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Chapter 2

The New African American Inequality

“It is now a commonplace,” observes historian Thomas J. Sugrue, “that the election of Barack Obama marks the opening of a new period in America’s long racial history . . . that the United States is a postracial society.”¹ In 2005, the year Barack Obama took his place in the United States Senate, Shorty, born three years after Obama, high on cocaine and alcohol, died from a knife wound on the racially segregated streets of North Philadelphia. Shorty’s foreshortened life—a run-down row house on a mean street, frequent encounters with the police, work outside the regular economy as a street mechanic, violent death at the hand of another black man—screamed the stubborn salience of race in American life. “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past,” wrote William Faulkner.² Whose life—Obama’s or Shorty’s—more accurately represented the trajectory of African American experience in early twentieth-century America?

The question is crucial because, as Sugrue notes, “the ways that we recount the history of racial inequality and civil rights—the narratives that we construct about our past—guide our public policy priorities and, even more fundamentally, shape our national identity.”³ The narrative of racial inequality weaves together multiple threads as it recounts African Americans’ struggle for political, civic, and social citizenship, to use T. H. Marshall’s famous typology. What are the story’s outcomes? This chapter concentrates on one thread: economic equality and mobility. It asks, “Have barriers to African American economic progress crumbled or remained stubbornly resistant to fundamental change? Has the story been similar for women and men? What mechanisms have fostered or retarded change?” These questions matter not only because they cut so close to the heart of twentieth-century American history but also because they bear on important public policy choices in the present.

The history of black economic equality and mobility does not support either the optimistic or the pessimistic version of African American history. But it does not come down in an illusory middle, either. Rather, it recasts the issue by showing that after World War II the nature of black inequality altered fundamentally. inequality worked differently at the end of the twentieth century than at its start or midpoint. At the start of the twentieth century, pervasive, overt racial discrimination barred blacks from most jobs, denied them equal education, and disenfranchised them politically. In the course of the second half of the twentieth century, slowly and sometimes with violent opposition, the situation of African Americans changed dramatically. Courts and Congress—prodded by a massive social movement, national embarrassment on the world stage during the Cold War, and the electoral concerns of urban politicians—extended political and civil rights.⁴ Affirmative action and new “welfare rights” contributed to the extension of social citizenship—guarantees of food, shelter, medical care, and education.⁵ By the end of the century, legal and formal barriers that had excluded blacks from most institutions and from the most favorable labor market positions largely had disappeared. Black poverty had plummeted, and black political and economic achievements were undeniable.⁶ Eight years later a black man was elected president of the United States.

Yet, for many people—both white and black—the sense remained that racism still pervaded American society, operative in both old and new ways, removing some barriers but erecting others. Observers found discrimination in racial profiling by police; verbal slips by members of Congress; disproportionate poverty, incarceration, and capital punishment; and the workings of institutions and public policies that disadvantaged blacks. Racism, they maintained, kept African Americans like Herbert Manes and Shorty residentially segregated and clustered disproportionately in the least desirable jobs, if not out of the workforce altogether, and circumscribed their opportunities for education, high incomes, and the accumulation of wealth. Far more often than whites, African Americans lived in poverty. Most black children were born out of wedlock, and a very large fraction of them grew up poor. And in the 1980s and 1990s, some indices of black economic progress began to reverse direction, accelerating downward during the Great Recession that marked the new century’s first decade.

Two books captured the debate over black progress. In Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, political scientist Andrew Hacker stressed the continued force of racism in American life. In America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, written partly in response to Hacker, historian Stephan Thernstrom and political scientist Abigail Thernstrom emphasized its attenuation.⁷ Hacker highlighted the continued obstacles confronting blacks; the Thernstroms focused on black progress. Hacker intended his analysis to buttress affirmative action; the Thernstroms wanted to undercut its legitimacy.⁸ Economic inequality was only one among several topics considered in each book. But it was crucial—fundamental to the story of progress, or its absence. Was the glass half empty or half full? Could past black achievement be projected into the future, or had it stalled, leaving this enduring categorical inequality etched deeply into the soil of American life?⁹ What did the contrasting histories of Shorty and Barack Obama signify?

