October 13, 1995
Forum Report
What do we know, or think we can know, about a person based on "race" or "class"? How do these concepts inform our views of history, democracy, and society? How do race and class function in the distribution of opportunity and resources in America, and indeed, the world? And why are our feelings about these issues so strong? The forum, Race and Poverty: Our Private Obsession, Our Public Sin, was the second forum presented by the Institute on Race and Poverty, and was part of a continuing effort to challenge the assumptions about race and class which structure our society.
The nature and definition of racial categories--as well as their interactions with poverty--were the central issues addressed at the forum. As a society, we have bifurcated our policy initiatives, conducting debates about race on the one hand, and poverty on the other. Race and poverty, however, interact in ways that exacerbate the problems of each. Each is difficult to address without consideration of the other. This joint inquiry requires that we re-examine the issues of integration and self-determination in poor communities.
The forum took place on October 13, 1995, at the Augsburg University Music Hall, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Professor E. Thomas Sullivan, Dean of the University of Minnesota Law School, welcomed participants, and Professor Sheila Ards, of the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, moderated the forum. The keynote speaker, Professor Michael Omi, addressed the evolution of race as a social construction, and its implications for how Americans organize and identify themselves. His presentation was followed by a panel discussion in which Professors Amy Stuart Wells, John Calmore, and I responded to Professor Omi's remarks and discussed the social construction of race, racial identity, racial segregation/integration, and their relationships to poverty.
We live in a society in which racial classification is too often determinative of a person's access to meaningful participation. This system self-referentially ascribes levels of ability and achievement to its defined groups; levels which closely reflect patterns of access to cultural resources. Lack of access, especially to the increasingly crucial educational resources of the society, result in poverty and alienation among the excluded. Poverty itself is a further restriction of a person's access to participation. This forum is part of an effort we must all make to challenge the circular thinking of the ism that is based on race, and to stop the downward spiral of exclusion that results from it.
The forum explored transformational, inclusive thinking about society. The future will require a renewed commitment to democracy, so that we may balance competing interests; real cultural freedom and interchange, so that we may share our knowledge, insights, and goals; and the development, through these interactions, of social values we can, and will, share. We need to take a hard look at the way we use our cultural and financial resources; at how we let them be used; and at how we want them to be used. If we decide that we do not want a society in which people suffer for lack of health care, lack of resources, lack of education, opportunity, and, worst of all, lack of hope, we can address and solve these problems. Their solution requires that we work together as a society. It requires a reconceptualization of the society which transcends categories such as "race" and "class" and affirms our common humanity.
john a. powell
Executive Director
Institute on Race and Poverty
Michael Omi
Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley
In February 1995, The Chronicle of Higher Education featured an article on racial classification and the sciences, which highlighted an interesting dilemma facing scientists in the United States. On the one hand, they routinely utilize racial categories in their research and regularly make comparisons between the races with respect to health, behavior, and (asThe Bell Curve controversy reminds us) intelligence. On the other hand, most scientists feel that racial classifications are meaningless and unscientific. Prof. Kenneth Kennedy of Cornell University is quoted as saying: "In the social sense, race is a reality. In the scientific sense, it is not." It is the reality of race in the "social sense" that I want to explore by focusing on the racial categories utilized by the federal government, the problems associated with them, and to highlight their deeply "political" character.
My initial interest in state definitions of race was inspired by a court case in the early-1980s. In 1977, Susie Guillory Phipps, who was then 43 years old, found herself in need of her birth certificate to process a passport application. Believing all her life that she was white, imagine her surprise when a clerk at the New Orleans Division of Vital Records showed her that she was designated as "colored." Quoting Ms. Phipps: "It shocked me. I was sick for three days. I was brought up white, I married white twice." The problem was a 1970 Louisiana state law which allowed for anyone with more than 1/32nd black blood to be defined as "black." Prior to that, a black person was defined as anyone who had "any traceable amount" of black ancestry. According to the state's genealogical investigation, Ms. Phipps great-great-great-great grandmother was a black woman slave named Margarita. Ms. Phipps was at least 1/32nd black.
The logic of this racial classification is consistent with what anthropologist Marvin Harris has called the principle of hypo-descent. This descent rule requires us to believe that anyone who is known to have had a black ancestor should be classified as black. This logic also brings to mind historian Barbara Field's comment that we can imagine a white woman giving birth to a black baby, but we have difficulty imagining a black woman giving birth to a white baby. Therein lies a particular kind of racial logic which we deploy.
Ms. Phipps went on to sue the state of Louisiana to change her racial designation from "colored" to "white." She lost. In 1983, the State Supreme Court denied her motion and upheld the state's right to classify and quantify racial identity. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the case and thus left standing the lower court's decision.
State Definitions of Race
The designation of racial categories and the determination of racial identity is no simple task. Over the last several centuries, it has provoked numerous debates in this country: among others, intense disputes over natural and legal rights, over who could become a naturalized citizen, and who could marry whom.
Racial and ethnic categories in the U.S. have historically been shaped by the political and social agendas of particular times. The first U.S. census in 1790 distinguished holders of the franchise, namely white male property owners, from the general population. Later, the practice of slavery motivated changes in categorization, including grouping blacks into free and slave populations.
The current categories were assigned and implemented in response to the anti-discriminatory and equal opportunity laws of the 1960s and 1970s. Established in 1977, OMB Directive No. 15 fosters the creation of "compatible, nonduplicated, exchangeable racial and ethnic data by Federal agencies" for three reporting purposes: statistical, administrative, and civil rights compliance.
An interrogation of some of these definitions reveals problems in their construction. Some of the categories are racial, some geographic, and some cultural. For example, OMB Statistical Directive 15 refers to the "black racial groups of Africa," but not the white racial groups of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East. Hispanics are not regarded as a "race," but are defined through cultural designators. Individuals who identity as American Indian or Alaskan Native need to "maintain cultural identification" with these groups through "tribal affiliation or community recognition." We do not demand this of any other group.
The Census Bureau and most government agencies use three different questions and concepts to describe/measure race and ethnicity:
Race -- the 1990 Census question included 16 categories
Ethnicity -- designed to see if a person is of Hispanic origin or not
Ancestry -- an open-ended question with no precoded categories
The existing categories are being seriously questioned. In February 1994, I participated in a two-day session convened by the National Research Council at the request of the Office of Management and Budget. The purposes of the meeting were to assess the existing racial and ethnic categories (as defined in OMB Statistical Directive 15), and note their limitations, and to consider more stable and coherent categories for research and administrative purposes. Any attempt to frame such coherent categories immediately confronts a range of contradictory choices and gaps in understanding.
Gap Between State Definitions and Individual/Group Identities
First, there is the gap between administrative requirements and popular consciousness. The federal, state, and local agencies involved in compiling and analyzing racial and ethnic data do so with the intent to track socio-economic progress, assess health trends, and determine patterns of discrimination, among other important indicators of well-being and life chances. Agencies want relatively static categories which can be objectively determined.
Such categories contrast sharply with conceptions of race and ethnicity which stress their dynamic nature and their "slippery" subjective indicators such as identity. Administrative definitions, therefore, may not be meaningful to the very individuals or groups they purport to represent. This is evident in Clara Rodriguez's studies of Latinos which reveal a strong group rejection of the dominant mode of conceptualizing racial categories in the United States. Over half of her Puerto Rican respondents answered the race/ethnicity question wrong. This finding is strengthened by other data. The Census Bureau reports that 40 percent of Hispanic respondents in 1980 and 1990 chose no other racial or ethnic identity. It is estimated that 95 per cent of persons reporting in the "Other" race category were Hispanic.
Part of the problems lies with differences in conceptualizing race. With respect to new immigrant populations, it is important to examine the shifts in racial self-identity as immigrants move from a society organized around specific concepts of race, to a new society with a different mode of conceptualization.
