Race in the Schools: Perpetuating White Dominance? 9781626374812

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RACE IN THE SCHOOLS

RACE IN THE SCHOOLS Perpetuating White Dominance?

Judith R. Blau with Elizabeth Stearns and collaborators Jenifer Hamil-Luker Nathan Hamilton Lyle V. Jones Vicki Lamb Steve Lippmann Stephanie Moller Lisa Pellerin

LYN N E RIENNER PUBLISHERS

B O U L D E R . L O N D O N

Paperback edition published in the United States of America in 2004 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU Published in hardcover in 2003. © 2003 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved ISBN 1-58826-333-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) Printed and bound in the United States of America

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The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5

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To Charles V. Willie Steadfast in his conviction that pluralism is the essence of fairness and quality schooling

CONTENTS

List of Tables and Figures

ix

Preface

xiii

1 The Study: Theory and Methods

1

2 Economic Inequalities and Moral Fences

21

3 Locating Difference

47

4 Encountering Character

79

5 Getting into Trouble

97

6 Tracking the Curricula

133

7 Social Learning

159

8 Going to College

177

9 Conclusion

203

Bibliography Index About the Book

217 229 237

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TABLES AND FIGURES

Tables 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 5.1a 5.1b 5.1c 5.2a 5.2b 5.2c 5.2d 5.2e 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

Educational Values, by Black and White Students Educational Aspirations, by Black and White Students Importance of Success, by Black and White Students Importance of Future Relationships, by Black and White Students Percentage of Black and White Seniors Who Rate Social Responsibilities as Extremely Important Integrity Scale and Baseline Controls (Definitions) Means for Integrity Scale for Race and Ethnic Group Additional Control Factors Used (Definitions) Means for Integrity Scale, Adjusted by Factors Multiple Classification Analysis GIT Scales, Race/Ethnicity, and Individual-Level Independent Variables Means and Standard Deviations of Student-Level Variables ANOVA Estimates of Variance for Outcomes HLM Between-Neighborhood Model for GIT Scales HLM Estimates on Unengaged Friends HLM Estimates on Unprepared for Class HLM Estimates on Cutting Classes HLM Estimates on Discipline Problems HLM Estimates on Substance Use Means and Standard Deviations, Interracial Friendliness ANOVA Estimates for Interracial Friendliness HLM Coefficients of School Effects, Interracial Friendliness Within-School Slopes and Intercepts, Interracial Friendliness ix

58 61 65 67 70 84 85 88 90 91 102 122 122 122 123 124 125 126 127 138 138 139 141

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6.5 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7

Tables and Figures

Factors Used in Correspondence Analyses Means and Standard Deviations, Gain Analysis HLM Coefficients, Within-School Models of Gains ANOVA Estimates for Gains HLM Estimates of Effects on Predictors of Gains Means on Importance of Education, Black and White Students Means on Importance of Education, Low, Middle, and High Scorers Means and Standard Deviations for Variables Used in Hierarchical Analyses Individual-Level Coefficients for Becoming a PSI Student HLM Regressions on Becoming a PSI Student Logistic Regressions of One-Year, Associate's, and BA Programs Logistic Regression of Becoming a PSI Student, with Class Rank

148 164 166 168 168 182 183 186 187 190 193 196

Figures

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6

Mean Income for White and Black Male Workers, 1970-2000 Unemployment Rates for White and Black Males, 1972-2001 Earnings Disparities, 1970-1988 Percentage of Whites and Blacks with High School Degrees, 1940-1999 Percentage of Black and White High School Graduates in College, 1976-1999 Probability of Having Been Retained in Elementary School White and Black Students' Residential Distributions by Composition of Neighborhood Race and Ethnic Differences on GIT Scales Relationships Between Neighborhood Diversity and GIT Means Relationships Between Neighborhood Consolidated Inequality and GIT Means Relationships Between Neighborhood Poverty and GIT Means Effects of Low and High Diversity on Cutting Classes Effects of Low and High Consolidated Inequality on Unengaged Friends

33 34 36 39 41 56 73 104 110 111 112 115 117

Tables and Figures

5.7 5.8 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 7.1 8.1 8.2

Effects of Low and High Consolidated Inequality on Substance Use Other Effects of Low and High Poverty Interracial Friendliness by Diversity and Enrollment Size Interracial Friendliness by White/Nonwhite and Low/ High Track Correspondence Analysis, Excluding Arts, with All Labels Correspondence Analysis, Excluding Arts, Suppressing Most Labels Correspondence Analysis: Performing Arts Correspondence Analysis: Musical Arts Correspondence Analysis: Studio Arts Effects of Consolidated Inequality on Average Gain Scores Probability of Becoming a Student at a PSI Probability of Becoming a Bachelor's Student

xi

118 120 140 143 149 150 151 152 153 170 189 195

PREFACE

Race is powerful in contemporary America in the phenomenological sense; the meanings people attach to race and racial differences pervade everyday life, shape social action, and are a dynamic component of interpersonal relations. It is precisely because of its phenomenological power that the study of race simultaneously opens up some doors for our understanding of American society and closes other doors. That is, the sheer phenomenological or subjective power of the categories of race and ethnicity—especially, black and white—means that we can unravel many puzzles when we take these categories into account, including, for example, how economic inequalities are patterned. Yet these categories bedevil our communications because the language categories we use—black, African American, white, Caucasian—are conflated with many meanings that we collectively, individually, and autobiographically attach to them. It may not be possible to overcome this perplexing dilemma, but it helps if we are self-reflective and self-critical and place contemporary racial relations into a historical context. Whites have advantages and privileges about which they are often unaware, as they are also often unaware of processes whereby racial advantage and privilege are reproduced over time and over social space, that is, from one situation to another and from one social institution to another. In this book, the result of more than a decade of research, I inquire about the significance of racial and ethnic differences for the members of a cohort of American adolescents who began high school in 1990 and were in their mid-20s in 2000. I framed the research questions mostly to compare black and white students because black-white relations are most emblematic of the complexities involving intergroup relations in the United States. Racial constructions and practices are by no means constant, and American institutions and normative structures that affect racial practices are also dynamic. The youth in the study grew up during the transition from an industrial society into what is sometimes termed the postindustrial society

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Preface

or the New Economy. This transition also accompanied great changes in intergroup relations and intergroup perceptions. I draw conclusions from the results of quantitative analyses using large datasets for adolescents, schools, and neighborhoods. An advantage offered by such analyses is that they allow rigorous, systematic comparisons and hypotheses testing, but the price can be that conceptual richness is sealed off by the formality of the analytical techniques that these data require. To overcome this problem, I have drawn extensively from the work of ethnographers and theorists to give the reader interpretative opportunities and to create open-ended conceptual possibilities for the important comparisons I make. My main focus, again, is on the complicated comparison involving whites and blacks, but many analyses include Asians and Latinos as well. The research is based on analyses of data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study ( N E L S ) and its metropolitan companion, the High School Effectiveness Study ( H S E S ) , which were designed and carried out by the U.S. Department of Education. The N E L S is widely used by researchers because of the high quality of the design of its questionnaires and the data collection procedures and also its breadth and scope. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the research methods. Chapter 2 summarizes my argument about how contemporary racism is deeply embedded in an ideology that is acceptable to white Americans, making racism difficult to overcome. In Chapters 3 through 5 , 1 inquire about race and ethnic differences in various respects, including in educational values (Chapter 3, "Locating Difference"), in integrity and honesty (Chapter 4, "Encountering Character"), and in delinquency (Chapter 5, "Getting into Trouble"). Chapter 6 ("Tracking the Curricula") examines the ways that school structures promote or impair interracial relations; Chapter 7 is about gains on social studies tests ( " S o c i a l Learning") and the final analytical chapter ("Going to College") presents an analysis of black and white probabilities of pursuing education past high school. A premise of this book is that liberalism, a core component of the American historical experience, culture, and institutions, has evolved over recent decades into a decidedly selfish neoliberalism that has altered the nature of racism and racialization. Liberalism has become an ideology, a defense used by white Americans to maintain their dominance. However, social values are never static, and I argue that neoliberalism, which accompanied the brief transition from an industrial society to postindustrialism, is not compatible with contemporary economic and social conditions. The New Economy encourages less hierarchical authority but more contingency, informality, and in-group preferences. Therefore, existing racial privileges and inequalities are easily reproduced and reinforced. This premise informs the study, but the results help to support it. The analyses reveal that white American youths are caught in these contradictions and that they are themselves harmed by white

Preface

xv

liberalism, just as the ideology of liberalism more obviously harms youths of color. Without practical support, no ideological construction can be expected to last. For this reason, it is not implausible to assume that American institutions will become more democratic, representative, and pluralistic. My optimism is in part grounded in my teaching experiences and the great changes I have observed among white students over the past decade or so. They are working hard and earnestly and, in collaboration with their brothers and sisters of color, understanding and undoing racial barriers. The research was carried out under the umbrella of a training program, Researching Adolescent Pathways ( R A P ) . I was exceedingly fortunate to have an excellent team of graduate and postdoctoral students who worked with me on the data analyses. In the initial stages of RAP, I worked with Rory McVeigh and Ken Land on a study of junior colleges and black student outcomes. Then Vicki Lamb, Lisa Pellerin, and I began using multilevel analysis to study contextual effects on adolescent outcomes, which became useful for many of the analyses presented in this book. When Vicki accepted a research position at Duke University and Lisa a teaching position at B a l l State University, Elizabeth Stearns took over most of the responsibility for data analysis. Other students who participated on the larger project include Berhane Araia, John Hipp, Tracy Holloway, Keri Iyall, Natalie Spring, and, as a postdoctoral student, Gladys Mutangandura. More directly involved in data analyses for book chapters were Nathan Hamilton, who carried out much of the statistical analyses in Chapter 5, and Steve Lippmann, who carried out the analyses reported in Chapter 6. He also helped with the descriptive analyses reported in Chapter 3, as did Jenifer Hamil-Luker and Stephanie Moller. Lyle V. Jones, a psychometrician affiliated with my university's psychology department, contributed immensely to the project through his superior knowledge of the Department of Education's datasets and variable construction. Chapters 4 through 8 are collaborative. Elizabeth in particular devoted considerable time to the project from 1998 to 2 0 0 1 as a graduate research assistant, and then from 2 0 0 1 to 2 0 0 3 as a postdoctoral fellow while she was also affiliated with the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University. Elizabeth helped to coordinate the final analyses as I began to write the book. Throughout, I distinguish between myself ( " I " ) as author and research director, and all of us ( " w e " ) who participated in decisions about measurement and statistical modeling. The computer work was completed by student researchers. This research received funding over six years from a variety of funding agencies. I am extremely grateful for support from the Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the American Educational Research Association. Living in one of Chicago's most impoverished ghettos ("the other side o f the Midway"), later a black middle-class community (after "it had

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Preface

tipped"), and participating in an integration project in Chicago's South Side provided me with a range of experiences in black communities that whites rarely have. In one frightening incident, when national guardsmen mistakenly assumed I was a black resident, I had a moment's experience with cruel, raw, racial hatred. I am aware that such experiences provided an incentive for me to do this research and no doubt helped to shape the research questions. Participating in classes and seminars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in which I was the only white person, has been invaluable; nonwhite undergraduates have openly shared their experiences and feelings with me, for which I am grateful. William (Sandy) Darity and Henry Frierson provided me with opportunities to teach in the university's summer Minority Undergraduate Research Assistant Program (MURAP). Students shared with me their humiliating experiences with discrimination, racism, and racial profiling, but they also shared with me the value of wit, irony, and solidarities when coping with such humiliation. Graduate students reflected less about race as a lived experience and more within a scholarly discourse. For sharing their ideas with me, I thank John Dye, Nate French, Ellington Graves, Chandra Guinn, Alison Roberts, and Demetrius Semien. In particular, I thank Keri Iyall, whose insights about the cultural rights of indigenous groups were helpful to me when considering other American minorities. Most especially, I am grateful for the support and encouragement of my colleague Rachel Rosenfeld. We had common research interests in education and inequality. She was also a friend, and her death last year was a great loss to me. Sociology of education is populated with many good citizens who promote the development of the field as well as provide support to those who work in it. I especially want to thank the following: Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Claudia Buchmann, Roslyn Mickelson, Jeannie Murdoch, Rubén Rumbaut, Barbara Schneider, Larry Suter, Charles Thompson, Kenneth Dodge, and the other members of the Duke-UNC Spencer Consortium, as well as Joseph E. Schwartz, a dear friend who was always generous when I asked him for statistical advice. I am also grateful to staff members in the Department of Education, especially Ralph Lee and Jeffrey Owings. I feel especially fortunate having Karolyn Tyson as a colleague. Drawing on observations in her school studies, and interviews with children, adolescents, and teachers, Karolyn was generous with her time and ideas. I am indebted to her for reflections and frank comments. Edward Reeves and Carol Wright provided valuable comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript and I thank them for their astute and insightful criticisms. Shea Farrell's professionalism and efficiency with manuscript preparation is gratefully acknowledged. As we have transitioned together over the years from DOS to Windows, Pine to Netscape, and from unzipped to zipped documents, she has

Preface

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been the better and more accomplished teammate, patient when I have lost and misnamed files, and correcting my botched formatting. The entire process of manuscript preparation and revision went extraordinarily well, and for this I thank Bridget Julian, Lynne Rienner, Lesli Athanasoulis, and most especially, Alan McClare. He was my coach, adviser, and support team all rolled into one. I experienced some difficulty plunging into writing this book during the summer of 2002, and were it not for my commitments to the graduate students who had carried out the analyses, I may not have completed it. Peter, my husband of, as he would have put it, "just over one third and a third of a century," was hospitalized with pneumonia in late February and died midMarch. Together we had shared many summers when one of us was buried with a book project. We took it for granted that both would share the same isolation and that social life—theater, concerts, travel, even eating out— would come to a standstill until the manuscript was completed. Over drinks and dinner, the one not immersed in writing was responsible for updating the other about the world outside, that is, domestic and international news, and the one who was writing would sketch out what was on the schedule for the next day. No chapter left the house without at least some rewriting in response to the other's criticisms. Still, writing this book I had a cheerleading team: my daughters, Reva and Pammy, my sister, Merilee, and my father, Harold. Although they were not underfoot, they approved the progress and were very poor critics. Charles V. Willie's reflections on youth and development and his writings in the fields of race, education, families, and communities played a major role in my deciding to carry out this research. He stresses the idea that it takes a team to prepare and educate young people. Parents, mostly, but also teachers, neighbors, siblings, and kin are the members of that team and together, much by way of example, they instill among youths a deep respect for the dignity of others and the understanding that it is difference that makes sharing and reciprocity possible. With great admiration for Dr. Willie and in appreciation for his wisdom about matters of race and schooling, I dedicate this book to him.