Trying to understand black inequality in the terms posed by the Hacker-Thernstrom debate, or focusing on whether America has become a post-racial society, takes us in the wrong direction. The question should not be framed in either/or terms or assessed on a single scale of progress. Rather, the historic pattern of black inequality based on social, economic, and political exclusion largely shattered during the course of the century—replaced by 2000 with its features rearranged in a new configuration of inequality. In the early twentieth century, the sources and results of America’s black/white divide overlapped with and reinforced one another. What stands out about the new pattern of inequality is the cumulative process from which it results and the internal differentiation which is its product. inequality among African Americans no longer grows out of a massive and mutually reinforcing, legal and extralegal, public and private system of racial oppression.¹⁰ Rather, it is a subtler matter, proceeding through a series of screens that filter African Americans into more or less promising statuses, progressively dividing them along lines full of implications for their economic futures.

Throughout the twentieth century, despite repeated contractions and expansions in the degree of economic inequality, the income and wealth pyramid remained durable and steep, with continuities in the distribution of rewards by work, ethnicity, and gender. Yet, immense individual and group mobility accompanied this structural durability. The coexistence of structural rigidity with individual and group fluidity is the paradox of inequality; it is resolved by the process of internal group differentiation or splintering as individuals divide along lines of occupation and income. Differentiation is one of the principal mechanisms through which inequality has been, and continues to be, reproduced in modern American history.

The history of black economic inequality is also very much a story about gender—although gender has not received nearly as much systematic analysis as it deserves. Historians, by and large, have written about either black men or black women, paying only incidental attention to their comparative experiences over time. inequality, however, has proceeded differently for African American women and men. In the middle of the twentieth century, African American women fared much worse than African American men or white women; by the century’s close, they had vaulted ahead of men in educational and occupational achievement, and they closed the gaps between themselves and white women more successfully than African American men reduced their distance from white men. This story of African American inequality, thus, is not only about the relation between blacks and whites. It also traces the emergence of the gender gap between black men and black women.¹¹

Public and quasi-public (privately controlled but government-funded) employment also has played a crucial role in the history of African American inequality and mobility. Especially for women, public employment has been the principal source of black mobility and one of the most important mechanisms for reducing black poverty. It has not received anything like the attention it deserves from historians or social scientists. Yet, its erosion in recent decades is one of the primary forces undermining black economic progress.

There is a widespread assumption that black men’s labor market problems result from deindustrialization. This idea needs to be questioned and modified. Midcentury discrimination denied most African American workers access to steady work in the manufacturing economy. Thus, their disadvantage was evident much earlier than often assumed, and the timing of the collapse of agricultural employment played a much larger role in their subsequent labor market difficulties than historians have appreciated. Nor have writers on African American history sufficiently grasped the paradoxical role of education. Contrary to much common wisdom, education has served as a powerful source of upward mobility for African Americans, who, at the same time, have suffered, and continue to suffer, from structural inequalities that leave them educationally disadvantaged. These arguments about inequality and mobility are not intended to ignore or deny the force of racism. Many scholars have documented the persistence of racist attitudes and changes in public opinion. The intent, rather, is to shift the focus away from individualist interpretations and toward structures and processes that result from racism but, once set in motion, operate with a logic of their own.

The rest of this chapter reconstitutes the history of African American inequality through five lenses.¹² The lenses are (1) participation—the share of African Americans who worked; (2) distribution—the kind of jobs they held and the amount of education they received; (3) rewards—the income they earned and the wealth they accumulated; (4) differentiation—the distance between them on scales of occupation and earnings; and (5) geography— where they lived. Because it underlies the other forms of inequality, geography comes first.

Geography

Throughout American history, African Americans have clustered disproportionately in the nation’s most unpromising places. Because the sources and features of inequality have always been tied so closely to where they have lived, changes in the spatial distribution of African Americans have mapped the reconfiguration of inequality among them. The consequences of African American migration have been immense as blacks, primarily a Southern and rural people at the start of the twentieth century, became, at its end, an urban population distributed far more equally throughout the nation. Movement off of Southern farms resulted in a mixed legacy for black inequality. It brought them closer to more rewarding sources of work, but, in the end, it left them isolated in America’s new islands of poverty.

