polity
Copyright © Enobong Hannah Branch and Christina Jackson 2020
The right of Enobong Hannah Branch and Christina Jackson to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3141-7
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Branch, Enobong Hannah, 1983- author. | Jackson, Christina Renee, author.
Title: Black in America : the paradox of the color line / Enobong Hannah Branch, Christina Jackson.
Other titles: Paradox of the color line
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “To be Black in America is to exist amongst myriad contradictions: racial progress and regression, abject poverty amidst profound wealth, discriminatory policing yet equal protection under the law. This book explores these contradictions to provide a sociology of Black lives in America today”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019023981 (print) | LCCN 2019023982 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509531387 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509531394 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509531417 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: African Americans--Social conditions. | Racism--United States. | United States--Race relations.
Classification: LCC E185.86 .B693 2019 (print) | LCC E185.86 (ebook) | DDC 305.896/073--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019023981
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019023982
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Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Enobong Hannah Branch is a professor of Sociology and Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement, at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. Her research interests are in race, racism, and inequality; intersectional theory; work and occupations; and diversity in science. She is the author of Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work (2011), and the editor of Pathways, Potholes, and the Persistence of Women in Science: Reconsidering the Pipeline (2016), as well as several journal articles and book chapters that explore the historical roots and contemporary underpinnings of inequality.
Christina Jackson is an assistant professor of Sociology at Stockton University in New Jersey. Her research interests are primarily in the intersections of race, class, and gender; social inequality; urban spaces; social movements; and the politics of redevelopment and gentrification. She is the co-author of Embodied Difference: Divergent Bodies in Public Discourse with Jamie A. Thomas (2019), as well as several journal articles and book chapters.
Emmanuel Adero is a senior director in the Office of Equity and Inclusion at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. He has conducted research on race and inequality, Black masculinity, fatherhood, and the family. He has previously served in numerous research and analytical roles related to demography, public policy, and crime analysis.
Lucius Couloute is an assistant professor of Sociology at Suffolk University in Boston, MA. His research interests are in race and racism, class, gender, prisoner re-entry, criminalization, insecure work experiences, and organizations. He has also served as a policy analyst with the Prison Policy Initiative and has authored three policy reports related to the re-entry challenges of formerly incarcerated people.
Candace S. King is a Ph.D. student in the W. E. B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. She is also an Emmy award-winning journalist (2017) for her coverage of the water crisis affecting predominantly Black communities in Flint, Michigan. Her research interests are in formations of Black female identities and misrepresentations in mainstream media.
Post-racial. adjective: having overcome or moved beyond racism: having reached a stage or time at which racial prejudice no longer exists or is no longer a major social problem.1
America is far from a post-racial society. Racial inequality is in fact our defining social problem. From rates of mass incarceration to infant mortality, health disparities to unemployment, staggering inequality along racial lines is as American as apple pie, so much so that sociologist Andrew Hacker penned a book in 1995 entitled Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, and 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.
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 and the Declaration of Independence as a “promissory note … a promise that all men – yes, Black men as well as White men – would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet America, King argued, had failed to honor this “sacred obligation” to Black Americans. Despite all evidence to the contrary, King still believed in the promise of liberty saying: “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.” He reminded America of “the fierce urgency of now” and warned that there would not be “rest” while Blacks were less than full citizens. King recounted many social ails from police brutality to the lack of a right to vote, from the ghetto to Jim Crow, and he urged Blacks to conduct civil protest with “dignity and discipline,” urging them not to be satisfied “until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
King noted how hard the struggle has been and told Blacks to “not wallow in despair.” And only then, four-and-a-half pages into his five-and-a-half-page speech, did he begin to dream, to offer inspiration to the crowd to keep fighting for a promise that had not yet been realized.
I say to you today, my friends, though, even though we face difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream … I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” … I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my 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.