Life Cycle Effects
Given the contextual nature of racial and ethnic identification, it may be difficult to achieve reliability and consistency in time series data and analysis. We are likely to elicit different responses on racial and ethnic identification in different historical periods. One is also likely to elicit different responses from the same individual at different points in her or his life cycle.
Since 1989, births have been categorized by the race of the mother. Racial classification at death, by contrast, is designated by a third party, either a physician or funeral director. This has led to a peculiar situation where one may be born one race, and die another. Studies have suggested that there is an over-assignment of deaths to black and white categories, and an under-assignment of deaths to American Indian and Asian categories.
Robert Hahn, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that "established" infant-mortality rates for some groups are fraught with error. Linking birth and death certificates, he found that the infant-mortality rates were 46.9 percent higher than previously reported for American Indians, 48.8 percent higher for Japanese Americans, and 78.7 percent higher for Filipinos.
Changing Self-Identification
In addition to these problems with existing classifications, there is also the temporal effect of evolving racial and ethnic labels. New labels come into vogue, old groups dissolve through assimilation, and new groups emerge as a result of changes in civil status or patterns of immigration.
A fascinating example of changing self-identification is the dramatic increase in the American Indian population. American Indians increased from 552,000 in 1960 to 1,959,000 in 1990 -- a 255 percent increase in 30 years. This rate of increase is virtually impossible demographically.
Much of the increase is explained by changes in racial self-identification. This is driven by shifts in attitudes toward American Indians, a romanticization of the past, and tangible benefits tied to American Indian identification. There is a very large pool of Americans who claim some degree of American Indian ancestry. In 1980, only 1.4 million chose American Indian as a racial category, while 6.8 million noted they were American Indian on the open-ended ancestry question. In 1990, the number claiming American Indian ancestry increased to 8.8 million.
Panethnicity
The reorganization of old groups and the creation of new groups are a feature of changing political and social contexts. One dramatic political development in the post-Civil Rights era is the rise of panethnic consciousness and organization. Groups whose previous national or ethnic identities were quite distinct became consolidated into a single racial (or in the case of Latinos, ethnic) category.
Prior to the late-1960s, for example, there were no "Asian Americans." In the wake of the civil rights movement, distinct Asian ethnic groups, primarily Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Korean Americans, began to frame and assert their "common identity" as Asian Americans. This political label reflected the similarity of treatment that these groups historically encountered at the hands of state institutions and the dominant culture at large. Different Asian ethnic groups had been subject to exclusionary immigration laws, restrictive naturalization laws, labor market segregation, and patterns of "ghettoization" by a polity and culture which treated all Asians as alike.
The panethnic organization of Asian Americans involved the muting of profound cultural and linguistic differences, and significant historical antagonisms, which existed among the distinct nationalities and ethnic groups of Asian origin. In spite of diversity and difference, Asian American activists found the political label a crucial rallying point for raising political consciousness about the problems in Asian ethnic communities and in asserting demands on political institutions.
These panethnic formations are not stable. Conflicts often occur over the precise definition and boundaries of various panethnic groups, and their adequate representation in Census counts, reapportionment debates, and minority aid programs. Panethnic consciousness and organization are, to a large extent, situationally and strategically determined. There are times when it is advantageous to be in a panethnic bloc, and times when it is seen as more desirable to mobilize along particular ethnic lines.
Lumping various groups together may result in a flattening of important distinctions we, as researchers and policy makers, may wish to discern and analyze. Specific groups may "all look alike," but they are not homogeneous. How meaningful, for example, is an Asian American category for analysis when both Japanese and Laotian Americans are subsumed under it? Only 28.4 percent of Japanese Americans are foreign born, only 9 percent do not speak English well, their median family income is 137 percent of the national average, and their poverty rate is 4.2 percent. By contrast, 93.7 percent of Laotians are foreign born, 69 percent do not speak English well, their median family income is 26 percent of the national average, and their poverty rate is 67.2 percent. The point is that the conflation of important differences is a hazard with the construction and use of particular categories.
The Shifting Meaning of Racial/Ethnic Identification
The meaning of racial/ethnic identification for specific groups and individuals varies enormously. Recent research on white Americans suggests that they do not experience their ethnicity as a definitive aspect of their social identity. Rather, they perceive it dimly and irregularly, picking and choosing among its varied strands that allow them to exercise, as sociologist Mary Waters (1990) suggests in her study, an "ethnic option." Waters found that ethnicity was flexible, symbolic, and voluntary for her white respondents in ways that it was not for non-whites.
Jeffrey Passel's analysis of the open-ended question on ancestry or descent which first appeared in the 1980 Census underscores the fluid nature of white ethnic identification. The question, "What is this person's ancestry?," was followed by an open-ended, write-in box. Below the box a group of well over a dozen examples were listed. What is intriguing is that the examples provided below the question had a dramatic influence on responses. In 1980, English was listed as an example, but dropped in 1990. As a result the English population of the United States declined by 34 percent. French was listed in 1980 and dropped in 1990, and the French population fell by 20 percent.
It should be noted that white ethnic groups were not the only ones susceptible to the listings. The Cajun population grew by more than 6000 percent between 1980 and 1990 has a result of the group's addition to the 1990 set of examples.
Multiracial Category
An important emerging issue is the inability of existing state definitions to deal with people of "mixed racial descent." There has been a concerted effort from school boards and organizations such as Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally) to add a "multiracial" category to the Census. This has been opposed by many civil rights organizations (e.g., Urban League, National Council of La Raza). Specific groups fear a reduction in their numbers and worry that such a multiracial category would spur debates regarding the "protected status" of groups and individuals. According to various estimates, from 75 to 90 percent of those who now check the black box could check a multiracial one. This is not to say they would, only to suggest that complex issues of identity would emerge from the institutionalization of a multiracial category.
Objectifying Race: The Debate's Meaning for Social Research
State definitions have inordinately shaped the discourse on race in the United States. Originally conceived solely for use by federal agencies, OMB Directive 15 has become the de facto standard for state and local agencies, the private and nonprofit sectors, and the research community. Social scientists use the Directive 15 categories because these are the data coding that are available.
Among scholars, there is a continuous temptation to think of race as an essence, as something fixed, concrete and objective. There is also an opposite temptation: to imagine race as a mere illusion, a purely ideological construct which masks some other more fundamental division, such as class.
Much of sociological research, though firmly committed to a social as opposed to biological interpretation of race, nevertheless slips into a kind of objectivism about racial identity and racial meaning. There is a marked tendency to treat race as an independent variable, and to downplay its own variability and historically contingent character. Thus sociologists can correlate race and residential patterns, race and crime, and (as The Bell Curve controversy dramatically reminds us) race and intelligence, without problematizing the concept of race itself.
There is no discussion about the constantly shifting parameters through which race is thought about -- how group interests are conceived, status is ascribed, agency is attained, and roles performed. Although abstractly acknowledged to be a sociohistorical construct, race in practice is often treated as an objective fact: one simply is one's race.
Sociologists have been debating the validity of race and have been arguing whether to eliminate the concept, scale it back in usage to specific and verifiable applications, or leave it alone. David Decker argues that a proper sociological protocol should require that:
...the use of race be defined explicitly when it is used in research so that it is clear whether the term is being used to refer to a mythical but perceived relationship between superficial anatomical characteristics and specific groups, or pointing to patterns and processes of discrimination, or to the history of the use and abuse of the term in human societies. It should not be used in a haphazard manner to seek correlates between race as a variable and other variables. It should not be used when researchers have not explained how and why the concept has been defined and is being used.
As an example, Decker states that there is little basis for presenting criminal arrest rates by race without explicitly explaining the meaning of race. Is race being used to indicate the inequity of arrest procedures? Or is it being used to show how processes of racial discrimination and its socio-economic consequences have an impact upon the likelihood of criminal involvement? Or is it suggesting that some groups are by genes or culture more predisposed to criminal activity?
