The idea of race in America

America in Black and White: Two Nations?Adam FaircloughThe Idea of Race in AmericaYou are all, I am sure, following the American presidential primary elections with intenseinterest. No doubt many of you will have shared my thought that this is one of the mostbizarre, inconsistent, and confusing set of procedures ever devised for choosing twopresidential candidates. And yet I think you will agree that this year’s contest is a grippingspectacle, a truly exciting competition. Moreover, we are privileged to see a historic “first”take place before our eyes. It seems all but inevitable that the Democratic party will, for thefirst time in its 200-year history, choose either a woman or a black man as its presidentialcandidate.The emergence of Barack Obama as a serious contender for the Democratic nomination is aremarkable phenomenon. Other black politicians have sought the presidency, most notablyJesse Jackson. Jackson even won some Democratic primaries. Yet neither Jackson norother black hopefuls stood a chance of gaining the Democratic nomination, let alone beingelected president. The political reality was that the great majority of white voters refused tosupport a black candidate. The unspoken assumption was that they refused to do so forreasons of racial prejudice.Obama, on the other hand, is attracting enormous white support. Indeed, his primary victoryin Iowa occurred in a state that is overwhelmingly white. Obama is seen as electable, apotential president. Many Republicans, in fact, believe that Obama would be far more difficultto beat than Hillary Clinton. (Of course, the Republicans who say this may be lying…)I am beginning this talk with mention of Obama because the Obama phenomenon raises acouple of interesting and very important points about race in America.In the first place, the fact that Obama is defined as black, or African American, tells us muchabout how race is used to categorize people.• White American mother, black African father. In the 19 th century this would beclassified as “mulatto,” or half-black, half-white. But this term is no longer used and isregarded as offensive. In the United States, unlike some Caribbean and LatinAmerican societies, categories between black and white have not been recognized. Abinary system, that divides people into blacks and whites, has been the rule.• This binary system, moreover, is a historical legacy of slavery, and of the system thatreplaced slavery at the end of the 19 th century, the system of racial segregation or, togive it a more accurate name, the system of white supremacy.• This manner of classifying the population into blacks and whites had a politicalpurpose. It is often said, and it is even something of a cliché, that race is a “socialconstruction.” What that meant in historical terms is that white people, who were thedominant group, devised the system for deciding who was white and who was black.As the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal wrote in his famous book An AmericanDilemma, published in 1944, the white man invented the American Negro.• Not based on color and not based on ancestry. Logically, it would be as just asaccurate to define Barack Obama as white as it is to call him black. But under the law1

