TWO

The Trouble with Post-racial Liberalism

“Whether race is a burden or a benefit is all the same to the race-neutral theorists; that is what they mean when they speak of being colorblind. They are colorblind, all right—blind to the consequences of being the wrong color in America today.”

—Julian Bond, Chairman, NAACP, 2003⁴¹

Post-racial liberalism, characterized by its rhetoric of racial transcendence and its public policy agenda of colorblind universalism, bases its claims for legitimacy on two pillars of presumed truth. The first is a presumption of racism’s declining significance, to conjure William Julius Wilson’s terminology. This argument holds that much, perhaps even most of the inequality between whites and people of color—especially blacks—in the United States, is no longer caused by racism and race-based discrimination. Rather, economic forces, and even ingrained cultural factors within the African American community have overtaken the role of racism in explaining the conditions of life faced by black and brown folks, especially the urban poor. The second presumption of post-racial liberalism and its proponents is that whether or not this first maxim is true—and they militantly insist that it is—we must act as though it were, for the political reality is such that whites simply will not support, in any real measure, policies that seek to target opportunity specifically to people of color or address racial inequities directly. That these two positions are internally inconsistent, as noted previously—in that the first presumes white folks are now committed to racial equity, while the second presumes they are not—matters little, it seems, to the apostles of colorblindness.

But is either presumption of post-racial liberalism accurate? Is colorblind universalism sufficient to ameliorate persistent racial inequities in income, wealth, housing, education and health care? Is a rhetoric of racial transcendence necessary in order to build political support for progressive politics in the modern era? And what are the consequences of this approach, not only for the political arena, but for our private lives as well? What would be the impact of colorblindness as a paradigm for thought and action among employers, teachers and others who interact with a racially diverse public? Would such an approach lessen racial discrimination or potentially make it worse?

THE REALITY OF RACIAL DISPARITIES

Before we can answer these questions, a bit of preliminary groundwork is in order. After all, although both the proponents of post-racial liberalism and those who put forth traditional an- tiracist theories agree that there are significant racial disparities that must be addressed—albeit through different means—it is not the case that everyone recognizes the depths of those inequities. Many readers may be unfamiliar with the evidence in this regard, and so a brief review may be helpful to frame the discussion to follow.

Sadly, presumptions of post-raciality are not new. In fact, such presumptions have long been the norm, especially among whites, for whom an understanding of ingrained racial inequities has long been absent. So, for instance, even in the 1960s, at a time when all would now agree the United States was a profoundly unequal place, where racial discrimination was deeply systematized, most whites saw little about which to be concerned. According to Gallup polls taken in 1962 and 1963, between two-thirds and nearly 90 percent of whites said that blacks were treated equally with regard to jobs, schooling and housing opportunities.⁴² Tat most whites could believe such a thing, even at the height of the civil rights movement—which, by definition, was animated by the reality that treatment was far from equal—says much about the pathological nature of white denial. Indeed, in 1963, three-fourths of whites said the civil rights movement was pushing too fast for change, and asking for “too much.”⁴³ This, during a year in which blacks were being hosed down in the streets of Birmingham by racist police, and blown up at the 16th Street Baptist Church there, as well as a year in which Mississippi NAACP chair Medgar Evers was murdered in his driveway, and Alabama Governor George Wallace promised to maintain segregation forever.

But putting aside the extent to which whites perceive opportunity to be equal—and thus, the extent to which bigotry and discrimination against people of color continue to be real problems—the sad truth is that most whites fail to possess even the slightest awareness that people of color face any different life situations at all, regardless of cause. Recent polling has found that most whites believe blacks are just as well off as they are when it comes to jobs and income.⁴⁴ This, despite the fact that African Americans are twice as likely as whites to be employed in low-wage jobs and twice as likely to be unemployed, in good times or bad.⁴⁵ As of 2009, even black men with college degrees were nearly twice as likely to be unemployed as their white counterparts.⁴⁶ Overall, according to the most recent data available at the time of this writing, blacks with bachelor’s degrees are twice as likely to be unemployed as non-Hispanic whites; Latinos with at least a college degree are nearly two-thirds more likely than non-Hispanic whites to be unemployed, and Asians with at least a college degree are about 13 percent more likely to be out of work than similar whites.⁴⁷ What’s more, the earnings gap between college-educated whites and blacks has actually grown in recent years, thanks to the tendency for persons of color to be let go first during economic downturns, in part because they obtained their positions later than whites, who were in the pipeline for the best jobs far earlier.⁴⁸ In other words, the notion that all workers are in the same boat, or that the disadvantages experienced by African Americans and other people of color are merely caused by poverty status or other human capital factors like education, is clearly false.

