2. Refiguring the
Boundaries of Citizenship
Race, Immigration, and National Belonging
6. Once Again,
Strangers on Our Shores
Mary C. Waters
Americans have a fundamental ambivalence about immigration. We are a nation of immigrants, yet racism and xenophobia are constitutive parts of our national psyche. Although we voice warm feelings about our immigrant ancestors, we see the present crop of immigrants as unworthy or even as demonic others, and the United States has a long history of trying to restrict immigration.
The current debate on immigration perfectly embodies this ambivalence. In the nearly four decades since the Hart-Celler immigration reforms opened the doors to non-European immigration, the largest flow in the nation's history has profoundly transformed U.S. society. For some the new immigrants, like the ones that preceded them, are a noble testimony to the success of the American experiment and the character of the immigrants who have fashioned it. Immigrants are seen as strengthening the best in American traditions, revitalizing decaying neighborhoods and stagnant industries and adding new talents and energies to the U.S. civic culture.
For others, however, this influx is nothing short of a disaster that displaces native workers, swells the minority "underclass, " and exacerbates racial and ethnic conflict. Many Americans find particular cause for concern in the "nonwhite" character of the recent immigrants who have increasingly come from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In 2000, 51 percent of the foreign born were from Latin America and the Caribbean,
Few people argue, at least out loud, that past immigration was bad for America. Instead the current debate hinges on the question of how today's immigrants differ from earlier ones. Restrictionists usually make two distinctions between the post-1965 immigrants and the earlier waves of European immigrants. First, arriving after the rise of the welfare state, today's immigrants are not encouraged to work as hard as previous immigrants, who did not enjoy such government help. Second, the immigrants themselves are different because we are now admitting racially different groups into a society that no longer advocates assimilation.
But evidence suggests that both these claims are exaggerated. When political refugees are taken out of the equation, working-age immigrants are no more likely to use welfare than working-age natives. A study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Urban Institute concluded, "There is no reputable evidence that prospective immigrants are drawn to the United States because of its public assistance programs." In any event recent welfare reform legislation restricts access to welfare among legal immigrants.[1]
Meanwhile, the argument that nonwhite immigrants are less likely to assimilate than European immigrants simply ignores the intensity of turnof-the-century beliefs that southern and central European "races" were genetically inferior to the northern and western European groups who came to the United States in earlier times and composed the "core American culture." In a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times on June 22, 1913, William Ripley, a Harvard economics professor, deemed "the hordes of new immigrants" to be "a menace to our Anglo Saxon civilization"; these hordes were producing a "swarthy and black eyed primitive type population."[2]
The weakness of the restrictionists' comparisons does not mean we should abandon that methodological instinct. Indeed, the experience of European immigrants and their descendants was irrevocably shaped by two conditions that no longer apply for current immigrants: the hiatus in immigration between the depression and 1965 and the economic growth and social mobility that characterized the American economy between World War II and the 1970s.[3] These changes speak powerfully to the question of whether today's immigrants will be absorbed in the same way that earlier waves of immigrants were.
The immigrants from Europe who arrived between 1880 and 1920 are an assimilation success story. As their children and grandchildren rose
Yet these immigrants achieved their progress in an era in which further immigration from Europe was cut off abruptly and in which in the years after World War II America saw rising income equality and sustained economic growth that benefited the middle and working classes. Today's immigrants arrive in a different milieu. There is no sign that the constant new supply of immigrants will be suddenly cut off. And since the mid-1970s the United States has seen rising income inequality and declining or stagnant real wages—especially for the working and lowermiddle classes.
THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF IMMIGRATION
The so-called Great Pause in immigration in the 1920s and the restrictions that effected it halted the flow of European immigrants for three generations. That sharp break cut off the supply of raw materials for ethnicity—so that what it came to mean to be Jewish or Italian or Polish in the United States principally reflects what happened in the United States subsequently.[5] In the absence of appreciable numbers of new arrivals successive generations of acculturated Americans, not unassimilated greenhorns, became the majority among the new ethnics. Today most Italian Americans or Polish Americans are second, third, and fourth generation. They did not cease being Italian or Polish and become just plain "Americans." But their ethnicity became less intense and increasingly intermittent, voluntary, even recreational. If some still enjoyed ethnic holidays or special foods, their ethnicity rarely determined their occupation or residence. As more and more of the later generations of white ethnics intermarried, their ethnic identity became even more attenuated, and individuals felt increasingly free to choose whether to identify with their mother's or father's or grandmother's or grandfather's ethnic origins.[6] As a result the vast majority of Italian Americans live in neighborhoods that are not predominantly Italian American. As fewer new immigrants from Italy arrived, the nation's Little Italys gradually
New immigrants from Mexico, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia face different circumstances. Given the continual stream of immigration, the members of these various immigrant communities will vary greatly in their level of assimilation, and the meaning of being Korean American, Mexican American, or Dominican will not diminish in quite the linear fashion experienced by earlier European immigrants.[7] Although some will undergo marked assimilation, they will be replaced by new individuals who will keep the ethnic group "fresh." Ethnic neighborhoods will not shrink and become quaint shrines to an earlier way of life but will remain vibrant new neighborhoods, even when the same people do not stay in them. The third-generation Chinese American who intermarries, moves to the suburbs, achieves social mobility, and develops a merely "symbolic" identity as Chinese American will be replaced by a first-generation Chinese American who lives in Chinatown, speaks little English, and lives a visibly rich ethnic Chinese lifestyle.
This replenishment powerfully shapes not just the immigrants' quest to define their identity but also the way immigrants present their collective self to outsiders and, thus, public opinion about immigration. Simply put, the visible aspects of the ethnic group—speaking a language other than English, occupational specialization, residential concentration—will not be diluted, and it will strike the average American that the new immigrants are not assimilating as the European immigrants did in earlier times, even though a great deal of assimilation is taking place among second-and third-generation Asians, West Indians, and Latinos.
Language provides a good example of this mismatch between perception and reality. Complaints about immigrants who refuse to learn "our" language, resentful anecdotes about voting signs in Spanish, and efforts to certify English as the hallowed language have all been a staple of talk radio and politicking. Meanwhile, the rushing stream of new immigrants ensures that many people in Los Angeles and Miami speak only Spanish. And this will happen despite irrefutable evidence that the new immigrants are rapidly acquiring English—sometimes in the course of a single generation. In a recent study of Miami and San Diego, Portes and Schauffler found only 1 percent of the second-generation youth they studied knew little or no English; 73 percent reported they are able to speak, understand, read, and write English "very well" and another 26 percent "well." In effect, even in Miami, the city in the United States where it is
This ethnic replenishment has another effect that obscures underlying assimilation: it gives rise to population projections that heighten fears about the changing racial composition of the United States and generate well-known predictions that whites will soon become a minority throughout the country. But all these forecasts assume no intermarriage and no change in ethnic identity. They assume that Mexicans, for example, will always marry other Mexicans and that all of their descendants will identify as Mexican.
If people at the turn of the century had made similar estimates of the future numbers of Jews, Italians, and Slavs, they would have missed the actual trajectory of those immigrants' progeny. And indeed fears about unassimilable immigrants and soaring population were directed at the Italian, Jewish, and Polish parents and grandparents of those who now worry about "their" unassimilable immigrants. In the last century the Irish were seen as a "race" apart from other European groups, and cartoons portrayed them as apes. If blacks were called "smoked Irish, " the Irish in turn were dubbed "niggers turned inside out."[9] They were also stereotyped as ignorant criminals and fecund child bearers who lacked discipline and good family values. Surely it would have been difficult to predict how popular, how quintessentially American, such a denigrated group would become in the next century.
Actually, the growth of the Irish from 4.5 million immigrants to 40 million Irish Americans by the 1980 census happened not because the allegedly fecund Irish were too different culturally to assimilate but precisely because they were able to assimilate.[10] The Irish had high rates of intermarriage with other white groups, and the offspring of those marriages tended to favor "Irish" as their preferred identity. And if turn-of-the-century projections had radically underestimated the Irish, similar forecasts would have failed to predict the decline in the boundaries separating white ethnic groups or that differences between southern and central European immigrants and northern and western European immigrants would gradually become a moot point. In all these cases groups such as Italians and Poles and Greeks, once seen as racially distinct, now intermarry to such a great extent with other white European groups that they are virtually indistinguishable. As Richard D. Alba reports, "In 1990 census data, more than half (56 percent) of whites have spouses whose ethnic backgrounds do not overlap with their own at all.… Only one-fifth
Even though the demography of current Caribbean, Latin American, and Asian immigrants will be more complex than the earlier generation's, significant intermarriage and identity changes are already occurring among the descendants of these immigrants. Rates of intermarriage have been growing since 1960 for all groups, even for those defined as "racial" groups.[12] Although it is still the case that only a small proportion of marriages by whites are with nonwhites and Hispanics (2 percent), the rate of increase in recent decades has been dramatic; "in 1960 there were about 150, 000 interracial couples in the United States. This number grew rapidly to more than one million in 1990. When marriages with Hispanics are added the intergroup marriages totalled about 1.6 million in 1990."[13] Although greater than 93 percent of whites and of blacks marry within their own groups, only 70 percent of Asians and of Hispanics do so. Black-white intermarriages are still the least prevalent, but among younger people there is evidence of dramatic change. Alba reports that "10 percent of 25 to 34 year old black men have intermarried, most with white women."[14]
Because immigration is ongoing, there may be two stories to tell about the new immigrants—one a story of new arrivals and the replenishment of ethnic culture, the other a story of quiet assimilation into a blended culture. But if the second story is obscured by the first, there could be growing public support for restricting immigration.
One might counter that the fluidity of white ethnic categories contrasts with the seemingly impermeable boundaries of race that Mexican, Korean, and Jamaican immigrants encounter in the United States. But those who believe that current immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean are less "assimilable" than those from European countries may be committing two important errors. First, as complaints about the Hebraic and Celtic "races" remind us, the legal and social systems of racial classifications in the United States are fluid, the product of a complex and contingent process, and subject to change over the coming decades. At the least, as intermarriage blurs the boundaries between groups, our ideas of what constitutes a "race" will change accordingly, just as they did with the Irish and Jews.
Those who fear the new immigrants will not assimilate commit a second error: they mistakenly assume the cultures of non-European groups
CHANGES IN THE ECONOMY AND SECOND-GENERATION DECLINE
The second major difference between contemporary and previous immigrants is economic. The children and grandchildren of the European immigrants who arrived in the peak years of immigration around 1900 benefited from the spectacular expansion of the U.S. economy between 1940 and 1970. As Barry Bluestone has summarized, "In the U.S. real average weekly earnings grew by 60 percent between 1947 and 1973. Median family income literally doubled.… And over the same period personal wages and family incomes became tangibly more equal.… Along with growth and greater equality, poverty declined across the nation."[16]
The existence of manufacturing jobs offering security and good pay meant that blue-collar workers with a high school degree or less could attain a stable middle-class lifestyle, as a rising tide really did lift all boats. By the 1980s the descendants of southern and eastern European immigrants and northern and western European immigrants had achieved economic parity.
This level of economic growth and widening opportunities was not sustained after the early 1970s. During the final decades of the twentieth century the restructuring of the U.S. economy from manufacturing to services was accompanied by rising inequality between rich and poor, especially in the nation's urban centers. The result has been described as an hourglass economy, with many jobs for highly skilled workers in professional services and information processing and many unskilled low-level jobs. The unionized blue-collar manufacturing jobs that supported middle-class lifestyles have become scarce. One result has been to increase
These disparities intensified in the 1980s, when the average real wages of male high school dropouts fell by 18 percent, and male high school graduates suffered a nearly 13 percent loss in real earnings. Only men with a master's degree or more registered an increase in inflation-adjusted earnings, and college graduates' earnings stayed about the same. This happened partly because all the employment growth in the economy during the 1980s came in the services sector, where wages polarized between high school dropouts and college graduates four times faster than in goods-producing industries.[18]
This new economy poses tough challenges for the children of unskilled immigrants no less than for native-born Americans who lack college degrees. Both face a generational erosion of real family income relative to their parents. Simply achieving their parents' low level of education will yield diminishing returns in earnings. As a result, to achieve a middleclass lifestyle the second generation must vault from their parents' lower-level service jobs and education to a completed college education. The unforgiving economy of today means that current second generations must accomplish in one generation what it took the Irish, Italians, and Poles several to accomplish. In the absence of well-paying blue-collar jobs for those without a high school diploma, the current second generation is climbing a ladder on which the middle rungs are missing, as historian Joel Perlmann has put it.[19]
These circumstances have played havoc with the ethnic bargain enjoyed by white ethnic immigrants. Their experience suggested each succeeding generation would become more similar to native-born Americans. Whatever the psychic costs of shedding identity for the third and fourth generation descendants, assimilation offered the substantial economic rewards of upward mobility.
Today's second-generation immigrants are no longer assured of this payoff, as Herbert Gans warned in the early 1990s. He outlined several possible outcomes for the second generation, including an ironic version of "Americanization": the children of immigrants—especially of parents who have not escaped poverty—refuse the low level, poorly paid jobs of their parents and, in their economic slide, begin to look increasingly like those poor young whites, blacks, and Hispanics who reject low-wage jobs.
Another possibility is an equally ironic form of refusing to assimilate. Instead of "becoming American" by adopting negative attitudes toward school, opportunity, and hard work, the children of immigrants embrace their parents' ethnic community and values and end up doing better. The people who have secured an economically viable ethnic niche acculturate less than did the European second and third generation, and those without such a niche escape dead-end immigrant and other jobs mainly by becoming persistently jobless Americans.