I THE STUDY: THEORY A N D METHODS

Demographically, the United States is a multiracial and multiethnic society, but it is not a pluralistic one: white Americans have not easily accommodated the nation's growing population diversity. Achieving a robust civil society is always challenging, but it is particularly so when economically advantaged and politically dominant groups hedge on their responsibility to be inclusive. Excluded groups include Native Americans and Latinos, whose ancestors occupied territory in North America before whites arrived, and African Americans, descendents of whites' slaves. With increasing immigration from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, white Americans should be reflective about how to help advance pluralism and representative institutions. Extraordinary economic inequalities between whites and nonwhites and the spatial isolation of whites present major obstacles. Both impede intercultural exchanges and the achievement of social equality. So long as whites see themselves as the criterion group that others must emulate, pluralism will be impossible to attain. I recognize that white—or any other—cultural identity is not singular. There is a great fluidity of social identities and roles. Many values are widely shared among different groups, and there is considerable overlap in group interests, tastes, and conventions. Nevertheless, dominant social, governmental, economic, and political institutions are neither pluralistic nor inclusive in any genuine sense. Instead, these institutions are racialized settings and hierarchies that reproduce white advantage. To the extent that this is the case, it harms individuals, communities, and social relations. My main purpose is to inquire about features of white culture by studying differences between white and other adolescents in the context of their schools and neighborhoods. My general conclusion is that whites' cultural dominance harms white adolescents as well as—more obviously—harming adolescents of color. This book is organized around topics that are central I

2

Roce in the Schools

in schooling and important in young people's lives, including attitudes about integrity and cheating, behavioral problems ("getting into trouble"), interracial relations, learning (primarily social learning, but also learning in mathematics, science, and reading), and going to college. To study these topics, I selected two datasets developed by the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES): the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) and its metropolitan supplement, the High School Effectiveness Study (HSES). 1 A main reason I selected NELS is because it is so highly regarded by researchers for its scope and quality, and HSES provides unique opportunities for research inquiry about adolescents who live in the inner cities and suburbs of highly diverse metropolitan communities. Both datasets allow linkage with school data and geocoded community data to analyze social contexts. An interesting feature of these data is that they provide opportunities for studying a sample of youngsters who were born about a decade after Congress affirmed blacks' legal rights under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Social and legal turmoil marked the ensuing decades and created a climate of conflict in schools and neighborhoods and, no doubt, confusion for many children and adolescents. The ink was barely dry on the congressional act when opponents of school integration prevailed and resegregation of schools increased in the 1970s.2 Thus, members of this cohort were familiar with blacks' legal protections, but they also experienced the backlash of resegregation, white flight, and the intensification of the private school movement. They were also growing up during the incipient stages of what we now refer to variously as the postindustrial economy, the New Economy, or the global economy. The economic transformations of the 1970s and the 1980s had dramatic consequences for their parents' employment and their families' level of economic security and directly affected the NELS students themselves. Under the conditions of this new economy, it became virtually imperative to complete high school and acquire some advanced training or education. The decline of industry and the expansion of the service sector were accompanied by an intensification of academic credentialism that was consistent with other meritocratic trends in the United States, such as the greater emphasis on testing of achievement and aptitude. A drawback of these datasets, at least for my purposes, is that they were designed not so much to study race and ethnic and cultural differences as to study individual variation in educational outcomes and the extent to which variation depended on characteristics of families, teachers, and schools. This, however, turned out to be useful. The empirical data and study design put constraints on my assumptions and speculations about adolescents' experiences with race and how they constructed their racial identities. I could not overtheorize about the differences between whites

The Study: Theory and Methods

3

and others when the empirical results told me that my hunches and hypotheses were wrong, and I could not push for certain conclusions when the analytical findings did not justify them. My theoretical assumptions were evolving as I laid out the analytical problems on which we were working, and because I and the other members of the research team were situated within a paradigmatic subspecialty—the sociology of education—I had to position my assumptions about culture within that subspecialty. Fortunately, there is a rich ethnographic literature based on studies of youth, schooling, and families that was immensely helpful in my thinking about the cultural significance of racial differences. Moreover, new theory on liberalism and pluralism helped to provide a conceptual framework for the analyses we were doing. In the remainder of this chapter, I introduce the scaffolding of this conceptual framework and describe the datasets and some of the methodological approaches that we adopted for these analyses.

Difference and Race For Americans, realities of cultural difference seem distant, like something college students discover in study-abroad programs or in the Peace Corps. Cultural differences are cloaked in a discourse of the advantaged and disadvantaged, of the privileged and the underprivileged, and more recently, of the foreigner or immigrant and the American. My objective in this project was to find differences—not disparities or distinctions—between the advantaged and disadvantaged and to determine how these differences are relevant for educational aspirations and attitudes about school and attending college. The paradigmatic division in the United States, as many authors have stressed, is the one between blacks and whites, and I believe that once white Americans come to understand this division they will learn how to overcome their role in sustaining it. This requires a new understanding about working with others to achieve a more pluralistic society. Euro-Americans and African Americans share a complex historical experience in which Euro-Americans have been the oppressors and African Americans the oppressed. In our times, African Americans, compared with EuroAmericans, have less adequate health care, are inadequately represented in government, live in underserved communities, are often charged more by banks and lending institutions, and receive less fair treatment in the criminal justice system. Whites for the most part know that these racial disparities exist. Accounts of them are presented in college social science courses and documented in newspapers and television programs. Whites frequently express the view that these inequalities will disappear once blacks embrace white

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values and act like whites. This response, as Immanuel Wallerstein and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva suggest, is rooted in the long-standing liberal tradition that emphasizes that society is an aggregation of individuals and purports that the same rules and conventions apply equally to all.3 Liberalism cannot easily accommodate cultural diversity and group differences. It is instead a quest for rights for individuals as detached individuals, and does not concern itself with individuals' rights to identity, group membership, and social roots. Whites who consider themselves liberals repudiate racism— or they do if they are consistent—but nevertheless may believe that blacks, and often Latinos and Native Americans, do not appropriately relate to dominant white institutions. I do not wish to imply an unintended essentialism. Race has no biological or genetic basis; this is the conclusion of scientists who worked on the Human Genome Project and is the official position of the American Sociological Association. 4 I agree with the understanding that prevails in U.S. sociology that race is a powerful social construction that has far-reaching consequences for inequalities of all kinds. De-essentializing race is important because essentialism is the basis of oppression and racialism. According to Kwame Anthony Appiah, racialism is the belief "that there are heritable characteristics possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all of the members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with members of any other races." 5 Paradoxically, however, from a social science perspective racialism will be overcome only when we recognize how it is relevant for understanding existing racial differences in social, cultural, economic, health, and other outcomes. In that sense, I believe that we must acknowledge race, just as we do gender, as an ideologically contested social construction. This is a prime vehicle for progressive social change. Therefore, the repudiation of essentialism does not preclude the view that there are differences between black and white culture owing to blacks' and whites' different structural positions and blacks' ongoing historical struggle to achieve equality. Oppression has real consequences both for oppressed people and for the oppressors. One of the most astute observers of the dynamics and effects of oppression in the United States was W. E. B. Du Bois. Writing a century ago and drawing on his training in Berlin, Du Bois described the phenomenological and experiential aspects of racial oppression. 6 To explain the distinctive experience of being black in the United States, Du Bois used the metaphor of "the veil" and described how blacks experience "twoness." His rich conceptualizations are difficult to summarize, but my own interpretation of the veil is that it is the symbol and objectification of the exclusion of blacks from white society. The veil is also a screen that whites cannot easily penetrate and that therefore shields black

The Study: Theory and Methods

5

culture. Du Bois describes this culture in various ways, drawing from his understanding that the black experience includes the qualities of idealism, faith, collective struggle, and high aspirations. My interpretation of Du Bois's concept of twoness is that blacks learn white culture in order to protect themselves and to navigate in white society while participating in their own communities and social institutions.7 On the other hand, whites' privileges constrict their own ability to perceive the ominous aspects of racialized power, and this impairs their consciousness of the full range of human experience. One of the earliest writers to consider the complexities of whites' moral quandary in the United States was Alexis de Tocqueville. Writing after his 1831 visit to the United States, he contended that the "calamity" white Americans would face after the abolition of slavery would be racial prejudice of a very high order that would be exceedingly difficult to cure.8 Race relations and racism in the United States have many layers of complexity. I started this study with the objective of understanding how a pluralistic civil society and multicultural public spaces can emerge that reflect the dynamic demographic composition of the nation. The Euro-centered and Western biases that dominated Americans' views during earlier periods of high immigration, around 1880 to 1910, made it possible to sustain Anglo-dominated social institutions. Germans, Norwegians, Italians, Russians, and others privatized their cultures and participated in public life as white Americans as they assimilated into work organizations, political life, and communities.

Liberalism Along with the slave trade and colonization, the nascent political and social doctrine of liberalism developed in England and other European nations. This doctrine accompanied slavery in the United States. Yet it was primarily in the United States that political and social strands of liberalism became confounded with ideas about ownership and economic rights, which in turn laid the foundations for tenacious racism and a racial hierarchy. Why was this so? Two general interpretations emphasizing the importance of ideas and ideology address this puzzle. The first is that the Hobbesian version of liberalism prevailed over the Lockean version in the nineteenth century. More specifically, economic rights became central in early industrial capitalism, and in a crude sense liberalism became the cover of legitimacy for colonists and slaveholders. According to this interpretation, it was the economic interests of colonists and slave owners, and therefore the economic interests of nations as well, that helped to legitimize a doctrine of white supremacy. This interpretation stresses that liberalism is a doctrine about economic rights.9 The other interpretation draws on the Lockean conception of liberalism that prevailed in political theory in the late eighteenth century; it stresses

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Race in the Schools

the social dimensions of rights. Specifically, this conception is about the importance of individualism, universalism, rationality, and reason. While it did not justify white supremacy, it did assume that those who were "underdeveloped" would have to emulate and adopt the ways of "developed" people. 10 This liberal doctrine about universalism, rationality, and reason, which predated U.S. independence from England, is most clearly articulated in the Bill of Rights and has recently been infused with the individualistic ethos of late capitalism. The doctrine is now under strain as the peoples of new nations, freed from colonial rule, are finding that their own cultural and social identities are not those of Europeans or Americans, and as the expansion of capitalism brings on frighteningly high levels of economic inequality throughout the world. Accompanying these shifts are intense scrutiny of the term underdeveloped and increasing criticism of the ruthless exploitation of labor by multinational firms in countries on the periphery of advanced capitalism. Whites in the United States interrogate and judge others from their own perspective, unaware that others may not share that perspective. Whites fail to be reflective about the privileges they enjoy, the power they possess, the entitlements they claim, and the extent to which their institutions dominate others. The suggestion that whites routinely oppress others is at odds with white Americans' conception of themselves as being tolerant of the underprivileged and with their pride in the nation's historical experiences with the assimilation of immigrants. However, white Americans fail the test when it comes to people of color, especially American blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans. The national story about tolerance and assimilation is an account mostly about European immigrants, and even then the story is more coherent when the Catholic Irish, Sicilians, Muslims, and some other groups are excluded from the narrative. Racist thinking rests on a ludicrous contradiction. Racists believe that blacks do not strive to achieve, but they criticize blacks who do strive to achieve. They contend that blacks do not have initiative and do not apply themselves, but they treat blacks as though they are not ready for responsibility and react as though assertive blacks are uppity and do not know their place. Black adolescents with whom I have talked describe the strategies they deliberately use to give the impression that they are neither undermotivated nor overmotivated, that they strive neither too little nor too much. As a result of instabilities in the economy and high rates of immigration, rapid changes are occurring in the United States. Among white college students with whom I discussed race and racial differences, there was greater reflectivity compared with even a decade ago, but also considerable confusion. I can draw only on anecdotes to describe this change, however, as the surveys have not yet been carried out to support the observations I have made about my discussions with students on college campuses.

The Study: Theory and

Methods

7

The Study in Historical Context This book is about the cohort of young people mostly born in 1974 and completing high school in 1992. As I was doing this research from the late 1990s through 2002, I devoted considerable effort to reconstruct my own experiences with college students in this cohort, as well as with slightly younger and older students. Teaching at Hunter College, New York University, and the State University of New York in Albany in the 1980s, I was aware of the stark differences between Hunter students and those at the other two schools. Economic struggles facing the Hunter students took precedence over racial differences, although being beautiful and black was as important as being determined and female. At NYU and Albany, middle-class black students did not articulate, at least in my classes, anything about having distinctive identities, and middle-class white students considered themselves color blind, something about which I have more to say in Chapter 2. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, black students began to sit at the front of the class, lead off in discussions, and outnumber white students in my office hours. These were the years in which Black Studies, African American Studies, and African Studies programs were beginning to mature. On the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina (UNC), and no doubt elsewhere, these programs provided marvelous intellectual opportunities for our black students and greatly enhanced their confidence. And this was about the time that many of the NELS seniors were starting college. Blacks, and stigmatized minorities generally, must negotiate dominant institutions and learn the mainstream culture. It is, therefore, socially and psychologically important for black adolescents to protect their own culture and to nurture those aspects of that culture that fit them especially well. For example, it is important for black adolescents in high school and college to learn about the beauty and distinctiveness of gospel and other music of the black church, to encounter the complex tradition of contemporary black literature and its roots, to keep up with the rapid changes in urban black music, and to reaffirm African styles of dress and coiffure. By the early 1990s black culture, especially music, slang, and stylized mannerisms, had begun to be cool, and many white adolescents, puzzled perhaps as to why black culture was considered subordinate by white adults, began imitating black styles—from hip-hop to handshakes, from the prison-pants look to dreadlocks and Malcolm X watch fobs. Many white parents, teachers, and school administrators became alarmed, concluding that white youth were under the "bad influence" of black youth. The consequences of these perceptions, in the aggregate, fueled the school-choice, private-school, and homeschooling movements and accelerated the rate of white segregation. Had more white and black youth had an opportunity to work out cross-cultural understandings during this period, U.S. public culture today might be more vibrant and civil than it is.

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Race in the Schools

Some educators began to recognize that U.S. schooling was becoming increasingly impoverished as schools and neighborhoods became highly segregated and U.S. culture was polarized. There was growing concern in some communities and schools that racial polarization was becoming alarmingly high, and this led to a variety of experiments to counteract it. Many reform experiments of the 1990s remain a story as yet untold. 11 These experiments included the establishment of community-school partnerships, charter schools, magnet high schools in large cities, and integrated learning environments in predominately black and minority neighborhoods. Although these programs helped to promote multicultural curricula and opportunities for interracial contact, they failed to generally promote intercultural pluralism, at least on any broad scale. College students sometimes discuss with me the discontinuities between their experiences in high schools with student bodies that were separate-though-integrated (as distinct from separate-and-nonintegrated) and their experiences as young adults in university settings. White and black students who attended multiracial schools, even those with a multicultural emphasis, describe the lack of genuine intergroup contact, particularly in large schools in which elaborate tracking systems kept racial groups mostly separate. At an early fall orientation camp, I talked with a white college freshman who said that because he had grown up in a mostly white and Asian suburb of a large southern city and had attended white elementary schools, he had chosen to attend the city's downtown magnet school instead of another school closer to his home that was predominately white. However, he said, his classes were so segregated because of tracking policies that he had few close contacts with black students and no black friends. He had decided to attend UNC because of its reputation as a good university for both blacks and whites. Although he is unusually articulate, this student is not entirely atypical of white students these days. While poverty, disadvantage, and low achievement remain largely color coded in the United States, in the South and in the nation as a whole white students are increasingly searching for more varied expressions of culture. For this reason, race figures into many class discussions and into campus life generally these days. White students are searching for schools with students of ethnicities other than their own, and this, I believe, will help to promote a more pluralistic and openly democratic society, as well as to liberate white students from the bondage of late-twentieth-century liberalism. Some remarkable class discussions in recent years indicate to me that black-white relations are dynamic and that increasingly students wish to explore issues related to racial identities as well as racial differences. Students in one of my classes put on an outdoor campus performance of Mitchell Duneier's Sidewalk,12 an ethnographic account of black male street

The Study: Theory and Methods

9

vendors and panhandlers in New York City. We dressed our parts, and some panhandled or vended for UNICEF, while others harassed the panhandlers. As it turned out, many black students chose white parts—police officers, business people, and residents—and white, Middle Eastern, and Asian students took black parts. With expert coaching, an East Indian student who had grown up in Liberia mastered a black Brooklyn dialect. With a few props, including an oversized coat and cap, this student might easily have been taken by a casual observer as a New York City panhandler. A southern African American student who had been mostly responsible for coordinating the behind-the-scenes activities for the improvised performance played the role of Mitch Duneier, the ethnographer-sociologist-author. He did so with extraordinary savoir faire while also giving "stage directions" whenever the performance began to stall a little. At the next class meeting, one student volunteered to facilitate the class discussion about the performance and what students had gotten out of it. During that discussion a white student who had played a black role remarked how difficult it must be to maintain dignity and humanness while working the streets. A black student who had played the part of a white policeman remarked about the strangeness of "being white" and bossing around "whitey"—namely, whites miming homeless blacks. Collectively, we had turned a corner, although it is true that not everyone had made the turn. When a white student in another class of mine remarked that "Mexicans farmworkers don't use initiative," several white students responded at once with disapproval. Not only did they disagree with his summarily judgmental statement, but they countered his premise with details: the working and living conditions of farmworkers, the problems of seasonal employment, the financial value of workers' remittance payments, the health hazards of pesticides, the lack of medical care, and the effects of migratory work on family lives. I only had to glance at the student I considered the wisest in the class—a returning college student, a somewhat older black male—to confirm my hunch about this exchange. A big grin was on his face, and up went his thumb in the air for me to see. I knew that we had turned another corner, although it is true that—as in the earlier semester— not everyone had made the turn. I had seen extraordinary transformations take place in our southern university in the past decade. A motive for doing this research was to gain leverage on the positive changes I had seen among many of our white college students during the previous few years. However, I do not wish to gloss over the problems. White students exclude black students from informal networks and groups that serve such purposes as sharing information. Whites have traditionally monopolized such information in predominately white universities, including lore about courses and student government. Of course, black students also exclude white students from their networks and groups, but it is more about preserving their

10

Race in the Schools

autonomy than about monopolizing resources that other students would wish to access. White students interrupt black students in classroom discussions, and sometimes a white student says things to a black student that conveys the belief that the black student comes from a poor or femaleheaded household. Such generalizations and assumptions are insulting, and outside of class black students deal with it by drawing on a repertoire of jokes. Teaching during the summer in classes with all nonwhite students helped immensely to raise my awareness of the healthy yet careful and perceptive ways students of color respond to slights and insults. It is not easy. In Chapter 2 , 1 will develop the themes about historical change and liberalism that I have briefly mentioned here, and in Chapter 3 , 1 will draw on other studies as well as our own to provide some descriptive background for the queries that are posed in the remaining chapters. In the next sections of this chapter, I will describe the data and the research procedures, particularly stressing the usefulness of contextual or multilevel analysis. Though multilevel analysis is intuitively clear to social scientists because of our long-standing interest in the macro-micro intersections in social life, it is not everyone's cup of tea. Like statistical methods in general, it is analytical, abstracting dimensions of variation from social reality and processes, and it therefore denies holistic realism to social life and processes. However, quantitative research that uses statistical methodologies is valuable, if not essential, for testing the insights of ethnographers through the use of large samples and controlling for factors that offer alternative explanations for what is being examined or explained. Before I review the major statistical procedures used in this study and summarize the datasets, I will clarify how ethnographic and quantitative research traditions helped to motivate both this study as a whole and the division of responsibilities within the research team that composed Researching Adolescent Pathways (RAP).

