Race and Ethnicity in America

SOCIOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Edited by John Iceland, Pennsylvania State University

This series introduces students to a range of sociological issues of broad interest in the United States today and addresses topics such as race, immigration, gender, the family, education, and social inequality. Each work has a similar structure and approach as follows:

• introduction to the topic’s importance in contemporary society

• overview of conceptual issues

• review of empirical research including demographic data

• cross-national comparisons

• discussion of policy debates

These course books highlight findings from current, rigorous research and include personal narratives to illustrate major themes in an accessible manner. The similarity in approach across the series allows instructors to assign them as a featured or supplementary book in various courses.

1. A Portrait of America: The Demographic Perspective, by John Iceland

2. Race and Ethnicity in America, by John Iceland

Race and Ethnicity in America

Race and Ethnicity in America

John Iceland

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2017 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Iceland, John, author.

Title: Race and ethnicity in America / John Iceland.

Other titles: Sociology in the 21st century (University of California Press); 2.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Series: Sociology in the 21st century ; 2 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016041577| ISBN 9780520286900 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520286924 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520961975 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Ethnicity—United States. | Equality—United States. | Minorities—United States—Social conditions.

Classification: LCC E184.A1 I124 2017 | DDC 305.800973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041577

Manufactured in the United States of America

26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

To my family

Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables

Acknowledgments

1. Conversations about Race

2. Race and Ethnicity and Causes of Inequality

3. Black-White Inequality

4. Hispanics and Asians

5. American Indians

6. The Multiracial Population

7. International Comparisons and Policy Debates

8. Conclusion: American Color Lines

Notes

References

Index

Illustrations and Tables

FIGURES

1. Racial and ethnic composition, using mutually exclusive groups

2. Racial and ethnic composition, where people can choose more than one group

3. Percentage of people who have completed high school, by race and ethnicity

4. Percentage of people who have completed college, by race and ethnicity

5. Percentage of blacks and whites in occupations, by gender

6. Poverty rates, by race and ethnicity

7. Racial and ethnic residential segregation

8. Mean isolation, by group

9. Percentage that is poor where whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians live

10. Life expectancy at birth, by race and Hispanic origin

11. Median household income, by race and ethnicity

12. Median net worth, by race and ethnicity

13. Cumulative risk of imprisonment, by race and ethnicity

14. Percentage of births to unmarried women, by race and Hispanic origin

15. American Indian population in the United States

16. American Indian socioeconomic status compared with other groups

17. Percentage of marriages that are interracial or interethnic

18. Percentage distribution of the two or more races population

19. Socioeconomic status of the multiracial population compared with other groups

20. Percentage of the population that is foreign-born in selected OECD countries

TABLES

1. Hispanic population by origin

2. Asian population by origin

3. Characteristics of Hispanics by national origin

4. Characteristics of Asians by national origin

5. Characteristics of Hispanics and Asians by nativity

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank a number of people who provided critical help for this book, often in the form of insightful reviews of draft chapters: Richard Alba, Jenifer Bratter, Carolyn Liebler, Kris Marsh, and Arthur Sakamoto. I would like to extend a special thanks to Naomi Schneider, executive editor at the University of California Press, who has provided, yet again, invaluable advice, direction, and support for this project.

Most of all, I would like to thank my wife, Jean, for her continuous love, support, and insight, and my children, Jakob and Mia. I would like to thank my parents, Harry and Joan, who provide wise counsel on all matters. Finally, I would like to thank all of my other family members, including Charles, Debbie, Matthew, Josh, Matt, John, Edna, and Athena.

1

Conversations about Race

Discussing racial issues can be difficult. It is often more challenging than talking about many other sociological topics—such as changes in the occupational distribution of American workers or regional migration patterns—because race can be very personal. For many Americans, race is an important part of their identity. It affects how they view themselves, their aspirations, and their communities. This is reflected in, for example, personal ads (single white female seeks . . .) and, institutionally, in the design of the decennial census questionnaire, which asks people about just a few basic characteristics, including age, gender, race, and ethnicity, and where and whom they live with. Also signifying the sensitivity of the topic, racial epithets have become among the most taboo terms to speak in public forums, as their use often results in immediate censure.

Race is important today because racial conflict has been an integral part of U.S. history. It was present during colonial times, in the form of the violent seizure of land from American Indians by white settlers and in the forcible importation of slaves from Africa. Waves of immigration from a variety of countries provided fresh opportunities for animosity and conflict, as new immigrants—such as the Irish and Italians—were often viewed with alarm and disdain, and certainly as racially inferior to U.S. natives of northern and western European stock. Nevertheless, over time all these groups have made critical contributions to the growth and vitality of the country’s economy and culture.

Even periods of apparent tranquility often veil simmering problems and resentments. These often flared in race riots, of which there have been many, including riots by Protestant nativists again Irish Catholic immigrants in New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston in the mid-nineteenth century, riots by whites against blacks in East Saint Louis, Atlanta, and Tulsa in the early twentieth century, riots by blacks across many cities in the Northeast and Midwest during the civil rights era in the 1960s, and, more recently, riots by blacks in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015.