Race further complicates the relationship between the ethnic bargain and economic decline for immigrants of color. In their study of second-generation children in Miami and San Diego, Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut identified a pattern in which those groups who come with strong ethnic ties, access to capital, and fewer ties to U.S. minorities—Koreans and Chinese—experience "linear" ethnicity. The orbit of ethnic networks helps transmit parental authority, traditional values, and access to job opportunities. As a result resistance to acculturation ends up providing better opportunities for their second generation.[21]
In another pattern second-generation youth whose parents lack the ability to provide jobs develop an "adversarial stance" toward white society similar to that of many American minorities and may even come to identify with them. Immigrants may thus lose their ethnic distinctiveness only to become indistinguishable from native blacks or Latinos. For them assimilation may mean joining the street culture of the urban ghetto.
In striking contrast to Chinese and Korean children, Haitians feel pressured by black American peers to adopt "black culture" in school and to identify as blacks rather than as Haitians or West Indians. The peer culture imparts a skeptical view of upward mobility and school success. Portes and Zhou discern a similarly sad fate for members of the second generation who cast their lot with America's minority groups: "Children of nonwhite immigrants may not even have the opportunity of gaining access to the white mainstream, no matter how acculturated they become. Joining those native circles to which they do have access may prove a ticket to permanent subordination and disadvantage."[22]
Portes and Zhou's findings have been replicated for other ethnic immigrants. Suarez-Orozco found that successful Central American immigrant children maintained a dual frame of reference.[23] They contrasted their experiences in the United States with their experiences at home and developed an immigrant attitude toward school that helped them to do
I found something similar among second-generation West Indian youth in New York City. Students from middle-class backgrounds were likely to maintain ties to their parents' ethnic identities and to resist identifying as black Americans. Poor and working-class youth in segregated neighborhoods were far more likely than their middle-class counterparts to reject their parents' stress on West Indian heritage and to strongly identify as black Americans. These identities were closely related to perceptions of racism in American society. Those who believed that discrimination blocked their way developed more oppositional theories of how to "make it" and tended to identify with American black youth. The type of identification was highly correlated with levels of educational success and thus future prospects.[26]
One final twist of the racial dynamic complicates the story. Intensifying the payoff to "ethnic" rather than "minority" identification, membership in cohesive ethnic enclaves has a positive impact not just on the aspirations of job seekers but on the perceptions of the employers who consider hiring them. After all, employees also use the identity of "notnative minority, " which functions to reassure employers about the work habits of immigrants. As the employers articulate it, the newcomers are much more willing to accept lesser jobs, for their frame of reference is the situation they left back home, not the American context used by American minorities for comparison.
Several recent studies have attempted to measure this odd form of "racial" discrimination that works in favor of immigrants of color, in which white employers take their immigrant status to be more important than their nonwhite status. In a survey of hiring practices among Chicago area employers, Kirschenman and Neckerman found that employers strongly preferred immigrants over inner-city blacks.[27] Kasinitz and Rosenberg found the same preference among employers in the Red
But will the children of immigrants continue to enjoy these advantages? Will the second generation still be able to tap into the social networks that provide access to jobs and reassure employers? Will they resist the same disdain toward low-level service jobs that native minorities feel? Will potential employers see them as racial minorities and pass them over for employment in favor of even newer immigrants, perhaps from their parents' country of origin? Will they be more successful than native minorities in staying in school through college? For now, the answers to all these questions are pending.
Becoming an American includes learning about American racial attitudes and prejudices. Although Latin American and Caribbean first-generation immigrants may not see themselves in terms of U.S. racial categories, the second generation probably will, at least in part. Many Dominicans in New York are dark-skinned and would be classified as black by most Americans. These immigrants often label themselves white because in the Dominican Republic to be partly white means to be non-black.[30] Will the children of these immigrants adopt the American view and identify as black? What impact will the way others see them have on the way the children of the immigrants see themselves? Some researchers argue that whether immigrants see themselves as "ethnics" or "minorities" will influence political and social outcomes for the group.[31] It is quite possible that as the second generation experiences racial discrimination, it may embrace a black identity and adopt an oppositional identity.
At present the evidence on outcomes for the second generation, based as it is on ethnographic case studies and small-scale surveys, is sketchy. The question of how much second-generation decline there is awaits more systematic survey research. Yet the question of decline directs our attention to the intersection of two major problems in current American society—rising income inequality combined with constricting opportunities for the least educated and continuing racial discrimination and racial exclusion.
However uncertain the prospects of our newest Americans, the fluidity of racial and ethnic identities, as well as their entanglement in broader forces of economic opportunity and labor-market access, make this much clear: if the culture of current immigrants and their children does matter
Ironically, recent attempts to restrict the access of immigrants to the social welfare safety net may produce the very conflicts restrictionists claim to want to prevent. The most radical proposals deny schooling, and even citizenship, to the children of illegal immigrants. By creating separation and exclusion—thereby ensuring a lack of assimilation and second-generation decline—such policies pose a serious threat to social cohesion in the United States.
NOTES
1. Poor immigrants are actually much less likely than poor natives to use welfare; about 16 percent of poor immigrants receive cash assistance, compared to 25 percent of poor natives. See Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Urban Institute, "Immigrants and Welfare, " Research Perspectives on Migration (Sep./Oct. 1996): 3.
2. Cited in Thomas Muller, Immigrants and the American City (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 40.
3. Douglas Massey was the first to choose these two factors as the most important historical differences between the experiences of European immigrants who arrived at the turn of the century and more recent immigrants. See his "The New Immigration and Ethnicity in the United States, " in American Diversity: A Demographic Challenge for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Nancy Denton and Stewart Toldnay (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2002), 75–98. Although Massey explores the impact of these changes on the meaning of ethnicity, I concentrate here on the possible impacts of these changes on support for immigration restrictionism and on the future outcomes of the second generation.
4. Stanley Lieberson and Mary C. Waters, From Many Strands: Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988).
5. See Massey, "New Immigration."
6. Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Richard D. Alba, Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985).
7. Massey, "New Immigration, " 18.
8. Alejandro Portes and Richard Schauffler, "Language Acquisition and Loss among Children of Immigrants, " in Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race,
9. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 41.
10. See Michael Hout and Joshua Goldstein, "How 4.5 Million Irish Immigrants Became 40 Million Irish Americans: Demographic and Subjective Aspects of the Ethnic Composition of White Americans, " American Sociological Review 59 (Feb. 1994): 64–82.
11. Richard D. Alba, "Assimilation's Quiet Tide, " Public Interest (spring 1995): 13.
12. Gary Sandefur and Trudy Mckinnell, "American Indian Intermarriage, " Social Science Research (1986): 347–71; Akemi Kikumura and Harry L. Kitano, "Interracial Marriage: A Picture of the Japanese Americans, " Journal of Social Issues 29 (1973); Harry L. Kitano, L. K. Chai, and H. Hatanaka, "Asian American Interracial Marriage, " Journal of Marriage and the Family 46 (1984): 179–90; Stanley Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants since 1880 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Belinda M. Tucker and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, "New Trends in Black American Interracial Marriage: The Social Structural Context, " Journal of Marriage and the Family 52 (Feb. 1990): 209–18; Claudette Bennett and J. Gregory Robinson, "Racial Classification Issues Concerning Children in Mixed Race Households" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Statistical Association, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., 1993).
13. Roderick Harrison and Claudette Bennett, "Racial and Ethnic Diversity, " in State of the Union: America in the 1990s, vol. 2, Social Trends, ed. Reynolds Farley (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995), 165.
14. Alba, "Assimilation's Quiet Tide, " 17.
15. Muller, Immigrants and the American City, 245.
16. Barry Bluestone, "The Inequality Express, " American Prospect 20 (winter 1995): 82–83.
17. Ibid., 83.
18. Ibid.
19. Remarks at the Jerome Levy Institute of Bard College Conference on the Second Generation, Bard College, New York, Oct. 25, 1997.
20. See Herbert J. Gans, "Second-Generation Decline: Scenarios for the Economic and Ethnic Futures of the Post-1965 American Immigrants, " Ethnic and Racial Studies 15, no. 2 (1992): 173–93.
21. Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). See also Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, "The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants, " Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 530 (1993): 74–97.
22. Portes and Zhou, "New Second Generation."
23. Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, "‘Becoming Somebody’: Central American Immigrants in U.S. Inner-City Schools, " Anthropology and Education Quarterly18 (1987): 287–99.
24. Margaret Gibson, Accommodation without Assimilation: Sikh Immigrants in an American High School (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).
25. Eugenia Matute-Bianchi, "Situational Ethnicity and Patterns of School Performance among Immigrants and Nonimmigrant Mexican Descent Students, " in Minority Status and Schooling: A Comparative Study of Immigrant and Involuntary Minorities, ed. Margaret Gibson and John Ogbu (New York: Garland, 1991).
26. Mary C. Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
27. Joleen Kirschenman and Kathryn Neckerman, "We'd Love to Hire Them, but—The Meaning of Race for Employers, " in The Urban Underclass, ed. Christopher Jencks and Paul Petersen (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1991), 203–34.
28. Philip Kasinitz and Jan Rosenberg, "Missing the Connection? Social Isolation and Employment on the Brooklyn Waterfront, " working paper of the Michael Harrington Institute, Queens College, Queens, New York, 1994.
29. Muller, Immigrants and the American City.
30. Sherri Grasmuck and Patricia Pessar, "First and Second Generation Settlement of Dominicans in the United States: 1960–1990, " in Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America, ed. Silvia Pedraza and Rubén Rumbaut (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1996).
31. Peter Skerry, Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority (New York: Free Press, 1994); Robert C. Smith, "Doubly Bounded Solidarity: Race and Social Location in the Incorporation of Mexicans into New York City" (paper presented at the Social Science Research Council, Conference of Fellows, Program of Research on the Urban Underclass, June 1993).
7. Expelling Newcomers
The Eclipse of Constitutional Community
Cecilia Muñoz
For a nation of immigrants the United States has long been ambivalent about immigration. On the one hand, we have a rich tradition of treating immigrants generously. The attitude of welcoming strangers, embodied informally in the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty and the integration of each generation of new immigrants into the fabric of American life, has nurtured a formal tradition that codified generosity in legal forms: the relative ease and universalist criteria that encouraged becoming an American citizen; a doctrine of birthright citizenship, quite different from most European societies, that automatically conferred citizenship on children born in the United States; and a reluctance to grant citizens and noncitizens different rights and benefits, save the right to run for president and to vote.
On the other hand, there is a less welcoming tradition, embodied in the fear and resentment of immigrants, that has subverted rather than grounded the tradition of democratic pluralism. Long ago Ben Franklin worried about the Germans streaming into Pennsylvania. Their culture, he feared, would render them incapable of becoming Americans. Their language, he complained, might overtake English as the common language in culture and commerce. Worse still, nativist emotion has given rise to a chronic disregard for the rights of people even perceived as immigrants. As recently as the 1950s Mexican Americans were the targets of roundups known as "Operation Wetback, " in which thousands of persons,
We are a far cry from the nativist crusades of the 1920s, and in general the United States is successfully absorbing millions of new Latino, Asian, West Indian, and other immigrants. Yet a growing fear of immigrants in the 1990s, both of their economic threat and their cultural and racial differences, bred an emotional climate of restrictionism evident in English-only referenda, in Pat Buchanan's bids for the Republican nomination for president, and in California's Proposition 187. A few years ago, in an eerie parallel to Operation Wetback, the city council of Chandler, Arizona, enlisted the police to "clean up" a neighborhood scheduled for redevelopment. With the help of Border Patrol officials Chandler police spent several days accosting anyone who appeared Mexican, requesting that they demonstrate their right to be in the United States. Many native-born U.S. citizens were questioned multiple times as they drove to work, did their shopping, and took their children to school. Unfortunately, such practices are becoming more common as the presence of immigrants increases across the country.
To an extent barely recognized in public debate, a series of recent laws and policies has radically challenged the old immigration regime. American society has been quietly refiguring the boundaries of national community and sacred notions of citizenship. The erosion of constitutional community began with the California governor's race in 1994, spilled over into national legislation with provisions of the welfare and immigration bills of 1996, found expression in a 1998 proposal in Congress to revoke the concept of birthright citizenship, and continues with the increased use of racial and ethnic profiling in the enforcement of immigration and other laws.
Efforts to restrict immigrants and to give them a secondhand form of citizenship endanger not just the dignity of immigrants or traditional American values but the very practice of democracy in everyday life. They have undermined the civil rights enjoyed by citizens of specific ethnic groups. They have made suspicious appearances—and thus biological criteria—a ground for withholding fundamental liberties. They have created new divisions within the national community, not just between immigrants and citizens but between citizens from dominant ethnic and racial groups and citizens who look "different" or have Asian and Latino-sounding names and between undocumented immigrants and their U.S.-citizen children. They have subjected large numbers of U.S. citizens and legal immigrants to the infringements and invasions of arbitrary state
THE RECENT IMMIGRATION DEBATE
The erosion of civil rights and constitutional community emerged in a distinctive political environment. Perhaps the defining moment in the immigration debate of the 1990s came in the summer of 1993, when California governor Pete Wilson, in an open letter to President Clinton, called for changes in immigration control policy. Wilson claimed undocumented immigrants were responsible for California's economic crisis because of their illegitimate use of public services.
