- ogists who have documented case after case of abnormal cell growth and tumor development. In short, we would disavow the claim that “cancer was cured long ago” simply by pointing to the plethora of signs, symptoms, and effects of cancer obvious in everyday life.

The same logic applies to social diseases. Earlier in this section we listed some symptoms of racism, evidence that race, indeed, is a fundamental part of ev- eryday life. Race penetrates all aspects of our lives—our history, our collective memory, our schools, our jobs, our streets. It structures the inner workings of our hospitals, our prisons, our bastions of political power, and our economy. We witness its effects on our art, our entertainment, and our churches, mosques, and synagogues. Our intimate relationships—the relationships we have with family, friends, lovers, leaders, role models, heroes, enemies, teachers, landlords, and supervisors—are influenced by relations of race. Race is even there in the basic ways we understand ourselves; it informs our inner thoughts and, indeed, our very identities as people. Life in America—and, indeed, life around the globe—is a life saturated with the reality of race.

This reality of race, like many other social realities, has grown adept at shape-shifting. Unlike cancer, which looks the same as it did 100 years ago, the racism of our generation looks different from the racism our parents witnessed, which, of course, looked different from the racism their parents witnessed. Racism is mercurial, ever changing. Twenty-first-century patterns of racial stig- matization, exclusion, and repression—as well as promises of racial reconciliation and multicultural coalitions—do not immediately resemble those of the twentieth century. Although racial violence still occurs in America today, there are fewer victims than there were in the previous generation. And although many high schools, universities, neighborhoods, job sites, nursing homes, country clubs, restaurants, and parks remain segregated along lines of race, this racial segregation no longer is enforced by law.

6 Chapter 1 | Race in the Twenty-First Century

Today’s racism is not always obvious. It can be slippery, elusive to observation and analysis. Like a recessive tumor, twenty-first-century racism has disguised itself, calling itself by other names and cloaking itself behind seemingly “race-neutral” laws, policies, practices, and language. But it is still with us, influencing our relationships, our institutions, and our world. And it will not simply fade out of existence if we turn a blind eye toward it. A tumor will destroy a body regardless of whether its bearer recognizes it or not.

We should also keep in mind that present-day society is directed by the past. History structures the workings of today in innumerable ways, some of which are so deeply familiar to us that we fail to notice them. In the words of Émile Durkheim, a French sociologist and one of the founding fathers of the discipline, “in each one of us, in differing degrees, is contained the person we were yesterday. . . . The present is necessarily insignificant when compared with the long period of the past because of which we have emerged in the form we have today.”6 If the world we occupy is shaped by the struggles of yesterday, then we cannot divide past racism from pres- ent racism in a hard-and-fast manner.

What is more, racial inequalities, as well as racial privileges, accumulate over generations. In other words, our standing in today’s world largely is dictated by the ways in which our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were treated during their own lifetimes. If our parents suffered from systematic social exclusion and discrimination based on their race, then many aspects of our lives—our eco- nomic and educational opportunities, for example—will be disadvantaged. In the same way, if our parents benefited from the very race-based methods of social exclu- sion and discrimination that caused the parents of some of our peers to suffer, then we will enjoy a certain degree of privilege in today’s society. The accruing afflictions or affluence of our mothers and fathers are visited upon us, sons and daughters.

Racism persists as the cancer of American life. Pervasive, corrosive, dehuman- izing, and deadly, modern-day racism infects the health of our society. It is our re- sponsibility, then, as students of society, and as future citizens of our communities, to understand the realities of racism. As citizens of a world that grows more racially diverse every year, we must understand how race and racism work. And we must develop tools to analyze this social creation that is responsible for so many cleav- ages and inequalities in our world today. This book aims to do just that. It seeks to explain the inner logic of race and racism and to describe the nature of race relations in the present day. In addition, it hopes to provide you with a way of understanding race that is informed by historical sensitivity, critical thought, sociological analysis, and a global imagination.

