Whitewashing Race

Bankruptcy of Virtuous Markets

Contemporary Racism
Review
Charles Tilly
Durable Inequality
Opportunity Hoarding
Herbert Blumer
Racism as a sense of group position
Derity and Myers
discrimination is endogenously linked to the
employment needs of non-Black males
Hughes
Racial attitudes have not changed much in the
last 50 years, since the integration of the University
of Alabama.

Chapter Questions
Why is there an income gap between
blacks and whites
How does deep poverty remain despite a
growing black middle class?

Objectives
Understand that there are tangible
outcomes to stereotypes
Apply Critical Race Theory to contemporary
conditions
Begin to understand contemporary racism
as a legacy of past racism through the
contemporary practice of job market
segregation.
Use the intellectual tools provided in this
lecture to create a counter-argument
against racial realists.
The Black Middle Class
The Black middle class made large gains between the 40s and 70s.
From 5-22% rise in white-collar employment.
Thernstroms believe that it was educational attainment sans
federal enforcement that facilitated these gains.
Conservative scholars believe that credentials led to
equitable jobs.
They feel as though education overcomes labor market
discrimination
They attribute economic disparities to choices and family
structure.
Black men not willing to accept low paying jobs and
matriarchal headed households are also assumed to be
at the forefront of social practices linked to racial
disparities by conservative thinkers.
Black womens refusal to get married and Black mens
choice of crime over legitimate employment are choices
that increase disparities.
This assessment ignores the impact of racism by
assuming that gains equal a decrease in
discrimination.

Shift In Work
Between the 40s and 70s, the majority of
Black workers shifted from sharecropping
work to manufacturing work.
There were still segregated practices in
manufacturing that limited created
disparate conditions in pay and treatment.
White workers were paid more and treated
better
What of the impact of
racism?
Conservative scholars conclude that
education overcomes labor market
discrimination.
Uneducated Black workers receive less play
than their White counterpart
Whites have historically controlled labor
markets, denying economic benefits to Blacks
so that they can be allocated to Whites.
This can be considered social affirmative
action.

Public Policy and Safety
Nets
Public policies helped to industrialize the
South and precipitated a wave of
northward migration in the 1950s and 1960s.
Economic policies between the Depression
and Civil Rights Movement helped to solidify
the White middle class just as much as
helping to create a Black middle class.

Gains and Pains
Gains and pains of economic growth are not
equally distributed.
Labor market discrimination is best understood as
a group phenomenon in which White workers
limit Black workers access to economic
opportunities and employers base their hiring
decisions on negative stereotypes and workers
racial identities.
Discrimination is linked to the needs of White
workers
When the economy is robust, racial competition
is minimal. Consider stop and frisk, pre-
employment discrimination, and the New-Jim
Crow in the Age of Obama
Pains of the Growing
Economy
Job ceilings affected Black, more than
White workers.
Between 1940 and 1970, Black employment
decreased relative to White employment.
Working aged Blacks were 3 times more likely
to be unemployed than Whites.
Black unemployment is substantially higher
than White unemployment regardless of
education, age, occupation or industry.

Pains
Blacks are twice as likely to be unemployed
in Post WWII predominantly in the
manufacturing industry and were excluded
from supervisory roles.
In 1966, Blacks amounted to only 13% of all
basic steel workers in America, holding 28%
of all menial jobs
48% of all Black men worked in the
manufacturing industry in the South in the 60s.
They were 23% of steel workers and 63% of
them were laborers.

Job Market
Discrimination
The job market was segregated both in the
North and in the South.
Despite educational gains, the wage gap
between Blacks and Whites rose between the 50s
and 60s from $5-8,000.
Northrup concludes that overt discriminatory
systems are few; instead, the subtle manipulation
of transfer rights, promotion criteria and type for
seniority unit result in observable inequalities.
(color-blind racism).
Blacks also did not make it into the skilled labor
force due to barring by predominantly White
unions that controlled apprenticeship programs.

Educational Gains
Educated Black workers were more vulnerable
to unemployment at that time.
Killingsworth found that unemployment ratios rose
for educated Blacks after WWII.
Baron and Hymer observe that the greatest wage
gaps in the 1950s were directly affected by
education noting that the gap is greater at
higher levels of education.
Baron and Hymer found that educated Black
managers and sales workers made 57 and 54
percent of what their white counterparts made
while operatives and laborers made 80 and 91
percent of what their white counterparts made.

A Break Through
A white-collar breakthrough happened between the
60s and 70s due to affirmative action policy and other
devices aimed at eliminating job ceilings and other
exclusionary practices.
***GAINS IN EDUCATION DID NOT PRODUCE ECONOMIC
GROWTH FOR BLACKS***PUBLIC SECTOR EMPLOYMENT
THROUGH AFFIRMATIVE ACTION PROGRAMS DID
In the 60s and 70s most of the high-ranking jobs that Blacks
were occupying were in the publically funded social
welfare and education agencies.
College educated Blacks were the main beneficiaries
Almost half of Black male and 3/5 of Black female
college graduates worked for the government.
The public sector was relatively less discriminatory than its
private counterpart.