Wilson had been languishing at a low point in popularity. Almost immediately after his call for restrictions on immigrants he experienced a twenty-point surge in popularity. After funneling major financial and political support to what was then a little-known ballot proposition drafted by extremist restrictionists, the "Save Our State" initiative, or Proposition 187, Wilson rode this particular issue back to popularity and reelection as governor in 1994. The authors of this initiative were the late former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Alan Nelson and former INS western regional director Harold Ezell. The latter was known for his inflammatory anti-immigrant statements in the 1980s, and the former was working as a consultant for the Federation for American Immigration Reform at the time he drafted the initiative.
Proposition 187, which passed by a 59 percent to 41 percent margin, established the principle that dominated the rest of the decade: almost no policy is too extreme if it is designed to control immigration. One of its provisions required all children enrolling in public school to identify their own immigration status and that of their parents. If the purpose of this seemingly innocuous procedure was noxious indeed—to deny children an education and provide a vehicle for deporting their parents—its consequence was even more radical. In targeting not only undocumented children but U.S.-citizen children whose parents did not have immigration status, it guaranteed children of foreign appearance would have increasing encounters with arbitrary state power. In addition, it required state and local officials, including health care providers, teachers, and
In the end the draconian consequences of Proposition 187 were suspended by litigation that has effectively stopped its implementation. But an important symbolic victory had been won. Governor Wilson was easily reelected, and an important political message had been sent: even extreme anti-immigration measures made great politics.
Subsequent congressional campaigns in California and the presidential campaign of 1996 underscored this perception. Republican congressional candidates in California campaigned on proposals that they sought to enact in Congress, such as the Gallegly Amendment, which would have allowed states to deny a public education to undocumented students. In addition, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole and vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp both reversed longstanding proimmigration positions during their campaigns in what was widely viewed as an attempt to woo California voters by following Governor Wilson's model for success. Although their resounding defeat among Latino voters in California has begun to reshape politics, so far the change has been more in the area of style than substance. For example, in his 2000 election campaign George W. Bush wooed Latinos with highly effective bilingual ads, at the same time avoiding entirely the difficult questions of immigration policy.
Although Governor Wilson was careful to limit his rhetoric to illegal immigrants, in short order federal legislation was enacted attacking legal immigrants and naturalized citizens. These proposals, enacted into law in 1996, contained elements extreme enough to rival Proposition 187, and America is still living with their consequences.
The events set in motion in California in the early 1990s culminated in the enactment of major welfare and immigration reform bills in 1996. These laws, which codified many of the ugly proposals first floated in the California debate, have seriously eroded the rights of immigrants and naturalized citizens and created a double standard for Americans of immigrant origin. They have worsened existing discrimination against Americans who are perceived as or mistaken for immigrants. All this has betrayed America's historic commitment to equality and the pluralistic notion that anyone can become a full American regardless of his or her origin.
The first of these proposals enacted into law was the Welfare Reform
Welfare reform divided the U.S. population into three groups, each with different eligibility for receiving government-funded social services. The first, U.S. citizens who can document their citizenship, continues to be eligible for all government-funded programs, provided they meet income and other eligibility requirements. The second, "qualified noncitizens" (generally meaning legal immigrants), are ineligible for the four major safety-net programs (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families [TANF], Supplemental Security Income, Food Stamps, and Medicaid) until they can demonstrate that they have worked for ten years. The states also have the authority to decide their eligibility for such programs at the state level. The third group, nonqualified immigrants (generally meaning those without immigration status), continue to be ineligible for welfare programs, even though this category includes hundreds of thousands of immigrants who are lawfully present in the United States. The states have the authority to determine whether or not they will be eligible for a variety of other social services that are provided at the state level, such as nutrition programs, prenatal care, and other basic services.
Welfare reform overturned a long tradition that held that immigrants legally in the country had the same responsibilities and the same access to social services as citizens. Although it cut off access and disposed of the benefits, Congress left intact the responsibilities immigrants are expected to uphold, including paying taxes to support safety-net services they may no longer receive, serving in the military, and other aspects of good citizenship. At one point in the debate the Senate even approved language that would have allowed the government to deny services to naturalized U.S. citizens if they had not fulfilled the requirement that they work for ten years, but this language was dropped from final legislation. Although a substantial portion of the benefits that were eliminated for legal immigrants has been restored, at this writing few restorations apply to immigrants who have arrived since 1996, leaving this population of taxpaying new Americans without a safety net.
While welfare reform was busy circumscribing eligibility, it was also expanding the state's power to monitor immigrants and reduce their presumptive right to privacy. The reporting provisions of the bill expanded
This is more than a mere administrative formality; it is a threat to substantive democracy. In the more than fifteen years since employers were required to verify their employees, it has become clear that the requirement to determine immigration status invites discrimination against people who are mistaken for immigrants. Nearly a dozen studies, including a 1990 report by the General Accounting Office, Immigration Reform: Employer Sanctions and the Question of Discrimination, have documented the widespread pattern of discrimination that resulted from the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act's requirement that employers verify the work authorization of their new employees. Applicants with Hispanic surnames are frequently assumed to be noncitizens and thus can be denied services until they produce immigration papers—even if the applicant is a native-born U.S. citizen. In addition, citizenship documents such as birth certificates are likely to be scrutinized more closely when they belong to someone with a "foreign-sounding" name.
Even more forbidding, welfare reform enables states to submit quarterly reports to the attorney general with the names and addresses of persons who are known to be illegally in the United States. This provision, which directly echoes Proposition 187, provides a mechanism some states employ to frighten U.S.-citizen children away from services for which they are eligible because receiving them is tantamount to turning their parents in to the INS. In 1998 the San Diego County Board of Supervisors instructed county officials to send a letter to recipients of the food stamp and CalWORKS (TANF) programs informing them that their family members will be reported to the INS. Although the letter was ultimately not sent, San Diego County's intention has echoed in the delivery of social services in that county, as well as elsewhere in the state.
The threats that welfare reform has posed to American values, due process, and civil rights have been compounded by the impact of the 1996 Immigration Reform Act. The worker verification mandated by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which required employers to check their newly hired employees' immigration status, had already intensified discrimination in employment, creating a Kafkaesque world of arbitrary justice, of presumed guilt, and of punishment without crime. Employers selectively check the documents of "suspect" employees
The case of Rosita Martinez underscores dramatically the impact of such provisions. The Marcel Watch company insisted that Martinez, an employee of Puerto Rican birth—and therefore a U.S. citizen—could not work until she showed her green card. When Ms. Martinez's case was heard before a judge, the employer insisted that she was a "foreigner" and that the law required him to see her green card.
As unsavory as some of these practices are, the 1986 law at least offered some protection against arbitrary infringements. By contrast, the 1996 immigration reform law did not even maintain this level of procedural recourse. On the contrary, it radically limited the force of antidiscrimination protections. For starters the 1996 law added an intent standard; that is, any victim of discrimination must now prove that her or his employer intended to discriminate. This would seem to discount discrimination that results from employer ignorance, the most common employment practice under this law. The result is a policy regime that targets immigrants and those perceived to be immigrants and subjects them to an entirely different set of workplace eligibility criteria than those who are perceived to be natives of this country. It also, in essence, legally sanctions stereotyping and bigotry. And it continues the process of constricting the boundaries of our national community.
The third realm in which the 1996 law erodes citizenship and civil rights, the provisions on judicial review, may be the most constitutionally ominous. Unlike technical eligibility requirements or employer conduct, it involves immigrants in encounters with the state itself and thereby affects their perceptions of its legitimacy.
The 1996 immigration law permits arbitrary actions by the INS and eliminates judicial review of INS decisions, with potentially horrific consequences. Among the most egregious assaults on traditional notions of individual rights and protections in Anglo-American law, noncitizens can be arbitrarily deported from the United States if they cannot establish residence under standards of proof that are not articulated under the law. Persons seeking political asylum can be turned away at the airport by low-level INS officers as they seek entry and summarily returned to the
Similarly, the law mandates the expedited removal of persons convicted of certain crimes, expands the definition of such crimes to include relatively trivial offenses, and applies these provisions retroactively. The consequences of such mandates, even if unintended, were utterly foreseeable: the creation of an informal system of two-tiered citizenship, with some citizens getting more ample helpings of rights and due process than others. Since the law was enacted, long-term U.S. residents who have been in the United States since they were children are being detained and deported for relatively minor offenses that were committed sometimes decades ago, despite the fact that they have lived exemplary lives since these incidents occurred. The law provides no discretion for a judge to provide relief in these cases.
One poignant example of the implications of these changes in the law is the case of Olufolake Olaleye, who in 1993 attempted to return baby outfits worth $14.99 to an Atlanta store. She was accused of shoplifting the clothing because she did not have a receipt; thinking this was a simple misunderstanding, she appeared in court without a lawyer. To end the ordeal, she pled guilty to shoplifting, was fined $360, and was sentenced to a twelve-month suspended sentence and twelve months of probation. When she paid her fine, the probation was terminated.
When these events occurred, Ms. Olaleye was approved but not yet sworn in for citizenship. Because the 1996 law functions retroactively, her shoplifting offense became an "aggravated felony" under immigration law. The fact that it is not considered an aggravated felony under criminal law is irrelevant; she was denied her citizenship and placed in deportation proceedings. Without a change in the law Ms. Olaleye will be banished from the United States without the possibility of return, all for failing to produce a receipt when returning $14.99 worth of baby clothes for her two children, who are native-born U.S. citizens.
One notable case that received widespread media attention is the case of Jesus Collado, who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic as a child. When he was a teen, he was arrested and charged after his girlfriend's mother filed a complaint against him for allegedly engaging
The final assault of the 1996 immigration bill, a departure of frighteningly resonant symbolism, can only be described as "racing toward Big Brother": The law updated the employer sanctions regime by adding a computerized verification system that allows employers to verify the work authorization of new hires by accessing INS data. These "pilot" projects, mandated by statute in the five most populous states, are currently being used to verify real workers, despite evidence of problems with the INS database. An extensive recent study, based on previous experiments by the INS and the Social Security Administration (SSA), demonstrates that as often as 28 percent of the time, the system is not able to correctly verify the workers whose information is submitted.
Still worse, the statute provides no protection for workers who are the victims of errors in the system. Under the law, if the computer system is unable to verify an employee after the first or second try, neither the government nor the employer is responsible for determining the nature of the problem preventing verification. That obligation is tossed back to the employee, who must discover what information is in the computer records and correct any errors. In a final absurdity, nearly twenty years after 1984 there is no procedure in place that allows an individual access to information in the computer about his or her work eligibility.
The INS has gone still further in the use of verification and identification information as an immigration enforcement mechanism through the creation of Operation Vanguard, through which it examined the employment records of an entire industry. Operation Vanguard, which was implemented in Nebraska and Iowa in 1998 and 1999, involved demanding the employment files of the entire meatpacking industry in those states and comparing that information to INS and SSA records. The records of more than twenty-four thousand workers were examined, and nearly five thousand came back as "suspect." But of the one hundred to show up for interviews with the INS—no one knows exactly what happened to the thousands who never came forward—only thirty-four turned out to be undocumented workers. These results suggest serious problems with the quality of the data and enormous inconvenience for the thousands of workers affected, many of whom may have lost their jobs without
It is true that the United States has a long, if imperfect, tradition of extending rights to the vulnerable. But it is also true that the current regime of immigration enforcement undermines the rights of Hispanic Americans and others often perceived as immigrants.
It is important that we dwell on the implications of the contradiction between confident expectations of the enjoyment of civil rights and the ethos of suspicious appearances derived from biological notions of race and ethnicity. The environment that has developed in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks makes this even more apparent. Close observers of the government's response to these events have noted a series of disturbing policy changes—interrogations of thousands of American Muslims and Arab Americans selected solely because of their ethnicity, indefinite and secret detentions, heightened surveillance, secret trials, monitoring of attorney-client communications, special visa requirements for Arabs and Muslims, military tribunals, and restrictions on student visas, among others.
Comparatively less attention has been paid to the crisis facing immigrants, their citizen family members, and their communities in the aftermath of September 11. A number of extraordinary policy shifts have taken place within the government in the period since the attacks, most of them the result of administrative actions made relatively quietly within the Justice Department or other federal agencies. Some of these changes have breathtaking implications that could affect generations of immigrants and those perceived to be of immigrant heritage.
For example, in the spring of 2002 the Justice Department reversed decades of legal precedent by declaring that state and local law enforcement agencies have "inherent" authority to enforce civil violations of immigration laws. Although many local police departments have announced that they will not engage in immigration enforcement for fear of alienating communities they seek to serve, this policy shift has created enormous fear within immigrant communities and has fostered a general reluctance to call police and fire authorities to respond to emergencies. Some immigrant advocate groups at the local level describe the environment as akin to siege.
Similarly, the Justice Department has announced that it will now enforce an obscure provision of immigration law in a way that will make it a criminal—and hence deportable—offence to fail to report a change of address to the INS within ten days of moving. The first high-profile
Finally, in creating the new Homeland Security Agency, Congress essentially abolished the Immigration and Naturalization Service altogether, integrating its functions into the multiple pieces of the new agency. Significantly, the version of the bill that created the new agency excluded even the administration's proposals to restructure the INS and lacks targets or deadlines for the processing of visas and naturalization petitions, as well as protections for civil and human rights. Observers of this area of policy uniformly predict that handling times and backlogs will grow, perhaps dramatically, and immigration enforcement, inspections, and admissions decisions are likely to be made from a security perspective, an extraordinary development in a nation built by immigrants, whose policies have emphasized the reunification of families and resettlement of refugees.