AMERICAN RACISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY How, then, should we begin to wrap our minds around race in America in the twenty- first century? Consider this chapter a necessary prelude to a conversation, a concep- tual cornerstone on which everything else rests. Many debates about race involve people heatedly talking past one another. If conversations about affirmative action

American Racism in the Twenty-First Century 7

or immigration leave us frustrated, it often is because we have very different un- derstandings not necessarily about these specific policies, but about the nature of race itself. What are the realities of American racism and multiculturalism today? How should we think about enduring problems and recent progress? How should we conceptualize racism alongside other forms of privilege and disadvantage, such as those based on religious identity, class background, sexuality, or gender? And what is “race,” in the first place? This section begins to address some of these questions. Before we articulate what we believe race to be, however, perhaps the best way to start is by offering some suggestions as to how not to think about race.

Five Fallacies about Racism There are many misconceptions about the character of racism. Americans are deep- ly divided over its legacies and inner workings, and much of this division is a result of the fact that many Americans understand racism in limited or misguided ways.7 We have identified five fallacies about racism—logical mistakes, factual or logical errors in reasoning—that are recurrent in many public debates, fallacies one should avoid when thinking about racism.8

1. Individualistic Fallacy. Here, racism is assumed to belong to the realm of ideas and attitudes. Racism is only the collection of nasty thoughts a “racist individual” has about another group: “Mexicans are lazy”; “Blacks are criminals”; “A black person driving a nice car is a criminal”; “Native Americans are lazy drunkards.” It is a matter of personal “prejudices” (defined by social psychologist Gordon Allport as “antipathies based upon faulty and inflexible generalizations”) and of “stereotypes” (“exaggerated beliefs associated with a [racial] category”).9 Someone operating with this fallacy thinks of racism as one thinks of a crime and, therefore, divides the world into two types of people: those guilty of the crime of racism (“racists”) and those innocent of the crime (“nonracists”).10 Crucial to this misconceived notion of racism is intentionality. “Did I intention- ally act racist? Did I cross the street because I was scared of the Hispanic man walking toward me, or did I cross for no apparent reason?” Upon answering “No” to the question of intentionality, one assumes they can classify their actions as “nonracist,” despite the character of those actions, and go about their business as innocent. In a society with signs of racial injustice everywhere, virtually everyone can say they are not racist.

This conception of racism simply won’t do, for it fails to account for the racism woven into the very fabric of our schools, political institutions, labor markets, and neighborhoods. Conflating racism with prejudice ignores the more systematic and structural forms of racism; it looks for racism within individuals and not institu- tions.11 Labeling someone a “racist” shifts our attention from the social surround- ings that enforce racial inequalities to the individual with biases. It also lets the accuser off the hook—“He is a racist; I am not”—and treats racism as aberrant and strange, whereas American racism is quite normal.

Furthermore, intentionality is in no way a prerequisite for racism. Racism often is habitual, unintentional, commonplace, polite, implicit, and well meaning.12 Thus, not only is racism located in our intentional thoughts and actions; it also thrives in our dis- positions and habits, as well as in the social institutions in which we are all embedded.

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2. Legalistic Fallacy. This fallacy conflates de jure legal progress with de facto racial progress. “De jure” and “de facto” are Latin expressions meaning, respectively, “based on the law” and “based in fact.” Thus, one who operates under the legalistic fallacy assumes that abolishing racist laws (racism in principle) automatically leads to the abolition of racism in everyday life (racism in practice).

This fallacy begins to crumble after a few moments of critical reflection. After all, we would not make the same mistake when it comes to other criminalized acts: laws against theft do not mean that one’s car never will be stolen. By way of tangible illustration, consider Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case that abolished de jure segregation in schools, making it illegal to enforce racially segregated classrooms. Did that lead to the abolition of de facto segrega- tion? Absolutely not. Fifty years later, schools still are drastically segregated and drastically unequal.13 In fact, some social scientists have documented a nationwide movement of educational resegregation, which has left today’s schools even more segregated than those of 1954.14

3. Tokenistic Fallacy. One who is guilty of the tokenistic fallacy assumes that the presence of people of color in influential positions is evidence of the complete eradication of racial obstacles. This logic runs something like this: “Many people of color, such as Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Carol Mosely Brown, and Alberto Gonzales, have held high-ranking political posts; therefore, racism does not exist in the political arena. Many people of color, such as Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Lopez, and Lucy Liu, are celebrities and multimillionaires; there- fore, there is no racial inequality when it comes to income and wealth distribution. Poor people of color (not society) are to blame for their own poverty.”