That said, a central question continues to haunt policy-oriented research: What is it that we are trying to get at in defining racial and ethnic categories? What do we want to know and why?
The federal government is currently grappling with this question. Many social scientists and statisticians are arguing for categories which are conceptually valid, exclusive and exhaustive, measurable, and reliable over time. I think that race and ethnicity will continue to defy our best efforts to establish coherent definitions over time. The real world is "messy." Nothing demonstrates this better than the social construction of racial and ethnic categories.
The strange and twisted history of the classification of Asian Indians in the United States provides an instructive example. During and after the peak years of immigration, Asian Indians were referred to and classified as "Hindu" though the clear majority of them were Sikh. In the Thind decision (1923), the U.S. Supreme Court held that Thind, as a native of India, was indeed "Caucasian," but he wasn't "white" and therefore was ineligible to become a naturalized citizen. "It may be true," the court declared, "that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today."
Their status as non-white was reversed after W.W. II when they became "white", in part as a reward for their participation in the Pacific war, and as a consequence of a postwar climate of anti-colonial politics. In the post-Civil Rights era, Asian-Indian leaders sought to change their classification in order to seek "minority" group status. In 1977, the Bureau of the Census agreed to reclassify immigrants from India and their descendants from "white/Caucasian" to "Asian Indian." Currently, Asian Indian students at my campus, UC Berkeley, prefer the term "South Asian" in order foster panethnic identification with those from Pakistan and Bangladesh among other countries.
The point of all this is that racial and ethnic categories are often the effects of political interpretation and struggle, and that the categories in turn have political effects. I believe that this understanding is crucial for the on-going debates around the Federal Standards for racial and ethnic classification.
John O. Calmore
Professor of Law
Loyola Law School
Race and racism are kind of a joint package. Something Professor Omi said that struck me as insightful, was what race means for white people. I want to interrogate this notion of whiteness and what it means for white people. My response is going to be limited to contrasting what I see of what whiteness means to whites and what blackness means to me. I'm going to do it with metaphor.
I begin with the take on whiteness which I've used in my anti-discrimination law class, which seems to have resonated with students: There's a reflective working paper by Peggy McIntosh, which explores the ways it is difficult for people who are privileged to see or understand their privilege. McIntosh began consciously seeking to understand the ways in which she had been taught to accept life structured around privilege, the privilege of being white; which she had also been taught not to see. To begin the project of learning to see, McIntosh listed 46 ways that she identified the daily effects of white privilege in her life. She says she found all of these effects of privilege extremely subtle and forgot them repeatedly until she wrote them down. The list included things that happened because she is white, and things that do not happen because she is white.
I'm not going to give you the 46 items. You can come up with your own list; but stick with me here as we look at her metaphor. After listing her 46 items, McIntosh conceptualized her white privilege as an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, maps, tools, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear and blank checks. Her knapsack included both unearned assets and unearned power. I would pray for a knapsack like that on behalf of my blackness.
Race to me is very different. Shortly before dying from the effects of AIDS, the tennis great Arthur Ashe said, "Race has always been my biggest burden." Listen to the context here. The man is about to die from AIDS. He is a very successful black man: one who is pretty acceptable in the eyes of the white people, one who lives in a very well-off suburb. He says at this time in his life, "Race has always been my biggest burden." That inspired me to write the following poem.
"Having to live as a minority in America. Even now it continues like an extra weight tied around me." When I think about how "race" matters, how matters are "raced," and how I experience racism, I too think about "race"/racism's weight: How it weighs on people; how it measures and apportions; how it counts; how it merits consideration as important, as in the "weight of the evidence" or the "burden of proof"; how it overburdens and depresses; how it cracks, splinters, and breaks things; how it mashes vision and distorts discourse; how it crushes self esteem, respect, and confidence, while providing a foundation for estrangement and anger; how it flattens spirits, buries dreams and entombs lives; how it fatigues and overpowers; how it knocks hard on your door when you need peace and want quiet; how it fills your space, denting it and blocking you; how it is backed by the weight of society; how it harshly and cruelly governs--oppresses-- with your hard-fought "democratic" vote against it wasted; how it weights public opinion against you; how it weighs/ways into/under class; and yes, how it really is a heavy load and even when you can handle it--push it, pull it, carry it--the weight is weigh/way too heavy to bear no matter how you bear down or what you bear in mind. I even think how the homonym to "weight" is "wait": How the nation plays a "waiting game" with racism; how, with respect to simple justice, so many people of color spend so much time in a "waiting room," or waiting on a ride, or waiting for Aretha to sing "Respect" again; or how many others are waiting for Dred Scott to be overruled and for their 40 acres and a mule; or for the Freedom Train a comin'. I think further how for justice delayed, all kinds of colored people are on a "waiting list," or waiting on a "call-back," or waiting on "Tally's Corner," or waiting for "Godot"; how they are "waiting" hopelessly/(ware)housed in prisons; and how so many blacks are "waiting" on death row.
If you look at the physical separation of the races, particularly blacks and whites, in terms of residential segregation, you see that along with that physical separation, there is also divergence in world views. There is divergence in value orientations. There is divergency in almost every way you can imagine. Cornel West, in Race Matters, notes that 86 percent of suburban white Americans reside in neighborhoods where the percentage of blacks is less than one percent. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton's American Apartheid lists 16 metropolitan areas that are not merely segregated, but hyper-segregated.
Now, you cannot begin to fully appreciate this. It's not just stark segregation, it's heavy segregation. You can be in predicaments, and you can be in deep predicaments. This is a deep predicament for African America, the way we're segregated. Among the 16 areas that Massey and Denton cite, 6 of the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the United States are included, and together those areas house 35 percent of the nation's African Americans, and 41 percent of all blacks who reside in urban areas. Massey and Denton note that, ironically, within a large, diverse and highly mobile post-industrial society such as the United States, blacks living in the heart of the ghetto are among the most isolated people on earth. No other group in the contemporary United States comes close to this level of isolation.
When I was in law school, I was inspired to be an attorney on behalf of poor people. For 14 years I practiced in legal services. When I graduated from law school in 1971, I read an article by Robert and Joanna Zangrando. They said at the time, "Many assumed that the protection of the law, the heritage of national values and the aspirations of the black community formed a functionally cohesive triad." If so, what happened? I guess I'll just leave you with that question. t
Looking for Race, Changing Race
john a. powell
Executive Director
Institute on Race and Poverty
Race is a verb: it's something we do.1 Race is relational, existing only in relationship to others. All of us have the capacity to race each other. White people have been racing other people for a long time, but it's only recently that they are being raced themselves, and it is disturbing to them. In the context of racism, those in power have had the capacity to race others in a particular way. That power maze is becoming fragmented, so now we're seeing that we all influence each other; sometimes against our will, sometimes with our collusion, on issues of race.
It is very important for us to think about racial categories, and how we describe and define ourselves; but the real project is how to transform race and racial hierarchy in this country. Let me tell you a story. I live in the Kenwood area in Minneapolis, which is, as is a lot of Minnesota, overwhelmingly white. I was coming home late the other night, and I was fumbling at the door for a couple of minutes, no lights on in my house. Up pulls a police car, and I thought, "Oh, here we go." I knew the police would probably stop me; but I thought, that's not an irrational thing for the police to do. It's late, and I have been outside for two minutes trying to get my key into the lock. I am an African American man, and many other things we can extrapolate from there. Instead of stopping me though, the police shone a light onto my lock, and in a muted voice over his loudspeaker, said, "Does that help?" I said, "Yes, thank you" and went into the house.