Research Questions, Research Process, and Collaboration Quantitative and Ethnographic Research Traditions and the Role of Critical Theory Some research topics lend themselves particularly well to interactive research processes that require the interests and skills of both ethnographers and quantitative researchers. The reason I started the present study, under the umbrella of RAP, was that I was challenged by the idea of bridging two research traditions that flourished in the mid-1990s but were relatively independent of one another. Sociology of education is an older, established

The Study: Theory and Methods

field in the United States and has recently benefited from, and indeed has advanced, contextual analyses using multilevel statistical techniques. Contextual analysis is ideally suited to examining how outcomes of students are affected by their school and classroom characteristics when taking into account their family and other background characteristics. Maureen T. Hallinan and her collaborators and Alan C. Kerckhoff provided the early conceptual foundations for subsequent statistical advances in multilevel analysis by focusing on school organization and its impact on student outcomes. 13 This sociology of education tradition best lends itself to analyzing individual-level and school-level characteristics. Study of race and ethnicity was vitalized in the 1990s and accompanied much interest in the role of cultural differences in families and communities. Some of this work on youth was carried out by anthropologists who combined empirical analyses with qualitative techniques, such as Carola and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, and some was pursued by sociologists who used large samples and combined description with analytical techniques, such as Rubén G. Rumbaut, Alejandro Portes, and Grace Kao and her collaborators.14 Working within both traditions in this study of adolescents poses two interesting challenges. First, cultural orientations and identities are difficult to incorporate into statistical analyses. The values of the variable race or ethnicity are easy to use as dichotomies or categorical variables in, for example, regression analyses, but they are difficult to employ within an interpretative framework that retains the rigorous assumptions of statistical analysis. Second, while ethnographic researchers recognize the importance of controlling for confounding variables in, say, a study of adolescent outcomes, social class, and English-language skills, it is difficult to take many of them into account simultaneously because of the small numbers of cases in most such ethnographic studies. However, this ethnographic tradition is, in my view, every bit as rigorous as quantitative research because of the care ethnographic researchers take to ensure that their conclusions are robust. Ethnographers' studies require rigorous logic and thoughtfulness about possible unexplored bias. Critical theory is different from the quantitative and qualitative traditions in that it starts with the premise that the social sciences, just as the humanities, are rooted in a system of meanings and values. It is often the case, according to critical theorists, that we fail to examine what these meanings and values are. That is, we uncritically accept our own identities—our gender, race, class, and citizenship—and privilege these identities in our work without scrutiny or reflection. Sociology has long had a lively critical tradition that stressed the viciousness of elites and the exercise of class power, represented in, for example, the works of Karl Marx, C. Wright Mills, and Robert and Helen Lynd. Currently, the heirs of the critical tradition

12

Race in the Schools

in sociology focus especially on the harms of white privilege and power, and they include, for example, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Joe R. Feagin and Hernán Vera, David Wellman, Walda Katz-Fishman, Patricia Hill Collins, and Howard Winant. Critical race theory encourages whites to reflect on their privileges and advantages. For this research I chose to carry out quantitative analyses while incorporating the insights and conclusions of ethnographic, qualitative researchers into the study design and asking questions from the perspective of critical theory.

Contextual Analysis, Data, Measurement Issues Contextual

Analysis

In many analyses of sociological problems, individuals are considered as embedded in contexts—as members of groups, organizations, or networks, or as people living with others in the same locale or community. From an analytical point of view, a context is relevant only when many share it. For example, the extended family, peer group, and summer camp may all be important contexts for a young person, but to study these contexts one needs a sufficient number of members to study whether the context affects everyone the same way or affects some individuals differently than others. In formal models, researchers study within-group (individual) variation, between-group (contextual) variation, and the extent to which there are cross-level effects and to which social context affects all individuals or only some. Analyzing cross-level effects helps us to distinguish the unconditional effects of social context from the conditional effects that impact only some individuals because of their particular characteristics. A simple example is that extremely hot weather may be unhealthy for all people, but especially for tiny babies and older people. More generally, contextual analysis (also called multilevel or hierarchical level modeling) focuses on the effects of the social context on individual outcomes. 15 Researchers in the sociology of education have made considerable use of multilevel analyses because schools and residential neighborhoods are unambiguous contexts for young people. 16 For interested readers, there are some excellent descriptions of the procedures and techniques of multilevel analysis, sometimes referred to as hierarchical level models (HLM). 17 To give a hypothetical example, let us suppose that we wish to do a study of students' differing involvement in various activities on college campuses. To do this study we would need to have a representative sample of colleges and within each a representative sample of students. At the context level, the mean level of involvement, hypothetically, probably relates to college size, whether the college is located in a city or not, and, say,

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13

whether it is a private or a public college. At the individual level, it is plausible that the level of involvement depends on gender, race, and ethnicity, whether the student attends school full-time or part-time, and, say, the student's social class. The procedural steps for a multilevel analysis are as follows: (1) obtain an individual-level estimate predicting student involvement from regressions within each school, using individual-level variables; (2) obtain a context-level estimate predicting mean level of student involvement across all colleges, using college-level variables; (3) obtain an estimate of the extent to which individual-level involvement is predicted by individual-level variables and by school-level variables, independently of each other; and (4) obtain estimates of the extent to which school-level characteristics affect individuals' levels of involvement differently, depending on individuals' own characteristics. The final step (4) is termed "slopes as outcomes" or "cross-level interactions." It is the most interesting step because it addresses the question of whether contextual effects are uniform for different individuals. In my example, we might learn that part-time students are less involved in school activities generally but that the larger the college is, the greater the effect of being a part-time student. We might also learn that average involvement is higher in private schools, but that students with high socioeconomic backgrounds are more involved than others are, regardless of whether the school is private or public. Although the principles of contextual analyses are hardly new, the main technical problem that has faced researchers has been that of estimating standard errors within the contextual unit. The elements within a unit typically have yielded a distribution with underestimated standard errors, and it is only within the last decade or so that computer programs have been developed to correct for this problem. We used the HLM program created by Anthony S. Bryk and Stephen W. Raudenbush. 18 Analysts make certain decisions depending on their assumptions, and it is useful to review here the assumptions that I made. In our work, we standardized the contextual variables so that their values were each measured in standard deviation units from their mean. This allowed for the size of the effects to be comparable across the context measures. 19 Another set of decisions involved how we would make comparisons for individuals and interpret individual-level effects. In some instances we did not adjust individual values, but left them to vary as uncentered variables. In other applications, it was appropriate to compare individuals to the entire sample or to compare individuals within each given context. When the comparison was within the entire sample, we used population centering; that is, we measured the degree of deviation from the grand mean. When the comparison was within the context, we used group centering; that is, we measured the degree of deviation from the context (school or neighborhood) mean.

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Race in the Schools

When we wanted to evaluate the interaction between contextual variables and individual variables, we used a random intercept, one with a randomly distributed error term, so that the intercept varied across schools or neighborhoods. When we were not interested in these interactions or when a random intercept would cause instabilities, we left the intercept as fixed, with no error term, so that the intercept was constant across all schools. For example, if we were interested in how school size affects individuals' involvement in campus activities depending on their ethnicity, we would treat ethnicity as having a random intercept. If we were not interested in this, we gained statistical flexibility by defining ethnicity as a fixed variable. Another issue relates to the number of individual respondents required within a context to regard the contextual unit as one that has sufficient internal variation. Following conventional guidelines we included a case if there were at least five respondents. 20 We used sample weights at each of the individual and context levels, according to standard practice in education research, 21 except in multilevel nonlinear (binomial and multinomial) analyses, in which second-level data cannot be weighted according to the sample design. 22 My solution for nonlinear analyses was to use equal-weighted individual and school data and to replicate individual-level analyses with weighted data. To reassure ourselves that the results were robust, we carried out one-level and two-level analyses when possible with both weighted and unweighted data. With such large numbers of cases we found that the results led to identical conclusions across both specifications. A final general point is that the measurement solution for some complex indicators, such as population diversity, is principal components analysis. This involves carrying out a factor analysis on all of the items considered as measures of the indicator. Such a factor analysis produces factors, or dimensions, and what is essentially a set of correlations—loadings— between each item and each factor. 23 For the purpose of illustration, let us suppose a researcher was interested in measuring healthy lifestyle choices. The researcher could carry out a principal components analysis of items that reflect healthy and unhealthy lifestyle choices. Hypothetically, the first dimension may be defined by items, such as eating vegetables and drinking milk, that have high positive loadings and by items, such as eating pizza and drinking Coke, that have high negative loadings. That means that people who eat vegetables also tend to drink milk, and those who eat pizza also tend to drink Coke. This then defines our first dimension. But independent of the first dimension there may be yet a second or even more dimensions. Let us say we find the makings of a second dimension for which walking daily has a high positive loading and watching television has a high negative loading. If my hunches are correct, then, healthy lifestyle choices are not cut of one cloth, but actually involve two relatively

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15

independent dimensions. One dimension has to do with eating and the other has to do with exercise. To obtain a score for each individual on the first dimension, the healthy eating scale, the individual's response on each item is multiplied by the item's loading on the first dimension. These product values are then added up. The same procedure applied to all of the items for the second dimension would yield individual scores on a scale for healthy exercise lifestyle. In other words, the conceptual framework helps to select the items that go into the scale, and the principal components analysis both yields an empirical indication of whether the concept can be operationalized and provides the procedures for assigning scores. Other statistical techniques were also employed, including multiple classification analysis (a specialized form of variance analysis) and correspondence analysis. I describe them when they are introduced in given chapters. Data

The first wave or base year of NELS data collection was in 1988, with follow-ups of the same students in 1990, 1992, and 1994. That is, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) surveyed youths in their eighth, tenth, and twelfth grades, and two years after their scheduled high school graduation. (Another follow-up occurred in 2000 but was not included in our analyses.) NCES designed the study as a nationally representative sample of eighth graders, and the study initially included 26,000 students. In the base year, there were questionnaires for students, teachers, parents, and school principals. Teachers and school administrators were resurveyed in the 1990 and 1992 waves, and parents in 1992. The HSES sample comprises the sample in the first follow-up in 1990 of eighth-grade NELS students who attended schools in the thirty largest U.S. metropolitan areas. In order to achieve sufficient intraschool variability, this sample was augmented with a random sample of students from the same schools. Like NELS, HSES has data for students, teachers, and school administrators from 1990 and 1992, and parents from 1992. The student and school weights that we used permit generalizing to the 1990 tenth graders who completed twelfth grade in the schools of these thirty metropolitan areas. This sampling frame is advantageous for particular analytical problems because the dataset includes sufficiently large numbers of immigrant, black, and white students from the largest U.S. central cities and their suburbs. Metropolitan schools are ideal for many of the study's purposes because of the range of neighborhood conditions, from very affluent to very poor, and from racially integrated to highly segregated. That is, there is great within- and betweencontext variation at the level of both the school and the neighborhood.

16

Race in the Schools

Sources of school data for NELS and HSES include surveys of principals that accompanied the student surveys, as well as the NCES's Common Core of Data,24 an annual compilation of information on all schools and a useful supplement to the information in the principals' survey. NELS is a public-use dataset, but linkage to schools and neighborhoods requires a license through the U.S. Department of Education. HSES is available only as a licensed dataset. Schools are social contexts for adolescents, and so are neighborhoods. Depending on the question being asked, we used schools or neighborhoods and sometimes both in multilevel analyses. There is a long-standing debate about how to define the boundaries of communities and neighborhoods. 25 Ideally, of course, we would be able to combine ecological data for neighborhoods from secondary sources with additional data from primary sources—namely, residents' accounts of how they define and characterize their neighborhoods—but this is prohibitive for any large-scale survey. The conventional solution is to use the smallest geographical entity possible. Given the option between school zip codes (provided by the NCES) and counties, we used zip codes to define communities. We extracted zip code level data from 1990 census files, acquiring a precise match with the 1990 data on high school tenth graders. 26 The black-white comparisons for the NELS students are comparable to those reported by others using nationally representative samples. The average income of black households is about half that of white households, 27 and the black students live in poorer communities. 28 Black students also have educational disadvantages in that they attend larger schools, on average, compared with white students (the mean enrollments for the NELS sample are 1,352 and 1,084, respectively), and they attend schools with more poor students (the mean percentages in the NELS sample on the freelunch program are 32.7 and 15.1, respectively). In our research we took into account the contrast between growing up in a poor household and growing up in a nonpoor household—that is, socioeconomic status (SES), the focus of much social science research. 29 We also used indicators of poverty in our analyses at the neighborhood level. However, we discovered early that the contrasts between the poor and affluent at the neighborhood level are not always the most important ones; we singled out the significance of two additional neighborhood dimensions. One dimension was the extent to which neighborhoods are diverse or relatively uniform in terms of racial and ethnic composition. Diversity offers unique advantages over homogeneity in that it provides cosmopolitan opportunities for youngsters. Although we can imagine that most parents, white and black, believe that young children feel more secure in neighborhoods where other people are similar to themselves, we will show that teenagers benefit from cross-cultural challenges. The second dimension

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17

was the extent to which race and economic resources confound one another at the neighborhood level, that is, the extent to which whites have superior resources and blacks and other nonwhite groups do not. Measurement Issues Although we used many variables in only one or a few analyses, we used other variables in many or all of them. Race and ethnicity, as reported by students, are categorized as follows: Asian or Pacific Islander; Hispanic; Black, not of Hispanic origin; and White, not of Hispanic origin. There were too few American Indians and Alaskan natives to yield stable estimates so we excluded them from analyses of individual groups, but they were included in counts of the total number of students. Often we excluded Asians and Pacific Islanders and Hispanics as individual groups because these groups are highly heterogeneous. There are conventions, although fuzzy, that suggest that African American and black are synonyms, as are Hispanic and Latino. Race and ethnic categories are far from clear and unambiguous when we recognize that race is itself a social construction and all people have mixed race and ethnic backgrounds. For example, some Latinos have mostly African origins whereas others have mostly indigenous or Spanish origins, and virtually all African Americans have white ancestors. However, in social settings, a person's account of his or her own race or ethnic identity tends to be stable and reflect his or her own assessments as well as others' perceptions. In other words, these distinctions are clear and unambiguous in the sense that students use categories that are socially constructed and institutionalized. The decision about whether or not to contrast poor with nonpoor households, that is, whether to use socioeconomic status, was often based on precedents in the literature pertaining to a specific analytical problem, and sometimes on the results of our exploratory analyses. Socioeconomic status is a continuous variable that the NCES constructs as a composite of male and female parents' or guardians' occupation and education 30 and family income. If the students' parents did not complete a parental questionnaire, the NCES substituted student data to construct the SES composite. In this case, the NCES used a ranking of material items present in the household in place of the measure of family income. When we use poor versus nonpoor, the contrast is between values in the lowest quartile of the SES measure and values in the top three quartiles. At both the school and the neighborhood level, we were interested in racial and ethnic diversity. We employed the Gibbs-Martin Index, which is widely used in sociological applications. 31 It captures the degree of heterogeneity in a population when there is a set of mutually exclusive categories. Another measure that we used to describe neighborhood variation

18

Race in the Schools

is consolidated inequality, which captures the extent to which there are white-nonwhite inequalities in household resources. It matters considerably to adolescents whether they live in communities in which there are great white-nonwhite disparities in household resources or in communities in which there are few disparities. It matters in a different way, of course, to whites than it does to nonwhites. I define consolidated inequality in Chapter 5, and it is part of the analyses presented in Chapters 5 and 7. Before I present the results of our various analyses, it is necessary to ground my observations and assumptions in a larger historical and theoretical framework and to indicate how we tested them, at least in a preliminary way. This I do in Chapters 2 and 3.

