Review - American Jewish Archives

206 American Jewish Archives
can account for the fact that African Americans as a group have
consistently failed to conform to the patterns that have characterized
the social and economic trajectory of other ethnicities? Or, as
William Julius Wilson has argued in The Declining Significance of
Race (1978) and When Work Disappears (1996)~ have there been major
economic and social changes that have, for very specific reasons,
disproportionately affected African Americans and Puerto Ricans
and canceled out many of the advances made by these groups between
1945 and 1970?
The reason it is important to develop a more explicit perspective
on the present situation lies in the fact that data similar to those advanced
by Binder and Reimers have been used to promote very
conservative causes. For Thomas Sowell, for instance, in his Ethnic
America: A History? the dynamics of ethnic stratification- the fact that
immigrants start at the bottom and work their way up -delegitimize
the notion of the existence of a majority and a minority culture.
Similarly, the fact that Jews and Japanese have "succeeded" in American
society, against the odds of racism and bigotry, in his view, undermines
any idea of lasting and potentially debilitating effects of
racism. Moreover, because the one assured route to immigrant success
is individual entrepreneurship, federal assistance for public education,
according to Sowell, will have little or no effect on the
social mobility of those in the lower economic ranks. Needless to
say, arguments such as these, scientifically, leave a lot to be desired.
Unfortunately, politically, they do seem to have a wide currency.
By, from the outset, positioning black New Yorkers outside the
range of "tolerancel' the authors evoke a certain historical determinism
and place themselves at an analytical disadvantage. Racism becomes
a separate and timeless category, the one last remove from the
attainment of the promise of liberal pluralism, rather than a phenomenon
that can be deconstructed into its various component
parts, and is inflected by a particular historical context.
What exactly are the contingencies that have made the history of
African Americans diverge from that of other ethnic groups? Why
has racism toward African Americans proven to be more persistent
than racism toward other groups and other forms of prejudice
based on religious difference or national origin? How does the decline
of those prejudices shed light on the plight of African Americans?