of slavery a child always took the legal status of its mother. The purpose of this lawwas clear: to permit white men to father children by slave women without weakeningthe system of slavery. The child of a white father and a slave mother wasautomatically slave.• After the abolition of slavery, as whites struggled to impose a subordinate and inferiorstatus upon the newly-freed black population, they had to devise a new legaldefinition of black and white. So they passed laws defining you as a black person ifyou had more than a small fraction of so-called “black blood.” This meant thatalthough you might look white, if you had one great-great-great grandparent who wasblack, you could not take the legal status of a white person. The laws of some statesdecreed that “any traceable” colored or Negro ancestry defined you as black.• The consequences of being defined as black were of course enormous. You attendedseparate schools, sat at the back of the bus, couldn’t vote or hold political office, andwere excluded from all the best jobs. You were systematically degraded, insulted,demeaned, and subject to the violence of lynch mobs.• To buttress this system every southern state, and some northern states too, passedlaws that made it a crime for blacks and whites to marry, to cohabit, or to have sexualrelations.Now all this might seem very remote from today. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and1960s destroyed this system of white supremacy. Racial discrimination is illegal. Blacks canvote and hold office. And for the past forty years, since the Supreme Court held thatVirginia’s law against racial intermarriage was unconstitutional, blacks and whites have beenfree to marry.The US census now allows people to choose which racial category they think best describesthem, and it has recently added “mixed race” as one of the possible choices. Yet thepresumption that you are either black or white persists. As a boy Obama struggled with hisown identity, but came to define himself as black. And although he tries to avoid being limitedpolitically by his racial identity, he knows that his potential appeal to African American votersis an enormous political advantage.Obama, then, represents the convergence of the old and the new in race relations. Hecannot escape the pull of the old black-white division, but he is trying to transcend it.Andrew Hacker and the “Two Nations” ConceptTo any European travelling to the United States, two facts about race are immediately visible.One is the extent to which black and white Americans live in geographically distinct areas,the segregation of cities and suburbs by race. The second is the scale of extreme poverty,and the fact that such poverty is concentrated among black Americans. These strikingconditions, which are easy to observe just about anywhere in the United States, encouragethe easy conclusion that America is still a society characterized by fundamental inequalitiesbetween blacks and whites. It also prompts the obvious question: To what extent are suchpersisting inequalities the products of racism?Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (1992).Unexpected bestseller. Punchy, readable prose buttressed by copious statistics. Basic thesisthat it is still an enormous advantage to be born white, and an equally large disadvantage tobe born black. In terms of income, wealth, education, health, housing, political influence, andfreedom from violent crime, whites as a group are far better off than blacks as a group. And amajor explanation for that difference, according to Hacker, is the continuing impact of racism.2

Hacker defines racism in three ways:• Attitudes and actions of individuals that have adverse effect upon blacks. He cites theexample of a taxi driver who refuses to stop for black riders – one of the mostcommon forms of discrimination experienced by blacks. The taxi driver may simply beprejudiced, or he may be making a rational calculation that he is more likely to berobbed if he picks up a black rider. But the effect is the same, and the action,regardless of motivation, is unfair.• Institutional racism. The powerful institutions of American society – banks, businesscorporations, law firms, universities etc. – have an inherent bias against blacksbecause of their overwhelmingly white make-up. That bias may not be intentional, butit nevertheless works against blacks. Blacks are the outsiders trying to get in. Theinsiders, who have the right social connections and are familiar with the rules, have abuilt-in advantage.• The stigma of slavery. “There persists the belief that members of the black racerepresent an inferior strain of the human species.” Racism developed as ajustification for the enslavement of Africans, and then, after the abolition of slavery,for the system of racial segregation or white supremacy. In the late 19 th and early 20 thcenturies, scholars gave scientific respectability to the idea that darker skinnedpeoples were inherently inferior to lighter-skinned peoples. By the 1950s suchthinking was largely discredited, and today hardly any scholars openly express abelief that blacks are inferior. Yet Hacker argues that most white Americans, partlybecause they harbor negative images of Africa, continue to suspect that people ofAfrican ancestry are less advanced than members of other races.These three variants of racism, Hacker concludes, make for a powerful and toxiccombination. And they explain why the black-white division is still the most importantdeterminant of one’s life chances in America.Some contend that the massive scale of immigration by non-white peoples in recent decadeshas rendered the idea of “two nations” out-of-date.• In 1970 whites made up 83 % of US population; blacks 11%. Hispanics provided only4,5% and Asians a mere 1%.• By 2000 Hispanics had become the biggest minority group, with 12% of thepopulation. The proportion of Asians now constituted 3,6%.Surely, then, the old biracial division of black and white has been superseded by a multiracialsociety, with at least four major racial categories.Wrong, says Hacker. Neither “Asian” nor “Hispanic” constitute racial groups. In the first place,the various peoples within those two categories have no common history, no commonidentity, and identify themselves primarily by their national origin – they regard themselves asJapanese, Korean, Cuban, Dominican and so forth.In the second place, members of these other groups are not subject to the samediscrimination that black Americans suffer. This is partly a matter of history. Althoughmembers of both groups experienced discrimination, neither Asian-Americans nor Hispanic-Americans have ever been slaves on American soil, avoiding the enduring stigma thatslavery impressed upon its victims. Asian-Americans and Hispanic-Americans find it mucheasier to “become white” in the sense of being accepted by, and assimilated to, the white3