Notes 1. National Center for Education Statistics, National Education Longitudinal Study (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 1988-1994), CD-ROM; National Center for Education Statistics, High School Effectiveness Study (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 1990-1992), CD-ROM. 2. Amy Stuart Wells and Robert L. Crain, Stepping over the Color Line (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997). 3. Immanuel Wallerstein, After Liberalism (New York: New Press, 1995); Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2001). 4. American Sociological Association, Task Force Report, "Importance of Collecting Data and Doing Scientific Research on Race," adopted by the ASA Council, August 2002. 5. Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Racisms," in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David T. Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1990), 4—5. 6. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1965 [1903]). 7. Judith R. Blau and Eric S. Brown, "Du Bois and Diasporic Identity: The Veil and the Unveiling Project," Sociological Theory 19 (2001): 219-233. 8. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), 357. 9. See Alan Pendleton Grimes, American Political Thought (New York: Henry Holt, 1955). 10. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein, (New York: The New Press, 2000). 11. See Jeffrey R. Henig, Richard C. Hula, Marion Orr, and Desiree S. Pedscleaux, The Color of School Reform (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1999). 12. Mitchell Duneier, Sidewalk (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). 13. Maureen T. Hallinan, ed., The Social Organization of Schools (New York: Plenum, 1987); Alan C. Kerckhoff, Diverging Pathways (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 14. Carola Suärez-Orozco and Marcelo Suärez-Orozco, Transformations: Migration, Family Life, and Achievement Motivation Among Hispanic Adolescents

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(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Rubén G. Rumbaut, "The Crucible Within: Ethnic Identity, Self-Esteem, and Segmented Assimilation Among Children of Immigrants," International Migration Review 28, no. 4 (1994): 748-794; Alejandro Portes, ed., The New Second Generation (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996); Grace Kao, Marta Tienda, and Barbara Schneider, "Racial and Ethnic Variation in Academic Performance," Research in Sociology of Education and Socialization 11 (1996): 263-297. 15. Valerie E. Lee, "Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling to Study Social Context: The Case of School Effects," Educational Psychologist 35, no. 2 (2000): 125-141; Valerie E. Lee and Anthony S. Bryk, "A Multilevel Model of the Social Distribution of High School Achievement," Sociology of Education 62 (1989): 172-192; Kenneth A. Frank, "Quantitative Methods for Studying Social Context in Multilevel and Through Interpersonal Relations," Review of Educational Research 23 (1998): 171-216; Anthony S. Bryk and Yeow Meng Thum, "The Effects of High School Organization on Dropping Out." American Education Research Journal 26, no. 3 (1989): 353-383. 16. Anthony S. Bryk and Stephen W. Raudenbush, Hierarchical Linear Models (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1992); Ita Kreft and Jan de Leeuw, Introducing Multilevel Modeling (London: Sage, 1998); Tom Snijders and Roel Bosker, Multilevel Analysis: An Introduction to Basic and Advanced Multilevel Modeling (London: Sage, 1999). 17. See Anthony S. Bryk, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Richard T. Congdon, HLM: Hierarchical Linear and Nonlinear Modeling with the HLM/2L and HLM/3L Programs (Chicago: Scientific Software International, 1996); Stephen W. Raudenbush, Anthony S. Bryk, Yuk Fail Cheong, and Richard T. Congdon Jr., HLM Manual (Lincolnwood, 111.: Scientific Software International, 2000). 18. Carolyn L. Arnold, "Methods, Plainly Speaking: An Introduction to Hierarchical Linear Models," Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development 25, no. 1 (1992): 58-90. 19. Valerie E. Lee, Todd K. Chow-Hoy, David K. Burkam, Douglas Geverdt, and Becky A. Smerdon, "Sector Differences in High School Course Taking," Sociology of Education 71 (1998): 314-335. 20. Weights are applied for the purpose of generalizing to the larger population, which in this study is the nation's eighth graders in 1988, and for HSES is the population of tenth graders in 1990 attending school in the thirty largest metropolitan areas. Nevertheless, weighting is somewhat controversial because of the possibility that sampling errors confound estimated effects; see Christopher Winship and Larry Radbill, "Sampling Weights and Regression Analysis," Sociological Methods and Research 23, no. 2 (1994): 230-257. 21. Guang Guo and Hongxin Zhao, "Multilevel Modeling for Binary Data," Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 441-462. 22. See George H. Dunteman, Principal Components Analysis (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1989). 23. National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data (Washington, D.C.: Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 1991), CD-ROM. 24. Scott Greer, "Urbanism Reconsidered: A Comparative Study of Local Areas in a Metropolis," American Sociological Review 21 (1956): 19-25. 25. The source of zip code data is the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Population and Housing, 1990: Summary Tape File 3B [data for zip codes] (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1991).

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26. The mean income for NELS black households is $13,749; that for NELS white households is $27,500. This information is not available in HSES. Questions about household composition were phrased differently in the NELS and HSES surveys and are therefore difficult to compare. About equal percentages of black and white NELS students reported that they lived in a single-parent household, 14 percent for whites and 15 percent for blacks. HSES parents were asked about the number of adults in the household, and 16 percent of whites and 47 percent of blacks reported one adult in the household. These contrasts may be explained by the differences in the wording of the question, the sources of the answers, and actual differences between metropolitan households and those throughout the nation. 27. For the metropolitan HSES sample, the black and white means are significantly different on major indications (from the US census) of neighborhood disadvantage: percent unemployed, 8.8 and 4.9, respectively; percent single-parent families, 35.7 and 17.7; percent in poverty, 17.0 and 7.5; and per capita income, $13,478 and $19,132. However, blacks live in more diverse neighborhoods than whites. On leading indicators of neighborhood diversity, the means for blacks and whites are: percent of neighborhood residents foreign-born, 17.1 and 9.2, respectively; and percent bilingual adults, 17.8 and 11.1. The mean differences for the NELS sample are not as pronounced, but they are comparable. 28. For example, see Sheldon Danziger and Jane Waldfogel, ed., Securing the Future (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000). 29. In Chapter 6, we use biological parents. We discovered through replication that however measured, family structure, a control variable, had trivial effects on our dependent variables. 30. The equation for the Gibbs-Martin Index is 1 where the pi is the percent in each category; see Jack P. Gibbs and Walter T. Martin, "Urbanization, Technology, and the Division of Labor," American Sociological Review 26 (1962): 667-677.

ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES AND MORAL FENCES

Compared with nonwhite children, white children grow up with abundant opportunities and material advantages and have considerable freedom to enjoy their years of childhood. They generally have access to relatively good, if not excellent, schools with qualified teachers, up-to-date computer and science labs, enriched curricula, and career counseling and other services. These early educational opportunities prepare them for college, and white children anticipate having rewarding jobs and financial security. Of course, not all white children are equally privileged, but collectively they have great advantages over children of color. It is easy to make a persuasive case for the importance of greater equality of educational opportunities. Talent loss in the school years leads to talent loss in adulthood, and to limited access to productive employment, and these are both personal and societal harms. Good educational experiences in elementary and secondary schools usually lead to postsecondary training, a virtual necessity in the contemporary economy. Americans pride themselves on a national tradition of providing schooling opportunities for children from all class backgrounds—for children of economically disadvantaged homes as well as for children of middle-class and affluent homes. This is fair to individuals, and it is important for the vitality of a democratic society. However, owing to the character of racial stratification in the United States, the problem is not simply one of creating educational opportunities for the economically disadvantaged, but also one of creating educational opportunities for children of color. White Americans have difficulty understanding this challenge because they trace their own economic success to their personal efforts and often fail to understand the nature of entrenched institutional racism and the extent to which their skin color is responsible for their advantaged position. My thesis is not simply that racial practices harm youth of color; rather, it is that racial practices harm both white youth and youth of color. I consider a 21

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Race in the Schools

variety of consequences of such practices, including their effect on students' values and attitudes, behavioral problems, educational aspirations, and likelihood to enroll in college. I also consider the extent to which racial and ethnic diversity in schools and neighborhoods benefit youngsters. Considerable research has shown that when schools affirm the distinctive worth of children's racial and ethnic backgrounds, minority children's self-esteem and confidence is enhanced, thereby promoting their engagement with school.1 There is powerful evidence that multicultural education and diverse, pluralistic environments benefit nonwhite children. 2 The research findings presented in this book support that conclusion, but I also show that multicultural educational settings and pluralistic environments benefit white children as well. White youth, paradoxically, live in a precarious world. They are expected by their parents and relatives to "do better" than their brown and black classmates, and, indeed, the system works best for them. However, many white American youth recognize the contradictions that underlie racialized hierarchies and are themselves unsure whether or not they merit what they receive. Even if this assertion assumes too much about the moral conscience or social awareness of white adolescents, I assert that many white students are aware that students of color possess underrecognized and underrewarded talents and skills. Moreover, white teen culture reflects far more the rich textures, sounds, and images of diversity than do American schools. My general argument is that white and nonwhite students fare better in pluralistic educational settings than in monocultural ones. As philosopher Amy Gutmann encourages us to consider, greater pluralism in U.S. schools would advance a more inclusive democracy and enhance the quality of U.S. civil society.3

The Study Cohort The members of any age cohort have much in common because they experience the same major events and the same large-scale social, economic, and political transformations at the same time and at the same age. For example, all U.S. children who grew up during the Great Depression, regardless of differences among them, shared experiences of deprivation and frugality that affected their attitudes and perceptions throughout their adult lives. 4 Likewise, the youths of the cohort of 1974 share certain experiences, two of which are particularly notable. The first is the transition from the Old Economy to the New Economy that was part of the global economic restructuring of production and labor. It entailed massive changes in work

Economic Inequalities and Moral Fences

23

organization and communications technologies, and it led to the expansion of the service sector. Beginning in the early 1970s, this transition affected all U.S. households to some degree. The second shared experience is the transformation in black-white relations after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although the NELS children were born a decade later, they experienced the confusing attempts to implement civil rights legislation, notably affirmative action and busing and other efforts to integrate schools. During this era there was a shift in white American attitudes and values that was in part a response to the demands of the emerging economy and in part a response to the formalization of rights for African Americans.

Economic Transformation The New Economy saw plant closings, downsizing, mergers, and rapid technological change, and these, in turn, were responsible for massive layoffs, the stagnation of wages, and the deterioration of pension and benefit plans.5 It also entailed a dramatic increase in economic inequality. In the United States, the salaries and overall compensation of executives increased many times over while the take-home pay of most workers declined. Overall, the income of the top-earning 20 percent of Americans increased, and that of middle-income workers stagnated; the lowest-earning 20 percent of Americans experienced declining income and growing poverty. A disproportionate percentage of the growing number of poor people were black. Increases in earnings inequality were accompanied by even greater increases in the inequality of assets and wealth. In her analysis of the changing distribution of wealth in the last decades of the twentieth century, Lisa A. Keister uses separate indicators of net worth (assets) and financial worth (liquid assets) to estimate changes in wealth distribution in the United States over time. She describes the dramatically increased concentration of net worth and financial worth through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. By 1995, the top 20 percent of households owned nearly 84 percent of net worth and 93 percent of financial wealth, whereas the remaining 80 percent of households owned only 16 percent of net worth and 7 percent of financial wealth. 6 Elsewhere, Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro document the extent to which white households dominated in this dramatic increase in wealth. 7 The economic returns on education increased dramatically in the 1980s. In summing up the change between 1979 and 1989, Richard B. Freeman and Lawrence F. Katz reported that the pay differential between young males with a college degree and young males with a high school degree

24

Race in the Schools

increased 30 percent. In a typical large city in the late 1980s, a college graduate earned, on average, about double what a high school graduate earned. 8 Later I will compare earnings and educational attainment for blacks and whites, but the point I wish to make here is that these economic transformations created uncertainties for most U.S. families. With the dismantling of job ladders, company downsizing, and factory closings, traditional forms of worker solidarity declined and individual competitiveness increased. As workers lost their pension and benefit plans, there was growing unease about retirement and financial security. Parents, quite understandably, were especially eager that their children acquire the education that "good jobs" increasingly required. Perhaps an indicator of the overall toll these pressures had on whites was a dramatic upturn in rates of divorce among whites, accompanied by a tendency to delay marriage. 9 I suggest that economic and cultural factors have confounded effects, and together altered the dynamics of racial prejudice. During much of the 1970s and through the 1980s, as Barbara Ehrenreich describes, low- and middle-income whites had considerable anxiety that they would lose their jobs and fall into poverty. 10 Because poverty, like welfare, is racialized in the United States, whites consider it to be the plight of blacks, not of people of their own race. This anxiety expressed itself in many ways and perhaps most especially in vehement opposition to affirmative action programs and set-aside provisions for minority applicants to colleges and universities. Yet, in spite of whites' fears about "becoming poor like blacks," white poverty did not increase substantially during this period. Black poverty did. The 1964 Civil Rights Act had greatly raised the expectations and hopes of black Americans, but the economic transformations beginning in the same decade brought increasing poverty and economic declines that tragically undercut these expectations. In relative terms, white families did not experience great material declines, mostly because white mothers took jobs and white males worked longer hours. However, among low- and middie-income white families there was a perception that the boundary between themselves and traditionally poor blacks, which once was firm, had now become weak and porous. Therefore, I conclude, underlying the racializing processes associated with changes in the economy was whites' reification of white-black differences and racial categories. The Civil Rights Act had presumably eradicated the boundary between blacks and whites, but as whites became increasingly anxious over their own economic well-being, they engaged in moral fence building to further enhance differences between themselves and blacks in an effort to distance themselves from poverty. The group of white and nonwhite youngsters we studied grew up with special concerns about their education and a changing economy. During this time, a race-coded line between poor and nonpoor aggravated racism by whites against nonwhites.

Economic Inequalities and Moral Fences

25

Civil Rights A c t of 1964

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 affirmed the legal rights of blacks as individuals without undoing the inequalities of group membership. 11 That is, it prohibited discrimination in employment and made it illegal for public facilities, including public schools, to exclude people because of their race or skin color, as well as their gender and nationality. It prescribed the legal equality of individuals, but had no particular implications for the moral equality of groups. Whites, in turn, fashioned symbolic and moral fences between themselves and blacks. As the NELS children were growing up, adults denied they were racist while U.S. institutions, as Richard A. Wasserstrom stated, were "infected with racism." 12 To clarify this, I draw from critical race theory, and in particular from the writings of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, David Carroll Cochran, Andrew Kemohan, David T. Wellman, and Joe R. Feagin and Hernán Vera.13 Whereas old racism under Jim Crow was a relatively straightforward ideology about the superiority of whites that was justified by legal boundaries separating whites and blacks, in the post-civil rights period whites no longer have legal grounds on which to make distinctions between themselves and blacks. The new ideology that emerged was that of color-blindness, which involves the racialization of attributes that have nothing to do with race. It allows whites to say they are impartial about race while justifying their racist attitudes in terms of what they think black people tend to be like. 14 Racialization and color-blindness are compatible with traditional U.S. values relating to liberalism and thus can appear noncontradictory to whites.