Black migration from the South to the Northeast and Midwest represented a shift from rural to urban living. In 1900, only 16 percent of adult blacks, compared to 35 percent of whites, lived in a metropolitan area, but by 1960, blacks had become more urbanized than whites—a distinction they retained: in 2000, 86 percent of blacks and 78 percent of whites lived in metropolitan areas.¹³ Not only did blacks become more urban: over the course of the century, they concentrated more than whites in central cities. In 1900, 26 percent of white adults and 12 percent of black adults lived in central cities. This situation reversed between 1940 and 1950. By 2000, the African American fraction had climbed to 52 percent while the white share had dropped to 21 percent, a stunning reversal of metropolitan racial ecology.

In the decades after World War II, with whites leaving and blacks entering central cities, racial segregation increased, reaching historic highs by late in the twentieth century.¹⁴ As Chapter 1 observed, segregation in 2000 was much higher than it had been in 1860, 1910, or 1930, when, except for Chicago and Cleveland, in northern cities whites still dominated the neighborhoods in which the average African American lived. This situation reversed by 1970: between 1930 and 1970, the neighborhood in which the average African American lived went from 31.7 to 73.5 percent black. Affluent as well as poor African Americans lived in segregated neighborhoods. The segregation index went down after 1980, but still remained high. At the end of the twentieth century, the typical African American still lived in a neighborhood where two-thirds of the other residents were black.¹⁵

In the century’s last decade, black suburbanization increased modestly: the percentage of blacks living in suburbs rose from 34 percent to 39 percent. But most black suburbanization was movement to inner-ring suburbs, themselves segregated and developing the problems of inner cities. Between 1990 and 2000, there was no change in the segregation of blacks within suburbs; in both years, the average African American suburbanite lived in a neighborhood that was 46 percent black.¹⁶ Overall, postwar configurations of segregation and inequality remained mostly in place.

Racial segregation did not just happen as a result of individual preferences, the racism of homeowners, or the venality of realtors who practiced blockbusting—although all these influences were at work. It resulted just as much from government policy and action. All levels of government share the culpability. The underwriting practices of federal agencies that insured mortgages introduced “red lining,” which virtually destroyed central city housing markets, froze blacks out of mortgages, and encouraged white flight to suburbs. Governments also deployed interstate highway and other road construction to manipulate racial concentration by confining African Americans to inaccessible, segregated parts of cities. In the 1930s, when the federal government initiated public housing, its regulations forbade projects from disturbing the “neighborhood composition guideline”—the racial status quo. Thus, even before World War II, two-thirds of blacks in public housing lived in wholly segregated projects. In the years after the war, local governments found ways to use public housing to increase black isolation even further by locating developments only in segregated neighborhoods.¹⁷

The spatial redistribution of America’s black population in the twentieth century intersects African Americans’ history of economic inequality.¹⁸ Segregation, Massey and Denton show, is itself a force that initiates a vicious cycle that concentrates poverty and magnifies its impact.¹⁹ An overwhelming number of African Americans started the twentieth century clustered in America’s poorest spaces—rural southern farms; they also ended the century concentrated disproportionately in the nation’s least-promising locations—central cities, where only 21 percent of whites remained.

Participation

The geographic redistribution of African Americans focuses one lens on the reconfiguration of black inequality in the twentieth century; the altered relationship of black men to the labor market focuses another. For it is among black men, more than among black women, that these trends created a new form of disadvantage.²⁰

Patterns of black women’s market work varied over the twentieth century. For much of American history, black women worked out of necessity.²¹ As slaves, they were forced to labor; after slavery, and in the North, they worked to supplement men’s meager wages or because they were more often widowed.²² In post–World War II cities, disincentives built into public assistance kept many of them from employment until after 1996, when new welfare legislation forced them into the labor force—for some a welcome opportunity, for others a chance to join the ranks of the working poor.²³ At the same time, better education, the impact of the civil rights movement, and the expansion of jobs in government, health care, and the social services opened more attractive work opportunities to black women. By contrast, for many black men in the late twentieth century, just a job in the regular labor market itself often proved elusive, a situation highlighted by social scientists who lamented black men’s chronic detachment from the labor force.²⁴ The eminent social scientist William Julius Wilson titled his 1996 book When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor.