More than Just Race Read online

  Additional Praise for

  More Than Just Race

  “In a forceful repudiation of the conventions of colorblindness, Wilson calls upon social scientists and policy makers to confront the problem of durable inequality anew. Wilson argues that deep-in-the-bone racial indifference, seemingly neutral policies like highway construction, and the weakening of informal job information networks all work together to reinforce the architecture of racial isolation. In order to intervene constructively, policymakers need to galvanize political will. But first they need the intellectual will to probe beyond conventional wisdom on either the right or the left to explore the structural foundations and the cultural adaptations that cement the linkage between being black and poor in the inner city.”

  —Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor of Law, Harvard University

  “William Julius Wilson is one of the nation’s foremost thinkers and advocates for poor Americans. At this moment in our history, Bill’s voice and ideas are needed more than ever. In More Than Just Race, Bill tackles some of the toughest and most intractable issues facing our country in a hopeful and powerful way. The intersection of race and poverty in America needs the kind of head-on, incisive treatment that is Bill’s trademark.”

  —Angela Glover Blackwell, founder/CEO, Policy Link

  “Wilson has given us a compellingly evidence-based comparison of the socioeconomic and cultural causes of African American urban poverty and its consequences. His insightful analysis enables us to confront the continuing moral and political question: how to allocate the blame and the responsibility for the worsening plight and pathology among so many of the country’s poorest citizens.”

  —Herbert J. Gans, author of Imagining America in 2033

  “A courageous, provocative, and penetrating analysis that powerfully illuminates the true social condition of the urban poor—essential reading for anyone interested in urban inequality in America.”

  —Elijah Anderson, Yale University

  Also by William Julius Wilson

  There Goes the Neighborhood (coauthor)

  Good Kids from Bad Neighborhoods (coauthor)

  The Bridge over the Racial Divide

  When Work Disappears

  The Truly Disadvantaged

  The Declining Significance of Race

  Power, Racism, and Privilege

  American Becoming (coeditor)

  Poverty, Inequality and the Future of Social Policy (coeditor)

  Sociology and the Public Agenda (editor)

  The Ghetto Underclass (editor)

  Through Different Eyes (coeditor)

  Issues of Our Time

  Ours has been called an information age, but, though information has never been more plentiful, ideas are what shape and reshape our world. “Issues of Our Time” is a series of books in which some of today’s leading thinkers explore ideas that matter in the new millennium. The authors—beginning with the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, the lawyer and legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, and the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen—honor clarity without shying away from complexity; these books are both genuinely engaged and genuinely engaging. Each recognizes the importance not just of our values but also of the way we resolve the conflicts among those values. Law, justice, identity, morality, and freedom: concepts such as these are at once abstract and utterly close to home. Our understanding of them helps define who we are and who we hope to be; we are made by what we make of them. These are books, accordingly, that invite the reader to reexamine hand-me-down assumptions and to grapple with powerful trends. Whether you are moved to reason together with these authors, or to argue with them, they are sure to leave your views tested, if not changed. The perspectives of the authors in this series are diverse, the voices are distinctive, the issues are vital.

  HENRY LOUIS GATES JR., SERIES EDITOR

  W. E. B. DU BOIS PROFESSOR OF THE HUMANITIES

  HARVARD UNIVERSITY

  Issues of Our Time

  Other titles

  KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH

  Cosmopolitanism

  AMARTYA SEN

  Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny

  ALAN DERSHOWITZ

  Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways

  CHARLES FRIED

  Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government

  Forthcoming authors

  LOUIS MENAND

  CLAUDE STEELE

  AMY GUTMANN

  NICHOLAS LEMANN

  MORE THAN JUST RACE

  BEING BLACK AND POOR IN THE INNER CITY

  William Julius Wilson

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  NEW YORK • LONDON

  Copyright © 2009 by William Julius Wilson

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Production manager: Anna Oler

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wilson, William J., 1935–

  More than just race: being black and poor in the inner city /

  William Julius Wilson.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-07352-2

  1. Equality—United States. 2. African-Americans—Social conditions. 3. Social classes—United States. 4. Inner cities—United States. I. Title.

