Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America
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Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America
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| ISBN-13: | 9780817998738 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hoover Institution Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 438 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Beyond the Color Line
New Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America
By Abigail Thernstrom, Stephan Thernstrom
Hoover Institution Press
Copyright © 2001 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8179-9873-8
CHAPTER 1
The Demography of Racial and Ethnic Groups
STEPHAN THERNSTROM
THE UNITED STATES has been a racially and ethnically diverse society from its beginnings. But the conventional wisdom these days is that something radically new is happening now — that demographic changes are fundamentally transforming our society in unprecedented ways. Peering into a crystal ball, many observers have claimed that the groups we currently designate as minorities are destined to become the new majority. By the middle of the twenty-first century, they predict, and perhaps even sooner, whites will have been reduced to minority status and "people of color" will have become the majority. This, it is claimed, will have momentous implications for the nation's political, social, and cultural life.
Such is the argument, for example, of Peter Brimelow's Alien Nation, a 1995 volume that contended that current population shifts were "so huge and so systematically different from anything that had gone before as to transform — and ultimately, perhaps, even to destroy — the ... American nation."
Brimelow is a conservative, but many observers on the multicultural left are equally convinced that a profound demographic transformation is under way. They are cheered rather than dismayed by the prospect, however. They welcome the arrival of a minority majority and see it as evidence of the need for immediate action — for more multicultural education in the schools, continued affirmative action and diversity training programs in higher education and the workplace, and an expanded welfare state.
The demographic projections upon which both sides of this debate depend are too flawed to be taken seriously, as I shall argue later. But the general public seems to have got the message — so it would appear, at least, from the results of a 1995 poll that asked Americans to estimate what proportion of the population belonged to various racial or ethnic groups (see Table 1). This survey revealed that whites (that is, non-Hispanic whites, a distinction to be discussed at a later point) thought that the black population was almost twice as large as it was in fact — 24 percent in their minds, just 13 percent in reality — and that there were 50 percent more Hispanics and almost three times as many Asians in the country as the Current Population Survey figures revealed there to be. These three minority groups together, whites thought, made up fully half of the total population, when they actually were little more than one quarter. The "minority majority," in the eyes of whites, was not a possibility in the remote future; whites were already on the brink of losing their traditional majority status.
It is tempting to interpret this misconception as evidence of widespread white paranoia. But the delusion was not confined to whites. Indeed, blacks and Hispanics were even more prone than whites to exaggerate their numbers. They also greatly exaggerated the size of other minority groups: minorities together, they believed, were already a distinct majority of the population, constituting 54 or 55 percent of the total. Asians were a little better informed than other groups, but they too greatly overestimated the size not only of their own group but also of other minorities. Whatever their backgrounds, most Americans tended to have similar misconceptions about the racial-ethnic composition of the nation's population.
It has long been claimed that nonwhite people are socially invisible in American society and that the minority presence deserves to be given far more attention than it receives on television, in the press, in classrooms and textbooks. President Clinton's Race Initiative was based on the premise that most white Americans do not pay sufficient attention to their fellow countrymen with skins of a different hue. These polling numbers suggest that the opposite may be closer to the truth: Americans have become so attentive to racial divisions and so obsessed with racial matters that they have developed a badly distorted picture of the shape of their society.
The Arbitrary and Unscientific Character of the Official Racial-Ethnic Categories in Current Use
The survey referred to above employed four crude categories: white, black, Hispanic, and Asian. Why are these the relevant categories for subdividing the population into cultural groups? Why are these few groups singled out for attention, while a great many others with some claim to a distinct identity are not? What about Italian Americans, for example, or Jews? Are divisions among "races" deeper, more fundamental, and more enduring than divisions among "ethnic groups"?
The idea that "race" is a crucial and immutable division of mankind is a product of the primitive social science of the nineteenth century. According to theorists of the day, all the peoples of the world were divided into four distinct races: white or "Caucasian," black or "Negroid," yellow or "Oriental," and red or Indian. White, black, yellow, and red people were profoundly different from each other, as different as robins from sparrows, trout from salmon, rabbits from squirrels. People who belonged to different races were not only distinct physical types; they differed in innate intellectual potential and in cultural development. If they were to mate across racial lines, their offspring would be biological monstrosities.
Since these race theorists were white, it is hardly surprising that they fervently believed that Caucasians were the superior race. Orientals were next in line, with blacks and American Indians at the bottom of the heap. Given this premise, it was only natural that representatives of the "most advanced" race believed that they were entitled to rule over the "lesser breeds."