Liberalism

In the U.S. context, modern liberalism, which has its roots in English and Continental doctrine and practice, places great emphasis on the value of free individual expression and the maintenance of social and political institutions that support personal freedoms. 15 Shifts in liberal thought during the twentieth century, initially accompanying the Great Depression, allowed for the development of greater state involvement in individuals' lives, but by the close of the century, there was a major shift back toward laissez-faire liberalism, which made it all that easier for racism to infect social institutions. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a liberal piece of legislation in that it was rooted in the long-standing Western political commitment to individual rights. Liberalism is by no means incompatible with the idea that there are natural inequalities and with the conception that some are more gifted than others. In a capitalist society, economic liberalism and political liberalism reinforce one another so that freedom to compete accompanies a belief in

26

Race in the Schools

the legitimacy of unequal outcomes. The moral standard of liberalism thus hinges on success, and whether it is a group or an individual that fails to succeed, the ensuing inequalities are considered fair and just. Liberalism entails much that is attractive from the perspective of individual human rights. In principle, the liberal ideal affirms the impartial and universalistic treatment of individuals. It is the belief that individuals ought to receive fair and equal treatment. However, as Iris Marion Young notes, the impartiality ideal of liberalism leads to the suppression of difference and provides those with power the basis on which to generalize from their own experience when making rules and moral evaluations. 16 At its core, liberalism is monoculturalist, and in the U.S. context it is a doctrine about assimilation. Because it centers attention on individual autonomy and freedom, liberal thought tends to support meritocratic principles: the conception of a person's moral worth depends on natural abilities, talents, and accomplishments, which justify unequal returns. The distributional processes that yield inequalities of wealth, income, and status can therefore be construed by many people as fair and just. Advantage amplifies inequality and inequality tends to reinforce advantage. Whites often consider this process impartial. Yet disadvantage has a black face to it. According to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, color-blind liberalism denies the relevance of racial differences and thereby fails to recognize the contradiction that the institutions it promotes are fashioned along the lines of white culture. It furthers the myth that U.S. institutions are the consequence of the autonomous efforts of individuals, rather than historically evolving arrangements in which particular interests play the dominant role. 17 I would also add that because social life became increasingly easy to analogize in competitive market terms, whites could legitimize superior occupational and earnings outcomes as being the consequences of many good personal choices. Thus the racialization of U.S. institutions accompanies the racialization of the boundary between poor people and others. Whites justify racial inequalities as therefore being fair while considering themselves to be blind to color. I depart somewhat from the cultural premises of critical race theory by contending that large-scale economic changes beginning in the 1970s played a role in the changing racial dynamics in the United States. While blacks were experiencing considerable overall losses, most whites failed to make overall gains and they experienced great anxieties about their jobs and careers during this period. Still, the initial economic advantages that whites enjoyed in the early 1970s, at the onset of these economic changes, allowed them considerable flexibility during the turbulent final decades of the twentieth century. In sum, the sources of contemporary racism are complex partly because they are an expression of whites' anxiety about the uncertainties of the New

Economic Inequalities and Moral

Fences

27

Economy. Anxious about their economic well-being, whites recast a seemingly benign set of foundational U.S. values centered on individual success, using evidence of that success—homeownership, a steady job, a college diploma—to support their assumptions and claims about their superior efforts and attitudes. Later in this chapter, I summarize some historical trends that have bearing on the changing nature of racial inequality. However, I first provide an overview of two influential twentieth-century social science contributions that, in my view, aggravated racism by reifying black and white differences in terms of the moral categories of liberalism. Then I consider the writings of William Julius Wilson, an African American sociologist, who, though many black intellectuals criticize him for trivializing racism, sensitizes our understanding of racism by historicizing the selective effects of economic restructuring on blacks and whites.

Twentieth-Century Liberal Social Science Three prominent social science contributions illustrate how liberal ideas evolved within the social sciences and influenced public policy on race in the last decades of the twentieth century. The first two, by James S. Coleman and by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, reflect the view that the United States ought be a single culture and that black assimilation is incomplete. The third is William Julius Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Wilson begins by agreeing with Moynihan that the black inner city is a "tangle of poverty,"18 but his explanation is an economic one, not a cultural one, as he shows that the economic restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s had particularly adverse consequences for urban black Americans. The contrast between Moynihan and Coleman, on the one hand, and Wilson, on the other, is helpful because their positions illustrate different aspects of the liberal perspective on racial inequality. Moynihan and Coleman asserted that blacks' cultural values impaired their assimilation, whereas Wilson appealed to the promises of civil rights legislation, namely those of equal opportunity and racial fairness. Moynihan's and Coleman's vision of blacks' assimilation persists in popular thought and provides whites with justification for exclusion and discrimination. Wilson's contribution and its implications are more complex. The Truly Disadvantaged clarified, as few other social science contributions did, the ways in which the New Economy systematically disadvantaged blacks. However, Wilson drew inferences about the cultural consequences of black poverty that differ little from those of Coleman and Moynihan. In support of his argument about the development of a cultural underclass, he asserted that poor blacks

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"develop behavioral norms that diverge from mainstream areas of life." 1 9 He gave racism short shrift. 20 The Liberal Defense of School Segregation

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated a survey to assess the "lack of availability of equal educational opportunities for individuals by reason of race, color, religion or national origin in public educational institutions." Congress commissioned sociologist James S. Coleman to carry out the survey, and he and his collaborators subsequently produced a report, Equality of Educational Opportunity, which came to be known simply as the Coleman Report. 21 Although the congressional mandate was to assess variation in schooling quality and opportunities for blacks and whites, Coleman and the members of his research team reframed the question to focus instead on variation in achievement, or "outputs." They concluded that racial variation in educational achievement was due not to differences in school practices, but rather to inadequate parenting. Coleman summarized the conclusions of the report in this way: "The sources of inequality of educational opportunity appear to lie first in the home itself and the cultural influences immediately surrounding the home; then they lie in the schools' ineffectiveness to free achievement from the impact of the home."22 In short, according to Coleman and his collaborators, the black family and the black community, not schools, were responsible for black children's slow progress. The Coleman Report concluded that differences in the schools that blacks and whites attended made virtually no difference for student outcomes. The report surprised courts and educators with its conclusion that blacks' schools were not inferior to whites' because there was abundant evidence that they were. The conclusion disappointed proponents of school integration and busing. It appalled civil rights advocates who had witnessed brutal racist practices in the South and increasing segregation in the North. The report was also controversial among statisticians, some of whom noted that the statistical analyses did not adequately separate family, community, and school effects. 2 3 As subsequent developments have shown, the methods used by Coleman and his colleagues were flawed. 2 4 Around the time that Congress commissioned the school report, Harvard professor of education Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor, analyzed 1960 census data on black and white households. His 1965 report, The Case for National Action: The Negro Family, became known as the Moynihan Report. His interpretation focused on the "pathology" of the black family, namely, the disproportionate number of female-headed households. His argument was that illegitimacy and female-headed households, combined with the fatalistic orientations of black mothers, helped to perpetuate poverty and joblessness. In

Economic Inequalities and Moral Fences

29

other words, like Coleman he alluded to a culture of poverty for which blacks were themselves responsible. "At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society," he wrote, "is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time." 25 As William Ryan noted, Moynihan blamed slum residents and not slum landlords, the unemployed and not employers who discriminated. He blamed mothers for their children's lack of school progress and not city governments that failed to provide adequate funding for schools in black neighborhoods. 26 Moynihan's own data, Andrew Billingsley pointed out, showed that 75 percent of all black families, the vast majority, were not female-headed. 27 Other studies yielded results that contradicted those reported by Moynihan. For example, Charles V. Willie found in his research that family instability was a better predictor of delinquency among whites, whereas economic insecurity played the greater role among blacks. 28 The press gave considerable coverage to Moynihan's official report but paid little attention to Moynihan's critics or to contradictory evidence. 29 Both Coleman and Moynihan contrasted mainstream white culture— with its individualistic achievement and performance orientation—with black culture and its deficiencies in these respects. Both problematized black culture and assumed that it would disappear as blacks drew more on white models. Although Coleman and Moynihan were criticized at the time for "blaming the victim," social scientists still draw to a certain extent on the same model, specifically citing characteristics of blacks' families and communities to account for why black children have lower achievement test scores and higher school dropout rates. By adopting voluntaristic premises, the liberal argument makes it seem that cultural values are a matter of choice and that there are good and bad choices. By adopting assimilationist premises, the liberal model makes assumptions about the moral worth of cultural values. In these respects, the Coleman and Moynihan studies provide textbook cases of how white liberals contended with racial inequalities by emphasizing that black culture was deficient, though remediable. The goal, according to Moynihan, was to "bring the Negro American to full and equal sharing in the responsibilities and rewards of citizenship." 30 The Liberal Account of Economic

Inequalities

Crucial in shaping a social science perspective and public discourse during the late 1970s and early 1980s were two books by William Julius Wilson. In The Declining Significance of Race (originally published in 1978) he contended that fundamental changes in race relations accompanied civil rights legislation and that there had been an important shift from "black oppression" to "economic class subordination." 31 He also suggested that

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economic transformations systematically disadvantaged blacks. In The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) he returned to the theme of class differences by focusing on the selective effects of deindustrialization—the initial stages of the New Economy—on urban blacks. For Wilson it was not racism but rather the larger structural forces of the national economy that accelerated the rise in black poverty, joblessness, and homelessness. 32 In the early decades of the twentieth century, blacks migrated from the rural South to northern cities to find jobs in precisely those urban industries that would close or go elsewhere beginning in the early 1970s. Wilson's 1987 book has had a major impact on all subsequent research on black poverty, and it continues to do so long after its publication. 33 Nevertheless, The Truly Disadvantaged was controversial. Wilson minimized the importance of racism and discrimination, undercut arguments for more radical transformation of U.S. institutions, and allowed little space in his economic analyses for recognizing black experiences. I believe racism plays a greater role than Wilson contended. I also suggest that what he described as pathologies, notably delinquency, crime, and out-of-wedlock births (or what one might consider early family formation), are normal responses of people who live in neighborhoods in which more than 40 percent of households are below the poverty line while poverty levels elsewhere in the city are trivial. However, his contributions to an understanding of the macroeconomic foundations of black-white inequalities are tremendously important, and I draw from his analyses in sections of this chapter. Wilson described the initial phases of structural dislocation caused by economic restructuring—the out-migration of industry from the United States, and especially from old industrial centers in the Northeast and Midwest—and the implications for the black and white labor markets. At about the time that sociologist Wilson wrote The Truly Disadvantaged, economists were beginning to investigate these dramatic economic dislocations nationwide 34 and, later, worldwide. 35 Wilson's distinctive contribution was to show how selective the effects of these dislocations were for black workers.

Racial Economic Inequalities Wilson attributed job loss among urban black males in the 1970s and early 1980s to the dramatic decline of manufacturing and other industries. Firms were relocating from high-wage communities in the Northeast and Midwest to low-wage communities in the South and overseas. It has since become clearer that this was not merely a glitch in the U.S. economy, but instead the beginning of a long process involving the larger global economy. The process became evident in the early 1970s with the collapse of the international

Economic

Inequalities

and Moral

Fences

31

financial regulatory system, the emergence of highly efficient technologies of production (outsourcing, subcontracting, just-in-time ordering, and other flexible production techniques), the development of new methods of coordinating the global labor force, and rapid advances in telecommunications. Production industries pursued cheap labor, and cheap labor was available off U.S. shores. In the United States, manufacturing dramatically declined and job growth occurred in the largely nonunion, low-wage service sector. Wages remained virtually stagnant from the early 1970s through the end of the century. White families maintained their standard of living through increases in female labor market participation and increases in the number of hours individuals worked. During this period there was also retrenchment in federal programs—notably Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), but also the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) and legal aid assistance programs—that had provided the most vulnerable with some protections. In the broadest sense, Wilson's hypothesis is that black workers were in the wrong place at the wrong time—working as unskilled laborers in metropolitan industrial establishments in the early 1970s. In my view, he underestimated the extent to which service-sector employers were discriminatory. Urban blacks, particularly males, were left without job opportunities at a time when the service sector was growing and the industrial sector was shrinking. And he minimized the role of racism generally. My supplementary argument is that although some whites became extremely rich during this period, most whites experienced job uncertainty and stagnant or declining earnings. Such uncertainties, combined with the rhetoric and the realities of intensified competition in labor markets, provided a platform for racism that was different from that in the earlier economy and in the years before the 1964 civil rights legislation. It was easier for whites to blame affirmative action policies for white job loss than to blame macroeconomic transformations, just as it was easier for whites to blame blacks for their moral failings than to critique emerging microeconomic practices. Thus, racism has a psychological component, as whites' displace their deep-seated anxieties about the changing economy. But racism also draws from the newly transformed liberal ideology. This liberal ideology, rooted in long-standing U.S. traditions about work and individual success, is increasingly fashioned by the neoliberal character of the marketplace. Neoliberalism stresses the importance of individual choices and win-or-lose outcomes and minimizes the importance of fair rules. Losers are considered deficient. With a focus on the NELS 1974 cohort, it is useful to compare the longterm trends in black and white incomes, unemployment, and education to see how people fared through this period of economic transition. My purpose

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is to examine the larger context that affected NELS children. The trend lines for economic indicators and educational attainment are especially useful because they reveal the overall contrasting experiences of black and white youth as they were growing up. They also provide a background for analyses I later present on social values and attitudes about education among black and white adolescents. Black and White Incomes

and

Unemployment

Figure 2.1 shows mean incomes in constant dollars for black and white yearround workers from 1970 to 2000. This is the period in which the New Economy was transforming U.S. labor markets and the individualistic logic of the post-civil rights era was unfolding. Mean income—unlike median income— increased over this period, largely because increasing incomes among the relatively few at the top of the income distribution had a strong effect on the mean. Especially in the 1990s the incomes of black professionals were growing, although not nearly as fast as those of white professionals.36 What is important to note, besides the increases in mean incomes, is the growing gap between white and black mean incomes. In 1970 this gap was $3,681, and three decades later, in 2000, it was $15,756. The gap grew at a steady pace. Taking five-year intervals, beginning with 1970, these dollar amounts are: $3,681, $4,887, $6,863, $8,980, $11,488, $12,420, and, as noted, nearly $16,000 in 2000. 37 For another perspective on black-white economic differences, we can examine unemployment rates. Following William Julius Wilson, I use rates for males. Figure 2.2 presents unemployment rates for the period of 19722001 for males twenty years of age and older. The shapes of the two curves tend to be similar since both respond to recessions and the periods of structural unemployment that economists attribute to plant closings and other sources of concentrated joblessness. However, black male unemployment rates always exceed those of white males, and modest increases in white male unemployment always accompany dramatic surges in black male unemployment. For example, in 1976 black male unemployment was twice that of whites, in 1983 it was three times greater, and in 1992 it was again twice as high. Of particular note is that the smallest gap was around 1975— before the New Economy had taken hold in most labor markets. Wilson's conclusions about the unprecedented levels of black male joblessness in the 1980s are evident in this longer time series. Earnings

Discrimination

To restate Wilson's core hypothesis simply: "Blacks were in the wrong place at the wrong time." That is, they worked in the industries in large

Economic Inequalities and Moral Fences

35

cities that were moving elsewhere. Wilson's argument hinges on the notion of such occupational and spatial mismatches. Others, notably William Goldsmith and Edward Blakely, and William Darity and Samuel Myers, contend that black job loss and earnings declines through the period of deindustrialization were not simply artifacts of spatial and occupational mismatches, but that employers actively discriminated against black workers. 38 There is an economic cost of being black. Goldsmith and Blakely estimate that, given workers with identical skills and education, a black worker earns about 20 percent less than a white worker. 39 During the late 1970s and the 1980s, there were also increases in intraracial inequalities. I draw from analyses carried out by Darity and Myers to show that the economic cost of being black fell most heavily on uneducated black males. 40 For the period between 1970 and 1988, Darity and Myers examine ratios of earnings for young (sixteen- to twenty-five-year-old) male workers using the following comparisons: white high school dropouts to white college graduates, black high school dropouts to white college graduates, and black high school dropouts to black college graduates. I have reproduced their results in Figure 2.3. The three ribbons represent the change in the ratios of annual earnings of uneducated workers to those of educated workers. In 1970, the ratio of annual earnings of high school dropouts to that of college graduates was more or less the same for all pairings. The ratio of earnings of dropouts to college graduates in all comparisons was about twenty-five cents for every dollar. At this early point in the time series, the structural changes in the economy were merely incipient. Once these structural changes gathered momentum, beginning around 1972, there were dramatic effects on labor markets, earnings, and employment. Figure 2.3 shows that these effects on young black male earnings were selective. Among whites, the ratio in earnings between uneducated and educated males remained stable for the years between 1970 and 1988; that is, uneducated white workers continued to earn about twenty-five cents for every dollar earned by white college graduates. Thus, white males with college degrees had a constant wage advantage over uneducated white male workers. The comparisons that included uneducated black workers did not reveal this constancy. First, uneducated black males experienced a drop in wages relative to college-educated white males. Whereas they earned twenty-five cents for every dollar earned by college-educated white males in 1970, this declined to five cents for every dollar in 1988. Second, uneducated black males experienced a drop in wages relative to college-educated black males. This increase in the disparity between educated and uneducated black male workers is comparable to the increase in disparity between educated white male workers and uneducated black male workers. The blackwhite gap, like the black-black gap, widened from twenty-five cents to the dollar in 1970 to five cents to the dollar in 1988.