Although it is true that many people of color have made significant inroads to seats of political and economic power over the course of the last fifty years, a dis- proportionate number remain disadvantaged in these arenas.15 We cannot, in good conscience, ignore the millions of African Americans living in poverty and, instead, point to Oprah’s millions as evidence of economic inequality. Instead, we must ex-

plore how Oprah’s financial success can coexist with the economic deprivation of millions of black women. We need to explore, in historian Thomas Holt’s words, how the “simultaneous idealization of Colin Powell [or, for that matter, Barack Obama] and demonization of blacks as a whole . . . is replicated in much of our everyday world.”16

Besides, throughout the history of America, a hand- ful of nonwhite individuals have excelled financially and politically in the teeth of rampant racial domina- tion. The first black congressperson was not elected after the Civil Rights Movement, but in 1870! Joseph Rainey, a former slave, served in the House of Repre- sentatives for four terms. Madame C. J. Walker is ac- credited as being the first black millionaire. Born in 1867, she made her fortune inventing hair and beauty products. Few people would feel comfortable pointing

South Park comments on the Tokenistic Fallacy by naming the black character “Token Black.”

American Racism in the Twenty-First Century 9

to Rainey’s or Walker’s success as evidence that late-nineteenth-century America was a time of racial harmony and equity. Such tokenistic logic would not be accurate then, and it is not accurate now.

4. Ahistorical Fallacy. This fallacy renders history impotent. Thinking hindered by the ahistorical fallacy makes a bold claim: most U.S. history—namely, the ex- tended period of time during which this country did not extend basic rights to people of color (let alone classify them as fully human)—is inconsequential today. Legacies of slavery and colonialism, the eradication of millions of Native Americans, forced segregation, clandestine sterilizations and harmful science experiments, mass disenfranchisement, race-based exploitation, racist propaganda distributed by the state caricaturing Asians, blacks, and Hispanics, racially motivated abuses of all kinds (sexual, murderous, and dehumanizing)—all of this, purport those operating under the ahistorical fallacy, does not matter for those living in the here-and-now. This idea is so delusional that it is hard to take seriously. Today’s society is directed, constructed, and molded by the past.17 All that is socially constructed is historical- ly constructed, and since race, as we shall see, is a social construction, it, too, is a historical construction.

A “soft version” of the ahistorical fallacy might admit that events in the “recent past”—such as the time since the Civil Rights Movement or the attacks on September 11, 2001—matter, but things in the “distant past”—such as slavery or the colonization of Mexico—have little consequence. But this idea is no less fallacious than the “hard version,” since many events in America’s “distant past”— especially the enslavement and murder of millions of Africans—are the most consequential in shaping present-day society. In this vein, consider the question French historian Marc Bloch poses: “But who would dare to say that the under- standing of the Protestant or Catholic Reformation, several centuries removed, is not far more important for a proper grasp of the world today than a great many other movements of thought or feeling, which are certainly more recent, yet more ephemeral?”18 (Additionally, any historian would remind us that, since America is just over 200 years old, all American history is “recent history.”)

5. Fixed Fallacy. Those who assume that racism is fixed, that it is immutable, constant across time and space, partake in the fixed fallacy. Since they take racism to be something that does not develop in any way, those who understand racism through the fixed fallacy often are led to ask such questions as “Has racism in- creased or decreased in the past decades?” And because practitioners of the fixed fallacy usually take as their standard definition of racism only the most heinous forms of racism—racial violence, for example—they confidently conclude that, indeed, things have gotten better.