Debate about America's immigration policy has always been something of a referendum on our immigrant past, something of a referendum on the direction in which current immigration is taking the country. In a country whose destiny has been shaped by immigration it is only fitting that the debate be vigorous and thoughtful. The current debate has a good deal more vigor than thought, however; denying the link between today's immigrants and those of the past, it has become a smoke screen behind which policies that jeopardize the rights of all Americans are enacted. At some level immigration enforcement has historically been conducted at the expense of American civil and constitutional rights, particularly those of Hispanic Americans. But more than thirty years after the enactment of this century's most significant civil rights laws, and at a moment in which the influence of Hispanic Americans on U.S. society is growing, it is long past time to insist that the immigration debate be conducted in a way that respects the contributions of all Americans and, more important, respects their rights.
Over the last decade, immigration policy, rather than helping to forge a national community, has threatened to create separate societies, subject to vastly different standards when it comes to fundamental rights—the right to work, to receive services, even to walk down the street without
At issue is the country's willingness to continue a tradition of being enriched by those who seek to come to America and to link their destinies with ours. It is a unique American tradition that both the immigrants and the larger society emerge from that process transformed and better for it. It is also uniquely American that this evolution has been greeted with fear and skepticism that periodically reach a fever pitch and produce policies of which we are later ashamed. Tragically, the United States has taken several steps down the path, perhaps more precisely a slippery slope, of weakening core democratic principles. The challenge for the nation is to reverse this trend and forge a dialogue on immigration policy that threatens neither our national values nor the rights of American residents and citizens.
8. The United States
in the World Community
The Limits of National Sovereignty
Douglas S. Massey
The large immigration of recent years has stimulated popular debate and popular unhappiness over the impact of immigration on American life. As recently as the 1950s only 2.5 million immigrants arrived in the United States, with 60 percent coming from Europe or Canada, 25 percent from Latin America or the Caribbean, and only 6 percent from Asia. Given the relatively small numbers, mostly of European origin, no one paid much attention. By the 1980s, however, immigration to the United States had nearly tripled to 7.3 million persons, only 12 percent of whom came from Europe or Canada, with 47 percent originating in Latin America and another 37 percent in Asia. During the 1990s an additional 10 million immigrants entered the country, exceeding the record pace set in the prior decade by 37.7 percent. As before, the vast majority of these new arrivals were Asian or Latin American. Not surprisingly, immigration has become a hot political issue.
In seeking to account for this tidal shift, most Americans envision a world of desperately poor people driven from their homes by privation and political repression, people who come to the United States seeking freedom and fortune. Of course, the United States has been freer and richer than most of the world for many years, but surely the United States was no less freer and richer before the 1970s.
In truth, that master image, informing as it does both popular resentment and policy debate, has been flawed in at least two ways. First, Americans tend to look at immigrants as if they were making truly personal
Why, then, are there so many immigrants? What happened between the 1950s and the 1980s to transform American immigration so radically? Many observers point to the 1965 Amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act, which scrapped a discriminatory national origins quota system enacted in the 1920s and repealed a ban on Asian immigration dating to the 1880s. In place of these biased policies it substituted an impartial system that distributed visas on the basis of family ties to legal U.S. residents and, to a lesser extent, according to U.S. labor-market needs. It allocated a maximum of twenty thousand visas per year to each country but exempted immediate relatives of U.S. citizens from this limitation.
The new rules were phased in and implemented fully by 1968. During the 1970s immigration rose by 35 percent over the prior decade. For the first time in American history a majority of immigrants to the United States (more than three quarters) were not of European origin. In the minds of scholars and citizens this remarkable transformation followed from the provisions of the 1965 act itself, which eliminated Western Europe's privileged access to immigrant visas. Soon voters were clamoring for new legislation to restore the lost "control" over immigration that had been forfeited by the 1965 amendments. If legislation had caused the problem, the thinking went, then new legislation would solve it.
Actually, the transformation of American immigration had little to do with the 1965 amendments, and successive legislative acts did not—and could not—restore the conditions of the 1950s. The dramatic decline of immigration from Europe stemmed from changes there, not from anything that happened in the United States. After World War II Western Europe underwent a profound transformation that converted it from a region of emigration to one of immigration. By the mid-1960s labor shortages had grown so acute in northern and western Europe that governments there established formal programs to recruit immigrant workers. By the 1970s even the nations of southern Europe—Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece—had begun to attract immigrants. Europeans stopped coming to the United States because of structural shifts in European society itself, not because of changes in U.S. immigration policy.
The 1965 amendments also had nothing to do with the expansion of Latin American immigration. On the contrary, they functioned to restrict entry from this region. Prior to 1965 immigrants from the Western Hemisphere were exempted from national origins quotas and could enter without numerical restriction. The 1965 amendments imposed the first-ever ceiling on immigration from the Western Hemisphere (120, 000 persons), and a quota of twenty thousand visas per country was applied in 1976. Contrary to popular belief, the upsurge in immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean occurred in spite of, not because of, the 1965 amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act. Were these amendments never to have passed, immigration from the region would have been substantially greater that it actually was.
The one change that can be traced directly to the 1965 amendments was opening the door to Asian immigration that had been slammed shut at the end of the nineteenth century. But immigration from Asia would have expanded anyway, even without the amendments. In the wake of South Vietnam's collapse the United States was reluctantly compelled to accept hundreds of thousands of "boat people" as refugees. Most of them were "paroled" into the United States by the attorney general for political and humanitarian reasons, outside of the numerical limits and entry criteria established under the 1965 amendments.
Whereas only 335 Vietnamese entered the United States during the 1950s and 4, 300 arrived during the 1960s, 172, 000 were admitted during the 1970s; 281, 000 arrived during the 1980s; and 125, 000 entered during the first half of the 1990s. The U.S. misadventure in Indochina also led to the entry of thousands of Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong refugees, who collectively totaled 300, 000 by 1990. All told, about a third of Asian immigration after 1970 stemmed from the U.S. intervention in Indochina.
Thus, none of the drop in European immigration, none of the expansion of Latin American immigration, and only a portion of the increase in Asian immigration can be traced to the 1965 amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act. Whether or not this legislation had ever passed, immigration to the United States would have been transformed. But if a change in U.S. law did not bring this about, what did?
The forces driving immigration to the United States are the same as those bringing immigrants to every other developed country in the world today. Migration is no longer restricted to a few settler societies, such as the United States or Canada. During the 1980s, immigration became a worldwide phenomenon focused on five core receiving areas: North
In 1998 my colleagues and I completed a systematic study of the causes of international migration within these five regions.[1] I completed my own detailed statistical analysis of the forces driving Mexican migration to the United States.[2] Both exercises yielded the same conclusions: immigration is initiated by structural changes in developed and developing nations that occur as a result of their incorporation into the global market economy, and, once begun, immigrant flows are perpetuated through self-sustaining social processes—the relay systems built out of networks of kith and kin—intrinsic to immigration itself.
The spread of markets into nonmarket or premarket societies contributes to immigration in a variety of ways. Since World War II, capitalism has steadily expanded into ever further reaches of the globe. The emergence of developing nations from their precapitalist pasts, and the shift of former socialist countries from command to market economies, creates profound upheavals in those societies. The coming of markets and capital-intensive methods of production disrupts traditional social arrangements and displaces people from customary livelihoods. The result is an increasingly mobile population of workers who actively search for new ways to support themselves. That is why most international migrants come not from poor, isolated places that are disconnected from world markets but from regions and nations that are undergoing rapid development as a result of their insertion into global trade, information, and production networks. Development—not the lack of development, as is commonly assumed—is the engine of the movement of peoples.
As developed nations participate in the global economy, they suffer new competitive pressures that segment domestic labor markets, creating strong demand for workers at the low and high ends of the skill continuum but weak demand in the middle. This splitting is most acute in certain global cities that play a key role in financing and coordinating the expanding global economy. The concentration of managerial, administrative, and technical expertise in these places concentrates wealth and increases the demand for low-wage services so that global cities attract a disproportionate share of the world's immigrants. In the United States, for example, roughly half of all immigrants go to just six urban areas
Immigrants are channeled to these places because the same processes of market expansion that create mobile populations in developing regions also create the links of transportation, communication, and culture that make migration possible, even likely. In addition, the foreign policies and military actions that wealthy nations undertake to maintain international security, protect foreign investments, and guarantee access to raw materials further create entanglements and obligations that encourage the movement of refugees, asylees, and military dependents. The largest flows in Asia come from nations that have housed significant U.S. troop concentrations since 1945, namely Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and, of course, Indochina, which together account for 42 percent of Asian immigration.
Once begun, migration tends to perpetuate itself, in part through processes that affect the individual, in part through the social networks in which individuals are embedded. At the individual level international migrants tend to begin as "target earners, " seeking to earn money quickly, attain a predetermined income goal, and return home. Yet a migrant who comes home may not be satisfied with a return to the status quo. Working in a more advanced industrial economy can lead to irreversible changes in a person's motivation. Once again, that makes additional migration more likely. So in a spiral of rising desire, satisfying the needs that originally led to migration creates new needs, just as access to high wages and the goods they buy creates new standards of material wellbeing and ambitions for upward mobility. Migrants grow accustomed to higher incomes. They alter their consumption patterns and adopt new lifestyles that cannot easily be maintained through local labor, making additional trips necessary.
But it's not just motivations that shift. Migrants acquire new forms of human capital—personal attributes and abilities that make them more productive and desirable in foreign labor markets. In the course of traveling and working abroad they come to learn the host country's language, employment practices, job routines, and ways of life. They make important contacts with employers, learn how to enter the country legally or illegally and discover how to manage daily life in a foreign setting. There is, then, a technology as well as a psychology of immigration, which only diminishes the costs and risks of foreign travel, while the potential benefits of foreign labor increase.
In sum, once tried, migration tends to be repeated. The more someone migrates, the more he or she is likely to continue migrating, yielding a self-sustaining process of human capital accumulation that produces more trips of longer duration.
Migration has powerful effects on migrants' social capital, as well as on their human capital. Social capital refers to value that accrues from people's relationships with others. Thus, for someone considering a trip to the United States, whatever the emotional value of a tie to a current or former U.S. migrant, such bonds have a certain practical value. It's worth more than sentimentality. One can draw on it to gain access to a high-paying foreign job or to learn of cheap housing or to find out where to go if one is seriously ill. Such ties to migrants already in the host country thereby lower the costs and risks—and raise the benefits—of moving across national borders. In another spiral of value creation each experience of migration spreads value to the migrants' friends and relatives and changes their calculus of risk and reward. To put it differently, the expansion of networks of people linked to migrants expands the social capital flowing through the entire community, which expands the collective inducements to migrate for everybody.
It is precisely these causal dynamics that successive adjustments to the Immigration and Nationality Act since 1965 have ignored. And it is these same dynamics that explain why such amendments have failed to restore the conditions of low, ethnically homogenous immigration characteristic of the 1950s. Despite encouragement by recent immigration legislation, Europeans have not rejoined the flow of immigrants. Meanwhile, immigration from Asia and Latin America has continued to increase. Current U.S. policies simply do not come to terms with the fundamental forces responsible for immigration. Indeed, U.S. policy is at war with itself, simultaneously seeking to discourage immigration with repressive sanctions but encouraging it through other means.
The case of Mexico most clearly reveals the inherent contradictions of these policies. From 1942 to 1964 the U.S. government actively recruited some 4.5 million Mexicans into the United States as temporary workers, creating the very conditions that allowed immigration to flourish. After 1965 the United States reversed itself and sought to discourage the flow it had created. New restrictive policies were implemented, including lower ceilings for legal immigration, sanctions against employers for hiring illegal migrants, a ban on the receipt of federal benefits by immigrants, and the allocation of more resources to the U.S. Border Patrol.
These repressive measures were spectacularly unsuccessful. By 1965 the processes of social and human capital formation had become self-sustaining. Even more ironically, even as the United States worked to strengthen its enforcement apparatus and increase barriers to the legal and illegal entry it had provoked, it pursued other policies that further increased the flow of immigration.
Under U.S. law each legal entry generates entitlements for subsequent entry for close relatives such as wives, children, parents, and siblings. The allocation of immigrant visas according to the principle of family reunification thus increases the efficiency of migrant networks and enhances the formation of social capital in sending regions. This process notably intensified in 1986 with the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which sought to discourage undocumented migration by applying employer sanctions and increasing the budget of the Border Patrol; but it also authorized a massive amnesty program for undocumented migrants that legalized 2.3 million Mexicans between 1987 and 1990.
The paradoxical effect of legitimizing their status in the United States and solidifying their ties north of the border was to make it easier for migrants to sponsor the subsequent immigration—illegal and legal—of friends and relatives at home. Coming from a family containing someone who was legalized under IRCA became the strongest single predictor of new undocumented migration, raising the odds of illegal entry by a factor of nine, to around 35 percent in any given year.[3] Legalization also created new entitlements for admission under U.S. law, and by 1994 some 30 percent of all Mexican residence visas went to relatives of persons who had been legalized under IRCA. Thus, whereas U.S. policy grew more restrictive in some ways, in others it acted strongly to promote immigration.