  HM821.W55 2009

  305.5'690899607301732—dc22 2008051239

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  To Jittima

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER 1

  Structural and Cultural Forces That Contribute to Racial Inequality

  CHAPTER 2

  The Forces Shaping Concentrated Poverty

  CHAPTER 3

  The Economic Plight of Inner-City Black Males

  CHAPTER 4

  The Fragmentation of the Poor Black Family

  CHAPTER 5

  Framing the Issues: Uniting Structure and Culture

  Notes

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In the preparation of this book, I am indebted to a number of individuals. I am grateful to my editors at W. W. Norton—Roby Harrington and Mollie Eisenberg—for helpful comments on various drafts that improved the clarity of my arguments and the overall flow of the manuscript. I owe a great deal to Susan Allan for her assistance in making the book more accessible to a lay audience, to Edward Walker for his careful proofreading and editing of various drafts of the manuscript, and to Stephanie Hiebert for skillful copyediting that further improved the book’s readability. I would also like to thank Anmol Chaddha for his careful research of library materials and government documents used in More than Just Race.

  I am also indebted to the following scholars, who read an entire draft of the manuscript and provided detailed and insightful comments that led to significant revisions: Deirdre Bloome, Anmol Chaddha, Michèle Lamont, Christopher Muller, James Quane, Eva Rosen, Tommy Shelby, and Van Tran. Furthermore, I am grateful for the exchange of ideas I had with Robert Asen, Mario Small, and Erik Wright that are reflected in a number of arguments in the book.

  Finally, I would like to give a very special thanks to Jessica Houston Su, the coordinator of the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Program that I direct at Harvard University. She improved various drafts of the manuscript with her substantive and editorial comments; and her creative synthesis of materials from a number of archival documents, government docum
ents, and secondary literature greatly facilitated not only my analysis of data, but the organization of my arguments as well.

  All of the chapters in this book are original, although a few rewritten paragraphs and quotations from my book When Work Disappears (copyright © 1996 by William Julius Wilson and used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House) are integrated into Chapters 3 and 4. And parts of an essay I wrote, entitled “The Economic Plight of Inner-City Black Males” (from Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black, and Male, edited by Elijah Anderson, copyright © 2008, used by permission of University of Pennsylvania Press) were integrated into Chapter 3.

  MORE THAN JUST RACE

  CHAPTER 1

  STRUCTURAL AND CULTURAL FORCES THAT CONTRIBUTE TO RACIAL INEQUALITY

  I am an internationally known Harvard professor, yet a number of unforgettable experiences remind me that, as a black male in America looking considerably younger than my age, I am also feared. For example, several times over the years I have stepped into the elevator of my condominium dressed in casual clothes and could immediately tell from the body language of the other residents in the elevator that I made them feel uncomfortable. Were they thinking, “What is this black man doing in this expensive condominium? Are we in any danger?” I once sarcastically said to a nervous elderly couple who hesitated to exit the elevator because we were all getting off on the same floor, “Not to worry, I am a Harvard professor and I have lived in this building for nine years.” When I am dressed casually, I am always a little relieved to step into an empty elevator, but I am not apprehensive if I am wearing a tie.

  I get angry each time I have an experience like the encounter in the elevator. It would be easy to say that the residents’ reaction to me is simply another manifestation of racism. However, when I lived in a middle-class Chicago neighborhood that bordered a ghetto neighborhood, I, too, would tense up when I walked my dog at night and saw a black man or a group of black male teenagers approaching me on the street. The portrayal of black men in the media and their widely known disproportionate rates of incarceration may have influenced some of the residents in my condominium when they saw me in casual clothes. This experience is exacerbated for low-skilled black males and, as we shall see in Chapter 3, is especially problematic when employers assess the suitability of black males for jobs. This is a cultural phenomenon in which people respond to perceptions about black men depicted in the electronic and print media, including racist perceptions. But as a sociologist, from years of research and study I am also aware of and understand the structural reasons—including the limited availability of economic and social opportunities—for the extremely high crime rates of young black men from ghetto neighborhoods. Indeed, I will spend some time discussing the plight of black males in Chapter 3, basing the current exploration on this previous scholarship.

  Although we have made considerable progress since the days of Jim Crow segregation, it is clear that we still have a long way to go. Indeed, one of the legacies of historic racial subjugation in this country is the extremely high crime rate among black males, including the violent crime rate. And as long as these disturbing rates persist, people of all racial and ethnic groups will often react to black males in public and private spaces in negative ways.

  These problems will not be addressed, however, if we are not willing to have an honest and open discussion of race in America, including a discussion of why poverty and unequal opportunity so stubbornly persist in the lives of so many African Americans. We depend on the work of social scientists to help us come to grips with and understand these issues. However, social scientists have yet to find common ground on how to explain the social and economic destinies of African Americans. In More than Just Race I hope to further our understanding of the complex and interrelated factors that continue to contribute to racial inequality in the United States. In the process, I call for reexamining the way social scientists discuss two important factors associated with racial inequality: social structure and culture. Although the book highlights the experiences of inner-city African Americans, the complexities of understanding race and racial inequality in America are not limited to research on blacks. Formal and informal aspects of inequality have also victimized Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. In this book, however, I use the research on inner-city African Americans to elaborate my analytic framework because they have been the central focus of the structure-versus-culture dispute.