It is important to trace the career of American racism and to analyze, for example, how racial attitudes or measures of racial inclusion and exclusion have changed over time. Many social scientists have developed sophisticated techniques for doing so.19 But the question “Have things gotten better or worse?” is legitimate only after we account for the morphing attributes of racism. We cannot quantify racism in the same way we can quantify, say, birthrates. The nature of “birthrate” does not fluctuate over time; thus, it makes sense to ask, “Are there more or less births now than there were fifty years ago?” without bothering

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to analyze if and how a birthrate is different today than it was in previous histor- ical moments.

American racism assumes different forms in different historical moments. Although race relations today are informed by those of the past, we cannot hold to the belief that twenty-first-century racism takes on the exact same form as twentieth-century rac- ism. And we certainly cannot conclude that there is “little or no racism” today because it does not resemble the racism of the 1950s. (Modern-day Christianity looks very different, in nearly every conceivable way, than the Christianity of the early church. But this does not mean that there is “little or no Christianity” today.) So, before we ask, “Have things gotten better or worse?” we should ponder the essence of racism today and how it differs from racism experienced by those living in our parents’ or grandparents’ generation. We should ask, further, to quote Holt once more, “What en- ables racism to reproduce itself after the historical conditions that initially gave it life have disappeared?”20

Racial Domination We have spent a significant amount of time talking about what racial domina- tion or racism is not. We have yet to spell out what it is. Racial domination is the arrangement of racial life in such a way that its ordinary, everyday workings serve to benefit certain racial groups (in our society, predominantly whites) at the expense of others (in our society, predominantly nonwhites). The dominants of a racial order are those who occupy a place in it such that the regular operation of that racial order works in their favor. The dominated are those who occupy a position in it such that its regular operation works against them.

Far from always involving overt coercion or violence, as in the days of slavery, racial domination is a matter of how institutions ordinarily operate, how interper- sonal exchanges (within and across racial divides) typically unfold, and even how individuals (whites and nonwhites alike) unthinkingly come to see themselves and their place in the racial order.

We can delineate two specific manifestations of racial domination: institutional racism and interpersonal racism. Institutional racism is systematic white domina- tion of people of color, embedded and operating in corporations, universities, legal systems, political bodies, cultural life, and other social collectives. The word “dom- ination” reminds us that institutional racism is a type of power that encompasses the symbolic power to classify one group of people as “normal” and other groups of people as “abnormal,” the political power to withhold basic rights from people of col- or and marshal the full power of the state to enforce segregation and inequality, the social power to deny people of color full inclusion or membership in associational life, and economic power that privileges whites in terms of job placement, advance- ment, and wealth and property accumulation.

Informed by centuries of racial domination, institutional racism withholds from people of color opportunities, privileges, and rights that many whites enjoy. Examples of institutional racism include the tendency of schools and universities to support curricula that highlight the accomplishments of European Americans, ignoring the accomplishments of non-European Americans; the disproportionate numbers of white people in high-ranking political, economic, and military posts

American Racism in the Twenty-First Century 11

and the ongoing exclusion of people of color from such posts; and the prevalence of law enforcement practices that target people of color, especially African Americans and Arab Americans, as criminals or ter- rorists. In all three of these examples, racial domina- tion is carried out at the institutional level, sometimes despite the motives or attitudes of the people work- ing in those institutions. Because institutional racism operates outside the scope of individual intent, many people do not recognize institutional racism as racism when they experience it.

Below the level of institutions, yet informed by the workings of those institutions, we find interpersonal racism. This is racial domination manifest in everyday interactions and practices. Interpersonal racism can be overt, as in old-fashioned bigotry (old-fashioned but not outmoded, as the examples at the start of this chapter indicate). In such instances, people act out their preju- dices, giving direct expression to their negative attitudes and guided by their demeaning stereotypes of others. However, most of the time, interpersonal racism is quite covert: it is found in the habitual, commonsensical, and ordinary practices of our lives. This is part of the reason why our racial problems are so challenging: they extend far beyond the confines of straightforward, conscious bigotry. Our racist attitudes, as Lillian Smith remarked in Killers of the Dream, easily “slip from the conscious mind deep into the muscles.”21 Since we are disposed to a world structured by racial domination, we develop racialized dispositions—some conscious, many more unconscious and bodily—that guide our thoughts and behaviors.