My first thought was that this is how the white community experiences the police. He is a servant. He helps, and it's nice to have that service available to you. It was nice, but not quite as nice as I thought. What I deduced was that the policeman was not just delivering a service to me because he was trustworthy. He also knew that was my house-- that in that house, in the Kenwood area, an African-American family lived. While it didn't take away all of the benefit of his actions, it changed it somewhat.
Race in our society is incredibly complex. It's not unitary, and it's certainly not symmetrical. What race means to whites and what it means to African Americans is very different, as what it means to Latinos is very different. In thinking about some of those differences, we can think about race as a descriptive adjective, as a verb, or as a function in society; one that functions differently for different people at different times in different spaces and different classes.
When we think about race and how race and racism function, we need to be very specific and fairly pragmatic. For example, on the specific issue of integration and segregation: in much of the debate today, there is this question, "Do races have to be together? Why is it that we have to have a white child and black child sit next to each other in order to learn?" But let's take a very narrow definition of segregation. Segregation was imposed, it was a form of exclusion. Exclusion, in terms of racism in this society, has been about the excluding of some from opportunities, structures, benefits, culture, and identity in favor of others. It has never just been about two people sitting together.
The rationale for that has varied. Some people have used the rationale of the inferiority of certain groups, and contamination. We say those people are irrational. There is, however, a rational function of race and racism, and that's the rationale of privilege. Professor Hacker noted in his book, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, that when he asked his students, "If you were given $50,000, would you be willing to categorize yourself as African American?" they said no. In the cost/benefit analysis, they decided it was not in their best interests. Fifty thousand dollars sounds like a lot, but the tax the dominant society has put on other people is substantial.
Race is a structure in our society, and where people fall in that structure varies. Professor Omi's work has described our society as moving from a racial caste system to a racial hegemony: instead of the complete bar prior to 1954, it's more fluid, certain groups can participate. The structure is still largely in place, however, so one consequence of the middle class's being given the opportunity to move out of the ghetto, out of the barrio, is that we have resegregated, excluded poor minorities, even more strongly and with a stronger rationale than before Brown. Douglas Massey has suggested that if we reduce residential segregation for African Americans by 25 percent, we increase their income by 12 percent. Segregation is a struggle over resources, which have been segregated in this country.
The historical framing of the issues of integration, assimilation, and segregation has been based on the racial caste system. Obviously, segregation and exclusion in its sharpest form is part of racial subordination and a caste system. How does assimilation or integration play into that caste system? The assumption in the fifties and sixties was that there was something wrong with people of color, specifically black people. If they only behaved, they would be allowed to sit at the table. So the cost of coming to the table was becoming transparent or, becoming "white." The assumption was that you had to let go of your race, let go of your identity. As Professor Omi demonstrated, when people talk about "race," sometimes they're talking about ethnicity, sometimes culture, and sometimes class. Sometimes they're talking about, whatever it is, race. African Americans in this country have both a race and a culture. Sometimes there's an appropriation of that culture while there's a rejection of African-American people. Inclusion is a very important part of the project of transformation. Inclusion, not in the sense of assimilation, not in the sense that you leave your identity at the door, that you leave your race, your gender, your sexual orientation at the door; but that the whole meaning of the project itself, the whole meaning as to what counts becomes part of what's contested. In terms of this effort, we're just starting.
The Creation of the Color Line and Desegregation in Saint Louis
Amy Stuart Wells
Professor in the Graduate School of Education
University of California at Los Angeles
When we socially construct race and allot some races more prestige and status than others, that confers differing values to the institutions people of different races use, including things like schools and neighborhoods. This then relates to property values and the value of the credential that the educational institutions confer. Integration, school desegregation, is very much about equal access to high status institutions. If you go back to decisions on school desegregation, before the Brown decision, you see a lot of that in the rulings.
Residential segregation has major consequences for life chances, access to employment, personal financing, home equity, a better educational system, and the kinds of personal contacts and networks that help make social mobility possible. So a lot of the knapsack that white and wealthy people carry around has to do with space and where they live. According to Massey and Denton, residential segregation is the institutional apparatus that supports other racially discriminatory processes, that binds them together into a coherent and uniquely effective system of racial subordination. The unwritten rules regarding property values in a given neighborhood remain, and continue to shape the most important economic decisions of individuals' lives, where to purchase a home.
The culture and structure of segregation in the society has created a situation in which white people believe that their financial and social well-being is in no way related to that of African Americans or Latinos. In this social culture and structure, whites will continue to move further away from the cities, into more and more remote suburbs. The jobs will go with them or they will telecommute to their jobs, and they will continue to build higher and higher fences and employ more private security guards. They will socially construct their understanding of those communities in a way that allows them to rationalize the continued separation and segregation. As long as white and wealthy people can separate themselves from urban ghettoes, they will not hear much about what happens in those areas. Whites not only are able to separate themselves, but they're also able to deny that they played any part in creating the racial segregation and isolations that exist in this society. They actually don't understand how the color line was created, and therefore see that they played no part in that.
These issues regarding segregation and isolation are in part what led me to look at the St. Louis desegregation plan. St. Louis is significant because it has a profound history of racial segregation. It was the site of Shelley v. Kraemer, the 1948 Supreme Court decision prohibiting judicial enforcement of racially restrictive covenants in real estate. A restrictive covenant written in 1911 in one neighborhood in St. Louis was an example of what was going on across the city. The restrictive covenant stated that "no part of said property or any portion thereof shall for any term of 50 years be occupied by any persons not of Caucasian race." In the forties and fifties, whites were moving to the suburbs, and creating personal wealth with the benefit of the federal government mortgage loan insurance. There was massive suburbanization in St. Louis as everywhere.
Blacks were excluded from most suburban neighborhoods. Exclusive zoning eliminated low and moderate income housing, and zoned for commercial development. FHA and VA loan guarantees were tied to the redlining practices of the Homeowner Loan Corporation. St. Louis is cited as one of the most extreme examples of discriminatory processes and redlining. Meanwhile, the St. Louis Real Estate Board went beyond the racial policies of the National Real Estate Board to establish unrestricted colored districts in which blacks could purchase property. The rest of the city was off limits to them. This led to a systematic process of block busting, in which real estate agents make a lot of money buying cheap from whites and selling high to blacks.
St. Louis was also the site of Jones vs. Merwich, a Supreme Court case in which African Americans trying to purchase homes in the suburbs were steered away by realtors. Public housing in St. Louis was also highly segregated with the help of the federal government. The point is that there were a lot of private and public decisions being made to create the segregation in St. Louis. By 1985 Kenneth Jackson wrote, "St. Louis has become a premier example of urban abandonment. Once the 4th largest city in America, the gateway to the West is now the 27th. After Chicago, St. Louis is the nation's leading exporter of brick. It is the supreme indignity--having lost more than 300 factories in the 1970s to the Sun Belt, St. Louis itself is now being carted away."
The federal court ordered desegregation plan crosses the color line and allows African-American students to attend white suburban schools in sixteen districts. It has become a link between the city and the suburbs that wasn't there before. The key finding from St. Louis is that many African-American students from segregated, isolated urban neighborhoods, are quite successful in suburban schools. A diploma from those suburban schools helps much more in the labor market and in access to college. The social networks that are available in those high schools in terms of linkages to colleges and universities are not there in the urban schools that the students would be attending. Also, the benefit of interracial interaction has been of extreme benefit for both the black and white students in suburban St. Louis.
Fifty-nine percent of the African-American students who attend the suburban schools have said that it has helped them learn how to get along with whites. Another 30 percent said it has helped somewhat. White students also now agree that they understand African Americans better than they used to in their all-white schools. It hasn't been easy for the African-American students. What we are seeing now, though, is that several of the suburban schools are becoming more focused on cultural issues and trying to work with teachers. This has now been going on for 15 years, and there have been some gains in that area. Some of the teachers who are more problematic are retiring. Suburban schools in St. Louis are also reexamining issues of tracking and resegregation through the tracking system in ways that are benefiting white students as well. They're really questioning the rigid track structure that they've had, and the lack of opportunity for students in the lower tracks.