Some might point to the years immediately after the election of Barack Obama in 2008 as a high point in terms of optimism about race relations. Indeed, one poll conducted in 2011 indicated that only 28 percent of the population reported that racism was a big problem in society, down from 41 percent in 1995. But a similar poll just a few years later, in 2015, indicated a sharp increase in saying it was a big problem, to 49 percent. African Americans were more likely to say that racism was a big problem in all years, but even among African Americans there was a drop in the percentage saying so between 1995 and 2011 from 68 percent to 50 percent, before a substantial increase to 66 percent in 2015.¹ What happened? Did racism get much worse from 2011 to 2015? Is racial inequality worse today than just a few years ago, not to mention more than two decades ago?

Rather than signifying a sharp increase in racism in the course of a few years, the change in public opinion in the early 2010s was likely an outgrowth of a series of widely covered incidents that exposed and symbolized simmering and unresolved issues reflecting deep-rooted racial inequality. In a country that was supposed to be on its way to being postracial, they indicated that there was much ground yet to be covered in reaching this goal. Among the incidents between 2011 and 2015 was the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year old African American, in 2012 by George Zimmerman, and Zimmerman’s subsequent acquittal. Zimmerman had invoked Florida’s Stand Your Ground law in his defense (this law authorizes a person to protect and defend his or her own life against threat or perceived threat). Then there were a series of African American fatalities at the hands of the police (often white officers) in 2014 and 2015 that received considerable attention, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Eric Garner in New York City; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; Freddie Gray in Baltimore; and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina. Many of the incidents were caught on camera and disseminated through both conventional and social media. These deaths spurred protests in numerous cities against police brutality, the overpolicing of black communities, and the poor treatment of blacks in the criminal justice system. These coalesced into the national Black Lives Matter movement, which protested racism, discrimination, and racial inequality in the United States.

Yet the public’s opinion on these issues remains divided. People have strong opinions about race and the source of inequalities, because, as noted earlier, race is personal. Thus, conversations about race can quickly devolve into aggressive or defensive discussions about culpability concerning the current state of affairs. Incidents that make the news are filtered through one’s beliefs, values, and experiences and take on broad symbolic meaning. In some sense, then, it may not altogether matter if a particular incident was sparked by racial animus or not; rather, it often represents a set of broader grievances.

For many, the deaths of African Americans at the hands of law enforcement represents the devaluation of black lives, and especially young black men, by the police—and by all Americans. That some of these men were involved in criminal activity before their confrontations with police (for example, Michael Brown stole cigarillos from a liquor store and Eric Garner was selling untaxed cigarettes on the street) symbolize to others black criminality, the disproportionate violence in black communities, and the lack of appreciation of the challenges police officers routinely face in enforcing policies not necessarily of their own making. The comment boards that accompany online news accounts of these incidents exemplify the discordance in conversations about race. For example, comments posted in response to an opinion piece about racism and police brutality by New York Times columnist Charles Blow spoke past one another. Here are but a couple of such comments (and note that these are relatively civil and articulate ones, in contrast to the often nonsensical and hateful ones easily accessed on various online forums and social media):

Mr. Blow is telling us to please, please think systemically about racial bias and injustice. It is possible to have racism without racists. In both NYCity and Ferguson black and brown men are routinely stopped under the guise of good police practice. The stop and frisk practices in NY were found to be racially biased in the round of protests around racial profiling in the late 1990s, but were continued and defended by multiple NYC administrations. If police are instructed to treat black and brown men as criminals until proven innocent, than [sic] this is what you get.

In contrast, we have another:

A movement for social justice organized around the championing of street criminals is doomed. And it should be doomed. Michael Brown was a drug-addled bully who, high on marijuana, committed a robbery, assaulted a store clerk half his size, and shortly thereafter grabbed for a cop’s gun while punching him twice in the face. Eric Garner was only marginally a criminal and one of the things so disturbing about his death is not his race but the pathos of someone dying for committing the most trivial of crimes. But he was also a 400 pound man who suffered from morbid obesity, chronic asthma, and a weak heart and who, consequently, should have known better than to have initiated a physical confrontation with several strong, young cops whose duty was to arrest him (which he did by resisting arrest).²

These conversations about race are typically not that productive, as people are not really listening to one another. Their arguments, more generally speaking, also are often not based on empirical evidence and instead rely on anecdotes.

The goal of this book is to address this issue by providing such an empirical overview of patterns and trends in racial and ethnic inequality, as well as their causes and consequences. In doing so, I offer a social scientific basis for much-needed conversations about race. Having this kind of basic information is critical to reduce the extent to which people talk past one another with their own alleged facts accompanying their own opinions. Then people can be honest about their interests and values and recognize that these also play a key role in informing their policy preferences. In short, we need to cut through the clutter of empirical falsehoods to have real substantive discussions about racial inequality in the United States and what to do about it.