The depth of King’s dream far exceeds the Black History Month oneliner and ode to colorblindness to which it has been reduced. King aimed for racial justice, for America to be post-racial in the definitive sense, to overcome racism and enable Blacks to be truly free. Yet, just as Mississippi continues to struggle with racial prejudice,3 Blacks in America are still judged by the color of their skin. In some ways, we are farther away from achieving the dream today than we were in 1963.
We now have a national holiday that recognizes the contributions of Martin Luther King Jr., and laws that prohibit segregation, but racial inequality persists. Blacks in America face the insurmountable struggle of trying to define the discrimination they face without being accused of playing the race card. America embraced colorblindness – the racial ideology that suggests the best way to end discrimination is by treating individuals as equally as possible (without regard to race) – while leaving the underlying inequality tied to racial domination untouched. The American Dream itself espouses a post-racial ideal that hard work and effort are all that is required for success, and meritocracy will win out in the end. Yet all of the available evidence suggests we are not there yet. Our racial legacy has left footprints that reinforce the centrality of race and racism in post-civil rights America. Sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield (2015) argues that insisting on colorblindness comes at a cost:
By claiming that they do not see race, they also can avert their eyes from the ways in which well-meaning people engage in practices that reproduce neighborhood and school segregation, rely on “soft skills” in ways that disadvantage racial minorities in the job market, and hoard opportunities in ways that reserve access to better jobs for White peers.
The Civil Rights Movement led to a cultural shift in the understanding of racial inequality as inherent (a decline in overt racism), but today many draw on cultural explanations to explain persistent racial inequality alongside widespread belief in the virtue of racial equality. This book documents the role that racism (in shifting forms) has played in structuring the social and economic landscape that Black Americans must navigate.
We orient the reader historically, paying special attention to slavery and its legacy (Jim Crow), to show how the structure of American society, and Blacks’ long-time outsider status within it, have lasting contemporary implications. By examining both contemporary and historical facets of the Black experience, through a structural lens grounded disciplinarily in sociology, we aim to illuminate what is easily missed: a comprehensive understanding of the precise ways in which race continues to act as a fundamental organizing principle of American society today. Throughout the book, we integrate spotlights on resistance highlighting how Black Americans grapple with and respond to constraint.
Chapter 1, “How Blacks Became the Problem: American Racism and the Fight for Equality,” provides the historical and conceptual foundation for the book, arguing that it is impossible to understand the Black community without also interrogating the role that American racism played in its formation and the continued maintenance of the racial boundaries imposed on it. Education, and the active restriction and constraint on Black education from slavery to the present, is utilized to illustrate the institutional nature of racism and explain that, even though many claim today not to “see” race and therefore believe they cannot be “racist,” this logic misses a fundamental truth: one can claim not to be “racist” and yet reproduce a racial hierarchy.
Chapter 2, “Crafting the Racial Frame: Blackness and the Myth of the Monolith” (with Candace S. King and Emmanuel Adero), describes how Black Americans have been framed from without, by the stereotypes that suggest who they are supposed to be and represent. But it also emphasizes how Black Americans have defined and are actively restructuring what it means to be Black from within, resisting all attempts at a simple narrative. This chapter lays the groundwork for understanding the complexity of race, representation, and obstacles to integration. Blackness is often thought of, and projected as, a monolithic experience that includes welfare, poverty, and female-headed households. The ubiquity of these images, and their taken-for-granted associations, force all Blacks to navigate their everyday lives through a lens of deviance, no matter how incongruous the fit. Among Blacks themselves, Black identity and its expression are shaped by a host of intersections, such as gender, ethnicity/immigrant status, class, sexuality and disability. The intersection of identities further marginalizes some Blacks while privileging others. This unevenness in oppression has the ability to create fractures within the Black community, even while it is one of its defining features.