The United States also encouraged Mexican immigration through its sponsorship of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Under this agreement powerful market forces were guaranteed to penetrate more deeply within Mexico, setting off structural transformations that inevitably displace people from livelihoods and promote migration. Since the mid-1980s Mexico has moved rapidly to eliminate tariff barriers and state subsidies that protected its industries from competition. Government-owned industries were sold off, and a state-sponsored system of communal agriculture was privatized. As a result of these changes the Mexican economy grew increasingly volatile, with periodic devaluations, recurrent bouts of inflation, falling wages, rising joblessness, and
Mexican families turned to international migration as a means of adapting to this new economic environment. By allocating workers to different labor markets (local, urban, and international) households diversify risks to family income, and by sending one or more members abroad for work they gain access to capital in the form of migrant savings. The new economy provided new means to achieve these goals, for with market integration comes new transportation links to make travel to the United States cheaper and easier, and new means of communication to transmit information rapidly throughout the continent. The expansion of travel for business, education, and pleasure in North America also creates cross-border ties and obligations.
Perhaps the most important factor fueling Mexican migration, however, is the huge stock of human and social capital available in Mexico to support international movement. After fifty-five years of continuous movement back and forth, social connections and personal experience with the United States run deep. Representative surveys reveal that half of all adult Mexicans are related to someone living north of the border and that a third have been to the United States at some point in their lives.[4] Tabulations from the 1992 Survey of Mexican Population Dynamics suggest that about a fifth of all adult Mexicans have worked in the United States.[5]
Given ongoing integration in the North American market and the huge quantity of human and social capital available to support Mexican immigration, there is probably little that the United States can do to reduce it. The most we can reasonably hope to accomplish is to direct ongoing flows in directions that are consistent with our interests. Efforts to prevent these flows, which arise as a natural consequence of social and economic forces well established on the continent, will be counterproductive, yielding the worst of all possible worlds: continued immigration on terms that are unfavorable to the country and disastrous for immigrants themselves.
The internal contradictions of U.S. immigration policy contribute directly to social and economic fragmentation in the United States. But the greatest danger does not lie in the most often cited division of our society along ethnic lines, the kinds of visible and often flamboyant tensions evident in virulent fights between blacks and Latinos, whites and Vietnamese fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico, or Anglos and Cubans in
The turning point came with IRCA's passage in 1986, when the United States enacted employer sanctions, strengthened the Border Patrol, militarized the border, and generally embarked on a more repressive, punitive approach to immigration enforcement. Before this time legal and illegal migrants earned the same wages, worked the same hours, and generally experienced the same working conditions. Afterward, the labor market position of undocumented migrants deteriorated markedly. Compared to legal migrants they earned systematically lower wages, worked fewer hours, were more likely to earn below the statutory minimum wage, and were more likely to experience irregular terms of employment. Moreover, whereas analyses based on the 1980 census suggested that immigration had few significant influences on the employment or wages of natives, studies done using data from the 1990 census uncovered significant negative effects. U.S. attempts to suppress immigration seem to have increased class polarization, undermined the economic status of native workers, and marginalized immigrants in American society.
To the extent that punitive policies influence the behavior of migrants at all, they have the perverse effect of transforming circular flows into more permanent, settled communities. If the greatest risks are encountered at the border, once inside the country migrants rationally choose to stay put. Thus, when European governments suspended labor recruitment in 1973 and barred the reentry of guest workers, migrants who normally would have returned home stayed on and sent for family members. As a result Europe's foreign population grew, and its composition shifted decisively away from employed sojourners to dependent settlers. In the United States, implementation of repressive border policies in the late 1980s reduced the odds of return migration among Mexican immigrants and generated longer stays and more settlement north of the border.[7]
If repressive measures cannot stop immigration and also produce side effects that are against U.S. interests, what are the alternatives? A more
One way is to make temporary work visas freely available to prospective migrants so that people can reasonably expect to migrate again should their economic circumstances warrant, thus lowering the incentives to stay on in the receiving country for fear of not being able to return. A portion of immigrants' wages might be held back and paid to a foreign bank account only on the worker's return to the country of origin. Interest rates might be subsidized in foreign accounts to provide a return above the market, thus luring back migrants and their money. Finally, because migrants are often motivated by lack of access to insurance and capital markets, destination countries might enter into cooperative agreements with sending nations to establish public programs and private firms to meet these legitimate economic needs, policies that are quite feasible for Mexico within the NAFTA framework.
With state resources freed up from vain attempts to suppress immigration, receiving countries could increase internal inspections at work sites in sectors that employ large concentrations of immigrants, not to round up and deport illegal aliens but to assure employers' compliance with minimum wage laws, social insurance legislation, occupational safety and health regulations, tax codes, and mandated fair labor standards. Such an enforcement strategy has two advantages: it lowers the demand for immigrant workers by preventing employers from using them to avoid adhering to expensive labor laws, and it prevents the formation of an underground, clandestine economy.
Finally, given that international migration ultimately occurs as a result of the displacement of people from traditional livelihoods onto weak, poorly developed markets for labor, capital, and insurance, an indispensable
The globalization of capital and labor markets poses strong challenges to the nation-state and to the very idea of national sovereignty itself. It requires political leaders and citizens to move beyond nineteenth-century conceptions of territory and citizenship and expand them to embrace the transnational spaces that are being formed as a result of massive immigration. These changes are especially daunting because they must occur at a time of rising income inequality and growing fiscal pressure on the state.
Adapting to the reality of persistent international migration poses formidable challenges to the United States and its people, but these challenges will have to be met because immigration on a large scale will surely continue. Barring an international catastrophe of unprecedented proportions, international migration will most likely expand and grow, for none of the forces that energize it show any sign of moderating. The market economy is expanding to ever farther reaches of the globe, labor markets in developed countries are growing more rather than less segmented, transnational migration and trade networks are expanding, and the power of the nation-state is weakening in the face of this onslaught. The twenty-first century will be one of globalism, and international migration will figure prominently within it.
NOTES
1. Douglas S. Massey, Joaquin Arango, Ali Koucouci, Adela Pelligrino, and J. Edward Taylor, Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at Century's End (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
2. Douglas S. Massey and Kristin E. Espinosa. "What's Driving Mexico-U.S. Migration? A Theoretical, Empirical, and Policy Analysis, " American Journal of Sociology 102 (1997): 939–99.
3. Ibid.
4. Roderic A. Camp, Politics in Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 45.
5. Douglas S. Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan Malone, Beyond Smoke and
6. Douglas S. Massey and René Zenteno, "A Validation of the Ethnosurvey: The Case of Mexico-U.S. Migration, " International Migration Review 34 (2000): 765–92.
7. Massey, Durand, and Malone, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors.
9. "Who Cares Who Killed
Roger Ackroyd?"
Narrowing the Enduring Divisions of Race
Jennifer Hochschild
"Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?" Edmund Wilson asked in a famous 1945 New Yorker essay, referring to Agatha Christie's Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? Finding such mystery novels "a waste of time, " Wilson advised, "We shall do well to discourage the squandering of … paper that might be put to better use."[1] Wilson's warning might well be applied to arguments over the causes of racial animosity in America that have raged during the past several decades. It's not that asking who's to blame for racial hierarchy and division is entirely a waste of time. But it risks raising conflict without leading to illumination or productive results. The evidence on the causes of racial discord is as conflicting as it is voluminous, and the contenders hold equally passionate convictions about the causes of our nation's racial mess. I conclude not that there is no right answer to the causal question, but that I am unlikely to convince others that my answer is more right than theirs—and neither will they convince me.
We should turn instead to a question that we have a chance of answering and whose answer could make a real difference. We should ask not how we got into our racial fix but how we can fix it. For starters that query is likely to generate a less fractious and more productive conversation. Better yet, although there's no guarantee we will reach consensus, I hope to show that there is a surprising zone of agreement between the races that could serve as the foundation for an effort to narrow the enduring division of race.
At the outset we need to recognize the deep racial divide in perceptions of American politics, in beliefs about the problems faced by African Americans, and in explanations for those problems. In a 1995 survey more whites than blacks (63 to 56 percent) agreed that racial integration has been good for society. More whites also agreed that emphasizing "integration and opportunity" is the best means for "improving the situation for blacks in America, " whereas more blacks opted for the strategy of "building strong institutions within the black community." Such results would have delighted Malcolm X, sorrowed the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and dumbfounded Governor George Wallace.[2]
As the black responses imply, a considerable proportion of African Americans perceives whites to be deeply hostile to blacks, regardless of what blacks do or how they live. In 1990 more than three-quarters of black New Yorkers (compared with one-third of white New Yorkers) agreed that it was "true" or "might be true" that "the Government deliberately … investigates black elected officials in order to discredit them." Six in ten blacks (but fewer than two in ten whites) found it plausible that "the Government deliberately makes sure that drugs are easily available in poor black neighborhoods in order to harm black people." Among blacks, 33 percent (compared with only 5 percent of whites) even thought it might be true that "the virus that causes AIDS was deliberately created in a laboratory in order to infect black people."[3] Six years later, in a national sample, over two-thirds of blacks—compared with one-quarter of whites—found the drug hypothesis plausible.[4]
Where blacks see improvement in America's race relations, whites see worsening. From 1988 to 1993—the era of David Dinkins's mayoralty—an increasing proportion of African-American New Yorkers, but a decreasing proportion of white New Yorkers, thought race relations in their city were good. In 1994, after Mr. Dinkins lost the mayoralty to Rudolph Guiliani, white New Yorkers who perceived any change in race relations thought they were improving, but black New Yorkers who perceived change thought race relations were worsening.[5]
African Americans and whites perceive the social and economic circumstances of race in widely different ways. Half or more of whites (compared with a third of blacks) mistakenly agree that "the average African American" is as well off as or better off than "the average white person" in terms of jobs, access to health care, and education. More than four in ten whites (and about two in ten blacks) hold the same view with regard to income.[6] The races also differ in their explanations of the causes of
Conversely, three-fourths of blacks see serious racial discrimination, and the number of blacks who perceive rising racial discrimination is increasing. For example, fully 84 percent of African Americans (but only 30 percent of white Americans) agreed in 1995 that "discrimination is the major reason for the economic and social ills blacks face."[7] More generally, no more than one-third of blacks explain black poverty as resulting from "a lack of motivation" or "problems brought on by blacks themselves."[8]
The tremendous racial discrepancies that emerged in perceptions about O. J. Simpson's guilt provide one sharp example of disparities in perceptions of the power of race in American life. Fully 85 percent of blacks (but only 34 percent of whites) "agree[d] with the decision of the … jury" in the criminal trial. Only one in ten whites agreed that "the white establishment is always trying to bring down successful black people, " although up to six in ten blacks agreed. Most important, two-thirds of whites concluded simply—and poisonously—that "blacks often use race as an excuse to justify wrongdoing."[9]
An equally sharp example of racial discrepancies in perceptions grew out of the 2000 presidential election. Even seven months after the electoral dispute in Florida was resolved, African Americans continued to disapprove much more than whites of "the way the Supreme Court is handling its job." Three times as many blacks as whites (45 percent to 15 percent) agreed that the failure to count some votes because of "problems with the ballots or voting machines" is "more likely to affect racial minorities." Most notably, fully 85 percent of blacks, compared with 45 percent of whites, perceived this failure to be "mainly a deliberate attempt to reduce the political power of minorities" rather than "mainly an accident" (which only 9 percent of blacks believed).[10]
These racial differences in sentiment and perception are not in dispute. But how to interpret them, or to explain the causes of the social,
Some claim, simply, that racial disparities persist because whites are irremediably racist. Derrick Bell, the African-American critical race scholar, has argued that whites will never give up any position of power unless they are tricked into it, faced with an even worse threat (such as black rebellion), or able to perceive an ultimate advantage for whites from an apparent increase in racial equality.[11] Among the many historical incidents that demonstrate this claim, perhaps the quintessential case is the Compromise of 1876, which set the terms of black subjugation in the post–Civil War South for almost a century. In that political bargain the Democratic and Republican Parties mutually abandoned African Americans in the South to vicious white "Redeemers" in order to stabilize political and economic competition among white elites. Current practices are no different, argues Bell; indeed, we have entered a second Reconstruction. Latinos, white women, and the handicapped gained the most from the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, and affirmative action policies mostly benefit white women (and perhaps personnel managers and lawyers).
Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom offer a substantially different interpretation of racial disparities in perceptions and life chances. In their view overt prejudice and covert racism have declined to a degree that is historically astonishing: "Real progress has been made—more progress than those who put their lives on the line in the 1960s probably imagined.… The signs of progress are all around us, although we now take that progress for granted." African Americans used to suffer almost intolerable racist abuse, but those days are behind us now, and what racism remains is perpetuated mainly by continued insistence on racial disparities. "By no demographic or other measures are African Americans truly a people apart.… And yet if both they and whites believe they are, it may well become true."[12] Thus, the Thernstroms see people like Bell as inadvertently creating the very racial hierarchy they seek to destroy.
William J. Wilson proffers yet another interpretation of racial disparities. Since the 1960s, he argues, economic and social institutions have sorted Americans more by class than by race (or, as he claims in his recent work, by class in conjunction with racial discrimination).[13] Some African Americans were in a position to take advantage of the growing economy and of the opening up of educational, political, and residential opportunities in the 1960s. They attained a college education, moved to
If none of these explanations for racial disparities sound appealing, still more radical ones abound. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray argue that blacks have, on average, a lower I.Q. than do whites, to which many of their problems can be ascribed.[14] Afrocentrists such as Molefi Asante and Asa Hilliard III argue that African Americans are harmed by the domination of European culture, with its cold rationalism, selfish individualism, and rigid and linear thinking.[15] John Ogbu and Signithia Fordham point out that African Americans' refusal to "think white"—to compete in white-dominated schools, job markets, and criminal justice systems—is a rationally self-protective response to a system that appears to promise equality of opportunity but actually is structured to ensure that blacks fail.[16] Dinesh D'Souza argues that most contemporary problems within the black community are caused by African Americans' own weakness of will or the "civilizational gap" between white and black cultures.[17] And there are still other explanations to choose from.
