Give Affirmative Action Time to Act Give Affirmative Action Time to Act
By William Darity Jr.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
December 1, 2000
A standard objection to affirmative action and other race-based programs designed to remedy economic disadvantage is the observation that living white Americans are not responsible for past injustices visited upon black Americans. No living white American has owned slaves; no living white American voted for laws that established Jim Crow practices in the South; no living white American helped set up inferior legally separated schools for black Americans. Why, then, should living white Americans have to bear the cost of compensation for those injustices to living black Americans?
Furthermore, opponents of affirmative action argue, black Americans today do not live under the crippling segregation that previous generations faced. Therefore, now is the time to get rid of race-conscious policies and move toward the ideal of a colorblind society.
The apex of that argument is the proposal that blacks should give up their attachment to blackness. The call for blacks to cease being black is oddly unilateral, seldom accompanied by a call for whites to cease being white. The subordinate group is to surrender an identity that helps shield its members from the power of the dominant group, while the dominant group does not need to surrender an identity that confers racial privilege upon its members. The foundation of that philosophical position is the view that the past is irrelevant in explaining black-white relations in the United States today.
To believe that only the present matters is to deny the continued economic subordination of blacks. Yet as we enter the 21st century, black Americans' income per capita, is only 59 percent of that for white Americans--the same percentage that the economists Richard Vedder, Lowell Gallaway, and David C. Klingaman estimate was the case in 1880.
The continued subordination of blacks is due in significant measure to persistent discrimination against them at all stages of the employment process, form recruitment to interview, job offer, and promotion. Studies conducted in the 1990's by the Urban Institute in Chicago, San Diego, and Washington, and by the Fair Employment Council of Greater Washington Inc. in the Washington metropolitan area, show significant levels of discrimination in the labor market against black and Hispanic job applicants. Patrick Mason, an economist at Florida State University, and I recently reviewed the statistical research for the past 25 years and found that current discrimination in the labor market causes black men to earn 12 to 15 percent less than white men.
The discrimination that previous generations of blacks experienced in the labor market also harms modern blacks' employment prospects. For a paper forthcoming in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Jason Dietrich, David Guilkey, and I looked at census data for various ethnic and racial groups from 1880 to 1990. We controlled for variables like the individual's age, years of schooling, marital status, and whether he or she was born in the United States. We found astonishingly strong correlations between, on the one hand, the occupational status of American men and women in the 1980 and 1990 censuses, and, on the other, whether their ethnic or racial group had experienced discrimination a century ago.
A crucial mechanism for the transmission of discrimination's effects across generations is the transfer of wealth. Indeed, the sharpest economic gap between blacks and whites in the United States today is the gap in wealth. Unlike income or earnings, wealth is a measure of what an individual owns, like a home or stocks. Ngina Chiteji and Frank Stafford have examined studies of wealth, and concluded--in a article published in The American Economic Review in May 1999--that the medium white household wealth exceeds $10,000, while the median black household wealth is near zero.
The sociologists Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro have shown in Black Wealth/White Wealth that access to wealth affects people in many ways: whether they go to college, and where; how well they can survive emergencies, like the loss of a job; whether they are self-employed; whether they own their homes; what they can leave to their children. Moreover, a study by Dalton Conley, another sociologist, concludes that the difference in wealth among racial groups is one of the most powerful factors explaining racial differences in performance on standardized tests.
Today, as Francine Blau and John Graham documented in a 1990 article in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, the major source of wealth is inheritance. Although at all income levels, blacks save more of their money than whites do, black families now have comparatively less wealth than whites do, because black parents had less to bestow upon their children. And the children of today's black families will, in turn, have relatively less wealth, because their parents will have less to bestow upon them.
Affirmative action can address continuing discrimination, but it cannot address the racial gap in wealth. Michael Steman and other policymakers have proposed class-based measures to redistribute assets--for example, supplementing the savings of poor people with matching funds from the government. We should also consider race-based policies--for instance, having the government pay blacks' college tuition.
The social construct that we call race has a powerful impact on a person's opportunities in life. Because that impact persists over generations, policies like affirmative action may have to be applied for a century to have a significant effect.
The case of India is instructive here. Soon after the nation became independent, the government adopted a national system of preferences for members of the untouchable Hindu castes and certain tribal groups, to erode disparities that the caste system had produced. In the state of Kerala, the Ezhava caste, once a despised group, has displayed substantial upward mobility in recent years, to the point at which some younger members of the caste question whether they still need the preferences.
But there is more to the story. The system of preferences has been in place at the national level since 1950, but Kerala, a politically progressive state, had initiated the preferences on behalf of the lower castes half a century earlier. Thus, the Ezhava have benefited from preferences for close to 100 years, or about four generations.
Affirmative action in the United States, conducted on a much narrower scale than the Indian system, has been in effect for only a quarter of a century, and today it is being rolled back rapidly. Instead of pretending that racism and its effects no longer exist, we need to strengthen affirmative action and devise a new set of policies that directly tackle the racial gap in wealth.
William Darity Jr. is a professor of economics and sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a professor of public policy, African-American studies, and economics at Duke University.
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