Economic Inequalities and Moral Fences

37

A notable point of agreement between Wilson, on the one hand, and Darity and Myers, on the other, is that the workers most adversely affected under conditions of the New Economy were unskilled black males. Compared with unskilled white males, they experienced greater job loss and earnings reductions. Wilson's explanation is that the structural changes in the economy had the most negative effects on unskilled black males because they lacked educational credentials. Darity and Myers instead conclude that because these structural changes did not alter employment conditions for white unskilled workers, it is not the lack of educational credentials, but rather discrimination that adversely affects the employment conditions of black unskilled workers. Building on Darity and Myers's findings, I contend that discrimination plays out in different ways in the industrial sector and the service sector. Industrial firms rely on a pool of nonwhite semiskilled and unskilled workers for the production of cars, refrigerators, paper supplies, textiles, and so forth. Employers know that customers, consumers, and clients will never know the skin color of their employees. Black workers in manufacturing industries were, in this sense, invisible workers. When this niche for black workers disappeared, it left a wide swath of black unemployment. In industrial cities such as Detroit, Gary, and Pittsburgh, black unemployment rates exceeded 50 and 60 percent, as they did in some Southern communities after textile industries left for new production sites in Latin America and Asia. 41 Under the conditions of the New Economy, job growth for less educated workers occurred in places with high labor visibility, such as restaurants, hotels, department stores, and other retail establishments. Employers in this growing service sector cared considerably more about skin color than did employers in the industrial sector because workers interacted with their clients and customers, who were mostly white. Racial bias thus took new forms in the 1980s partly because of this shift from an industrial to a service economy. 42 Also, the New Economy, which relies less on labor contracts and more on flexible subcontracting, allows employers a high degree of discretion and flexibility. This greater fluidity makes it easier to discriminate and makes discrimination more difficult to document and prove. 43 The special relevance of these trends for our research is that the adolescents in our study were growing up while these important changes were taking place. They were born a decade after Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, while the states were reviewing the Equal Rights Amendment for possible ratification, and before the upheavals of the transition between the Old and the New Economy had gathered steam. Although the states ultimately did not ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, the government did exert some pressure for affirmative action in the workplace, and schools were implementing integration plans, a source of encouragement in the black community.

38

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In the late 1960s, researchers observed that black parents had become especially hopeful about the future, and their ambitions for their children soared. 44 However, by the time the NELS youngsters reached the eighth grade, black parents had less reason to be hopeful and ambitious for their children. As Figure 2.1 shows, the black-white income gap had increased from $4,636 in 1974, the year the NELS children were born, to $9,421 in 1988, when the NELS children were in the eighth grade. By the year the NELS cohort graduated from high school, that gap had grown to $11,402. Soaring black poverty in the 1980s had devastating effects on black communities, and the health, school performance, and psychological development of black youngsters were put in jeopardy. These inequalities are egregiously unjust to black parents and children, but they also create unrealistic expectations for white parents and their children. White parents embraced the idea that their superior incomes and occupational achievements were due entirely or mostly to their own efforts, thereby strengthening both the neoliberal strain within contemporary U.S. liberalism and the racialized conception of cultural differences between whites and blacks. Economic inequalities thus have great cultural and social consequences.

Over-Time Trends in Educational Attainment Trends in black and white educational attainment reveal interesting contrasts with economic trends. As Figure 2.4 shows, from 1940 to the mid1970s there were dramatic increases among whites and blacks in the percentage of twenty-five- to twenty-nine-year-olds who had completed at least a high school degree. Although blacks had lagged behind considerably in 1940, their rate of increase between 1940 and into the early 1970s exceeded that of whites. At the beginning of this four-decade period the gap between whites and blacks was about thirty percentage points, and by 1980 it was closer to ten percentage points. For the remainder of the series, the differences fluctuated between five and ten percentage points, and by the end of the series, in 1999, the difference had shrunk to 4.3 percentage points. In other words, although racial disparities persisted in the percentages of blacks and whites who completed high school, these trends, unlike those for income and unemployment, show increasing convergence. Another indicator of educational attainment is college attendance. Figure 2.5 shows the percentages of black and white high school graduates who enrolled in college between 1976 and 1999. This series begins shortly after the NELS children were born. From 1976 to 1981, white college enrollments increased from 50 to 55 percent, while black college enrollments were virtually stagnant at around 42 percent. Between 1981 and 1986

40

Race in the Schools

the percentage of white high school graduates attending college increased very little and the percentage of black high school graduates attending college declined. The beginning of this period coincides with extremely high rates of black unemployment, as summarized in Figure 2.2. However, this trend in black college enrollments turned upward in about 1986, and thereafter the percentage of black high school graduates who attended college steadily increased until at the end of the series the gap between blacks and whites was about three percentage points. Throughout most of their years of elementary school, black NELS youngsters would have had little basis for optimism about their prospects for going to college. However, by eighth grade and through high school they would have noticed that many older students were successfully applying for college. In Chapter 3 I use NELS data to compare the educational values of black and white NELS youth, and in Chapter 8 I present analyses of college enrollment.

Conclusion In the immediate post-civil rights period, blacks became more, not less, economically disadvantaged than whites. The New Economy entailed great uncertainties for all U.S. families, owing to the vagaries of downsizing, stagnant wages, lesser job security, reduced benefit and pension plans, and the dismantling of job ladders. Being white, however, was an asset in obtaining a job, a mortgage, or a credit-line advance. Whiteness became an even greater competitive advantage in a highly uncertain economy. The trends in household income and wealth reviewed in this chapter reveal that racial disparities were increasing while the NELS youth were growing up. On the other hand, trends in education attainment reveal a narrowing gap between whites and blacks. These over-time trends are helpful because they provide a historical context for our study of the NELS youth. These trends are the ones the NELS parents and children lived with; they were the basis of their perceptions about intergenerational experiences and of their anticipations about their own futures. The uncompromising liberal social perspective drew on language from neoliberal economics to evaluate peoples' worth in terms of outputs, and white Americans challenged black Americans to assimilate as a precondition of moral equality. The contention in the 1970s that black children's lower school achievement was the result of deficiencies in black culture, and the current contention that it results from black poverty are both disingenuous. Such contentions are rooted in a liberal ethos that is monoculturalist and assimilationist. They share the notion that merit is evident only in individual achievement that tests can validly and reliably measure. Enjoying economic, educational, and social advantages, whites find justification

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in perpetuating the idea that achievement, performance, and economic success are due to their strivings as individuals. The character of contemporary economic life, which favors competitive individualism, reinforces this contemporary version of liberalism. Like neighborhood segregation and racial exclusion in labor markets, practices in the schools create racial barriers—practices such as assessment tests, retention policies, tracking, and ability grouping. Even "color-blind" policies for awards and honors can penalize nonwhites; although this is not well documented, black students observe that in predominately white schools, tradition preserves white advantage regardless of the number of black students in the pool of qualified candidates for those honors. To illustrate the extent to which school officials draw on the language of social science research to sustain boundaries between white and black students, I draw from Karolyn D. Tyson's research on black students in public schools. She initially contacted school principals about the possibility of including their schools in her research on "black children's learning." In response to her question, "Do you have black children in your school?" one principal replied, "Oh yes, we have at-risk children." "No," Tyson pressed, "It is a study involving black children." To this the principal again replied, "Yes, I told you, we have at-risk children."45 This principal equates "being black" with "being at risk." He may feel that he is being color-blind, but he in fact is tightening up the line between blacks and whites. I attempt in this book to strip empirical indicators, such as economic standing and family structure, from their connotations in prevailing social constructions. In the research, I did not casually assume that black youth are at risk, but instead asked questions about the ideas whites have about themselves and about blacks. Like social philosophers Amy Gutmann and Iris Marion Young, I favor more pluralistic settings and cosmopolitan environments. However, as a sociologist, I must restate what I favor in terms of assumptions that have empirical consequences and then put these to the test. Notes 1. For example, see Angela Valezuela, Subtractive Schooling (Albany: S U N Y Press, 1999); Grace Kao and Marta Tienda, "Optimism and Achievement: The Educational Performance of Immigrant Youth," Social Science Quarterly 76, no. 1 (1995): 1 - 1 9 ; Mikyong Kim-Goh, "Serving Asian American Children in School," pp. 1 4 5 - 1 6 0 in Class, Culture, and Race in American Schools, ed. Stanley William Rothstein (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995); Dennis M. Mclnerney, Lawrence L. Roche, Valentina Mclnerney, and Herbert W. Marsh, "Cultural Perspectives on School Motivation," American Educational Research Journal 34, no. 1 (1997): 2 0 7 - 2 3 6 ; Margaret A. Gibson, Accommodation Without Assimilation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988).

Economic Inequalities and Moral Fences

43

2. See Raymond Montemayor, Gerald R. Adams, and Thomas P. Gullotta, eds., Adolescent Diversity in Ethnic, Economic, and Cultural Contexts (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2000). 3. Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). 4. See Glen H. Elder Jr., Children of the Great Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 5. See Steven J. Davis, John C. Haltiwanger, and Scott Schub, Job Creation and Destruction (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996); Judith R. Blau, Social Contracts and Economic Markets (New York: Plenum, 1993); Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone, The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America (New York: Basic Books, 1982). 6. Lisa A. Keister, Wealth in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 64-66. 7. Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth (New York: Routledge, 1995). 8. Richard B. Freeman and Lawrence F. Katz, "Rising Wage Inequality," pp. 29-62 in Working Under Different Rules, ed. Richard B. Freeman (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994). 9. Paul R. Amato and Alan Booth, A Generation at Risk: Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1997), 10. 10. Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon, 1989); Arne L. Kalleberg, Barbara F. Raskin, and Ken Hudson, "Bad Jobs in America," American Sociological Review 65 (2000): 256-278. 11. Specifically, the act served: "To enforce the constitutional right to vote, to confer jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations, to authorize the Attorney General to institute suits to protect constitutional rights in public facilities and public education, to extend the Commission on Civil Rights, to prevent discrimination in federally assisted programs, to establish a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity," and to serve "other purposes," Public Law 88-352 (passed July 2, 1964), United States Statutes at Large, vol. 78 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965), 241. 12. Richard A. Wasserstrom, "Rights, Human Rights, and Racial Discrimination," pp. 307-343 in Race and Racism, ed. Bernard Boxill (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 13. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2001); David Carroll Cochran, The Color of Freedom: Race and Contemporary American Liberalism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999); David T. Wellman, Portraits of White Racism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Joe R. Feagin and Hernán Vera, White Racism: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 1995). 14. Cochran, Color of Freedom, 17—40. 15. See David G. Smith, "Liberalism," pp. 276-283 in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 9, ed. David L. Sills (New York: Macmillan, 1968). 16. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). 17. Bonilla-Silva, White Supremacy, 137-166. 18. William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 21.

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19. Ibid., 183. 20. See William M. Banks, Black Intellectuals (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 230-231. 21. James J. Coleman, Ernest Q. Campbell, Carol J. Hodson, James McPartland, Alexander M. Mood, Frederic D. Weinfeld, and Robert L. York, Equality of Educational Opportunity (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966), italics in original. 22. James S. Coleman, "Equal Schools or Equal Students?" The Public Interest 4, no. 1 (1966): 73-74. 23. David J. Armor, "School and Family Effects on Black and White Achievement," pp. 168-229 in On Equality of Educational Opportunity, ed. Frederick Mosteller and Daniel P. Moynihan (New York: Random House, 1972). 24. Specifically, Coleman and his colleagues did not take into account the hierarchical structure of the data that involved both families and schools; see Tom Snijders and Roel Bosker, Multilevel Analysis: An Introduction to Basic and Advanced Multilevel Modeling (London: Sage, 1999), 13-37. 25. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Case for National Action: The Negro Family (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor, 1965), 1. 26. William Ryan, "Savage Discovery: The Moynihan Report," pp. 457—466 in The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy, ed. Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967). 27. Andrew Billingsley, Black Families in White America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1968). 28. Charles V. Willie, "The Relative Contribution of Family Status and Economic Status to Juvenile Delinquency," in The Family Life of Black People, ed. Charles V. Willie (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1970). 29. Herbert J. Gans, The War Against the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 30. Moynihan, Case for National Action, 48. 31. William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1. 32. More specifically, Wilson states: "One does not have to 'trot out' the concept of racism to demonstrate, for example, that blacks have been severely hurt by de-industrialization because of their heavy concentration in the automobile, rubber, steel, and other smokestack industries" (The Truly Disadvantaged, 12). 33. For example, Greg J. Duncan and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, eds., Consequences of Growing Up Poor (New York: Russell Sage Foundations, 1997); Donald J. Hernandez, America's Children (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1993). 34. For example, Harrison and Bluestone, The Great U-Turn. 35. For example, William K. Tabb, Unequal Partners (New York: New Press, 2002). 36. William A. Darity Jr. and Samuel L. Myers Jr. describe income changes between 1967 and 1990 in their Persistent Disparity: Race and Economic Inequality in the United States Since 1945 (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1998), 14-42. They divide the population into income quintiles (that are adjusted for inflation). Among whites, there were dramatic increases in the percentages of families who were very rich, rich, and very poor, and declines in the percentage of white families who were in the middle categories. Among blacks, there was a steady increase in the percentage of families who were rich, some increase late in the series in the percentage who were very rich, declines in the middle categories, and increases in the percentage who were very poor. In other words, the changes in the economy led to relative declines in both the black and white middle class, as there was relative

Economic Inequalities and Moral

Fences

45

growth in the top and bottom income quintiles. However, these over-time comparisons disguise the degree of racial disparity at the top and, especially, the bottom of the distribution. If we use 1988, the year NELS youth were in the eighth grade, and interpolate from Darity and Myers's data, 6 percent of white families had incomes of over $100,000, whereas only 1.8 percent of black families did. In that same year, about 2.5 percent of white families had incomes below $5,000, whereas about 10.8 percent of black families did. 37. Richard Veder and his colleagues estimate that black-white earnings differentials were the same in 1980 as they had been in 1880. See Richard Veder, Lowell Gallaway, and David C. Klingaman, "Black Exploitation and White Benefits," in The Wealth of Races: The Present Value of Benefits from Past Injustices, ed. George von Furstenburg et al. (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1974), 130; quoted in Darity and Myers, Persistent Disparity, 180. 38. William W. Goldsmith and Edward J. Blakely, Separate Societies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Darity and Myers, Persistent Disparity, 9-10. 39. Goldsmith and Blakely, Separate Societies, 26, 43. They also document occupational differences. In particular, black male employment increased in occupations that were relatively low wage, including records processing and administrative support, firefighting, and protective services, and they made little gain in high-growing, high-wage occupations. In the fastest growing high-income sector of the economy, corporate services, earnings for white males averaged $10.35 per hour, while African American males' earnings were only $6.86. Even after controlling for job-related attributes, age, and other demographic differences, Goldsmith and Blakely found that white adult wages were higher than African American adult wages, indicating discriminatory labor practices (p. 43). 40. Darity and Myers, Persistent Disparity. 41. For a summary, see Bonnie Thorton Dill, "Rediscovering Rural America," pp. 196-201 in The Blackwell Companion to Sociology, ed. Judith R. Blau (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001). 42. Between World War II and 1970, racial earnings inequalities had started to decline. Although this is not reflected in Figures 2.1 through 2.3, which focus attention on the structural adjustments beginning in the early 1970s, the black-to-white ratio of mean income for male full-time workers rose from .53 in 1948 to .73 in 1970. See Darity and Myers, Persistent Disparity, 44. 43. According to Victor Perlo, African Americans knew they were in demand only for jobs that whites did not want or when there was a white labor shortage. Economics of Racism II: The Roots of Inequality, USA (New York: International Publishers, 1996). 44. L. Scott Miller, An American Imperative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 92; Zena Smith Blau, Black Children/White Children: Competence, Socialization, and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1981), 3. 45. I thank Karolyn D. Tyson for sharing these insightful comments with me.