Some of the results: the transfer students are nearly twice as likely as their peers in the city urban segregated schools to complete high school. Those who graduate are more than twice as likely to go on to 2 or 4 year colleges. Regarding achievement test scores, the transfer students who go out to the suburbs start off with higher scores than those who stay in the neighborhood city schools, but lower scores than the kids who go to magnet schools in the city. That stays pretty constant up until the 8th grade. Between 8th and 10th grades, the magnet school students and the students in the segregated city schools level off or decline, while the students in the suburban schools either remain steady or increase. The students in the suburban schools are also more optimistic about their futures.
There's one student who captures a lot of the hard issues for the transfer students in how he describes his experience. His name is Will. He doesn't see the suburban school as utopia. He had a specific plan for going out there. He says, "When I first came out here, I came with the goal in mind that there were better facilities to help me because I wanted to have more money, more connections, more prestige. College wasn't necessarily real for me. But the longer I stayed, and the more I learned. Now I know that college is what I need. I visited two colleges that paid for me to come. I got a presidential scholarship." He's come to realize how important integration is, not just because it connects black students to the clout that comes with a suburban diploma, but also because white teachers and students who are open to reevaluating their beliefs benefit as well. He talked about one of the high school English teachers with whom he'd had some difficulties. The day of graduation he got a card from her. "She said she really enjoyed having me in her American Literature class because of the views I expressed from the eyes of a black man. I put it to her like that and she said that opened a lot of doors for her."
Excerpts from Professor Omi's Response
We're at a particularly interesting and dramatic juncture, in that there tends to be a crisis of vision within a lot of mainstream civil rights organizations in the United States. There's a reassessment of what notions of integration and segregation are, as strategies to overcome racism. There's a reexamination of what integration means in terms of the loss of a certain amount of autonomy and control within minority communities. At the same time, as Professor Wells and others have talked about, there's a continuing push noting the merits of school desegregation campaigns and initiatives. So that's one dynamic.
The other issue I think is a rather crucial one is something Professor powell brought up: the manner in which we use and deploy concepts of race and culture. Frequently, I think a lot of them are being collapsed into each other or conflated in some manner. I think what's interesting about the current political discourse, particularly coming from more conservative sides of the political spectrum, is the manner in which race is disappearing but culture is elevated. We see this Dinesh D'Souza's new book, The End of Racism, which argues that racism isn't the problem; it's cultural deficiencies, cultural differences. This has been echoed by neo-conservative African-American scholar, Thomas Sowell, of the Hoover Institution, for a number of years. So race is being either shoved aside or equated with culture. Somehow it's easier to talk about cultural deficiencies now than racial ones. We've moved from a biologistic, genetic paradigm into cultural kinds of arguments.
This is slippery, too, in that different people are going to articulate, across the political spectrum, different positions about the connections between race and culture. For example, I think Molefi Asante, an Afrocentrist, has a particular vision of what that link is that borders on some essentialist conflation of race and culture. By the same token, some people are trying to suggest how life experiences and the shaping of politics really unites broad sectors of the African-American community under a common banner. Even among communities like African Americans, as Professor powell and Professor Calmore talked about, we need to be attentive to the class splits: how distinct political agendas emerge from different class segments within these communities. In fact, we haven't done a very good job of noting even the concept of ethnicity among African Americans. For example, there is certainly a lot of diversity among who we consider African Americans now: people from Nigeria, from Haiti, from Barbados, who really contribute to a mix of different kinds of cultures.
Steve Rothschild: If we look at our inner cities, we basically have concentrated poverty. Many middle class people of all races are living in the suburbs. My question to any of you is, are we focusing enough on the question of class, and differences of class within race?
John Calmore: Are we spending enough time on class? We probably are not; but if you think in terms of an intersection of race and class, it begins to form the analysis. Because of hypersegregation, we have to really look at a triple intersection at least: the intersection of race, class, and space. A lot of the empirical data seem to indicate that suburban life for people of color, particularly blacks, is not the same as it is for whites. Blacks are moving to what we call "spillover suburbs," still very close to central city areas, still suffering some fallout from that; or else they're moving to suburban areas that are still being pocketed or enclaved. There's no leap from the inner city to suburban integration necessarily. So even if you look at the middle class, you still are looking often at race, class, and space as an intersection.
john powell: Certainly we haven't looked enough at class, but as Calmore implied, often there's an effort to change the discussion from race to class instead of race and class or the intersection of race and class. If we look at how poverty operates among different racial communities, it operates differently. Even the class structure is not unitary. The poverty that urban African Americans experience is clearly different from the poverty that white Americans normally experience. I've argued that the anti-poverty program was more directed toward white poverty. Poverty itself, class itself, is racialized. So class is really ubiquitous. Now having said that, I agree with what you're suggesting Steven, that we haven't looked enough at class.
Referring back to Professor Omi's comment: First of all, we're not clear about what we mean by integration. Secondly, the debate is not taking place against the backdrop of "How do you transform racial hierarchy?" What's most troubling, and what we can't back away from at all, is that the segregation that is being imposed by the state, exclusion by the state, is very problematic.
Michael Omi: Let me underscore what's just been said. In 1978 when William Julius Wilson released The Declining Significance of Race, there was a lot of creative theorizing or debate along those lines; but I think a lot of that debate really polarized the concepts of race and class in fairly static forms. "How do you explain the deterioration among parts of the African-American underclass? Is it race effects, or class effects?" In other words, it was a zero sum game, with people trying to pose it in that stark manner. The point that is interesting are the interactive effects of it, which is, according to my understanding, what the Institute on Race and Poverty is trying to get at: That they're not seen as static things, which are separate from each other, or a zero sum thing, in which the class factors lessen the race factors. For example, Wilson in his own work, talks about the de-investment from a lot of core cities in urban areas as if this can be a kind of rational, economic decision, a class-based decision, without looking at the fact that many of these kinds of decisions about where to move, the space questions, are in fact highly racialized questions. So it's really important to look at that particular kind of dynamic.
Paul Hudson: This issue that John Calmore raised about self-classification: Ebony magazine recently did an excellent article on blacks and how they define themselves. It had Halle Berry, Mariah Carey and Tiger Woods. The one that struck me most was Tiger Woods. He self-identified as Asian, but the media had already made him a major author who's going to turn the world upside down, and who's black, and that's unusual. Clearly, however he defines himself, the world has already defined him. That's a kind of a racism-- the institutional side of this whole identification issue.
This kind of discussion needs to get out of the world of academia, because you're just talking to the people who already have some sensitivity. To give you an example of why this is so important, I can't think about one group, one discussion, one news article since 1978 in which integration and segregation are talked about or even raised as an issue. They do exist, but to say that anybody is focused on it, from Newt Gingrich to President Clinton to Paul Hudson is, I think, out of touch with reality.
How we can bridge that gap is really important. We have to figure out how you can take your reality and balance the reality of the Los Angeles Times--the image that is being projected by the media. Because it's a very divisive, very black and white, very clear-cut, "Where do you stand on O.J. Simpson?" kind of message.
Amy Stuart Wells: I'm a member of the Education Writers' Association, which is a group of journalists in major papers across the country. Just last weekend, we were discussing kind of what you're saying, that the media tends to trivialize a lot of issues or just not address them in depth. If you look at Los Angeles, an example of how segregation and integration is indirectly being talked about right now, is the debate around the breakup of the L.A. unified school district. It may not be phrased that way in terms of segregation and integration but I think that's the backdrop to that discussion.
Question: I'd like to ask the panel to name two or three policies at the state or the federal level that you think would be effective in transforming the racial hierarchy as we know it now.