  This book will likely generate controversy because I dare to take culture seriously as one of the explanatory variables in the study of race and urban poverty—a topic that is typically considered off-limits in academic discourse because of a fear that such analysis can be construed as “blaming the victim.” Nonetheless, I hope I can convince the reader of the urgent need for a more frank and honest discussion of complex factors that create and reinforce racial inequality and to rethink the way we talk about addressing the problems of race and urban poverty in the public policy arena.

  We should be clear about what we mean by these two important concepts: social structure and culture. Social structure refers to the way social positions, social roles, and networks of social relationships are arranged in our institutions, such as the economy, polity, education, and organization of the family. A social structure could be a labor market that offers financial incentives and threatens financial punishments to compel individuals to work; or it could be a “role,” associated with a particular social position in an organization such as a church, family, or university (e.g., pastor, head of a household, or professor), that carries certain power, privilege, and influence external to the individuals who occupy that role.1

  Culture, on the other hand, refers to the sharing of outlooks and modes of behavior among individuals who face similar place-based circumstances (such as poor segregated neighborhoods) or have the same social networks (as when members of particular racial or ethnic groups share a particular way of understanding social life and cultural scripts that guide their behavior). Therefore, when individuals act according to their culture, they are following inclinations developed from their exposure to the particular traditions, practices, and beliefs among those who live and interact in the same physical and social environment.2

  In this book I try to demonstrate the importance of understanding not only the independent contributions of social structure and culture, but also how they interact to shape different group outcomes that embody racial inequality. When we talk about the impact of structure or culture, we are making explicit references to the forces they set in motion that affect human behavior. To help set up this analysis, let’s take a close look at these structural and cultural forces.

  Understanding the Impact of Structural Forces

  Two types of structural forces contribute directly to racial group outcomes such as differences in poverty and employment rate: social acts and social processes. Social acts refers to the behavior of individuals within society. Examples of social acts are stereotyping; stigmatization; discrimination in hiring, job promotions, housing, and admission to educational institutions—as well as exclusion from unions, employers’ associations, and clubs—when any of these are the act of an individual or group exercising power over others.

  Social processes refers to the “machinery” of society that exists to promote ongoing relations among members of the larger group. Examples of social processes that contribute directly to racial group outcomes include laws, policies, and institutional practices that exclude people on the basis of race or ethnicity. These range from explicit arrangements such as Jim Crow segregation laws and voting restrictions to more subtle institutional processes, such as school tracking that purports to be academic but often reproduces traditional segregation, racial profiling by police that purports to be about public safety but focuses solely on minorities, and redlining by banks that purports to be about sound fiscal policy but results in the exclusion of blacks from home ownership. In all of these cases, ideologies about group di
fferences are embedded in organizational arrangements.

  Many social observers who are sensitive to and often outraged by the direct forces of racism, such as discrimination and segregation, have paid far less attention to those political and economic forces that indirectly contribute to racial inequality.3 I have in mind political actions that have an impact on racial group outcomes, even though they are not explicitly designed or publicly discussed as matters involving race, as well as impersonal economic forces that reinforce long-standing forms of racial inequality. These structural forces are classified as indirect because they are mediated by the racial groups’ position in the system of social stratification (the extent to which the members of a group occupy positions of power, influence, privilege, and prestige). In other words, economic changes and political decisions may have a greater adverse impact on some groups than on others simply because the former are more vulnerable as a consequence of their position in the social stratification system. These indirect structural forces are often so massive in their impact on the social position and experiences of people of color that they deserve full consideration in any attempt to understand the factors leading to differential outcomes along racial lines.

  Take, for instance, impersonal economic forces, which sharply increased joblessness and declining real wages among many poor African Americans in the last several decades. As with all other Americans, the economic fate of African Americans is inextricably connected with the structure and functioning of a much broader, globally influenced modern economy. In recent years, the growth and spread of new technologies and the growing internationalization of economic activity have changed the relative demand for different types of workers. The wedding of emerging technologies and international competition has eroded the basic institutions of the mass production system and eradicated related manufacturing jobs in the United States. In the last several decades, almost all of the improvements in productivity have been associated with technology and human capital, thereby drastically reducing the importance of physical capital and natural resources. The changes in technology that are producing new jobs are making many others obsolete.