What are we to make of these multiple, contradictory interpretations of America's racial dilemma? If it is true that exponents of one view can almost never persuade others to change their mind, what would be the point of "squandering … paper" in that pointless effort? Analysts will never concur on whether white Americans are intentionally racist, whether American institutions create and maintain white racial domination regardless of anyone's intentions, whether blacks are capable of incorporation and ought to integrate into mainstream society, or whether racial disparities are as severe as ever. The politics are too entrenched and rewarding on all sides. The psychological and emotional investments are too strong and public for most people to be able to change their minds. It is even possible that the evidence is too indefinite or the real answer too complicated; explanations for racial disparities may vary for different individuals, communities, issues, or periods. Or the best explanation
"Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?" thus means "why bother trying to reach consensus, or even the right answer, on the deep underlying causes of Americans' racial animosity and inequality?" But this is no counsel of despair. It is a call to move away from the fruitless search for basic causes toward the fruitful search for realistic solutions to our ills.
Robert Goodin's distinction between "causal responsibility" and "task responsibility" is useful in this shift.[18] Causal responsibility occurs when we try to find the agent(s) or situation(s) that created the problem, identify thereby whom or what to blame, and begin to suggest solutions to the problem. If white racism is responsible for the fact that African Americans on average do less well than white Americans, then whites are to blame, and the solution either lies in changing white beliefs and behavior or in insulating blacks from the effects of racist attitudes and practices. Conversely, if a "civilizational gap" is responsible for the fact that African Americans on average do less well than white Americans, then blacks are to blame, and the solution lies in changing black beliefs and behavior.
Following the logic of causal responsibility is appealing for several reasons. First, blaming has emotional attractions. Angry African Americans and white sympathizers want to shift attention away from the selfinflicted destruction of inner cities and the possibility that some middleclass blacks (like some middle-class whites) are victims of their own lack of talent rather than of white racism. Conservatives want to divert attention from structural causes of individuals' inability to succeed and from the vast upward transfer of wealth that has characterized the United States since the 1980s. Second, blaming has real instrumental value, assuming that one can correctly identify who or what is to blame. There is, after all, no point in alleviating recurrent symptoms when one could instead be eliminating the underlying cause of the disorder—that dictum holds for racial inequality as much as for a headache or fever.
But in race relations, as in medicine, one cannot always identify the underlying cause or treat it even if it is identified. Here is where task responsibility enters the picture: it changes the question from "whose fault is it?" to "what can we do?" Such a reorientation draws warrant from the moral imperative to help someone who is vulnerable to you, regardless of whether you had any role in causing the vulnerability. Even if people have failed to take advantage of opportunities, as Goodin puts it, "others may still be able to act so as to avert [or correct] harm to them. To
This argument implies that political actors should find those people and structures most available or most capable of solving a given problem and hold them responsible for its solution—regardless of whether they caused it in the first place. Political engagement here becomes a search for levers for action: Who can act? What can or must we do to get them to act? What resources do they need to ensure that their actions are effective? Who controls those resources? How can we get them to act? As these questions suggest, task responsibility is not necessarily any simpler or more straightforward than causal responsibility. But it has the distinct advantage of avoiding energy-wasting blaming and defensiveness and of focusing efforts on fixing problems rather than trying to understand or catalogue them.
How would task responsibility work when it comes to disparities between the races? Consider first the matter of who is charged with responsibility. For a child drowning in the river, task responsibility implies seeking the nearest adult who can swim. For a problem like racial inequality, the search is less simple because it engages issues of motive, as well as opportunity. Thus we must revert to the search for causes to the degree that determining the proximate cause of a problem helps us to determine people's motives for solving it.[20] Less abstractly, consider a black child in an inner-city school who cannot read both because a teacher believes that poor black boys cannot or will not learn and because the child's mother is illiterate and cannot help him with his homework. Both adults have the opportunity to help, but one has a greater incentive to do so. In this case those with task responsibility should first direct additional resources to the mother rather than the teacher because the greater motivation of the former will most likely outweigh the greater skill of the latter. This prescription obtains despite the fact that the teacher is arguably more to blame for the child's illiteracy. The theory of task responsibility would, second, require one to determine who has the leverage to remove that teacher from the classroom or to persuade her that all children can learn and deserve a real opportunity to do so.
There are two, perhaps contradictory, ways of approaching the question
Thus one might determine what tasks people are responsible for by seeing what they can do if their livelihoods depend on it. Accordingly, we should ensure that teachers teach all children, that employers treat all of their workers with dignity, that police refrain from harassment or unnecessary violence, and that social workers attend to vulnerable children in abusive or neglectful homes. If these actors are unwilling to take on the same task responsibility for black as for white clients, are themselves too vulnerable or short of resources to have any impact, or are carrying out a policy over which they have no discretion, we then turn to people and institutions to which they are vulnerable and who can make a difference in their lives: the school board or teachers' union, city budgeters, corporate headquarters, authors of welfare regulations, the police commissioner. And this process goes on until we find the link of the chain that can repair the school's windows, ensure children's safety as they walk to school, and teach them once they reach the classroom. Then, and only then, can we reasonably ask black parents not to blame white educational administrators for their children's failure.
The end of the chain of tasks in this model is collective task responsibility. In Goodin's scheme, beyond the circle of primary responsibility, people may have a "residual responsibility" to help when others abdicate. This broader community has an ongoing duty to monitor the situation in case its help is required. The limit of this less direct responsibility is "the limit of the vulnerable agent's needs and of the responsible agent's capacity to act efficaciously—no more, but certainly no less."[23]In political terms this precept requires that all citizens help to alleviate Americans' racial hostility, racial domination, and racial excuse making.
The question of what people should be held responsible for could follow a different logic. Instead of starting with the lowest level of actors working on the most direct tasks and moving outward from there, one might begin at the highest level of the collectivity and work on the largest tasks. That is, getting people out of destructive loops—low expectations, therefore low effort, therefore low rewards, therefore blaming others and lower expectations—may require "something more dramatic and frame-breaking" than the incremental, close-to-the-ground steps implied by subsidiarity as I have just described it.[24] In that case we should begin at the opposite end of the responsibility chain—with a large reframing of citizens' and leaders' tasks that will inspire people to move out of the blame game into the mode of collective task responsibility.
To continue with the example of inner-city schooling: what might be possible if citizens said, "Our task is to ensure that all children can read and calculate proficiently by age sixteen; how must we reallocate resources and efforts to achieve this goal?" Perhaps with such a reframing of large and urgent concerns, as recent federal legislation in fact claims to do, citizens and policy makers would be able to relinquish at least temporarily the temptation to blame and carp in order to contribute whatever they can to the immense and noble task at hand. That is the hope and goal of at least some of those endorsing high standards and frequent testing—the remaining question is whether policy makers will put enough resources and commitment into the schools so that systemic school reform really helps those who have been ignored or dismissed in the past, rather than further penalizing them.
I cannot here resolve the question of just how to put task responsibility into practice. But whether one starts small, with subsidiarity, or large, with reframing, one ends up sooner or later at collective task responsibility. How—in a political culture as individualistic as that of the United States and as full of racial mistrust as the survey data indicate—are we to persuade ourselves and others to accept a shared commitment to pursue racial equality and comity?
The answer, paradoxically, lies in what is usually perceived as the individualism and conservatism of the ideology of the American dream. For better or worse, that ideology is the most widely shared framing of what it means to be an American that is available to us. In fact, despite deep divisions between the races, most Americans of all races share a belief
One can resolve that paradox through a clearer understanding of the American dream and its implications for task responsibility. The dream has four tenets. Together they explain who can participate in the dream, what they participate in, how to succeed, and why the dream is worthwhile. The tenets combine into the following formula: everyone has an equal opportunity to participate in a search for success as he or she defines it, and everyone can reasonably anticipate some success. That success is to be achieved through means under one's own control, such as ambition and hard work. Achievements must be associated with virtue to count as true success.[25]
The polity—that is, Americans as a collectivity—is responsible for carrying out the tasks implied by the first two tenets. With regard to who,only governmental policies can enforce strict nondiscrimination against people of color, women, religious minorities, the poor, and other disfavored groups. With regard to what, only governmental policies can provide all persons with the resources and institutional structure they need to fruitfully pursue success. Those policies should include the availability of a good education through high school, enough shelter and sustenance so that one can focus on how to succeed rather than on how to eat or stay warm, neighborhoods that are safe and decent enough so that one can focus on how to pursue success rather than on how to make it home alive, the availability of jobs for all who seek them, and a political process that allows all citizens to share in making decisions that affect them.
These are large duties. But they are balanced by equally large duties that are held by citizens and encapsulated by the third and fourth tenets of the American dream. Once the government fulfills its mandate to ensure equal opportunity and a reasonable chance to succeed, then individuals must accept responsibility for their own and their families' success (or failure); and they have a moral obligation to pursue virtuous, not merely material, success. Such a balance of responsibilities means, more concretely, that there can no longer be publicly legitimate excuses for illiteracy ifschools are good, for unemployment if jobs are available, for abandoning one's children if social networks are in place, for abdicating engaged citizenship if political channels are open to all, or for claiming victimhood or an irresistible temptation to do evil if one is sane and competent.
How to get individuals to take responsibility for their own actions is the subject of even more political and personal debate than how to get the government to fulfill its duties. But the basic point is simple: a focus on task responsibility in the context of the American dream provides essential balance between what the polity must do because individuals cannot, and what individuals must do because the polity cannot or should not. The polity must provide the means to success for all; individuals must pursue that success as best they can, with help from those to whom they are vulnerable and with help to those vulnerable to them. When vulnerability reaches beyond individuals' ability to help, then task responsibility reverts again to the collectivity.
In the end this formulation can help us to overcome the deep and bitter racial divide. The key point is that Americans of all races generally agree on the tasks implied by the ideology of the American dream and on the proper assignment of those tasks to both government and individuals. Virtually all Americans endorse the values of political equality, equal educational opportunity, equal opportunities in general, and equal respect. At least three-fourths of all Americans agree that skill rather than need should determine wages, that America should "promote equal opportunity for all" rather than "equal outcomes, " that "everyone should try to amount to more than his parents did, " and that they are ambitious themselves.
These are not views held exclusively, or even mainly, by whites. Seventy percent of black, and 80 percent of white, Californians agree that "trying to get ahead" is very important in "making someone a true American." More blacks than whites—and large majorities in both races—endorse self-sufficiency as one of their primary goals. Slightly more blacks than whites agree that "there are more opportunities for Americans today than in the past." Finally, more blacks than whites (89 percent to 70 percent) deem it very important for the public schools to teach "the common heritage and values that we share as Americans."
The most socially engaged African Americans agree with ordinary citizens in endorsing the tenets of the American dream. At least 85 percent of leaders of all groups—including blacks and feminists, labor leaders and businessmen, Democrats and Republicans—endorse equality of opportunity over equality of results. At least seven of ten black leaders think earnings should depend on ability rather than being distributed equally. And black adults are passing on the values of the American dream to their children: three-quarters of white youths and even more black youths see "fair treatment for all" and "self-reliance" as extremely important
This is a strong foundation of shared beliefs and values on which to build an ethos of task responsibility. It becomes even stronger when we consider the wide array of beliefs that blacks and whites share about the nature of political tasks facing the nation. On affirmative action, for example, most whites abhor "reverse discrimination" or "racial preferences"—and many blacks agree. Conversely, most blacks endorse programs to search out qualified minorities for college admissions or jobs, special training programs, wider distribution of information about jobs and other opportunities, the drawing of voting districts to ensure black representation in legislature—as do a majority of whites in most surveys.[27] Even on affirmative action, this most racially charged of issues, there is a core of agreement among a majority of African Americans and whites that politicians have done little to cultivate and work with.[28]
The same consensus can be discerned on crime. Throughout the 1990s white and black Americans agreed that crime is one of the most important issues facing their community. The two races are about equal in their mistrust of the criminal justice system (three in ten of both blacks and whites express "very little" confidence), and they usually agree on when it is and is not appropriate for a police officer to strike a citizen. They concur on the need to spend more to "halt the rising crime rate" and to "deal with drug addiction" (African Americans would like to increase spending on prevention of crime and drugs even more than would whites). Large majorities of both races concur that "the courts in this area do not deal harshly enough with criminals." Blacks and whites mostly concur on whether more tax dollars should be spent to solve eight major national problems (ranging from education to health care to crime and drug control).[29] Blacks are much more angry than whites over racial profiling and other biases in the criminal justice system, but that does not prevent them from wanting more and better protection.[30]
Or consider education: more than eight in ten of both blacks and whites agree that "the country needs common national standards of performance" for all schools. Even more members of both races further agree that the country needs higher standards of educational achievement. Solid, and sometimes huge, majorities also approve of "requir[ing] students
One could repeat this exercise for a variety of policy issues, but the point should by now be clear: there is much greater congruence between African Americans and whites on underlying values and on perceptions of essential public and private tasks than on causal explanations for the racial problems our nation faces. It would be foolish to claim perfect congruence on policy issues; one could generate a list of disagreements between the races at least as long as the list of agreements. But there is a list of agreements broad enough and specific enough to enable reliance on task responsibility to be a plausible strategy for ameliorating America's racial anger and inequality and for lessening some of its deepest social problems.