John Calmore: I have one and it's interesting that I'm going to give you this, because I've been a severe critic of this program. As many of you know, just to the east in Chicago, which is one of the most segregated cities in America, Dorothy Gautreaux started some litigation that went on for 25 years. She died before it was finished. Out of that developed the HUD Gautreaux Demonstration Program. Basically the program provides an opportunity to integrate low-income people of color into a better space in the suburbs. They get a voucher to help them pay the rent, and they use it to increase their mobility outside of the inner city. There are professors at Northwestern University who have shown concrete gains from this experience for the largely black and Latino groups that have been able to take advantage of it. The critique is that it's tokenistic, gradualistic and just furthers white domination, because acceptable terms are that it be tokenistic and gradualistic. So I have a few problems with it. But that is a policy at least for those people who get out of harm's way in the ghetto, and to perhaps some new harm in the suburbs, but at least it's more balanced. That's one policy that's out there. Unfortunately, that's all that's left of HUD's fair housing.
john powell: Newt Gingrich is very much concerned about segregation, and the white community is very much concerned about it. I had a call from the Secretary of HUD's office because basically Congress is trying to kill fair housing, period. Even though not much is going on, that's still too much for them. It's a concern, and they feel that in terms of playing to white voters, that this is a win situation. HUD feels, as Calmore said, that they know how to make things work, but politically it's just very costly.
There are two things I want to suggest as a possible focus in terms of national programs. One, I would like to see us shift from looking at income to looking at wealth. There's a new book by Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro called Black Wealth, White Wealth. There are a number of figures in there that are very disturbing. Depending on how you count net worth, the white population as a whole is worth about ten times as much in terms of wealth as the black population. If you count net assets, those of the African-American community are zero. When people look at the gains of the black middle class--even that is a misnomer, and shows how issues of class are racialized--if you read the polls, most white people feel that blacks have already achieved parity. It certainly isn't true in terms of wealth, but it's not even true in terms of income.
I was disappointed in the whole discussion about affirmative action. I thought a much better discussion would have been to take a look at the state of race in America, of racial classification and the civil rights movement, and in the context of that, talk about affirmative action. If you just look at affirmative action, which was at best a weak remedy, you can't really understand why we should defend it. But if you look at it in the context of wealth distribution, of opportunity, the buzz words that are already a part of our society, it can make a big difference.
I'm not in favor of what Wilson called "universal strategies" unless they're also race specific. Universal strategies that are not race specific and ethnic specific end up being programs for the white. I understand his sentiment: the working class is in very serious trouble in this country. In the 1980s there were 11 million jobs created in the United States, and less than 1 million of them paid a living wage. Most of those people were white, yet there's no discussion about that. The way the country is being restructured from a wage perspective is that we're creating an incredibly large pool of working poor with no health care benefits. It is this population, as you might know, that is most hostile toward what it perceives as blacks getting public assistance. So this issue should be addressed. Robert Reich, before he became the Secretary of Labor, wrote a very good book outlining some of this. Certainly I would like to see a policy that shifts the debate and talk about welfare to a wage program that encourages people to work. A study in Chicago interviewed several hundred welfare mothers, and found that every last one of them was working. That should be good news--we want people to work--but they were mad. They said the women were cheating the system. But how do you live in Chicago, a family of four, on $268 a month? You work under the table. So there's a lot going on, and I think part of this has to get out.
Amy Stuart Wells: James Rosenbaum at Northwestern University has been following the Gautreaux students, looking at their educational progress in the suburban schools, and has written a couple of things that show very positive results from them. They still state the same kinds of issues that the kids in St. Louis do, but their achievement level is up and they're more likely to go on to college.
john powell: Jack Bogar wrote an article calling for nationwide fair housing, a fair share plan. I agree with what's been said on the panel that since Jim Crow laws formally died, the subordination of people of color has been accomplished primarily through spatial segregation. To break that up, by allowing people to live wherever they want to, to live where the jobs are, we need to use more regional approaches. The Supreme Court in New Jersey said that building all low-income housing in Newark was a violation of the general welfare clause in the state constitution. It does not serve the general welfare of that population. I've been disappointed with how the remedy was implemented, but also disappointed no other state has really taken that up as a policy.
John Calmore: There's this irony happening now. The Supreme Court is basically removing the Voting Rights Act as a viable civil rights statute. There's been this irony that black people and a lot of Latinos have invested in segregation in order to get political power, to have an all-black or an all-Latino district. To the degree that race-conscious districting is no longer sanctioned by law, some of that motivation for us to stay together in order to have political power, as opposed to integrating and merely being an influence or a voter, is changing--the failure of the Fair Housing Act translated into the Voting Rights Act's being more viable. Segregated, we could elect the candidate of our choice. We have a black caucus that went all the way to thirty or forty folks. Some of them are going to have to come home because their districts are going to be redrawn. I've got to live in a segregated district to have a black Congress person. That's going to change I think. Maybe in spite of the Supreme Court and
Gingrich, they're going to further integration. That is an incredibly optimistic take. It's an irony that may translate down the line as a policy.
Matthew Little: Perhaps you alluded a little bit to the question that I was going to ask. The body politic has over the years played an important part as far as race is concerned. Certainly, we see now a very definite change in the pattern of politics. For example, one that you mentioned: the fact that in the South particularly, you find that as we develop more black legislators, more and more white legislators are becoming Republicans. There's an overall change in the political system of America. We see it rapidly. I just would like to ask the panel what the net effect is going to be, as far as race in America is concerned, over the long haul, if it continues in the same pattern we see unfolding today.
john powell: I don't have an answer, but going back to Michael's earlier remarks, race and what it means, and racial politics, and racial distribution in this country are highly contested. What we're seeing now can't be projected too far out. It will have a short life. No one has really explored this, but basically we were taught that, in a democracy, in order to control or influence things substantially, you have to have a majority. I think that's clearly wrong. Three percent of the population, well organized, can have a tremendous effect on the whole population, through veto politics. We need to become much more sophisticated in veto politics. In veto politics you can't get what you want, but by stopping others from getting what they want, you can make people come to the table.
We also need to articulate a positive vision--a positive vision starting off with a negative, anti-racism. What do we want? What do we believe? Certainly the assimilation model is dead and should be, and the resurgence of the segregation model, that should die also. What do we want, who see our destinies as tied together? Not just in terms of resources, but also in terms of who we are. None of us are completely subject to self definition. In a way, despite the power of Newt Gingrich or "white backlash", if you look at it differently, what you see is incredible white anxiety. There's a lot out there but it's not tied to anything. So it's an opportunity to move things. If someone can articulate a positive vision, a hopeful vision, instead of despair, they would command the attention of a lot of Americans, because despite our history of racism I think most people want something better.
Jay Wilkinson: I'm with the Legal Aid Housing and Discrimination Law Project. I wanted to react to this white privilege bag you referred to. Part of that is recognizing that the weightless white privilege bag that we carry as white people, and as men, male privilege, comes at the expense of somebody else's having to carry another bag with a lot of heavy rocks in it.
On the race and poverty issue, what I'm seeing on housing discrimination in the Twin Cities area is that we don't have the racial covenants of 20 or 30 years ago: what we have are economic covenants with racial consequences. We had a meeting on Monday morning with people from the housing association who were extremely upset that the Minnesota Department of Human Rights have the audacity to say that they will enforce the law that says you cannot use unreasonable occupancy limits to exclude families with children from renting apartments. They want to have a straight 2 person per bedroom limitation and keep everyone else out who might happen to have a family but they can only afford a two-bedroom apartment that might have six people in it. Who is that going to affect? It's going to affect poor families. It's going to affect largely my practice, people of color.