On average, blacks are about three times more likely than non-Hispanic whites to be poor and three and a half times as likely to be extremely poor.⁴⁹ Spells of unemployment also last longer for people of color. So, for instance, as of August 2009, out-of-work black men remain unemployed for about seven more weeks than white men, and unemployed black women remain out of work for about five more weeks than white women, on average. Asian men and women also face longer spells of unemployment, compared to whites: about seven weeks and four weeks more time out of work than their white counterparts, respectively.⁵⁰ It should be noted that to be counted in unemployment data, an individual must be actively seeking employment, so this data represents the difference between whites and folks of color who are all actively seeking jobs. It is not, as some believe, due to persons of color having less attachment to the labor market, possessing different work ethics, or merely not looking hard enough for employment.

Beyond mere unemployment, there are substantial gaps in terms of what kinds of jobs even the employed have, with many of these gaps playing out racially. So, for instance, whites continue to dominate the top jobs in America, holding approximately 83 percent of all management-level positions. Considering that this number includes public sector management positions as well (such as positions in schools, government, etc.), in which people of color are somewhat better represented than in the economy as a whole, it is safe to say that whites hold more than 85 percent of such jobs in the private and higher-paying sector.⁵¹ And yet whites are only about 68 percent of the national population. During the recent economic downturn, the gaps between whites and persons of color—both black and Latino—have actually grown at the upper end of the employment spectrum, with whites capturing a higher percentage of upper-income jobs and persons of color a lower percentage, than at any time in the past decade.⁵² Even Chinese-American professionals, who are on balance a highly ed- ucated group—and thus should be expected to earn relatively high incomes when compared to whites—earn only about 56 percent of what white professionals earn, despite their equal or greater educational credentials.⁵³

Tat most whites are unaware of these and other facts that collectively demonstrate the reality of racial inequity in America, is indisputable. According to the results of one national survey, 70 percent of whites demonstrate at least one if not several erroneous beliefs about the well-being of persons of color relative to whites,⁵⁴presuming a far greater degree of equity between the groups than exists in practice. A Kaiser Family Foundation report from several years ago indicated significant ignorance about matters of basic health and well-being, and the disparities between whites and blacks in that regard. According to Kaiser, two-thirds of whites think blacks are every bit as well off as whites when it comes to getting routine medical care when they need it.⁵⁵ In truth, African Americans are far more likely than whites to lack health insurance coverage, and thus have a much harder time accessing routine and quality care.⁵⁶

The most telling evidence of racial inequity, however, is to be found in data on relative net worth and assets. While incomes between similarly educated whites and persons of color have narrowed somewhat in the past two decades—though still, whites at every age level and educational attainment level continue to earn, on average, about 20 percent more than their black counterparts—gaps in wealth are truly stunning and have tended to grow over time, rather than narrow. At the beginning of the decade of the 2000s, for example, the median net worth for white households was approximately eleven times the median net worth for black households and eight times the median net worth for Latino households.⁵⁷ The typical young black couple, though earning about the same as their white counterparts (assuming they have comparable educations), will start out with a net worth less than one-fifth that of the typical young white couple: a difference of over $20,000.⁵⁸

Even that level of division masks a deeper and more disturbing reality, however. For blacks and Latinos, most wealth and assets are bound up with home value. For whites, home value represents only about 30 percent of overall wealth, as they are far more likely to possess financial instruments such as stocks, commercial real estate and other more easily liquidated and accessible assets. Indeed, once home equity is excluded from consideration, median white household wealth is nearly twenty times the median for black households and twelve times the median for Latinos. If the average white family were black, their net worth would be at least $100,000 less than it currently is.⁵⁹