Bootstraps
Even Horatio Algers theory was flawed in that
before WWII 2/3 of whites were living in poverty.
By 1960, that decreased to less than 1/5.
What does that mean for immigrant
comparisons?
Whites (naturalized or born citizens) were able to
take advantage of the federal government and
seniority systems in ways that Blacks were not.
The G.I. Bill is an example of the welfare upward
mobility granted to Whites, but not Blacks.
White Affirmative Action
Black veterans were serviced with traditional Negro
jobs, while White veterans entered professional
occupations through the United States Employment
Services.
Federal Housing Administration and Veterans
Administration used racist guidelines to assess credit
worthiness in terms of home mortgages. (financed
more than 1/3 of all post WWII home mortgages)
Devaluing Black Veterans credit worthiness also
worked to devalue Black neighborhoods relatively
to white ones.
Housing policies were used to sustain the racial
hierarchy through segregation and as a means to
facilitate White accumulation through Black
disaccumulation.

Home Ownership and
Wealth
Home ownership in the U.S. is the greatest
access point into wealth (income that
accumulates without work)
The disparity in the access to homeownership
allowed the White middle-class to expand and
accumulate wealth with government assistance
through the G.I. Bill, tax write offs, mortgage
interest deduction, veterans readjustment
benefits, and other various forms of public and
private assistance that worked to insulate the
newly found wealth after WWII.

Veteran Assistance
Programs/White Affirmative
Action
By 1955, Veterans had substantially higher incomes, more liquid
assets and were more likely to own homes than nonveterans
They had a disproportionate share of the highest paid and status
jobs and were more likely to be managers or skilled workers than
nonveterans.
21% of veterans were professionals and managers compared to
14% of nonveterans.
20% were skilled workers and foremen compared to 15% of
nonveterans.
Readjustment allowances in education, training, and
unemployment benefits added up to half of all veteran
expenditures during the peak years between 1947-51.
These allowances made it possible for veterans to be upwardly
mobile.
This was not the case for Blacks
Black Veterans
Black Veterans were primarily eligible for
Negro jobs after WWII rather than offered
employment with professional mobility.
Black veterans were not employed at the
same rate.
The disparity in distribution of resources was
most apparent in the South.
Although only 20% of veterans lived in the
South, 35% of benefits went to the South.

Veteran Benefits in the
South
The South paid high readjustment payments and
more than half of all Southern veterans were
enrolled in training and educational programs.
These benefits raised incomes in the South.
United States Employment Service forced Black
veterans into unskilled jobs.
Only 4% of all college students between 1946-47
were Black veterans.
Median income for Black college educated
veterans was 65% of that of their White
counterpart
Similarly, Black HS dropouts made 67% of what
their White counterpart made.

FHA and VA
Two programs financed almost 1/3 of all post-
WWII mortgages.
They used racist criteria to assess credit
worthiness.
Lenders were explicitly told to include restrictive
covenants to contracts and deeds.
Federal housing policies and veterans
readjustment benefits, tax write offs and similar
policies of public and private social protection
enabled the newly constructed White middle
class (a phenomenon that was reconstructed
after WWII) to accumulate wealth.

The 80s and Resulting
Ideologies
In the period after the 1970s, Blacks found white
collar employment, however taking a 13% pay-
cut.
Whites received a 36% pay increase after moving
to white-collar sales jobs after deindustrialization.
Deindustrialization in the 80s created
competition for scarce resources and anti-
affirmative action policy came as a result to
that.
Conservatives believe that the problem of the
poor is a moral one, not an economic one that
inevitably has nothing to do with race.
The Black Poverty rate dropped from 93% in
1940-about 30% in 1970s where it remains today.

Gains Were Not
Unilateral
Job market discrimination and forced residential
(and resource) segregation limit opportunities for
financial success.
Due to discrimination against Blacks, there is not
much financial gain in marriage thereby creating
a disincentive to marry. 26 % of married Black
women are below the poverty line, while 27% of
unmarried employed Black women are below
the poverty line.
Economic causes are more the cause of Black
poverty rather than family structure. (see page
89).
Economic resources typically consentrate
themselves where Whites rather than Blacks live.

Employment
Discrimination
Tilly et. al. found that 33% of employers felt
that Blacks had low motivation, 15% thought
they had limited communication and
interpersonal skills, and 20% thought that
they lacked the necessary training and
education. They also used racist
stereotypes to characterize inner-city
workers.
Employers are more likely to hire Whites than
blacks because of their racist beliefs.

Welfare
Johnson-era service programs helped to
redistribute wealth to the inner-cities, however
the great society was torn down by Nixon when
his administration changed that into block
grants: which had few restrictions and were
therefore re-routed to the middle class White
neighborhoods (see page 97).
Excluding transfers and before taxes, the 1990
Black Poverty rate was 39.7 and the white 17.7.
Combining governmental cash and non-cash
benefits and deducting taxes, the Black poverty
rate was 24.3 and White poverty rate was 9.

Because Blacks income is much lower,
unemployment rate is much higher due to
wage and employment discrimination,
middle-class safety net programs like
unemployment are relatively inaccessible.
Whites are more likely to get non-income
tested benefits, meaning that welfare better
serves Whites than Blacks (see pages 98-99).