We may talk slowly to an Asian woman at the farmer’s market, unconsciously assuming that she speaks poor English. We may inform a Mexican woman at a cor- porate party that someone has spilled his punch, unconsciously assuming that she is a janitor. We may unknowingly scoot to the other side of the elevator when a large Puerto Rican man steps in, or unthinkingly eye a group of black teenagers wandering the aisles of the store at which we work, or ask to change seats if an Arab American man sits down next to us on an airplane. Many miniature actions such as these have little to do with one’s intentional thoughts; they are orchestrated by one’s practical sense, one’s habitual know-how, and informed by institutional racism.

“Can people of color be racist?” This question is a popular one in the public imagination, and the answer depends on what we mean by racism. Institu- tional racism is the product of years of white supremacy, and it is designed to produce far-reaching benefits for white people. Institutional racism carries on despite our personal attitudes. Thus, there is no such thing as “black institu- tional racism” or “reverse institutional racism,” since there is no centuries-old socially ingrained and normalized system of domination designed by people of

With Mimic, a staged photograph, Canadian-born artist Jeff Wall re-created an incident he had once witnessed when a white man mocked an Asian man with this small but deeply powerful gesture.

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color that denies whites full participation in the rights, privileges, and seats of power of our society.22 Interpersonal racism, on the other hand, takes place on the ground level and has to do with attitudes and habitual actions. It is certainly true that members of all racial groups can harbor negative attitudes toward members of other groups. An African American may hold ill feelings toward Jews or Koreans. An Asian American may be suspicious of white peo- ple. And such prejudiced perceptions often are rampant within racial groups as well, as when a Cuban American feels superior to a Mexican American, a Japanese American feels uncomfortable around Chinese Americans, or dark- skinned African Americans profess to being “more authentically black” than light-skinned African Americans. Indeed, some nonwhite groups have a deep, conflict-ridden history with other nonwhite groups. One thinks here of the Black-Korean conflict, the so-called Black-Brown divide, bitter relations among Latino subgroups, and animus among various American Indian Nations.

People of color, then, can take part in overt and covert forms of interpersonal racism. That said, we must realize that interpersonal racism targeting dominat- ed groups and interpersonal racism targeting the dominant group do not pack the same punch. Two young men, one black, the other white, bump into each other on the street. The black man calls the white man a “honky.” In response, the white man calls the black man a “boy.” Both racial slurs are racial slurs and should be labeled as such, and both reinforce racial divisions. However, unlike “honky,” “boy” connects to the larger system of institutional racial domination. The word derives its meaning (and power) from slavery, when enslaved African men were stripped of their masculine honor and treated like children. “Boy” (and many other epithets aimed at blacks) invokes such times—times when tortur- ing, whipping, and raping enslaved blacks were not illegal acts. Epithets toward white people, including “honky,” have no such equivalent. (“Honky” comes from derogatory terms aimed at Bohemian, Hungarian, and Polish immigrants who worked in the Chicago meat-packing plants.) “Boy” also reminds the black man how things stand today: if the confrontation escalates and the police are called, the black man knows that the police officers will probably be white and that he might be harassed or looked on as a threat; if the two men meet in court, the black man knows that the lawyers, judge, and jurors will possibly be mostly (if not all) white; and if the two men are sentenced, the African American man knows, as do many criminologists, that he will get the harsher sentence.23 “Boy” brings the full weight of institutional racism—systematic, historical, and mighty—down on the African-American man. “Honky,” even if delivered with venomous spite, is powerless by comparison.

