Unequal.
Yet, despite this stubborn reality, many Americans largely desire to live in a post-racial society. In a 2015 survey conducted by MTV, 91 percent of young people between the ages of 18 and 24 said they believed in racial equality. The vast majority of them (68 percent) said focusing on race “prevents society from becoming colorblind.” Persistent inequality, in their view, is caused by focusing on race too much. The problem, as they see it, is America’s preoccupation with race, so if we ignored it, society would be better off. The questions seem to be: What’s up with race? Why can’t we all just get along?
In The Souls of Black Folk, one of the defining works on the Black experience in America, W. E. B. Du Bois opened with conviction and certainty declaring “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line” (1903:7). To our great disappointment, he was right. It is a saddening reality that, well into the twenty-first century, Du Bois’ clarion call still rings true. The problem of the color line remains. While the line itself is increasingly variegated as more racial and ethnic groups call America home, Black Americans retain an unwelcome distinction as America’s problem.
Yet, this idea was met with resistance at the start of the twentieth century when Du Bois uttered those words and it still is today. For many, Black success negates this truth. How can the color line be the problem, if evidence of Black progress is all around? At the start of the twenty-first century, words like post-racial and colorblind overtook the American lexicon, drowning out words like racism and discrimination, hiding – if only temporarily – the inconvenience of deep racial disparity. This is the quintessential American paradox, our embrace of the ideals of meritocracy and America as the land of opportunity, despite the systemic racial advantages and disadvantages accrued across generations that have denied this opportunity to Black people. To be Black in America is to exist among a myriad of contradictions: racial progress and regression, abject poverty amidst profound wealth, discriminatory policing yet equal protection under the law. The desire to focus on race less avoids the discomfort of this reality.
Allan G. Johnson in Privilege, Power, and Difference argues difference is not the problem, privilege and power are. In this sense, there is nothing wrong with racial difference itself, but with the way that race is used to structure and organize society. Yet just talking about the reality of racial inequality makes most Americans uncomfortable. Even among young people, who largely believe in racial equality, only 37 percent “were raised in households that talked about race.” Even fewer, 20 percent, “felt comfortable talking about biases against specific groups.” In this vacuum of belief in equality, but avoidance of racial bias as a cause of inequality, racial difference itself becomes the problem. Without discussing the racial privilege that structures American life, simply being Black becomes the problem, not the poverty, marginalization, or racism that scaffolds it.
Racial inequality is a social fact, but how should we understand race itself as contributing to or producing this inequality? The answer depends on one’s conception of race. Race can be defined as an ideology, a manner of thinking, a system of complex ideas about power that justifies who should have it along racial lines (Fields 1990). Or race can be defined as an ideological construct, a shared societal understanding of racial ideologies that manifest materially and socially within society, resulting in differential power along racial lines. Race can also be defined as a sociohistorical construct, developed over hundreds of years, producing a shared global understanding and reinforcement of relationships of domination and subordination along racial lines (Winant 2000a). Finally, race* can be defined as an objective fact: one is simply their race.
Sociologist Howard Winant emphasizes the importance of not treating race as an ideology to be discarded or as an objective fact to be factored into sociological analysis, but instead he argues we must “recognize the importance of historical context and contingency in the framing of racial categories and the social construction of racially defined experiences” (Winant 2000a:185). Yet, Winant notes, “much of liberal and even radical social science, though firmly committed to a social as opposed to a biological interpretation of race, nevertheless also slips into a kind of objectivism about racial identity and racial meaning” (Winant 2000a:184). Hence, sociologist Stephen Steinberg (1998) aptly critiques social science for its role in legitimating the racial hierarchy. Social scientists’ conceptualization of racism in terms of attitudes rather than social conditions led to a focus on White attitudinal change, rather than a focus on changing social conditions. Treatment of racial differences in objective terms without critical attention to the role of racism in creating those differences provides tacit acceptance of the view that race is no longer important, when in actuality its role has been ignored.
This book focuses exclusively on Black Americans to make plain the linkages between the past and the present. It unpacks how race became the basis of inequality historically, and threads together contemporary aspects of inequality. We define Black inclusively (see chapter 2) and explore the contradictions and the heterogeneity of the Black experience in America created by its burgeoning diversity. We engage the prism of differing intersectional social categories, such as ethnicity, gender, and class, which leads to a rich analysis of inequality that exposes how race joins with individuals’ privileges and disadvantages to differently shape the life chances of Black people.
Black in America: Revisiting Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream
The story of Black America is one of struggle and triumph. Black Americans in the twenty-first century are the most educated and financially stable Black generation by far. They have witnessed our nation’s first Black President and first Black billionaire. Blacks can be counted among the leadership in almost every industry and profession, from business to education. In the Black community, however, the substantial success of some is juxtaposed with the failure of others. The chasm between the haves and have-nots continues to widen and is redefining what it means to be Black – while race and poverty remain highly correlated, they are no longer synonymous.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s transformed American life, changing both the symbolic and material relationships Blacks maintained with the United States through the extension of voting rights and outlawing discrimination. Yet, in many ways, its central promise of true equality remains unfulfilled (Wilson 1978). Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” is interpreted by many as the original call for society to be colorblind. But that was not all Dr. King said. In fact, that was not even the focus of his speech at the March on Washington. The reference to not being judged by the color of your skin was made in the context of addressing the material inequality that was tied to race, specifically Blackness. Far from giving permission to trivialize race and focus on individual behavior, Martin Luther King’s now famous “I Have a Dream” speech sought to define the purpose of the march, “to dramatize the shameful condition” of Blacks in America.
It is helpful to revisit Martin Luther King’s actual words,2 because the reality that motivated the March on Washington and inspired King’s speech is often overlooked. He opened bemoaning the fact that, despite the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation 100 years prior, in 1963 Blacks were still not free. He continued:
One hundred years later the life of the Negro is still badly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land.
These powerful words were followed by his assertion that the 250,000 people who came to the nation’s capital that day were there “to cash a check.”
King described the Constitution