These gaps manifest at every income level, and do not merely reflect the extremes of white wealth and black and brown poverty. So, for instance, the poorest whites in terms of income (those in the bottom fifth of all households) still possess, on average, about $24,000 in assets, largely because they may have a small piece of property passed on to them from other family members. But blacks in the poorest fifth of all households possess, on average, only $57 in assets, for a white-to-black wealth ratio at this level of 421:1. These poorest whites also have forty-eight times the wealth of the poorest Latinos. In the middle fifth of income earners, white households have 5.2 times the wealth, on average, of the typical black household in the middle class, and 5.3 times that of middle-class Latinos. In the upper-income bracket, among households with incomes that place them in the top fifth of all income earners, whites have 3.2 times more wealth, on average, than comparable blacks, and nearly three times more than the typical Latino household.⁶⁰

As a result of these disparities, black families are far more vulnerable than their white counterparts to economic downturns, in that they do not have reserve assets on hand with which to pad their economic situation in case of a layoff. More than half of all black families are so asset-poor that they could not sustain as many as three months without income and still remain above the poverty line, while only one in four white families are equally asset-poor.⁶¹

RACE-BASED INJURY, INHERITED DISADVANTAGE AND ONGOING DISCRIMINATION

It is one thing, however, to acknowledge persistent gaps in well-being between whites and people of color, and quite another to understand the causes for those disparities. The proponents of color-blind liberalism seek to explain most of the racial gaps today by way of factors other than racism and discrimination. Tough they certainly do not deny the weight of past oppression, these theorists tend to minimize the extent to which past injustice determines the current status of blacks and other people of color in the United States. Rather, they claim to find the source of much inequity in race-neutral macroeconomic developments, such as the decline of manufacturing employment and a shift to service-sector jobs—which, according to Wilson, has created a spatial mismatch between where black people live and where most of those new jobs are—and additionally in certain attributes, behavioral and cultural, which they see manifested in urban spaces and which they believe keep people of color down, relative to whites.

Yet a careful examination of both the weight of past racial injustice and current evidence of ongoing racial bias and discrimination, calls into question the veracity of the post-racial narrative. Acts of race-specific domination and injustice, both historically and today, exact a much greater toll on black and brown communities than the post-racial liberals—and needless to say conservatives—are prepared to admit. As such, the rhetoric of racial transcendence is dishonest, in that it obscures the power of racism and its impact on present-day communities of color, and its advocacy of colorblind universalism at the level of public policy is destined to fail. After all, it is impossible to solve a problem if the source of that problem is ignored. Even if universal programs of uplift for all in need—in terms of jobs, schools and health care—were valuable (and surely they are), they cannot close racial gaps in income, wealth or health so long as those gaps are being replicated by way of racism and discrimination.

Recognizing the Weight of the Past

While a full recitation of how existing inequities carry over from past race-based oppression would fill volumes, a brief mention of some of the highlights of that oppression is in order, so that we can fully appreciate the cornerstone elements of institutional racial division in the United States.

On the one hand, blacks were subjected to a vicious history of enslavement by whites, under which as much as a trillion dollars in unpaid labor was provided to whites, and for the benefit of the national economy.⁶² Furthermore, indigenous persons suffered the theft of their land and violent conquest (as did those residing in Northern Mexico when their land was annexed to the United States). Blacks, Latinos and Chinese workers suffered forced labor (the latter especially as workers on the transcontinental railroad), and all non-whites experienced either de jure or de facto segregation from the late 1800s until the 1960s.