LOCATING DIFFERENCE

Liberalism assumes a universalizing culture into which autonomous individuals assimilate and are thenceforth free to pursue their individual interests. However, whites' cultural membership blinds them from understanding that the liberal regime oppresses people who have other cultural memberships. Not only do whites have more economic resources than blacks, as is very often noted, but also the extent of whites' spatial isolation offers an important clue for understanding racial differences. After presenting a brief history of the development of public schools in America, I will situate my argument about racial differences alongside empirical accounts by others of the challenges adolescents faced growing up in the 1990s. Then I will present some contrasts between white and black adolescents. These contrasts include differences not only in attitudes and values, but also in the extent of residential isolation.

The Origins of Public Schools In the United States, common schools, or free public schools, evolved in a cultural matrix alongside other institutions that had a particular stamp fashioned by white, Protestant Americans. The early public school movement of the 1820s and 1830s, spearheaded in Massachusetts by Horace Mann, was a response to the needs of burgeoning industries in northern cities for a disciplined and literate labor force at the very time that immigrants were arriving in the United States in increasingly large numbers. The aim, as described in the minutes of the Boston School Committee, was taking "undisciplined, uninstructed [children], often with inveterate forwardness and obstinacy, and with the inherited stupidity of centuries of ignorant ancestors; forming them from animals into intellectual beings . . . from intellectual beings into Spiritual beings."1 47

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Then as now demographic changes spurred school reform. The common-school movement of the late 1820s and 1830s was an Anglo-American response to the tide of new immigrants from Norway, Sweden, Germany, and especially Catholic Ireland. Schools, more than any other institutions, instill core cultural values and practices, and that point was not lost on northern reformers. As Alexis de Tocqueville, a contemporary of Horace Mann, observed in the course of his travels in the Northeast and Midwest, common schools were mediocre, but they met the nation's need to assimilate the growing number of immigrants. 2 Throughout the nineteenth century school reform movements, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, waxed and waned in response to demographic growth and immigration flows. They gained their initial energy from evangelical Protestants who wished to promote Christian morality and from members of a fledgling industrial class interested in promoting practical knowledge, but support also came from urban elites and middle-class people who feared dangerous elements among the immigrants. The common-school movement also helped to reassure Anglo-Americans in general that universal schooling would help preserve core cultural values. Common schools spread throughout the North, Midwest, and West early in the century, but they were not established in the South, whereby private schooling became the norm for white children. After the Civil War this largely remained the case in the South, where black churches and white missions provided black children with schooling. In 1867 Senator Lemuel Shaw sought to amend the Reconstruction bills to extend free public schooling to southern states with the provision that no student could be barred because of race. His proposed amendment failed, and the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 ignored black schooling. 3 All former states of the Confederacy adopted segregated schooling but in practice, through the remainder of the nineteenth century, education other than that provided by churches was virtually nonexistent for black children. It was not until the late 1890s that campaigns were again launched for free public schooling in the South. For the most part, however, the resulting appropriations went to white elementary and high schools. After 1900 reformers led by the Southern Education Board and northern philanthropists acquiesced to the reality that segregated schooling actually meant very little schooling for blacks, and, campaigning on behalf of Booker T. Washington, they advocated for the provision of vocational training in segregated black schools. According to Lawrence A. Cremin, the preeminent historian of U.S. schooling, as late as 1920 "separate but equal" meant virtually no schooling for southern black children; only after the 1920s did it come to mean that blacks received vocational training while white youth continued to receive an academically oriented education. 4

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The first major national effort to integrate public schools in the South came not from educational reformers, but from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and it was through its efforts, beginning in the mid-1930s, that cases challenging discriminatory schooling practices were brought to the courts. The first of a series of cases in the 1940s involved higher education and professional schools. In 1954 the Supreme Court decided to hear the important case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.5 The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Brown, thereby rejecting the majority opinion in the 1896 Plessey v. Ferguson decision on the justifiability of the separate-and-equal doctrine. In Brown, the Supreme Court accepted the argument that separate schools are inherently unequal and thus in violation of Fourteenth Amendment provisions. Although Brown put an end to the legality of segregated schools, it hardly altered existing patterns as many southern states rendered it moot, some by using delaying tactics and others by openly defying court orders. 6 It was not until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the accompanying Education Act of 1965, along with a series of Supreme Count cases in 1968 and 1969, that southern states eliminated official dual public schooling, pursuing instead strategies comparable to those pursued in northern states, including private schooling and residential segregation. Thus, while these legislative acts provided legal rights for African Americans, many social practices remained out of the purview of judicial oversight. Blacks' struggle for integrated schooling dramatically contrasts with the schooling experiences of immigrant children. An objective of the commonschool movement throughout most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to assimilate and Americanize immigrant children, whereas the intent of de jure segregation in the South and de facto segregation elsewhere was the systematic exclusion of black children from U.S. public schools. Although, as I have shown in Chapter 2, blacks were making dramatic gains in high school completion rates even before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the majority of black children lived in states where they received little more than vocational training. By the 1950s—the decade of the Brown decision—white-looking immigrants and their offspring had experienced considerable upward mobility, and their occupational attainment was comparable, and sometimes superior, to that of native whites.7 One inference is that assimilationist ideologies were sufficiently powerful in the first decades of the twentieth century that white-looking immigrants could assimilate into mainstream U.S. culture. At the same time, white institutions absorbed ethnic idioms, such as cuisines and holidays, in ways that trivialized social and cultural difference. By speaking English and adopting U.S. lifestyles, as well as by privatizing group traditions and religion, the offspring of white immigrants accommodated to U.S. life.

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Assimilationist ideology, motivated by political concerns about national stability, economic concerns about the need for disciplined labor, and cultural concerns about the preservation of Anglo-American values, seemed to justify itself by the ease with which white immigrants were absorbed into U.S. life. The experiences of white-skinned European immigrants were markedly different from those of black-skinned Americans.

Racism Beyond the Law I have highlighted the ways in which the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had social and cultural consequences that interacted with the dynamics of the transformation from the Old to the New Economy. While the act formally protects the legal rights of individuals by prohibiting discrimination in employment and in public places, including public schools, it does not ensure equality because there are other mechanisms that reinforce discrimination. School segregation persists because of the neighborhood segregation that results from homebuyers' prejudices and the prejudicial practices of lending institutions and real estate agents. Workplace segregation persists, in part because of the exceptions specified in Title VII of the act. Specifically, there are exemptions relating to establishment size and location; small establishments and those not located within the United States and its territories are exempt from the provisions of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. 8 However, firms increasingly subcontract and outsource to small establishments and to those in foreign countries. Thus, the flexible and decentralized economy has encouraged more flexible and decentralized discrimination. Black workers have also experienced new barriers to employment in the growing service sector because white employers prefer to hire white employees for positions involving contact with predominately white customers and clients. Accompanying both the economic transformations and the restructuring of blacks' legal rights under the new civil rights regime was a transformation in the ways that whites understood their relations with people of color. A difficult to prove but reasonable conjecture is that the New Economy, with its autonomous, fluid, and decentralized character, heightened the salience of self-interest, choice, and competition. I suggest that the new racism was a response not only to the new civil rights regime but also to the New Economy, as whites increasingly stressed the moral dimensions of individuated success and failure. Black children growing up in the 1970s and 1980s experienced racism that took on different forms from those of the racism their parents had grown up with. Jim Crow was an explicit and overt expression of racism; the young people we studied encountered new expressions of racism that were complex and insidious.

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Cohort Experiences The children born in 1974 attended high school and became young adults at a time of extraordinary transformation. They were coming of age when the New Economy was taking shape, with increases in female employment and declines in income for most U.S. families. There were also great increases in economic inequality. I have documented the sluggish growth of black incomes relative to those of whites, higher rates of black joblessness, and the pronounced discrimination against less educated black males. White workers and their families also experienced economic declines in the 1980s, but not to the degree that blacks did, and whites as a whole were more able to draw on savings and other family resources.9 Offsetting the decline for white households was an increase in the number of total working hours, largely due to increases in female employment. Black women, on the other hand, have historically had high rates of labor force participation.10 In short, black and white NELS youth experienced the changing economic conditions differently. Whereas many black youth lived in that experienced great declines in economic resources, many white youth lived in families that could make ends meet because both parents worked and because they could draw on savings, and some white youth lived in families that experienced dramatic growth in earnings and wealth. Given the importance of lifestyle and possessions to adolescents, the ready availability of consumer credit to non-poor families also aggravated the differences between poor and nonpoor adolescents.11 If the immediate worlds of school and work held more uncertainties for the cohort of 1974 than they had for their parents, the political climate in which the NELS youths grew up was less tumultuous than that which their parents and grandparents had experienced. They were born the year after the United States withdrew troops from Vietnam, and there was little domestic turmoil compared with that which had dominated earlier decades. Whereas close to 50 percent of all adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty voted in presidential elections in the early 1970s, by the early 1990s, when members of the 1974 cohort could vote, only about 30 percent did. Nevertheless, all teenagers of this cohort contended with complex problems, including widespread fears about AIDS and dramatically changing patterns in expectations and practices related to gender, family relations, and sex roles. 12 In his novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Douglas Coupland describes middle-class adolescents in the 1990s as enjoying considerable material advantage but feeling insecure, estranged from their parents and other adults and cynical about the relevance of the education they were receiving.13 White teens of "Generation X," were confused by the lack of fit between what their parents described as the best way to plan for their

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futures and their own observations of older friends and siblings who had trouble finding jobs. A college degree, though critical for escaping from the worst jobs, did not prepare graduates for what employers seemed to want. 14 Coupland's fictionalized account caught the public's attention, but Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson laid the sociological foundation for understanding teens in this cohort. In The Ambitious Generation,15 they provide a detailed and rich account of the experiences, perceptions, and dreams of young people, drawing from in-depth interviews conducted with about a thousand adolescents over a five-year period. Schneider and Stevenson point to a sharp contrast between young people who go directly to work after high school and others who first go to college. Those with no more than a high school degree mostly found low-wage, service-sector jobs because the higher paying blue-collar jobs that they wanted had largely disappeared. Adolescents who went to college faced a different problem: uncertainty about finding a pathway from college to a job or career. Many of them discovered only when they completed their schooling that their college credentials did not match the job descriptions of employers. Career opportunities were in constant flux because of changing technology and ongoing restructuring of businesses, and they found that job security, health benefits, and retirement plans, which their parents took for granted, were disappearing. I suspect that these conclusions are still valid. It is not uncommon to hear complaints from college graduates that they must wait tables, from high school graduates that there are no jobs, and from parents that their twenty-year-olds are still living at home. As Schneider and Stevenson describe them, youth in the 1990s had ambition but many lacked direction. This was not so much the fault of young people but rather the fault of the New Economy, whose rules were obscure compared with those of the earlier industrial era that their parents had known. Andy Furlong and Fred Cartmel theorize that young adulthood in the 1990s was a series of many discrete experimental journeys rather than a predictable and continuous pathway in a certain direction. 16 The links between schooling and jobs or careers had been clear for adolescents in earlier generations, but those finishing high school in the 1990s found that the links were weak and ill-defined. The logic of the industrial economy that mostly white parents had known rested on large bureaucratic organizations and industrial establishments, and well-defined professions, job ladders, and careers. By the 1990s, from the perspective of many young whites, jobs and work had little continuity or reasonableness. I suggest that whites' feelings about these uncertainties, including a sense of betrayal, affected the way they perceived the boundaries between themselves and blacks: they regarded themselves as the truly deserving and nonwhites as the less deserving.

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Race in Daily Practice Michèle Lamont's ethnographic study The Dignity of Working Men, though not about adolescents, helps to clarify the dynamics that underlie racial constructions and practices in the contemporary United States. The white working-class men she interviewed denied that they were racist, but stated that blacks had other qualities they did not like. They were not "against blacks," they explained, but they could "not get along" with most blacks. They stated that this was because blacks lacked "a strong work ethic," "self-reliance," and "a sense of responsibility." 1 7 Unlike the older white rhetoric about blacks not knowing their place, white respondents in Lamont's study framed the matter as blacks not knowing what the rules are. Lamont's interpretation amplifies how core liberal values come into play to reconfigure and reconstruct white attitudes about blacks. It is not polite in the contemporary United States to openly express racist attitudes, according to Lawrence Bobo, 1 8 and Lamont shows that what has largely displaced a simple dichotomy is the intertwining of moral, social, and racial boundaries. As Lamont notes, racism is not motivated by a dislike of blacks per se, but by whites' feeling that they embrace key American values whereas blacks do not. 19 Contemporary racism is insidious partly because in the current climate, as Bobo notes, it is not polite to be racist, and white adults discriminate while they tell others they are not prejudiced. 20 In a rare study of children's racial attitudes, Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin document the extent to which white preschool children adopt the racialized practices and language of white adults. In their ethnographic study of a multiracial preschool program, they describe young children's casual use of language, codes, and manners that mirror the racial constructions of adults. They report that three- and four-year-old white children possess a sense that being white means they are special, exempt from rules that apply to others, and that their whiteness authorizes them to seize power and control in social interactions. In one social exchange between a white and a nonwhite child, the white preschooler insists, "No, no. You can't pull this wagon." 2 1 As Michèle Lamont emphasizes, there is a lack of symmetry in the ability of each group to disseminate a demonized view of the other, and this is key to understanding the role of culture in the reproduction of racial inequality. 22 The new racism, according to Lamont, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Michael Omni and Howard Winant, and David Carroll Cochran, involves drawing a moral boundary around race and the work ethic in a single stroke. 23 While Lamont's respondents claimed they were not racist, they drew on a language of morality that was racialized and racially coded. They mentioned that they evaluated everyone the same—that is, that they were impartial, fair, and universalistic—but contended that more blacks than

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whites lack "self-discipline," "responsibility," and a "work ethic." In contrast, according to Lamont, blacks coupled class and moral worth, criticizing middle-class and rich people for being exploitative and for lacking a sense of empathy and caring. In educational policy circles, much attention is focused on the "blackwhite test score gap," which refers to average differences in academic achievement. 2 4 There are three major explanations for this gap: first, that the source is genetic; 2 5 second, that it is due to differences in family environment and cultural circumstances; 26 and third, that it is due to differences in the quality of schools that black and whites attend. 27 In Chapter 8 , 1 more specifically address the debate about the test-score gap, but here I note briefly that researchers have concluded that race in the United States has no genetic basis, 2 8 while there is substantial evidence that differences in family background, neighborhood environment, and schools play a role in motivation, learning, and school performance. An underappreciated perspective on the test-score gap is that there are cultural differences that underlie test scores and cultural reasons to question the validity of stamdardized assessments. 29 Prominent critics of assessment practices, such as Joyce A. Ladner, Ann Filer and Angela Browne-Miller, contend that the racial dynamics in schools impair black youths' progress and that performance standards are set in ways that advantage white youth. 30 John U. Ogbu argues that blacks' lower achievement levels stem from their belief they will have few opportunities after they complete school and that schools reinforce these views through tracking and retention. 3 1 Along similar lines, Claude Steele concludes that black students have lower performance levels on tests because they are aware of stereotypes, which creates test anxiety. 3 2 Black students are more likely than white students to be in a low track, sometimes regardless of motivation and earlier achievement, and such a track assignment has cumulative negative effects on subsequent achievement. 33 The dynamics that underlie these patterns are complex, and studying them would require longitudinal data from early childhood that are not yet available. However, a plausible assumption is that the racial composition of a school's body of retained students and low-track students sends a signal to all students in the school. Of the tenth-grade NELS students, 79 percent of the black students and 86 percent of the white students were in the combined college and general tracks, and 21 percent and 14 percent, respectively, were in the low track. (Of the Latino tenth graders, 20 percent were in the low track, while only 8 percent of the Asian tenth graders were.) Thus, high schools are highly stratified by race and ethnicity. Retention patterns in elementary schools reveal similar patterns. Of the eighth-grade NELS students, 22 percent of blacks had been retained at least one grade in elementary school whereas only 12 percent of whites had. To show how family socioeconomic status

Locating Difference

55

and race interact to produce distinctive patterns of retention, Figure 3.1 is a plot of retention probabilities by socioeconomic status (SES) for whites and blacks. The definition of retention is that the student is kept back at least one grade in elementary school, and SES is determined according to the continuous standardized scale constructed by the NCES. Figure 3.1 shows that regardless of SES, blacks are more likely to be retained than whites. It also shows that regardless of race, lower SES students are more likely to be retained than higher SES students. However, SES does not have constant effects on the retention probabilities for blacks and whites. The probability that a black student coming from one of the poorest families will be retained is .40, whereas this probability for a white student coming from an equally poor family is about .32. At the highest end of the SES scale the probabilities of retention for affluent blacks and affluent whites are .10 and .07, respectively. In other words, the retention gap is smaller at the high end of the SES continuum than it is at the low end of the continuum, and low-SES black elementary school students are at the highest risk of retention. That blacks are nearly twice as likely as whites to be retained a grade during elementary school is discouraging even for black students who are doing well in school. The higher rate of retention can create a climate that produces the sort of stress that Claude Steele observes among black test takers, or the oppositional attitudes that John U. Ogbu describes. Yet, as I have shown in Figure 2.5, the educational attainment of blacks has increased quite dramatically over time. This appears contradictory, and to explore this further I examine students' educational values and aspirations using the NELS data.