The industry argues against enforcement of this fair housing policy by getting back to something that gets a lot closer to race, and that's crime. They say the municipal anti-crime policies are forcing them to control, they didn't say this, but to control the criminal tendencies of the people who are trying to live in their apartment buildings. It's never hard to move from the issue of crime to the issue of race in this country. In fact, in the Minneapolis Community Crime Prevention Handbook for landlords, the same attorney made a point of saying that landlords should adopt neutral-sounding economic criteria so as to avoid claims of racial or other types of discrimination.
They say that because fair housing laws give some protection to municipal-based occupancy standards, that they're going to go to the suburbs to try to get enacted occupancy limits. That is going to impact on the problem of discrimination and spatial segregation and is going to bar the beginnings of Gautreaux-type efforts that are coming out of the public housing desegregation settlement here in Minneapolis. To borrow Calmore's metaphor, it's the use of the weight of poverty, the weight of class, to resegregate and to keep that segregation. It's critical to keep thinking about how these two concepts of class or poverty and race interact and really do reinforce each other.
John Calmore: When we really interrogate the terminology, and look at "race-neutral", or "colorblind," we have to look below it. Patricia Williams, a critical race theorist, has a beautiful phrase. She refers to colorblindness as "racism in drag."
If race is a social construction, and we're talking about contested meaning and significance, we have to provide the language and the interpretation that's good for our side. For instance, somebody said "social justice." You know we got wrapped up with a legalistic notion of justice in an attempt to redistribute opportunity. There's another side of justice that talks to the issue of subordination and oppression, which may be a heavier concept of social justice. Iris Young talks about cultural imperialism as a form of oppression, and of oppression's being injustice. Cultural imperialism means just what you think it does. It means that the dominant culture is imperialistic toward the minority group. It imposes its meaning on things, at the same time denying that group the opportunity to speak for itself. The more that we can counter that kind of cultural imperialism--it may have nothing to do with redistributing resources--we get voice. And if we get voice, maybe we get recognition, and maybe we get response. So I think affecting discourse is important. The problem with it is, you can't see the concrete payoffs.
Audience: I've been thinking I want these three Californians to give us some perspective on these two big discussions that are going on out there about race. So I have a two-part question. One is to Professor Omi. I wondered if you would give us your perspective on the Berkeley culture and what's going on with affirmative action. And I wondered if the two from L.A. would give their perspective on the racial discussions since the Simpson trial.
Michael Omi: Let me say something about the diversity of experience that's going on at Berkeley and maybe address some of these other issues that have come up. First, what I think is interesting about what's going on in race relations, particularly in areas that are experiencing a rapid demographic transformation and a real enormous diversity of groups coming into it, is that yes, there are these tendencies toward what some people term "Balkanization" and which has conservatives all worried about images of Bosnia or images of warring ethnicities. There's a resurfacing of an American nationalism, a rethinking of what it means to be an American. A lot of that has incredibly racially-coded dimensions to it. I think we're just about on the verge of passing through Congress some heavy immigration restrictions, and part of that is because of the manner in which we have racialized immigration. Here it's important to note, just as this person talked about how occupancy limits have these racialized effects, but they're done under the veneer of, "It's just objective. We're just saying there should be a two bedroom cap on some of the public housing that's available." It's like a number of issues. Even affirmative action is posed as race vs. merit; as if merit is something objective, that is not historically constructed, that has not been racialized or subject to a whole series of gender inequalities historically. It's as if this is the manner in which we're posing things now. Race has become erased.
What becomes important is the manner in which issues which seemingly have very little to do with race, at least in the popular consciousness and imagination, strike all the racial chords. In all these instances, it's really important to deflate and think about the reality behind those racial claims. For example, New York state, about two years ago, did a study with INS data, Immigration and Naturalization Service data, on who really are the illegal aliens in the state of New York. What's really funny is that the number one person was actually illegal Italians, who come in on these visitor visas and then disappear into their families. It's estimated, for example, that New York City alone has half of all the illegal Chinese in the United States, but Chinese were below illegal Israelis in the state of New York. So in drawing these facts out, it really exposes, to some degree, just how we've racialized or racially-coded these issues.
What's the upside of things? The positive aspects of this increasing diversity could be a new appreciation for what multiculturalism means. Quite frequently we have a very superficial notion of multiculturalism, particularly in educational institutions. We feel if we do Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or something, we have multiculturalism. But I think we're on the brink of considering what that means a lot more deeply.
It could be, of course, that all of us have been shaped in relationship to each other. What that means is that there have been dynamic patterns both historically and contemporarily in which we've really influenced different groups, different cultures, different races, whatever "races" means, and definitely impacted how people reconsider how they see things, how they see their lives, in very interesting fashions. So it's interesting to me is to have courses which are not just, "Let's spend two weeks on African American families, two weeks on Chicano families, two weeks on Asian families" but in fact, look at the points of intersection. Someone was doing a great course on architecture, looking at how American architecture in New England was influenced by a dynamic interaction between European colonial settlers, native Americans and African Americans brought in as slaves. There are dynamic patterns in which these things have been shared and adopted. There's a lot of hybridity. California demonstrates a lot of incredible hybridity--white folks with dred locks walking around on the streets. Our appreciation that these cultures are not very static, that they're continuing formation and that we do shape the nature of each others' existences is a really important lesson which is often missed.
Amy Stuart Wells: I'd like to talk briefly about both issues you've raised. At a recent faculty meeting, we spent an hour discussing how we're going to get around the UC Regents policy. We decided it's not going to affect our admissions process too much because we have a lot of autonomy as a graduate school in the way we define merit, which is not mainly on test scores and grades, although we have cutoffs for those. Going back to the notion of how merit is socially constructed: we have defined merit in terms of experience in urban education settings and other ways which create a very racially mixed and interesting pool of those admitted. There was a clear impact, however for the undergraduate admissions. Supposedly Murphy Hall, which is where the admissions are handled, is coming up with all sorts of creative ways to get around what the Regents have done. We're trying to work within the box to figure out how to circumvent what they were trying to do. What bothers me is that we're still in the box, and also that we're not actually trying to change their policy. That worries me, because the policy will still be there, and how long will the people who are going to be creative about getting around it be there? What happens with the undergraduate admissions has huge implications for our pool of graduate students.
I was at a high school in south central L.A. when they announced the O.J. Simpson verdict. I was really glad that I was there at that moment, because of a lot of things that have come out since then; the way in which white people have perceived the trial vs. African Americans, based on historical experiences with L.A.P.D., and police officers providing service vs. locking people up for unjust reasons. Standing there in that school and talking to the students and the faculty helped me to deconstruct that a lot faster and in a more thoughtful way than if I'd been standing in UCLA, which is next to Belair. A lot of people didn't have that advantage. A lot of whites didn't have the advantage of being in a situation in which so many people are viewing it so differently from the way your racial group would view it. I thought it was a privilege then to really look deep inside at the ways I'd been viewing things and to reconsider it. But most white people in Los Angeles haven't done that at all, and that to me is very scary.
Audience: In the state of Minnesota in 1977, we started a welfare reform program, which was destroyed, as well as our programs for the welfare recipients to be educated or to take part in on-the-job training. I have a great concern for the welfare mothers who have not worked. I feel that the families were asking for help and were oppressed from the beginning, with us looking at all the statistics that have been taken throughout our state in the inner-city ghetto areas. I have questions about the programs allowing families to move out to suburban areas after the family has already been in the inner city.
I have a story about Will also. Will lived in the inner city, was born here in the inner city in the state of Minnesota. Will is now 17 years old, and has been educated only up to the 6th grade level, with the Board of Education stating they would fix the problem. Now my problem with moving some of the children from the inner city into the suburbs is that we know the children are basically under what we call learning disabilities. Not only did they access $3,000 per quarter for the children, but they also access federal moneys which sometimes are an extra $4,000, adding up to $7,000 per quarter. So my questions are what type of economic problems will it cause in the school systems that don't have access to the same funds that the inner city has, and how will these suburban housing plans work for families from the inner city, if there are not the resources available in the suburban areas?
john powell: I'll talk about the housing problem. One way of thinking about it is there are a lot of ways to do good things badly. That's been the strategy. If you think about Brown v. Board of Education, 10 years later, 97 percent of the children were still going to segregated schools. When schools were really pushed, they created tracks and side schools. So now you look at a school building, and it looks integrated, even though the classroom is completely segregated, with all the problems attendant to that.