Racism manifested not only in violent terrorist attacks against communities of color (as with thousands of lynchings, bombings, and acts of arson, or the dozens of white-led race riots against communities of color during the early to mid 1900s),⁶³ but also in more institutionalized processes. For instance, for many years, persons of color were blocked from access to the skilled trades, and union bosses and politicians alike colluded to allow for the ongoing segregation of labor.⁶⁴ Politicians further sedimented inequality by institutionalizing racial discrimination in the awarding of GI Bill benefits, by allowing states to set their own eligibility standards. Such a practice gave Southern states the green light to deny benefits to blacks or to ensure that, even if benefits were awarded, black recipients who had served the country in combat would yet be relegated to the worst jobs and barred from mostly white colleges.⁶⁵ Even in states outside the South, blacks faced obstacles to their ability to fully utilize GI Bill benefits, with black workers in places like the San Francisco Bay Area facing regular relegation to the lowest-wage jobs available, despite their military service.⁶⁶ Nationally, only 4 percent of college students enrolled under the GI Bill following World War II were African American, in large measure because of ongoing barriers to full access.⁶⁷ Likewise, blacks were largely blocked from participating in most of the New Deal programs so vital to economic recovery after the Great Depression. Indeed, until Social Security policies were changed in the 1950s, two decades after the program’s creation, about three in four blacks were barred from participation, by way of exclusions implemented in the law that applied to domestic workers and agricultural labor (which comprised the bulk of black employment nationally).⁶⁸ As a result of their exclusion from retirement programs, African Americans were forced to continue working well into their seventies, far more often than comparable whites, who had been provided with a safety net in their old age.

Blacks were also provided with very limited educational opportunities throughout this period. In the South, spending for black schools was only about one-third of the amount spent for white schools, per capita, and by 1930, one-third of Southern counties had no four-year high schools for black students at all.⁶⁹Schools attended by blacks were far more crowded, had far fewer resources and were largely removed from the broader opportunity structures used by whites to pass down advantages intergenerationally. That public schooling was separate and profoundly unequal is an understatement of rather dramatic proportions.

The very government that was actively suppressing opportunity for persons of color was directly creating it for whites, however. From the Naturalization Act of 1790, which recognized whiteness and citizenship as synonymous and exclusively so for nearly a century, to fugitive slave laws that favored white property rights over the human rights of African Americans, white preference and privilege was normalized from the nation’s beginning. Indeed, it had been so dating back to colonial times, when European indentured servitude had been abolished in favor of chattel enslavement for blacks. In the mid to late 1800s, even as enslavement was coming to an end, and promises of equity began to flow from the lips of national leaders, the state moved to enshrine huge preferences for whites. So, for example, the Homestead Act, passed in 1862, ultimately distributed nearly 250 million acres of land to 1.5 million homesteading families, virtually all of them white. Today, at least 20 million white Americans continue to benefit from those early land giveaways, either by virtue of still holding said property in the possession of their families, or by having been able to sell the land and reap the benefits of those sales intergenerationally.⁷⁰Other estimates place the number of living Homestead Act descendants at closer to 50 million, with almost none of these being persons of color.⁷¹

Then, as mentioned previously, the creation of the Federal Housing Administration home loan program—which guaranteed mortgages written by banks to working-class families who otherwise would have been locked out of the housing market—subsidized white wealth creation in the mid 1900s, even as people of color were facing intense housing discrimination. As many as one-third of all mortgages written in the post–World War II period were written under the FHA and VA loan programs, amounting to approximately $120 billion in housing equity, almost exclusively for whites. These mortgages represented approximately half of all suburban housing in America at mid-century. By 1962, 40 percent of all white mortgages were being paid through the preferential lending policies of the FHA or Veteran’s Admin- istration programs to which most all people of color were being denied access.⁷² Combined with the GI Bill, which placed the lion’s share of nearly $100 billion worth of benefits in the hands of white veterans, these efforts can safely be credited with the creation of the white middle class.⁷³

The impact of this institutionalized discrimination and white racial preference has been profound, and it is mightily implicated in the current maldistribution of resources between whites and persons of color. Returning now to the issue of racial wealth gaps, there is no question that much of that gap reflects the generations of unequal opportunity that allowed the enrichment of whites at the expense of individuals and communities of color. The best predictor of a young family’s net worth, after all, is the net worth of their parents,⁷⁴ as up to 80 percent of family wealth derives from intergenerational transfers of assets between parents and children.⁷⁵Some of this transfer occurs upon parental death, but much of it transpires while the parents are still alive, as with down-payment assistance for a home or assistance with college tuition. And when it comes to the net worth of the parents of today’s youth—themselves mostly members of the baby-boom generation—the advantages for whites and disadvantages experienced by folks of color are extreme.