Moreover, sociologists have shown that, unlike white people, people of color are confronted with interpersonal racism on a regular basis, sometimes daily. For people of color, there is a cumulative character to an individual’s racial experi- ences. These experiences do not take place in isolation. Humiliating or degrading acts always are informed by similar acts that individuals have experienced in the past. To paraphrase sociologist Joe Feagin, the interpersonal events that take place on the street and in other public settings are not simply rare and isolated

American Racism in the Twenty-First Century 13

events; rather, they are recurring events shaped by social and historical forces of racial domination.24

Institutional and interpersonal racism are not altogether distinct phenomena, however useful it may be to distinguish them analytically. When Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton first brought the concepts into race studies in their 1967 classic, Black Power, they acknowledged that “institutional racism relies on the ac- tive and pervasive operation of anti-black attitudes and practices”; that is, they affirmed that those who “would and do perpetuate institutionally racist policies”— and who would do so “deliberately”—are driven as much by racism as are the per- petrators of interpersonal acts of insult and humiliation.25 For instance, the judge who sentences a person of color to a prison term longer than a white person would receive enacts institutional racism yet also engages (in an indirect and mediat- ed way) in an interpersonal interaction. Likewise, cemetery owners who put out a sign forbidding the consumption of food on their premises also interact, after a fashion, with visiting family members of color, whose ritual practices they specif- ically are targeting—some nonwhite groups con- sider bringing food to a cemetery a long-standing cultural practice—even as these authorities lay down their impersonal organizational rules in the isolation of their executive offices. Carmichael and Hamilton easily could have made the inverse point as well, namely, that every act of inter- personal racism also carries with it the force of institutional racism. Not only do institutions shape the perpetrator through past practices of socialization, but institutions also authorize her or his racist actions in the present. Institutional and interpersonal racism interpenetrate and sup- port one another: whenever one comes to light, the other’s shadow can be found alongside it. Their common root is a social psychology of ra- cial animus, dispositions and habits of thought, perception, feeling, and action that lead one to denigrate the racial Other, whether in face-to- face interaction or in more regularized practices that establish the rules and policies of an institu- tion. This especially is important to note in light of the tendency to invoke institutional racism in ways that absolve racial dominants of their cul- pability. As originally conceived, it may have been useful for finding ways to talk about the historical legacy of racial inequality. Yet it also allows per- sonal responsibility to be neutralized. After all, someone did lay down those prison sentences; someone did write up those cemetery rules.

A neutral dress code or something more?

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Symbolic Violence Elaborating on the nature of “unconscious racism,” law professor Charles Lawrence has observed, “Americans share a common historical and cultural heritage in which racism has played and still plays a dominant role. Because of this shared experience, we also inevitably share many ideas, attitudes, and beliefs that attach significance to an individual’s race and induce negative feelings and opinions about nonwhites. To the extent that this cultural belief system has influenced all of us, we are all racists. At the same time, most of us are unaware of our racism. We do not recognize the ways in which our cultural experience has influenced our beliefs about race or the occasions upon which those beliefs affect our actions. In other words, a large part of the behavior that produces racial discrimination is influenced by unconscious racial motivation.”26 Take note of the italicized sentence. Why didn’t Lawrence write, “To the extent that this cultural belief system has influenced all of us, all white people are racists?” The answer is that such a statement would be inaccurate.

Racism surrounds us. To borrow an analogy developed by Beverly Tatum, racial domination is like polluted air. On some days, the pollution is weighty and visible, while on other days, it is virtually invisible—“but always, day in and day out, we are breathing it in.”27 Because racism infuses all of social life, nonwhites and whites alike develop thoughts and practices molded by racism; nonwhites and whites alike develop stereotypes about other racial groups.

In fact, people of color may internalize prejudice aimed at their own racial group, unintentionally contributing to the reproduction of racial domination. Psychol- ogists have labeled this phenomenon “internalized oppression” or “internalized

“It is the peculiar triumph of society—and its loss—that it is able to convince those people to whom it has given inferior status of the reality of this decree.”—James Baldwin

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racism.” Following the work of Pierre Bourdieu, we label it “symbolic violence”: “violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity.”28 In the case of racial domination, symbolic violence refers to the process of people of color unknowingly accepting and supporting the terms of their own domination.29 “So we learned the dance that cripples the human spirit,” laments Lillian Smith, “step by step by step, we who were white and we who were colored, day by day, hour by hour, year by year until the movements were reflexes and made for the rest of our life without thinking.”30