NOTES
1. Edmund Wilson, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" New Yorker,Jan. 20, 1945, 66.
2. Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll, Oct. 27–31, 1995. By 2000, three out of five whites and blacks agreed that the goal of achieving racial equality in the United States was best approached through equal opportunity rather than integration or equal results (NBC News/Wall Street Journal News Poll, March 2–5, 2000).
3. New York Times/CBS News Poll, "Race Relations in New York City, " June 17–20, 1990. African Americans with at least some college education found all three charges much more plausible than did African Americans with less than a high school education. Among whites the pattern was reversed. See Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 106.
4. New York Times/CBS News Poll, Oct. 10–13, 1996. On this survey, also, more well-educated than poorly educated African Americans found the drug hypothesis true or plausible. My thanks to Michael Kagay of the New York Timesfor analyzing the data on this and the previous poll for me.
5. Hochschild, Facing Up, 60–61.
6. Washington Post, Kaiser Family Foundation, Harvard University, Racial Attitudes Surveyhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/nation/sidebars/polls/race_071101.htm, accessed April 22, 2001.
7. Washington Post, Kaiser Family Foundation, Harvard University, The Four Americas (Menlo Park, Calif.: Kaiser Family Foundation, 1995).
8. Evidence for this and the preceding paragraph are in Hochschild, Facing Up, 60–67. See also, "Conflict and Convergence: Race, Public Opinion, and Political Behavior in Massachusetts, " University of Massachusetts McCormack Institute Poll (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1998); Gallup Organization, "Hispanics, Whites Rate Bush Positively, While Blacks Are Much More Negative, " June 21, 2001 www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr010621.asp, accessed Nov. 8, 2002; General Social Surveys, 1972–2000: Cumulative Codebook(Chicago: National Opinion Research Center, 2001).
9. Richard Morin, "Poll Reflects Division over Simpson Case, " Washington Post, Oct. 8, 1995, A31, A34.
10. Supreme Court ratings are from Gallup Organization, "Hispanics, Whites Rate Bush." The views on voting are from Washington Post et al., Racial Attitudes Survey.
11. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Derrick Bell, Gospel Choirs: Psalms of Survival in an Alien Land Called Home (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
12. Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 17, 492; for a similar argument see Jim Sleeper, Liberal Racism (New York: Viking, 1997).
13. William J. Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); William J. Wilson, When Work Disappears (New York: Knopf, 1996).
14. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (New York: Free Press, 1994).
15. Molefi Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1990); Asa Hilliard III, Lucretia Payton-Stewart, and Larry Williams, eds., Infusion of African and African-American Content in the School Curriculum (Chicago: Third World Press, 1990).
16. John Ogbu, The Next Generation (New York: Academic Press, 1974); John Ogbu, "Diversity and Equity in Public Education, " in Policies for America's Public Schools, ed. Ron Haskins and Duncan MacRae (New York: Ablex, 1988), 127–70; Signithia Fordham, Blacked Out (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
17. Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism (New York: Free Press, 1995).
18. Robert Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
19. Ibid., 129.
20. Robert Goodin, personal communication, May 21, 1996.
21. This argument has affinities with the European principle of subsidiarity, as well as with Saul Alinsky's recipe for neighborhood regeneration and rebellion. Thus it does not have either a clear leftist or rightist caste. See Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (1946; reprint, New York: Random House, 1991).
22. Michael Tomasky, "All Fall Down, " New York Magazine, Feb. 12, 1996, 44–49.
23. Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable, 134–35.
24. Goodin, personal communication. As I wrote almost two decades ago, after reviewing the history of school desegregation policies, "incrementalism … does little to help either minorities or whites and does a lot to harm them. Half a loaf, in this case, may be worse than none at all" (Jennifer Hochschild, The New American Dilemma [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984], 91).
25. For further analysis of this ideology see Hochschild, Facing Up.
26. For citations and further evidence for the past three paragraphs see Hochschild, Facing Up, 55–56; General Social Surveys, 1972–2000;Pew Research Center Values Update Survey, Nov. 5–17, 1997.
27. Charlotte Steeh and Maria Krysan, "Trends: Affirmative Action and the Public, 1970–1995, " Public Opinion Quarterly 60 (1996): 128–58; Washington Post et al., Racial Attitude Survey.
28. Jennifer Hochschild, "Affirmative Action as Culture War, " in The Cultural Territories of Race: Black and White Boundaries, ed. Michele Lamont (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
29. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1996(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice), 114–15, 148–49; Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1999(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice), 102, 115, 126–27, 130–31; Jennifer Hochschild and Reuel Rogers, "Race Relations in a Diversifying Nation, " in New Directions: African-Americans in a Diversifying Nation, ed. James Jackson (Washington, D.C.: National Planning Association, 2000).
30. To cite only one example: 37 percent of African Americans, compared with only 4 percent of non-Hispanic whites, claim to have been "unfairly stopped by police." "Poll: Racial Profiling, " Washington Post, June 21, 2001 www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/sidebars/racepoll/062101racepoll.htm, accessed Nov. 8, 2002. See also Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1999:102, 109–11.
31. Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick, The American Dream and the Public Schools (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 4.
10. The Ambivalence
of Citizenship
African-American Intellectuals in Search of Community
Kevin Gaines
It has never been easy being an intellectual in America. The culture of the sound bite, the fetish of celebrity, and the eagerness of the news media to promote scandal rather than the public interest have eroded what little authority intellectuals ever had. But to be a black intellectual these days carries its own special vexations. On the one hand, African-American intellectuals have come to symbolize for many white intellectuals the separatist fragment that threatens American cultural unity. On the other hand, for many African Americans they seem distant and even disloyal figures in internal disputes over identity and the relationship of blacks to the larger American society and its legitimating myths.
In this swirl of debate that characterizes our post-cold war, post-civil rights moment, we might do well to remember Richard Wright's effort to balance a powerful affirmation of black identity without abandoning the ideal of a universal culture. Wright is particularly appropriate in this context, given his thoroughgoing engagement with the historical contradiction of Western culture: between the racist inhumanity practiced by Euro-Americans and their ideals of enlightenment, democracy, and human rights.
The hostility Wright faced as an independent critic of racism at the height of the cold war drove him to self-exile in France. Today's African-American intellectuals, by and large, find themselves in a less onerous, but still trying, condition of spiritual exile as they search for a community
Despite their ostensible differences, these black and white detractors are cut from the same cloth. Both share considerable anxiety at the phenomenon of diversity. Both balk at identities they perceive as threats to cultural cohesion. Both assert purist notions of group identity: the dominant Anglo-American position falsely equating its group status with the national community; the minority African-American identity, in its own defensive quest for community, deeply ambivalent regarding its American citizenship and its membership in Western culture.
THE DRAMA OF RACIAL RESPONSIBILITY
A vivid manifestation of the black intellectual's quandary might be called the drama of racial responsibility. This occurs at those public gatherings of black intellectuals who speak in roundtable fashion on matters of concern to black communities. Inevitably, an impatient, even angry, questioner charges that the speaker's scholarly endeavors (and by implication, his or her relative success) have had negligible impact on the plight of impoverished inner-city blacks. What, after all the speeches, are they going to do about it?[2]
Such ritual moments expose a fault line within the black middle class, often pitting activists, social workers, ministers, small-business owners, and teachers—all overwhelmed by social crises—against black academics who are usually removed from poor black communities. It epitomizes the dilemma of black intellectuals, whose success and visibility within the academy is belied by the obscurity of their work within black communities and, more decisively, by their invisibility, with a handful of exceptions, so far as the mainstream media are concerned. Placed on the defensive by activist claims that they have abandoned their communities, many black intellectuals feel compelled to play their part in this drama. Hence there is a tendency for some black public scholars to proclaim themselves activists, asserting their organic connection to black communities. The recurrence of this spectacle suggests such claims are seldom persuasive.
Black intellectuals, then, cannot afford the luxury of being intellectuals. Like all intellectuals, black intellectuals are not exempt from the responsibilities of living in a racist society. But like it or not, they must serve someone else's agenda: they must defend or uplift the race, flatter impossibly narcissistic white liberal desires for authentic black resistance, or serve still others as legitimators of the status quo. Anything else, especially the vast and growing amount of important African-American studies scholarship, doesn't seem to count.
Such charges seem patently unfair given the relative powerlessness of all but a select few black public intellectuals. At the same time, the highly theoretical modes of inquiry favored within academic African-American studies, as well as the obscure jargon that often goes with them, fuels popular suspicions in black communities that intellectuals are indifferent to their yearning for knowledge that might raise up the race and its spirits. Such skepticism is reinforced by a preponderance of work that eschews the 1960s Black Studies movement's challenges to Eurocentric myths and scholarship through the recovery of once ignored—or denigrated—African-American histories. Instead, a recent tendency within African-American studies has been to debunk notions of black solidarity in ways that do not leave us with a clearer sense of the past struggles of black intellectuals and social movements but with a disabling sense of discontinuity, of fragmentation.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is only the most famous symbol of this tendency. For years Gates has ably challenged Afrocentric myths and defended multiculturalism from attacks by cultural conservatives. Gates has also emphasized the realities of class polarization among blacks that undermine neonationalist illusions of racial authenticity. In his writings for the New Yorker through much of the 1990s, Gates consistently expressed a puckish skepticism about the very notion of black political solidarity. Similarly, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, noting that the concept of race is a fallacy, deemed scientifically unsound by scholarly consensus, contends that the political project of pan-Africanism, with race thinking at its core, is itself thus inherently flawed. And the black British critic Paul Gilroy has challenged Afrocentrism and black American notions of racial authenticity with an alternative model that situates black consciousness in a transnational, diasporic network. Gilroy's model of the "black Atlantic" describes a dynamic historical process emphasizing the migration patterns of peoples of African descent as crucial to the ongoing reinvention of black consciousness and politics.[3] In his latest book
Gilroy, Appiah, and Gates are correct to challenge parochial and racist expressions of black identity. But they would probably concede the persistent political cleavage along the black-white color line in the United States, most recently witnessed in the disfranchisement and intimidation of thousands of black voters in Florida in the 2000 election. With such powerful antagonists to black interests, African Americans will understandably wonder why such prominent black scholars condemn the lunatic fringe among blacks without "telling it like it is" when the rights of African Americans and the democratic legacy of the civil rights movement are under siege.
This postmodern version of African-American studies, it is tempting to argue, fails to enlighten our national culture on the legacies of race, slavery, and the civil rights movement. But perhaps it never intended to. Therein lies the key to its success, widely publicized in the case of Harvard's "Dream Team" of distinguished academics—a phrase, one suspects, that would be unthinkable to apply to nonblack intellectuals. This Barnumesque selling of African-American studies and "the black public intellectual" is of a piece with the corporate marketing of slain black leaders and their distorted legacies through the mass media or, worse, the false militancy and decadent misogyny of gangster rap. This conversion of critical black intellectuals into entertainment figures further fragments black collective memory and widens the gulf between black intellectuals and their communities of origin.
Filling the void in the 1990s were informal black scholars whose unscientific melanin theories pander to the masses[4] and, worse, cynical demagogues elevated by hypocritical news organizations whose feigned indignation did not preclude their willingness to profit from racism by extending a platform to the likes of Louis Farrakhan and Khallid Muhammad. Alienation is hardly a new condition for peoples of African descent. The persistence of segregation, poverty, and hopelessness ensures that the "social death, " as Orlando Patterson vividly describes it, experienced by African peoples uprooted and transplanted to slave societies in the Americas retains an archetypal hold over African-American cultural memory. For many such alienation and the struggle against it cannot be relegated to a bygone past. As a result many African Americans understandably look to Africa as the basis for an
The right's continuing invocation of the ethnocentrism of dominant Western myths of white civilization sustains this tendency. You only have to recall the respectful attention enjoyed in some quarters by the racial libel, to borrow Derrick Bell's apt phrase, [5] of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's pseudoscholarly apologia for racism, The Bell Curve. Nor was it too long ago that Dinesh D'Souza offered up his Orwellian defense of slavery and segregation, The End of Racism, as well as his indictment of black "civilizational deficiencies."
Such is to be expected from reactionaries. But even former civil rights allies have turned all too often to blaming the downtrodden and disempowered. To take just one representative case: in 1991 Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued in The Disuniting of America that racial and ethnic identities asserted by African Americans actually endangered national unity. For Schlesinger "multiculturalism, " "Afrocentrism, " and "bilingualism" stood for group identities that violated norms of individualism, amounting to a divisive "tribalism" that, left unchecked, would lead to cultural fragmentation.[6]
Schlesinger was most dismayed by the curricular reforms that sought to make Afrocentric materials available to youngsters in urban public schools. Maintaining that the purpose of American education was to inculcate in its students what he termed the Western democratic tradition, Schlesinger claimed that "ethnic ideologues" fostered in minority children divisive group identities based on therapeutic myths and a disabling sense of victimhood. Advocates of multiculturalism "have filled the air with recrimination and rancor and have remarkably advanced the fragmentation of American life."[7]
The liberal Schlesinger shares an assumption with many on the right that Afrocentrism constitutes a radical or leftist ideology. But the cruder forms of Afrocentric nationalism are fundamentally reactionary; they are tainted by biological notions of race, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and resentment against the black middle class.[8] Such provincialism, needless to say, renders coalition politics impossible and thus colludes with, rather than challenges, much that is hostile to human freedom.