Black-White Differences in Values The Importance of Education As Daniel G. Solorzano notes, many whites believe that blacks have lower educational ambitions and aspirations, and they base that belief on their observation that blacks have high rates of joblessness and poverty. 34 However, he finds that black parents typically have high educational expectations for their children and that black youth attach great importance to education. I build here on his analyses, examining multiple indicators of educational values and aspirations. Initially, I examined educational values, as indicated by the extent to which tenth-grade NELS students discussed school matters with their parents and by the relative importance of school-related practices among their friends. In the survey, students were asked how much they discussed "things

Locating Difference

57

studied in class," "grades," and "school courses" with their parents. Students were also asked about the importance their friends attached to "attending classes, " "continuing education, " "studying," "getting good grades," and "finishing high school." Table 3.1 summarizes mean responses for NELS tenth graders on these items, first comparing results for all black and white respondents (Panel A); then comparing low- and high-SES results for black and white students, respectively (Panel B); and finally, comparing black and white students' results for the low-SES and high-SES groups, respectively (Panel C). The response categories for the parent items (1 through 3) were "often" and "not often." The response categories for the friends items (4 through 8) were "very important" and "not very important." Comparing black and white tenth graders in Panel A, we see that black students generally place a higher value on education, although not all of the differences are statistically significant. Black students are significantly more likely to discuss their grades with parents (2) and significantly more likely to report that school issues are important among their friends (4 through 8). The question addressed in Panel B is whether there are social class differences in value placed on education among black and white students. Among the black students, SES mattered very little, with the exception that highSES black students were significantly more likely than low-SES black students to discuss courses with their parents (3). In contrast, there were striking differences between low- and high-SES white students. High-SES white students had significantly higher means on all of the items in Panel B (1-8) than did low-SES white students. Socioeconomic class, in other words, makes a great difference for the value white teens place on education, but it makes little difference for the value black teens place on education. Panel C simply rearranges the rows in Panel B to compare within-class differences rather than within-race differences. Among low-SES students, blacks had significantly higher values on all of the items relating to friends valuing school (4 through 8), and they discussed their grades significantly more often with their parents (3). However, among high-SES students there was hardly any difference between black and white students with respect to educational values. High-SES black students were significantly more likely than high-SES white students to say that their friends stress the importance of good grades (7), but none of the other comparisons is statistically significant. Three general conclusions can be drawn from this descriptive analysis of educational values. First, according to these measures, black youth value education more highly than white youth do. Second, class differences affect the degree to which white students value education, with high-status whites valuing it more than low-status whites, but differences do not affect the degree to which black students value education. Third, high-status students attach the same importance to education regardless of race, but low-status

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Getting into Trouble

113

heterogeneous communities. In addition, breaking rules is less likely to threaten the stability of a homogeneous community and is therefore more likely to be tolerated. Here I draw on the ordinary experience of being on our best behavior when we are among strangers or in a place where there is considerable group diversity. These results and my interpretation of them are counter to the popular view that it is better to bring children up in communities in which most other families are of the same race and background. People defend such opinions by arguing that youth need security and social support. To the contrary, we found that high diversity functioned as a deterrent for at least some kinds of deviance and that low diversity had the opposite effect. Effects of Consolidated Inequality I hypothesized that high consolidated inequality would reduce overall levels of misbehavior because of the apprehension created by social barriers that accompany much consolidation. When there is high racial and ethnic inequality—that is, when white households have considerable resources and nonwhite households have relatively few—youth will be fearful and apprehensive of others. Figure 5.3 indicates that high consolidated inequality reduced mean levels on unengaged friends, discipline problems, and substance use. However, it increased mean levels on cutting classes. I am unable to determine why it is that high consolidation reduced the levels of most kinds of deviance but not all. I might point out that the deviance it reduced includes the most serious forms of GIT, namely, substance use and discipline problems. In sum, high levels of consolidated inequality and high levels of diversity tended to suppress the extent to which adolescents got into trouble, and low levels of consolidated inequality and low levels of diversity allowed for higher probabilities that adolescents would get into trouble. There are some exceptions, but for the most part that is the case. From the perspective of equity, of course, low consolidation and high diversity are superior to high consolidation and the ghettoized sameness of low diversity. I pursue these issues later. What I point out here is that what the conditions of high diversity and high consolidation have in common is that they both magnified the significance of racial and ethnic differences in teenagers' lives. When race and ethnicity were highly visible in a community because there were many different racial and ethnic groups, or racial and ethnic groups were highly visible because of inequalities among them, teens were more likely to conform. Both high diversity and high consolidation, therefore, appear to promote social control. Effects of Poverty As Figure 5.4 shows, poverty, independent of diversity and consolidated inequality, did not have powerful results on mean levels of GIT. The higher

Race in the Schools

the level of poverty, the higher the mean on cutting classes and the lower the mean on substance use. The former might indicate that high-poverty conditions create special problems for students because they have to juggle work, school, and household responsibilities, resulting in high absentee rates. The finding for substance use indicates that drug and alcohol use tends to be higher in affluent neighborhoods, confirming other studies. 42 Contrary to the extensive literature on delinquency, then, poor neighborhoods do not have high levels of deviance when diversity and consolidated inequality are included in the analysis. Thus, our failure to replicate others' results on poverty is due to the greater importance of diversity and consolidated inequality; each of these has greater independent effects than poverty.

Multilevel Contextual Effects Background The final set of questions I asked in my analyses of deviance is whether individuals from the four racial and ethnic groups were differently affected by community context. I was especially interested in the contrast between whites and other groups because whites are the most segregated of all groups. I used the results from the final step of the HLM analyses ("slopes as outcomes" or "cross-level interactions") to answer these questions. I present only results that are statistically significant in Figures 5.5 through 5.8; interested readers may consult Appendix 5.2 for more complete results. 43 Contextual Effects of Diversity on Cutting Classes Diversity had no effect on the mean level of cutting classes (see Figure 5.2), but it did have specific effects on the scores of adolescents from given racial and ethnic groups. Figure 5.5 shows how Asians, Latinos, and whites were less or more likely to be regularly absent—cutting classes—depending on whether they lived in a less or more diverse community. The contextual effects for cutting classes were comparable for Asians and Latinos. For both groups, the greater the diversity the lower the values on cutting classes, and the lesser the diversity the higher the values on cutting classes. In other words, for these two groups, community diversity promoted school attendance. The pattern is the opposite for whites: the greater the diversity the higher the values on cutting classes, and the lesser the diversity the lower the values on cutting classes.44 It is also useful to point out that Asian's overall low scores and Latino's overall high scores on cutting classes (from Figure 5.1) are evident here, but whites' overall low scores are not owing to the powerful effects of neighborhood context. My

Race in the Schools

conclusion is that members of groups that have experience with complex and diverse environments have superior coping skills in such environments and under these conditions. I assume that ethnic and racial minorities probably feel more comfortable with diversity than whites do, or at least, whereas most minority teens take community diversity as quite ordinary, most white teens do not. Contextual Effects of Consolidated Inequality on Unengaged Friends High consolidation reflects asymmetry in groups' resources, with white households being better off than nonwhite households. Overall, the higher the consolidation the lower the mean values on unengaged friends (Figure 5.3), and whites have the highest values on unengaged friends (Figure 5.1). Examining how consolidated inequality affects unengaged friends for individual racial and ethnic groups, we identified two significant contextual effects: a positive one for Latinos (the higher the consolidation, the greater are scores on unengaged friends) and a negative one for whites (the higher the consolidation, the lower the scores on unengaged friends). Latino teens who lived in neighborhoods in which nonwhites were relatively poor compared with whites had high values on unengaged friends, whereas Latino teens who lived in neighborhoods with a more equitable distribution of resources had low values on unengaged friends, as summarized in Figure 5.6. The opposite is the case for whites. That is, white teens who lived in neighborhoods in which whites were relatively affluent compared with nonwhites—where they were at an advantage relative to others—had low values on unengaged friends, whereas white teens who lived in neighborhoods with a more equitable distribution of resources—where they were not at an advantage relative to others—had high values on unengaged friends (see Figure 5.6). Contextual Effects of Consolidated Inequality on Substance Use Consolidation in neighborhoods tends to reduce the mean level of substance use (Figure 5.3), and whites are far more likely to engage in this particular GIT behavior than all other groups (Figure 5.1). In testing for the effects of consolidated inequality on substance use for each of the four groups, we found only one significant contextual effect, namely, that of consolidation on whites' use of substances. Figure 5.7 summarizes this result. White teens who lived in neighborhood in which whites were relatively affluent compared to nonwhites (high consolidation) had lower values on substance use than white teens who lived in neighborhoods in which there was relatively little racial and ethnic inequality. This finding is parallel to

Getting into Trouble

that for whites and unengaged friends and therefore strengthens our conclusion that white teens have difficulty accommodating to community conditions in which members of their own group are not economically superior to members of other groups. Contextual Effects of Poverty on GIT Scales for Latinos, Whites, and Asians The conventional understanding in the social sciences is that community poverty is a root cause of deviance. I have already shown, however, that when we control for diversity and consolidated inequality, the effects of neighborhood poverty on mean levels of GIT are not substantial (Figure 5.4). In the final analyses I present, I show the effects of community poverty for the individual groups on all GIT scales for which there are statistically significant effects. Figure 5.8 summarizes these results. Latinos have average scores overall on the scale of unengaged friends (Figure 5.1), but these average scores mask the contrast between Latinos living in poor communities and those living in nonpoor communities (Figure 5.8). Latino teens had high values on unengaged friends when they lived in high-poverty communities and had low values on unengaged friends when they lived in low-poverty neighborhoods. Asians had high values on substance use when they lived in high-poverty neighborhoods, and low values when they lived in low-poverty neighborhoods. In short, two nonwhite groups—Latinos and Asians—were less likely to have behavioral problems when they lived in low-poverty neighborhoods. This is not the case for whites. Their scores on cutting classes were low when they lived in high-poverty neighborhoods and high when they lived in low-poverty neighborhoods. Thus, community poverty is associated with higher levels of particular types of deviance for two nonwhite groups, but community affluence is associated with high absenteeism for whites. I am not sure why this is the case, particularly when we have taken into account individual-level poverty, but I speculate that whites cutting classes in nonpoor neighborhoods is a subtle indicator of school disengagement, whereas nonwhites engaging in deviant behavior in poor neighborhoods is an indication of deprivation in the more conventional sense of the term. Summary of Contextual Effects We found that poverty does not have powerful overall effects, but it is associated with higher values on some GIT indicators for nonwhites and with lower levels of substance use for whites. Diversity and consolidated inequality reduce overall deviance levels, and our more detailed results show how this phenomenon varies from one group to another. The major

120

Race in the Schools

Figure 5.8 Effects of L o w and H i g h Poverty ori U n e n g a g e d Friends for Hispanics, C u t t i n g Classes for W h i t e s , and Substance U s e for Asians, H S E S Tenth G r a d e r s

0.15

• High Poverty • Low Poverty

Asians Note: Estimates f o r low and high values on poverty are -1.00 and + 1 . 0 0 standard deviations f r o m the m e a n value on the poverty scale.

contrast is that between whites and others. Whites' proclivity to deviance is somewhat greater when they are out of their element—in diverse communities and in communities in which whites are not the most economically privileged—and this proclivity is even greater when they live in affluent communities. Nonwhites have a greater tendency to be deviant in homogeneous communities, in places with great racial and ethnic economic inequalities, and in poor communities.

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A notable conclusion is that we cannot account for variation in black GIT behaviors by variation in community context. Our findings suggest that it is possible that black parents teach their children to be on their best behavior wherever they are. Being on their guard is something that all black youngsters must learn because they are often under suspicion. Such common experiences make their way into the lyrics of rap music: "driving while black," "voting while black," "walking while black." Researchers report that black parents are more restrictive with their children than other parents.44 This is consistent with my interpretation that black parents feel their children are more vulnerable because of their race, and that by monitoring their children's comings and goings they communicate to their children that they need to act the same in all places and in all communities. That is, our results suggest that black parents raise their children in ways that protect them from racist encounters, and as a result, adolescents immunize themselves against contextual variation.

Implications Diversity, consolidated inequality, and poverty together have powerful effects on the overall levels of community levels of adolescent deviance and on the likelihood that adolescents from different racial and ethnic backgrounds will engage in deviant practices. Overall, the greater the diversity and consolidation, the lower the levels of deviance, or what I term getting into trouble. Community poverty has lesser effects on adolescent levels of getting into trouble. Our results show that race and ethnic groups do specialize in certain types of GIT behaviors, but that such specialization depends on the characteristics of the community in which they live. We found contextual effects for the three neighborhood characteristics on certain GIT behaviors for Asians, Latinos, and whites, but not for blacks. I interpret this result for black teens as a reflection of the tendency among black parents to encourage their children to behave in ways that are relatively constant from one social context to another. The patterns of contextual influences for nonwhites and those for whites are different. Nonwhite GIT scores are higher under conditions of low diversity and much inequality. In contrast, white GIT scores are higher under conditions of high diversity and little inequality. These results suggest that white adolescents struggle in environments in which they are members of one group among many and in situations in which traditional racial inequalities do not prevail. A cost of whiteness is difficulty in adjusting to communities that are diverse and in which whites do not monopolize economic resources.

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Appendix 5.1a Means and Standard Deviations of Student-Level Dependent and Independent Variables, H S E S 1990

Dependent variables Unengaged friends Unprepared for class Cutting classes Discipline problems Substance use Independent variables Female Latino Black White Poor Single mother Other family arrangement

Mean

Standard Deviation

-0.02 -0.03 -0.04 -0.04 0.00

0.87 0.79 0.99 0.72 0.83

0.51 0.19 0.16 0.54 0.20 0.17 0.06

0.50 0.39 0.36 0.50 0.40 0.38 0.23

Notes: Unweighted data; N=3,375. Appendix 5.1 b A N O V A Estimates ofVariance for Outcomes, H S E S 1990 Unengaged Unprepared Cutting Friends for Class Classes Intercept (mean school gain) Variance and model fit statistics Student-level variance (s 2 ) Contextual-level variance (t) Proportion of variance in gain that is between schools Reliability

Discipline Substance Problems Use

0.00 (0.02)

0.01 (0.02)

0.01 (0.03)

0.01 (0.02)

0.01 (0.02)

0.74 0.03

0.64 0.03

0.85 0.12

0.76 0.03

0.65 0.04

0.03 0.42

0.04 0.45

0.13 0.70

0.04 0.44

0.06 0.53

Notes: Observations are weighted at both the student and school levels. N=4,839 students in 163 schools. Appendix 5.1c H L M Between-Neighborhood Model for G I T Scales, H S E S 1990 Unengaged Unprepared Cutting Friends for Class Classes Effect of independent variables on mean school score Average intercept Poverty Diversity Consolidated inequality Model fit statistics Proportion of between-school variance explained Reliability

-0.01 -0.04 -0.03* -0.08***

0.23 0.57

0.01 0.03 -0.05** -0.01

0.15 0.42

0.02 0.05* 0.00 0.12**

0.16 0.67

Discipline Substance Problems Use

0.01 0.01 -0.05* -0.07***

0.14 0.40

-0.01 -0.10*** -0.02 -0.06**

0.39 0.43

Notes: Observations are weighted at both the student and school levels. N=4,830 students in 163 schools. ***p