Such ideas have long been discredited and are now held only by those on the lunatic fringe. Scientists today agree that the genetic differences that distinguish members of supposedly different "races" are small, and that the races have become so intermixed that few people can claim to be of racially "pure" origins. The range of biological variation within any one race is far greater than the average differences among races.
And yet the government of the United States, remarkably, still utilizes these antiquated and pernicious categories in compiling statistical information about the American people. The entry on the black population in the index to the 1997 edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States gives 230 citations to tables that distinguish African Americans from other Americans. Another 140 citations direct the reader to data on "Hispanics," a newly invented quasi-racial category whose origins will be traced below. Asians and Pacific Islanders get 42 references, and American Indians and Alaskan natives 47. If you want to know how many African Americans regularly use the Internet, how many Asians were treated in hospital emergency rooms in the preceding year, how many Hispanics usually eat breakfast, or how many American Indians were arrested for burglary, the answers are all there. The federal government inundates us with data that convey the unmistakable message that Americans of different "races" differ from each other in many important ways.
It is very striking that the American public is not bombarded with similar official statistics on the socioeconomic characteristics of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims, and the many denominational subdivisions within those broad categories. Why not? Religious groups in the United States differ, often quite dramatically, in levels of education, income and wealth, SAT scores, unemployment rates, and most other socioeconomic measures. Why shouldn't the public be able to find out if Jews are much wealthier than Presbyterians, on the average, or if Mormons are more likely to attend college than Southern Baptists? The government of the United States has never inquired into the religious affiliations of individual citizens because religion is regarded as a private matter in American society and not the business of government. If such information did become readily available, the effect might be to heighten tensions between people of different faiths, inspiring some to complain that they did not have their "fair share" of federal judgeships or of seats on the boards of large corporations and that others were "overrepresented" in those positions.
If not religion, why race? The racial categories currently used by the federal government derive from discredited racial theories more than a century old, with only minor changes in nomenclature. "Negroid" has given way to "black" or "African American," and "Oriental" has been replaced by "Asian." But the idea that it is meaningful and socially useful to cram us all into one of the four racial boxes constructed by racist thinkers more than a hundred years ago remains unchanged. The previous decennial census, in 1990, still accepted the traditional premise that every American belongs in one and only one of four mutually exclusive racial categories; people of racially mixed ancestry were required to record just one race on the census forms. The Census of 2000 has broken from this tradition and allowed respondents to give more than one answer to the race question, but for purposes of civil rights enforcement the results will be tabulated in the same old crude categories, rendering the change virtually meaningless.
The issue is not confined to the U.S. Census. Nineteenth-century conceptions of race are also alive and well in the official guidelines that govern the statistical information that all federal agencies must gather. The authoritative statement of current practice is the Office of Management and Budget's Directive No. 15, "Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting," first issued in 1977 and still in effect. Directive 15 declared that the population of the United States was divided into four "races" and two "ethnic" groups and required all agencies of the federal government to compile data using these categories in order to assess the impact of their programs.
The "racial" groups identified in Directive 15 were the usual ones: whites, blacks, Asians and Pacific Islanders, and American Indians and Alaskan Natives. Even though the old idea of a racial hierarchy with whites on top had lost all intellectual respectability, the guidelines set forth in Directive 15 were designed to subvert that hierarchy. The rationale for requiring all governmental agencies to subdivide the population into these particular racial categories was that these nonwhite groups had been the targets of prejudice in the past. (So had many white immigrant groups, of course, but the guidelines made no mention of that.) It was necessary to monitor how the nonwhite races were faring in the present in order to overcome the allegedly lingering remnants of a history of white supremacy. The three minority races were victim groups that had once "suffered discrimination and differential treatment on the basis of their race." As victims, they were — and are — entitled to a variety of special protections and preferential programs not available to whites.
Does it make sense at the end of the twentieth century to identify "races" as defined by nineteenth-century supporters of white supremacy? The authors of Directive 15 were careful to say that "these classifications should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature." True enough, but the admission only makes their decision to utilize them more dubious. If these categories are not "scientific" or "anthropological," what are they? Why should the U.S. government distinguish some citizens from others on a basis that is not "scientific" or even "anthropological" (whatever that means) and use those distinctions in allocating public resources?
Perhaps the answer is that the OMB assumed that Americans today habitually draw these crude distinctions in their daily lives, and that recognition of social reality requires the government to do the same. This is a feeble argument. What is the evidence of a societal consensus on precisely these distinctions? Some Americans may see the population as divided into two groups, whites and nonwhites. Some, on the other hand, may make much finer distinctions than these racial categories provide, seeing Japanese Americans as quite different from Korean Americans, for example. It is certainly questionable whether Koreans and Japanese feel a strong sense of kinship and solidarity as "Asians"; there is considerable antipathy between these groups that grows out of the fact that Korea was under Japanese rule for most of the first half of the twentieth century. Immigrants from Ethiopia and Jamaica likewise differ from blacks whose ancestors came to North America as slaves centuries ago, but those differences are obscured when all are thrown together into the black racial category.
Even if it could be shown that these unscientific racial categories did correspond at least moderately well to the way in which the general public perceives the racial landscape, it does not follow that it is wise for the government to insist upon the saliency of race. Justice Harry Blackmun argued two decades ago that "in order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. ... And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently." But the race-conscious policies that have been pursued in the United States for a generation have plainly not taken us "beyond racism."
President John F. Kennedy was wiser than Justice Blackmun, I believe, when he said that "race has no place in American life or law." To continue to draw racial distinctions in our laws and to compile massive amounts of official statistical data about racial differences among racial groups will not serve to make race less important in "American life." We need not go so far as to bar government from collecting any information whatever about the ethnic composition of the population. But the evidence necessary to monitor the socioeconomic progress of groups and to identify problems can be obtained without pertetuating the dangerous fiction of race. The census currently includes a question about the "ancestry or ethnic origin" of respondents, a concept broad enough to include African Americans, Asian Americans, and all other Americans. The answers to this question will yield information about what are now classified as racial groups without contributing to the fallacy that they are fundamentally different from other groups based on a sense of common origins and peoplehood.
Is Racial Victimization Hereditary?
The rationale for making racial distinctions in official statistics is remedial. Directive 15 rests on the premise that being a member of a particular race that was treated unfairly at some point in the past leaves an indelible imprint on everyone with the same "blood." Is there no statute of limitations for complaints of historical victimization? Does the discrimination experienced by your grandparents, great-grandparents, or even more remote ancestors have any relevance to your life today?
The case for classifying some Americans as belonging to a victim group is, of course, strongest for blacks. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that official racial statistics would still be gathered but for the continuing "American dilemma," the seemingly never ending problem of how black Americans can be integrated into American society. The situation of blacks in the United States is sui generis. Although there are many points of resemblance between African Americans and immigrant groups that also encountered prejudice and discrimination, the differences are fundamental. No other group has such a bitter heritage of centuries of enslavement, followed by several decades of disfranchisement and legally enforced separation and subordination in the Jim Crow South and by intense racist hostility in the rest of the country.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Beyond the Color Line by Abigail Thernstrom, Stephan Thernstrom. Copyright © 2001 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Hoover Institution Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword John Raisian and Larry Mone,Contributors,
Introduction,
PART ONE THE BIG PICTURE,
The Demography of Racial and Ethnic Groups Stephan Thernstrom,
Immigration and Group Relations Reed Ueda,
What Americans Think About Race and Ethnicity Everett C. Ladd,
Wrestling with Stigma Shelby Steele,
PART TWO PRIVATE LIVES AND PUBLIC POLICIES,
Residential Segregation Trends William A. V. Clark,
African American Marriage Patterns Douglas J. Besharov and Andrew West,
Crime James Q. Wilson,
Health and Medical Care Sally Satel,
Supporting Black Churches John J. DiIulio Jr.,
PART THREE ECONOMICS,
Discrimination, Economics, and Culture Thomas Sowell,
Half Full or Half Empty? The Changing Economic Status of African Americans, 1967–1996 Finis Welch,
Discrimination in Public Contracting George R. La Noue,
PART FOUR EDUCATION,
Desegregation and Resegregation in the Public Schools David J. Armor and Christine H. Rossell,
The Racial Gap in Academic Achievement Abigail Thernstrom,
Schools That Work for Minority Students Clint Bolick,
Preferential Admissions in Higher Education Martin Trow,
PART FIVE LAW,
Racial and Ethnic Classifications in American Law Eugene Volokh,
Illusions of Antidiscrimination Law Nelson Lund,
PART SIX POLITICS,
Race, Ethnicity, and Politics in American History Michael Barone,
The Politics of Racial Preferences David Brady,
From Protest to Politics: Still an Issue for Black Leadership Tamar Jacoby,
PART SEVEN ONE NATION, INDIVISIBLE,
The New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation Linda Chavez,
In Defense of Indian Rights William J. Lawrence,
The Battle for Color-Blind Public Policy C. Robert Zelnick,
One Nation, Indivisible Ward Connerly,
Index,