Afrocentrism seems an unlikely target for liberal concern. No doubt a calmer, more dispassionate assessment would judge Afrocentrism a symptom of fragmentation rather than its cause. It would be more precise to say that Afrocentrism is a response to that American form of "tribalism"
The growing body of scholarship on whiteness has its origin in W. E. B. Du Bois's account of the violent backlash of white supremacy against the democratic reforms of Reconstruction. Du Bois argued that poor whites in the South preferred the psychological "wages of whiteness" to a class-based alliance with impoverished African Americans against their common oppressors, the white southern oligarchy.[9] It was this ideology of whiteness institutionalized as social policy that offered the children of once-despised working-class immigrants the material rewards of the middle-class American dream. Their success after World War II was predicated on racial segregation and the exclusion of blacks from skilled jobs and from quality housing and education. Today white identity politics, or, as George Lipsitz puts it, "the possessive investment in whiteness, " operates in the immediate context of transnational corporations moving production overseas in a race to the bottom of the global labor market alongside a gross upward redistribution of wealth and attacks on American workers through lost jobs and falling wages and benefits. The racial scapegoating of immigrants and the poor justifies slashing social programs that benefit society at large, the replacement of schools with prisons, and attacks on affirmative action, even as many poor and working-class whites stand to gain little from such punitive policies. This was the 1990s context in which racial discord issued less from the likes of Jeffries and Farrakhan than from the distracting demagoguery of Pat Buchanan and David Duke, from right-wing talk radio and from negrophobic attacks on affirmative action.
It is the problem of whiteness, then, the prototypical identity politics, that remains obscure to many, especially when it is made presentable, as when Schlesinger calls "[f]or better or worse, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition … the dominant influence on American culture and society." Schlesinger's insistence on the dominance of this tradition is striking in its defensive antipluralism and in his frank description of it as "white." Notwithstanding his civil rights credentials, Schlesinger's attack on Afrocentrism summons a more distant imperial past:
There is surely no reason for Western civilization to have guilt trips laid on it by champions of cultures based on despotism, superstition, tribalism, and fanaticism. The West needs no lectures on the superior virtue of those "sun people" who sustained slavery until Western imperialism abolished it (and, it is reported, sustain it to this day in Mauritania and Sudan), who
One may grant Schlesinger's point about the naive romanticism of Afrocentrism in the face of the specific horrors and human rights abuses he cites. Nevertheless, one might do better to emphasize that such brutalities and disregard for democracy are human, not African, crimes; in all fairness he might have acknowledged, too, the West's own histories of mass cruelty from slavery to the Holocaust. The very notion of affronted "white guilt" bespeaks a desire to evade moral responsibility, to foist blame on a discredited other.
Such self-righteous diatribes can only reinforce suspicions that the construct of Western culture is irreparably tainted by racial bias. Similarly, white obsession with black identity politics is matched by the extent to which Louis Farrakhan is driven to distraction by his own anti-Semitism. Each undermines civility and the hope of a common culture. Shocking though the discovery would be for them, the exponents of both views are blood brothers in bad faith, united in divisiveness and self-delusion.
We should not be surprised that African Americans' perpetual struggle to forge a positive identity within a hostile society has been a precondition for antiracist struggles for equality. Writing during the 1960s at the dawn of African independence and the civil rights movement, the sociologist St. Clair Drake could easily have been discussing Afrocentrism when he observed that "the myth of negritude, " although questionable as a romantic affirmation of African identity by westernized blacks in the diaspora, "can give confidence to the [black] masses in … America … who smart under the stigma of … being of African descent, although the intellectuals hardly need such a crutch."[11]
Of course, the optimism that accompanied the demise of colonialism in Africa and segregation in the South is a distant memory amidst the present crisis among African Americans beset by joblessness, poverty, social dislocation, and alienation, notwithstanding some economic improvement and the easing of the crack epidemic in recent years. The crisis, and the gulf between black intellectuals and their communities, has occasioned much uncertainty among blacks—even among those intellectuals in whom Drake had placed such confidence.
INTEGRATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
The crisis facing disfranchised and poor blacks, together with the rightwing-led retreat from racial justice, increasingly elicits anti-integrationist sentiment among some African-American spokespersons. Although there is no hard evidence to suggest dwindling support among African Americans for equal housing and education, one frequently hears negative assessments of "integration" on black talk radio, which is perhaps the most vital institution within the black public sphere.
Anti-integrationism is the peculiar product of both the persistence of racism and the generational fading of group memory. Many of those who voice such sentiments have either forgotten or never heard of the 1960s political critique of "integration" as the tokenism employed by white employers resistant to substantive equal opportunity. Nowadays, as we often hear it from college students, journalists, entrepreneurs, and even academics, anti-integrationism tends to blame middle-class African Americans for failing to return home, as it were, for failing to "give back to the community." One is tempted to regard this as little more than the naïveté of idealistic black college students wrestling with the anxious question of their future, but the crises facing black communities foster a broader middle-class anxiety. Anti-integrationist blacks thus struggle to reconcile their own aspirations for economic security with concerns for the race's survival. Often these concerns are accompanied by self-doubt regarding their authenticity and responsibility as middle-class blacks, doubts usually projected onto those—like black intellectuals in public forums—deemed suspect by virtue of their presumed social distance from less fortunate blacks.
Anti-integrationism is not antiwhite, although it sometimes issues from the conviction that when push comes to shove—when, for example, crucial policy making, zoning, and hiring decisions are made—those decisions are largely made by and for whites. The rejection of integrationism is more concerned with internal divisions among blacks that find expression in wariness of those who seem to have integrated themselves outside the community. In this view their exodus is seen as tantamount to a betrayal of blackness and, more concretely, of those left behind. As the memory of the unifying struggle against segregation recedes, blacks of all walks of life express anxiety at internal differences of class, gender, and sexuality.
Anti-integrationism is in large part the problem of blacks who have "made it, " as much as it is heard from the striving lower-middle class
Sentiment against integration also finds expression in Afrocentrism, which, despite its flaws, strives to revitalize the black community and its ideals against this perceived ideological and social fragmentation. However misguided some forms of it may be, anti-integrationism mainly derives from a continuing struggle for self-determination. It is part of an effort to define the political interests of communities under assault. For those who subscribe to this logic, black progress and social mobility since the civil rights era are not regarded positively but are seen as a threat to the community's health and cohesion.
Sadly, such mythic notions of blackness are often predicated on conservative gender politics of antifeminism and homophobia. Given the continued popularity of patriarchal notions of community, feminism (often merged with integration as a "white-identified" trend) and homosexuality among African Americans are lightning rods for much of the anxiety around social mobility and internal diversity.[12] Gains by black women are contrasted negatively with the economic plight of many black men. Within intellectual life the prominence of such black women novelists as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones during the 1980s, and their frank portrayals of sexual politics, elicited scathing accusations of their racial disloyalty by black male critics. As Ann duCille has written, "for black women, membership (real or assumed) in the sisterhood of feminists is in some circles an unpardonable sin punishable by excommunication."[13] As for those African Americans whose piety makes them susceptible
ONCE UPON A TIME: NOSTALGIA FOR SEGREGATION
Another motif in the anti-integrationist romance among middle-class blacks and even some intellectuals is nostalgia for the era of segregation. Again, innocence and a selective vision of the past seem to be gaining on the determination of the community's elders to "never turn back." For many African Americans too young to remember the protracted and bloody struggle against Jim Crow, or those reared in northern ghettoes and thus spared the tendency of their fellow Americans to display theirregional brand of nostalgia with the Confederate flag, the problems facing black communities are perceived as the result of integration. One black scholar contends that "[o]ut of racist segregation and discrimination, the African American neighborhood [under Jim Crow] molded a set of cohesive values, beliefs, legends, customs, and family lifestyles.… Racial integration of public schools transformed all of this." Another claims, as part of a critique of the use of social science theories of the damaged black psyche to support desegregation, that "[m]y disagreement with certain integrationist assumptions looms large in my analysis."[14]
This vision of a pre-civil rights golden age is motivated by the seductive fantasy of a thriving community threatened not by socioeconomic dislocations but, oddly enough, by the reforms of the civil rights era. As Adolph Reed has pointed out, such nostalgia for segregated black schools and communities reflects the sentiments of the middle-class survivors of the Jim Crow system, those privileged few who were groomed for success while the majority outside the fold languished in deprivation.[15]
Not the least of the difficulties with such rejections of integration is that they minimize the impact of structural and political changes on black communities. As Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton have shown, deindustrialization, joblessness, and, above all, residential segregation have accentuated the gap between affluent and poor sectors of the black population.[16] But for many commentators on "the black underclass, " poverty and social ills are attributed less to harmful policies and power relations
BEYOND COMMUNITY VERSUS FRAGMENTATION
No other prominent black thinker offers the contemporary black intellectual a better compass in these difficult times than Richard Wright. Surely no other black intellectual so courageously faced up to the tense encounter between people of African descent and Western modernity. Refusing the easy clarities of self-congratulatory embrace and angry repudiation, Wright's legacy challenges the polarized positions of Schlesinger and the Afrocentrists and separatists.
Wright refused to minimize the racism and exploitation on which the West was founded. At the same time, he cast his lot with all that is exemplary in Western culture: the triumph of artistic expression, science, and secularism over superstition; its affirmations of human freedom against arbitrary power and authority. He envisioned a synthesis within which independent African states would democratize Western culture and perfect its ideals of freedom. To be sure, the West and African independence movements were in conflict, but their ideals and interests were far from incommensurable. To achieve that harmony, however, the West would have to change. "Westerners, high and low, feel that their codes, ideals and conceptions of humanity do not apply to black men. If until today Africa was static, it was because Europeans deliberately wanted to keep her that way."[17]
In relation to Western culture Wright regarded himself as both participant and outsider. He was sustained in that betwixt-and-between state by his contact with African and Asian nationalist leaders who sought to resolve the tension between the traditional cultures of their
According to Cedric Robinson, "Wright dismissed as fraudulent the claims of ethical superiority of … the liberal democrats of the West and the Marxist-Leninists of the East."[18] Pursuing his lonely, independent course through the 1950s, Wright set a lofty standard for intellectual responsibility. That spirit of critical detachment remains a standard for contemporary black intellectuals. At least it should for those of us who prefer the larger project of human emancipation to the divisive pieties of black chauvinism and white identity politics.
NOTES
I am indebted to Jonathan Rieder, Martin Kilson, Wilson Moses, Nell Painter, and, especially, Penny Von Eschen for their comments and suggestions.
1. Jim Sleeper, "Toward an End of Blackness: An Argument for the Surrender of Race Consciousness, " Harper's, May 1997, 35–42; and Sean Wilentz, "Race, Celebrity, and the Intellectuals, " Dissent (summer 1995). For a similar argument questioning the validity of black solidarity, but in this instance made by an African-American scholar, see Randall Kennedy, "My Race Problem—And Ours, " Atlantic Monthly, May 1997, 55–66.
2. A textual example of the drama of racial responsibility is Eugene Rivers's indictment of black intellectuals for shirking their responsibility to the social crises facing blacks. See Eugene Rivers, "On the Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Crack, " Boston Review, Oct. 1992.
3. See Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West, The Future of the Race (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996); Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Black London, " New Yorker, April 28, May 5, 1997; Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House:
4. The best analysis of this phenomenon is Michael Eric Dyson, "Melanin Madness: A Struggle for the Black Mind, " Emerge (Feb. 1992): 2–34, 36–37.
5. Derrick Bell, "Racial Libel as Ritual, " Village Voice, Nov. 21, 1995, 51–53. For a trenchant analysis of the right's attempt to consolidate its power by seeking to legitimize racism see Toni Morrison, "Racism and Fascism: The Marketing of Power, " The Nation, May 29, 1995, 760. For a discussion of antiblack practices and sentiment prompted by the Rodney King beating and the Los Angeles uprising see Sylvia Wynter, "No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues, " in Voices of the Black Diaspora (fall 1992): 13–16.
6. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York: Norton, 1991).
7. Ibid., 130.
8. Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon, 1993); Darlene Hine Clark, "The Black Studies Movement: Afrocentric-Traditionalist-Feminist Paradigms for the Next Stage, " Black Scholar 22 (1992): 11–18; Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Europe Upside Down: Fallacies of the New Afrocentrism, " Times Literary Supplement, Feb. 12, 1993, 24–25.
9. See, e.g., W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Atheneum, 1975); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1998); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working-Class (London: Verso, 1991); David R. Roediger, ed., Black Writers on Whiteness (New York: Schoecken, 1998); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
10. Schlesinger, Disuniting of America, 128–29.
11. St. Clair Drake, "Hide My Face, " in Soon One Morning: New Writing by Negro Americans, ed. Herbert Hill (New York: 1963), 94.
12. An insightful discussion of this problem is E. Frances White, "Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse, and African American Nationalism, " in Expanding the Boundaries of Women's History: Essays on Women in the Third World, ed. Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 51–73.
13. Ann duCille, Skin Trade (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 60.
14. Doris Y. Wilkinson, "Integration: Dilemmas in a Racist Culture, " Society (March/April 1996): 29; Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), xviii.
15. See Adolph Reed, "Dangerous Dreams: Black Boomers Wax Nostalgic for the Days of Jim Crow, " Village Voice, April 16, 1996, 24–29.
16. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation
17. Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), 343.
18. Cedric Robinson, introduction to White Man, Listen! by Richard Wright (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995), xix.