Young whites today are about twice as likely as young blacks to find themselves in families where their parents are in a position to help them financially.⁷⁶ Because of past inequity of opportunity, white families were able to accumulate assets and pass them down to their children, while black families have not had the same ability. Whereas one in four white families have received an inheritance sufficient to put a down payment on a house, only 3.5 percent of black families have: a ratio of approximately 7:1. Not only are whites more likely to receive some form of intergenerational bequest, the average value of those handed-down benefits is 3.5 times greater than the value of benefits received by blacks from their families.⁷⁷

One of the principal forms of assistance provided by white families to their children (and in large part because past advantages have put them in a position to do so) is with college tuition assistance. The families of black students are only one-third as likely as white families to be able to pay the entire cost of their child’s education, and on average, black students’ families are only able to cover about 42 percent of the cost of college at the nation’s most highly rated (and expensive) schools, while white families are able to cover, on average, roughly 74 percent of the total cost.⁷⁸ And contrary to popular belief, black college students do not reap a disproportionate amount of financial aid or scholarships to make up the difference. Scholarships targeted specifically to people of color represent only one-quarter of one percent (0.25 percent) of all scholarship dollars,⁷⁹ and only about 3.5 percent of students of color receive any kind of race-based scholarship for college.⁸⁰ The different abilities of white and black families to pay the cost of higher education for their children no doubt helps explain why the median debt for blacks who go on to receive their PhDs is roughly double the median debt for similar whites: about $39,000, compared to nearly $21,000.⁸¹

To pay for a child’s college education—which whites are in a position to do far more readily, thanks to a history of unequal opportunity—has a huge snowball effect. First, it reduces the debt load carried by young whites at the outset of their careers. This then improves their credit rating and lowers their debt-to-income ratio, thereby improving the odds of being able to buy a home and begin to accumulate one’s own assets at an early age. It is in this way that the inertia of past inequity carries over into present and future generations.

Acknowledging Racial Bias in the Present—The Persistence of Prejudice

Unfortunately, it is not just the weight of the past that explains persistent racial gaps in wealth, health and occupational status. Tough commentators are quick to pronounce racial prejudices all but dead—especially in the so-called age of Obama—the evidence suggests a deep-seated and negative color-consciousness among large numbers of white Americans.⁸² This negative color-consciousness manifests both at the level of personal bias, or prejudice, and with institutional mistreatment, in the form of discrimination. That large numbers of whites continue to view people of color through lenses that are clouded by bias suggests that the rhetoric of racial transcendence is asking us to embrace a fictional narrative. Post-racial liberalism, by pronouncing an age of racial ecumenism and harmony, finesses the truth about this bias, thereby making it harder to address.

First, and before examining discriminatory treatment, let us examine the research on personal bias. The evidence in this regard is all too clear: Notwithstanding protestations to the contrary, ongoing racial bias is all too common among large numbers of white Americans. Although most whites have internalized the sense that overt expressions of racial hostility are inappropriate in mixed company, even blatantly hostile remarks and comments are quite frequent in all-white settings.⁸³ Disturbingly, even those whites who engage in positive and warm interactions with people of color on a fairly regular basis will often fall into these forms of verbal denigration when amongst themselves. One study, involving 626 white students at more than two dozen colleges, found that when asked to keep journals documenting any racially insensitive or racist comments, jokes, incidents or actions on the part of their white friends, participants in the study were able to document more than 7,500 blatantly racist events or incidents in a six-to-ten-week period, or roughly a dozen instances each week witnessed by each white person in the study.⁸⁴ Multiplied by millions of whites in colleges, or more broadly, by 200 million whites nationwide, one begins to see the possible magnitude of even blatant white racism in the early twenty-first century.