In terms of opening up housing opportunities outside the inner city, again, there are many ways of doing that badly. If you want to do it right, I don't think the resource problem is significant. First of all, just think of the statistic Dr. Wells gave earlier in terms of St. Louis' having been the fourth largest city and now being the twenty-sixth largest city. Tremendous resources moved out to the suburbs. We were able to move bricks and mortar and jobs and highways and sewers and buildings and houses and then millions of people out of the city. We can't move a social service agency out of the city? So it's clear resources are not static. They don't have to be here in Minneapolis. When they wanted to create a new community out in Eden Prairie, there were no sewers out there, there were no highways out there. They moved them out there. Then all the jobs went out there. I say central cities now, especially Minneapolis, import poverty, and export jobs. It's true. A poor person in the suburbs, a person who becomes poor in the suburbs, is more likely to end up living in Minneapolis; and yet 60 percent of the jobs that are being created are being created in the southwest suburbs.
When we talked to some low-income families about where they wanted to live, a lot of them said they wanted to live where they are, in the central city. They didn't want to move out to the suburbs, they said it was a terrible place, we all know that. But then we asked, "Do you want to live close to where jobs are?" They said yes. "Do you want to live close to where high-status schools are?" They said yes. They were joining the forces of integration warriors, knowing it was going to be a fight but also knowing this was where the resources were. Maybe we can bring some of those resources back to the city. Resources are incredibly fungible in some ways. They can move. So if there is a problem with resources, it's just a problem, it's not an impediment. It's not a wall. Especially in the day of computers, we can figure out how we can make resources available to people if we want them to feel welcome and we want people to have a decent life. Oftentimes we don't. So if a person moves, they'll want to isolate the person even further and hope they'll leave. In fact, in St. Paul, when people moved to the suburbs, what did they do? They welcomed them with a burning cross. But if we want to do it right, I think we can.
Amy Stuart Wells: By no means was the St. Louis plan perfect--there are a lot of problems with it; but I think it's better than nothing. There are a lot of issues that you alluded to that pertain here. For instance, when the African American kids transfer out to the suburbs, their parents aren't voting for school board members in those suburbs. So they don't have political representation there. That's part of the problem. On the other hand, if you look at what's happening to the city, there's really no political will to do anything with those schools. Even when there's a court order that says you have to have 20 to 1 class size in your elementary schools, we found teachers who said they're forced to lie about their class size, to say that it's 20 when they really have 27 or 28. There was state money available through the court order for the city schools to create school-emphasis programs in the neighborhood schools, which would be like mini-magnet programs and enrichment-type programs. Only one of the principals did it, and there was money sitting in a bank account for them to do it.
It has a lot to do with race and the fact that the south side is still predominantly white. Although they don't have many children in the public schools in the city, they turn out and vote and they still elect a lot of the board members. The political will, from the board of education on down, to really improve those schools in the city, isn't there. So I look at kids like Will who are going out to the suburbs and I'm happy they have that opportunity.
The "racial" categories now in use are a hodgepodge of descriptive efforts: assignments are made by linguistic heritage, cultural affiliation, and biologistic references. They are subject to political pressure and changing economics and demographics within and around them. Yet, activists and public officials alike attempt to make use of rigid racial categories. Race is not an absolute. An individual's own sense of "racial identity" can even shift over the course of a lifetime, as can the labels assigned by the government, or by other elements of society.
Race and racism are related through the purposeful use of apparent ancestry in the assignment of place or space in the society. Residential segregation, for example, has major consequences for life chances, affecting, or determining, access to employment, home equity, education, and the personal contacts and networks that help make social mobility possible. Much of the residential segregation we see today was created by federal mortgage insurance provided for white suburban development, by redlining of neighborhoods which were not racially homogeneous, and by the preservation of racial homogeneity by racial covenants. Low-income people of color continue to be segregated by the effects of exclusionary zoning.
The cost to society of this exclusion has been a festering lack of understanding between the separated groups, a growing segregation of the poor, and the loss of many of our brightest minds, as they are turned away from effective participation in society by the inadequate education and sense of alienation they experience in high-poverty, racially segregated schools. Students from these schools who are allowed to attend the best schools, often in the suburbs, achieve at much higher rates than their segregated peers. They learn more than academics, moreover: they learn how and why to go to college, they learn about the possibilities open to those who pursue education, and they learn valuable skills for survival in the majority culture. They teach and learn about different dimensions of American experience. They challenge, by their simple presence, the racist teachings from which our society still suffers.
"White" has been, in our culture, the norm by which others were measured, and which conferred upon all who qualified the rights of citizenship, and the right to participate and achieve. Merit itself is a highly subjective, often racialized, and certainly contextual matter. Segregation makes it possible for the majority culture to construct, uncontested, explanations for the exclusion of poor people of color. Many white people are beginning to experience life in a non-majority context for the first time. This change could help the white majority gain insights about being "raced" that will increase the pressure for debunking racial myths.
Race functions in different ways for different people; privileging some, while excluding or oppressing others. The privileged have learned not to see their situation as privileged, but as normal, even as segregation has made the excluded members of society "invisible" to them. The relationships between those privileged and those excluded, or oppressed, in our social structure have also been rendered invisible. "Colorblind" policies, applied in such a context, represent a further abdication of responsibility. This denial of the historic roots of many of our current social problems has kept us from addressing them in a coherent and decisive way.
Inclusive thinking is an important part of the project of transformation of the racial structure. Race is a social construction; its meaning and significance are subject to influence by our concerns. By affecting discourse, we can change social thinking and the resulting structures. Including everyone in the conversation would be a highly transformational first step. We needn't dissolve the mosaic of our different ways of seeing and being. Examining the ways we differ and affect each other can increase our appreciation for one another. Only together can we bring America to the realization of its democratic ideals, and its ideal of justice. Only together can we create a vision of stewardship for our society that embraces the reality of our all being part of a complex ecosystem, and envisions that system in a healthy condition.
John Calmore is a professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, California. He earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School and his B.A. from Stanford University. After graduating from law school, Professor Calmore worked with several legal services offices on a variety of issues, including housing and community development. A critical race theorist, Professor Calmore has written numerous articles, including Spatial Equality and the Kerner Commission Report: A Back to the Future Essay, and most recently, Racialized Space and the Culture of Segregation: Hewing a Stone of Hope from a Mountain of Despair.
Michael Omi is a professor of Ethnic Studies, and chair of the Asian American Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. and an A.B. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is co-author of the book Racial Formation in the United States, and has written numerous articles on racial theory and politics. He has also written about right-wing political movements, and race and popular culture.
john a. powell has practiced as an attorney for legal services in the areas of civil liberties, housing/community development, and human rights. He served as the National Legal Director of the ACLU from 1987 to 1993, when he joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota, and founded the Institute on Race and Poverty. He earned a B.A. from Stanford University and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor powell is a nationally recognized expert on issues relating to race, poverty, and the law.
Amy Stuart Wells is a professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University, her M.S. from Boston University, and her B.A. from Southern Methodist University. Professor Wells is the principal investigator in a study examining
detracking procedures in racially mixed secondary schools. She was responsible for conducting a two-year examination of the St. Louis desegregation project, evaluating one of the nation's largest city/suburban transfer programs. She has written numerous articles on educational issues, including Stepping Over the Color Line: African-American Students in White Suburban Schools and Time to Choose: America at the Crossroads of School Choice Policies.