Martin Chapter 3: Reworking the Color Line PDF

# Categorically Unequal ## Chapter 3: Reworking the Color Line The American civil rights movement began in the 1950s, culminated in the 1960s, and wound down in the 1970s. Key bookends of this era in U.S. history are the 1954 **Brown v. Board of Education** decision, which the Supreme Court used t...

# Categorically Unequal ## Chapter 3: Reworking the Color Line The American civil rights movement began in the 1950s, culminated in the 1960s, and wound down in the 1970s. Key bookends of this era in U.S. history are the 1954 **Brown v. Board of Education** decision, which the Supreme Court used to overturn "separate but equal" and the 1977 **Community Reinvestment Act**, which Congress enacted to outlaw the practice of redlining. ## Chapter 3: Reworking the Color Line - **1964 Civil Rights Act** - Prohibited discrimination in employment - Outlawed discrimination in services - Mandated faster action on school desegregation - **1965 Voting Rights Act** - Affirmed Black political rights - Empowered federal authorities to intervene on the state level - **1968 Fair Housing Act** - Outlawed discrimination in rental/sale of housing - **1969** LBJ's executive order mandating "affirmative" hiring in federal employment was applied to private contractors. This made racial hiring targets and race-sensitive recruitment methods standard in American labor markets. - **1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act** - Outlawed discrimination in retail lending. - **1975 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act** - Required banks to publish location data on the properties for which loans were granted and denied. ## Racial Stratification Before the Civil Rights Era Categorical mechanisms of racial inequality prevailed throughout the United States until the 1960s, but the means by which exploitation and exclusion were achieved differed in the North and South. ### The South: Jim Crow In Southern states, African Americans were second-class citizens by law and custom. The system of racial separation known as **Jim Crow** was codified by law, and separate facilities were required for black and white southerners in public services such as: - Education - Theaters - Hotels - Restaurants - Government Offices - Parks - Pools - Clinics - Hospitals - Washrooms - Buses - Trains - Drinking Fountains Formal segregation required a legal definition of who was black and who was white. Southern legislatures came to define `black` according to a "one-drop rule" whereby virtually any discernible African ancestry placed one on the black side of the color line. ### The North: Informal Segregation Northern states, where racial stratification occurred in private markets, did not have as explicit or violent a form of exclusion as Southern states. But as black populations grew in Northern cities, white Americans became less willing to accept black residents into their neighborhoods. The emergence of these "second ghettos" was fueled by: - **"Loitering" laws** that prevented African Americans from organizing and gathering, requiring them to hold contracts for labor and forbidding growers from bidding against each other. - All-white juries that would not convict a white citizen of murder, rape, larceny, assault, or fraud against a person of color. - **Informal practices** based on cultural understandings, such as lynching, and the spread of informal social practices which were built into the fabric of daily life. ## Reworking the Color Line - **The Durability of Cognitive Structures** - Racial schemas are resistant to change: They are learned, honed, and passed on, so they do not easily disappear. - **The Durability of Social Institutions** - It is unlikely that social institutions will just cease to exist when laws change. - **Cultural Lag** - Change in social structures does not happen immediately: Social institutions are often a drag on progress, as outlined by William Ogburn in 1922. ## Racial Stratification After the Civil Rights Era: New Forms The Civil Rights movement effectively banned overt discrimination, but whites were often unwilling to accept the changes to their social order that would be required to make racial stratification truly go away. Their resistance often takes the form of "discrimination with a smile," or the use of subtle and indirect mechanisms that persist despite the law (Massey 2005). - **The Power of Self-Interest** - Whites have a selfish interest in maintaining categorical mechanisms that perpetuate racial stratification. - **Discriminatory Innovation** - When confronted with the need to end overt discriminatory practices, whites tend to create new, more subtle ways to continue to maintain their privileged position in society. - **The Persistence of Cognitive Structures** - Whites still hold negative sentiments and beliefs about African Americans and are reluctant to live in close proximity to them. - **The Persistence of Institutional Practices** - These institutional practices, like redlining and steering in housing markets, persist. - **The Emergence of Mass Incarceration** - Mass incarceration, the modern equivalent of the "Jim Crow" era, is a prime driver of racial stratification, as it involves the deliberate racialization of crime and a systematic focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation. ## Barriers to Racial Change - **Inertia** - Social and institutional structures and human ideational structures are resistant to change and therefore often resist the efforts to end racial stratification. - **Self-Interest** - Most whites are reluctant to admit that categorical mechanisms of racial inequality work to *their* advantage. - **The Costs of Change** - Ending racial stratification requires significant government resources, involves direct costs, and imposes significant costs on people who benefited under the old racial regime. - **The Absence of a Plan** - The Civil Rights movement never developed a political plan to manage the losses of material, symbolic, and emotional resources that were entailed in the ending of racial stratification. **Conclusion**: Ending racial inequality in the United States likely requires a sustained, dedicated effort over a prolonged period. To understand why, one must analyze the system of racial stratification that the civil rights movement sought to overturn. ## The New Racial Stratification Racial stratification, and its effects, have become deeply embedded in American social practices and cultural conventions. The new order that emerged from the dismantling of Jim Crow is far more pernicious, insidious, and difficult to reverse than anything that came before. - **The Rise of Subtle Discrimination**: Overt, explicit discrimination has largely been replaced with more subtle and indirect practices, which are more difficult to identify, harder to prove, and largely immune from the legal sanctions that apply to overt discrimination. - **The Persistence of Stereotypes**: Whites overwhelmingly hold negative racial stereotypes that cause them to avoid direct contact with African Americans in families, schools, neighborhoods, churches, and other settings. - **The Mass Incarceration of African Americans**: Large numbers of African Americans are incarcerated behind bars for long terms. - **The Concentration of Poverty**: Hypersegregation leads to a concentration of poverty and other social ills in black neighborhoods. The resulting reinforcement of negative racial stereotypes makes the system of segregation self-perpetuating. - **Race-Blind Injustice**: The pursuit of "race-blindness" by whites has led to a new form of racial injustice. This means that those who are "race-blind" are in fact insensitive to the social consequences of legal equality, are often unsupportive of government efforts to ensure equal opportunity, and rely on justifications such as "personal responsibility" to explain why equality persists. ## Building a Better Underclass African Americans and other disadvantaged minority groups face the same fundamental barriers to social mobility and economic opportunity. White Americans, like all groups, are driven by a set of powerful economic and political interests, which they seek to protect at all costs. The rise of mass incarceration in particular is a profound example of how this dynamic plays out – White Americans, using the levers of the criminal justice system, have been able to successfully target and marginalize a particular segment of the African American population. These trends have severe implications for the entire society. ## Building a Better Underclass - **The Rise of Subtle Discrimination**: The pervasive nature of subtle discrimination throughout American society is a key obstacle to the achievement of a truly just society. - **The Need for a Public Response**: A truly effective public response to racial injustice needs to directly confront these more subtle forms of discrimination and work to empower formerly disadvantaged groups to make real gains in terms of their economic status, social integration, political participation, and personal well-being. - **The Role of Education**: Educational attainment and access to good employment are significant obstacles to moving up in the economic and social order. - **The Importance of Fighting for Social Change**: Ending racial stratification requires a concerted effort to combat the deeply ingrained racial biases that permeate American society.