majority population. Most Asian-Americans, for example, marry outside their own group. Inaddition, few whites object to the presence of Asian Americans in their neighborhoods, orobject to Asian-American children attending their schools. Most Hispanic-Americans eitherregard themselves as already white, or decline to make any racial choice. Before 1970, infact, the US census automatically classified them as “white.”The conclusion that Hacker draws is that the deepest and most relevant racial division is stillthe one between blacks and other Americans, and that it is sustained by racism.The “End of Racism” Thesis1. According to American conservatives, on the other hand, Hacker’s analysis is wrong onevery point – wrong in its fundamental argument and wrong in its presentation ofevidence. I label the conservative position the “end of racism” thesis, and I choose as itsbest example a book by Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White:One Nation, Indivisible (1999).• Direct rebuttal of Hacker’s “two nations” thesis. White racial prejudice is no longer amajor barrier to black advancement.• Election of blacks in white-majority districts• Rising incomes of blacks with education (e.g. women with university degrees)• No ceiling to black advancement (Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, OprahWinfrey)• Decline in racist attitudes as measured in opinion polls2. Disparities are not conclusive evidence of racial discrimination• Different racial/ethnic groups carve out occupational niches• Paucity of black elected officials is due to concentration of blacks in the liberal wing ofthe Democratic Party at a time of Republican dominance3. Black poverty mainly is caused by cultural deficiencies• High proportion of single-parent families• Lack of commitment to education• Drug use, criminal behavior4. Civil rights agenda of the 1960s is obsolete• Integrated schools are no panacea• Tactics of protest are inappropriate and counterproductive• Free markets, not government intervention, is the solutionThese ideas are endorsed by black conservatives such as Clarence Thomas and ThomasSowell.Conservative Political Climate Since 1980No doubt there is something to be said for both Hacker’s position and that of theThernstroms; both seem to be extreme interpretations. The problem with Hacker is that hisevidence is often anecdotal and his opinions subjective. The problems with the Thernstromsis that they are so committed to proving their thesis that they distort statistical evidence.4

The evidence of substantial black progress since the civil rights movement is overwhelming.Consider that before 1960:• Most blacks in the South could not vote• There were virtually no black elected officials in the South• Blacks were systematically excluded from entire sectors of the employment market(in 1960 a black person in the South could not even get a job driving a bus).• There were few black policemen, no black sheriffs or police chiefs.• The criminal justice system (judges, prosecutors) was all-white• Segregation laws excluded blacks from cafes, restaurants, hotels, parks, playgrounds• Blacks had separate and inferior schools and hospitals• Blacks were systematically disrespected by white people (never addressed by theirsurname; made to sit at the back of the bus).Yet there is also no doubt that the political climate since 1980 has adversely affected blacksin important ways. Progress for some has been accompanied by retrogression for others.1. Harsh criminal justice policies• “War on Drugs” has led to harsh mandatory sentences• “Three strikes and you’re out” laws• popularity of the death penalty• disfranchisement of convicted felons2 million people are now in America’s jails – the highest prison population in the world in bothabsolute and relative numbers. Almost half of these prisoners are African Americans.2. The Supreme Court is no longer encouraging school integration: we see the end of theBrown-era that began in 1954.• Segregated schools resulting from segregated housing patterns are not illegal.Housing segregation is a consequence of individual private decisions, notgovernment action• Even voluntary desegregation plans are illegal if based upon using race as a meansof assigning children to different schools• The most segregated school systems are to be found in northern states like NewYork and California• Public schools in the South are re-segregating.3. It is now illegal to deliberately create black-majority electoral districts. (Shaw v. Reno1994)Adam Fairclough is professor of American Studies at Leiden University5