Chapter 3, “Whose Life Matters? Value and Disdain in American Society,” reorients the reader away from the – unsettling for some – slogan Black Lives Matter to examine the historical value placed on Black life. We succinctly describe the devaluation of Blacks in the US through a focus on the historical treatment of the Black body and the myriad of ways in which the medical, legal and political system perpetuated it. We then chronicle Black resistance movements from slavery onward, demonstrating that Blacks have always resisted their subjugation, unwilling to accept the disdain for Black life even when racial oppression was violently reasserted. Movements, and the rise of the contemporary social movement Black Lives Matter, have essentially attempted to redefine the problem not as Blackness but as inequality that subjugates Black people.
Chapter 4, “Staying Inside the Red Line: Housing Segregation and the Rise of the Ghetto,” emphasizes the role of place in containing the Black body. Racial segregation still defines the life chances and landscape of inequality for Black urban residents, stigmatizing inner-city neighborhoods and rendering its inhabitants vulnerable. While segregation as an official policy, created to protect White citizens and lock in their advantages spatially, was eradicated nearly 50 years ago, other systems continue this protection and perpetuate historically stigmatized spaces such as the ghetto (Lipsitz 2015). Today, not only are we still avoiding “integrated” neighborhoods discursively, but the rationales used to rehabilitate spaces are coded racially. Historically Black neighborhoods are targeted for redevelopment and gentrification, needing “revival” and “resuscitation” through real-estate investment. Yet hegemonic ideas about Blackness, deeply held in the public’s imaginary, lock low- and middle-income Blacks out of quality housing that is created. We explore how Black residents make sense of this contradiction and resist.
Chapter 5, “Who Gets to Work? Understanding the Black Labor Market Experience,” emphasizes how race structures access to occupational opportunity that marginalizes Blacks in the labor market. In a meritocratic society, access to opportunity should be granted based on how hard a person works, and hard work should lead to economic rewards. This has not been true in America. Occupational opportunities were withheld from Blacks and extended to Whites. Blacks and Whites, men and women, when working alongside one another or in related jobs were compensated unequally because of their race and/or gender. Racism helped manage the dissonance between American ideals of equality and Black exclusion, ideologically and legally justifying the differential treatment of Blacks in the labor market until the Civil Rights Movement. There were some gains afforded by affirmative action, followed by losses as federal interest in enforcement waned. This chapter takes the reader on a journey to understand the context of historically unequal opportunity and the contemporary forces driving socioeconomic inequality today.
Chapter 6, “Is Justice Blind? Race and the Rise of Mass Incarceration” (with Lucius Couloute), examines the historical pathologization of Black bodies, placing it within a larger system of inequality and race-making. It begins first with the state of mass criminalization today, exploring the product of what Michelle Alexander (2010) calls “the new Jim Crow.” With millions of Black bodies under criminal justice system control, the chapter asks: How did we get here? The answer lies in the immediate post-emancipation period as social scientists, politicians, wealthy landowners and big business worked to create a system that reinforced racial inequality amid racial flux. We then examine shifting twentieth-century practices and policies grounded in – by then pervasive – racist ideas that governed the growth of our criminal justice system. The chapter then ends where it started, the contemporary period, this time examining the effects of criminalizing Black bodies and the reproduction of racial inequality in newer practices and policies.
Chapter 7, “Reifying the Problem: Racism and the Persistence of the Color Line in American Politics” (with Emmanuel Adero), provides an examination of the role of politics and policy in creating and driving the persistence of racial inequality. It outlines the politics of retrenchment after emancipation, which led to a split between Northern and Southern Democrats and the emergence of the Southern strategy, which appealed to the racism against Blacks held by Southern White voters. We then draw on the similarities between the Democratic and Republican parties and how racial appeals have shaped presidential politics and policies. While Blacks are a base to be catered to and at times courted by one party and antagonized by the other, both have played a definite role in the persistence of Black marginality. Finally, we outline policy as the outcome of racial politics. Though policies are seemingly race-neutral, their disparate impact on the Black community is well documented.
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