Moving to the specifics of what this book covers, I begin with a discussion of the meaning of race and ethnicity in the United States. Here I emphasize that people’s views of race have also evolved over time, as some groups that were once outsiders (such as the Irish) eventually became insiders (white ethnics). In other words, race is a social construction, and how groups are defined varies over time and place. This is followed by a discussion of the theoretical approaches commonly used to understand patterns of inequality, including human and social capital theories, perspectives that highlight the role of culture, assimilation theory, and theories that emphasize the role of racism and discrimination.

The main empirical chapters in the book review patterns and trends in inequality over the past sixty years for different groups and focus on education, income, poverty, wealth, residential attainment, and health. I offer a thorough discussion of the findings in light of these theoretical debates. For example, do human capital differences explain black-white inequality, or are other factors more important? Are we seeing patterns consistent with assimilation among Hispanics and Asians? The data for these chapters come from various sources, with the most prominent being the Current Population Survey, the decennial census, and the American Community Survey. I often draw on previous studies that used these data and also illustrate the main themes with in-depth stories gathered from ethnographic work and topical news stories.

My overarching conclusion is that color lines have generally softened over time, as there has been some narrowing of differences across many indicators for many groups over the past sixty years. The legal edifice supporting racial and ethnic inequality was dismantled during the civil rights era. Public opinion likewise evolved, with many fewer Americans articulating prejudiced beliefs than in the past; tolerance of others is greatest among younger generations too. Consequently, there are many more minorities in positions of power and influence in the United States, and some groups, most notably Asians, have reached socioeconomic parity with whites.

Nevertheless, some deep-seated inequalities remain, with blacks, American Indians, and some Hispanics doing less well than others in the United States according to a number of indicators. Despite some progress over many decades, illustrated by the substantial growth of the black middle class, African Americans are still more likely to be poor, unemployed, and incarcerated and suffer from worse health than whites. The legacy of historical inequities and residential segregation plays a role, as African American families are more likely to be poor and thus have to contend with overcoming obstacles associated with poverty, such as living in neighborhoods with inferior schools and having fewer resources to invest in the advancement of their children than wealthier families. There is also evidence that contemporary discrimination, while less virulent and obvious than in the past, still hampers African American mobility, be it in the search for employment in the labor market or housing in better neighborhoods. Discriminatory practices by social institutions have played a role in reinforcing racial inequalities, such as in the form of predatory lenders targeting poor and minority home seekers or law enforcement profiling young African American men.

Educational attainment among African Americans has increased significantly but still lags behind that of whites and Asians, and this contributes to observed differences in other outcomes. High rates of single parenthood contribute to relatively high black poverty levels and the transmission of disadvantage to children, as does social disorganization in some low-income neighborhoods. Finally, growing income inequality more generally has provided a headwind in efforts to reduce racial and ethnic inequality. So while there has been a continuous growth of African Americans in managerial and professional occupations, for low-income African Americans—and all low-income Americans—there has been very little, if any, increase in their standards of living, especially in recent decades. This growth in relative deprivation has likely also contributed to the widespread political and social disaffection in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

The story for Hispanics and Asians is complicated by the fact that many are immigrants or the children of immigrants, meaning that we have to take into account how the process of adaptation and assimilation (or possible lack thereof) affects their patterns of socioeconomic achievement and health over time and across generations. On the whole, evidence suggests that Asians, while certainly not immune from hostility from others, are nevertheless faring well in higher education and the economy. This is strongly suggestive of successful incorporation. Hispanics are achieving a measure of upward socioeconomic mobility, though not parity, with whites. Whether this upward mobility among Hispanics eventually translates into equality remains to be seen, and it is likely that darker-skinned Hispanics may face many of the same discriminatory obstacles that blacks do. It is important to note that considering Asians and Hispanics as a whole obscures the diversity of experiences among constituent ethnic groups (e.g., Chinese, Filipinos, Asian Indians, Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans), so I discuss these within-group differences in the following chapters as well.

Research tends to indicate that American Indians on average fare relatively poorly across a number of outcomes, such as educational achievement and income. American Indians have been, and continue to be, marginalized in a number of ways, such as spatially and economically, that contribute to their disadvantaged position. A challenge when examining American Indian outcomes is that, because of the group’s relatively small population, less data are available about them in nationally representative surveys than for most other groups. Moreover, it is difficult to gauge the change in outcomes over time among American Indians because of changing patterns of self-identification among people with some American Indian ancestry.

There is considerable interest in the growing multiracial population in the United States. I examine patterns of self-identification among people with mixed-ethnic origins and whether the socioeconomic and health outcomes among multiracial groups resemble one ethnic origin more than the other, or if they fall somewhere in between. Finally, racial and ethnic inequality is not just a U.S. phenomenon; this is a problem confronting ethnically diverse countries around the globe. I compare the United States mainly to multiracial peer countries, such as rich countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,