According to readily available survey data, about six in ten whites are willing to admit to believing at least one racist stereotype about blacks to be true: from a belief that blacks are generally less intelligent to beliefs that blacks are naturally more aggressive, lazier, and would rather live on welfare than work for a living.⁸⁵ Many of these studies have found that while whites are typically adamant about not being racist, those same whites, once pushed to dig more deeply into their perspectives, often cut loose with any number of anti-black views, such as the notion that “blacks lack a strong work ethic,” or that blacks are “less responsible” than whites.⁸⁶ Although many whites refuse to admit that they harbor racial prejudices, there is often a substantial difference between stated beliefs and deeper opinion. For instance, one study of whites at three selective universities found that when asked a simple question about their support for, or opposition to, inter- racial marriage, 80 percent expressed support. But once subjected to the in-depth interviews, less than half of those who claimed to be supportive of such unions stuck with that position, while the rest modified their support substantially, revealing in the process significant reservations they continued to have about interracial relationships.⁸⁷

Whites in metropolitan areas are significantly more likely to hold racist views, with more than half (and often as many as three-quarters) believing that blacks are generally lazier than whites, less intelligent than whites and more likely to prefer welfare to work. At least one in five whites in metropolitan areas hold racist views across the spectrum of categories, and could reasonably be considered severely racist in outlook.⁸⁸

White racism is so entrenched, in fact, that as many as one in four whites says the ideal neighborhood would have no blacks at all. While some may seek to chalk up such answers to class bias rather than racial animus (or perhaps a more benign tendency to prefer living around people with whom you share a common cultural background), research has found that anti-black stereotypes are four times more important than mere in-group preferences, and seven times more important than class-based prejudices in explaining why these whites prefer black-free neighborhoods.⁸⁹ Significantly, white biases against the presence of blacks in their neighborhoods are not, at least in the collective sense, the result of having had personal negative experiences such as rising crime rates or declining property values, as is often claimed. Research has found, for instance, that whites began to flee public schools in metropolitan areas long before busing, and long before they could have claimed any decline in the quality of their formerly white-majority schools. So, for instance, in Washington, D.C., St. Louis, Philadelphia, Chicago and Baltimore, formerly white public schools were already on the way to being majority black by the early 1960s.⁹⁰ In Matteson, Illinois, an area outside of Chicago, white residents began to flee in the early 1980s as African Americans began to move to the community. From 1980 to 1997 the percentage of Matteson residents who were white declined by half, and by 2002, only a third of the town’s residents were white. Although whites who left the community insist they did so because of rising crime and declining property values, during the period of racial transition crime actually held steady or declined, housing prices rose and the median income in the increasingly black community grew by 73 percent.⁹¹

In part, white biases against people of color stem from media coverage that over-represents blacks in pathological and deviant roles, from criminals to the long-term welfare–dependent under-class.⁹² Indeed, research from scholars at the University of Illinois has found that the more news one watches—be it local or from the national networks—the more likely one is to negatively stereotype blacks when it comes to aggressiveness and impoverishment. According to the research, the effect of news viewing on racist attitudes is independent of pre-existing racial views, gender, age, race, education levels, political ideology, income, levels of neighborhood diversity and even the crime rate in the viewer’s own community. In fact, as much as one-fourth of all stereotypical belief about blacks can be explained solely by levels of news viewing, independent of these other factors.⁹³ No doubt media exposure can help explain why 95 percent of whites say they picture a black person when asked to envision a typical drug user,⁹⁴ even though the data indicates that blacks are only about 13 or 14 percent of users, while non-Hispanic whites represent the clear majority—typically over 70 percent—of all drug users.⁹⁵

Not all racial bias is blatant however. Indeed, much of the research in recent years indicating the persistence of white racial biases has been in the area of implicit, often subconscious prejudice, which, however subtle, can still contribute to unequal treatment of people of color in given situations. Implicit Association Tests (IATs), which have been administered to hundreds of thousands of people in recent years, indicate that the vast majority of whites hold implicit biases in favor of whites and against African Americans. The group Americans for American Values provides an easy-to-understand description of how implicit association tests work:

The IAT uses reaction time measurement to look at subconscious bias. To take a simple example, imagine that you are asked to associate a list of positive words (pretty, sweet, calm) with a list of flower names. Next, you are asked to associate a list of negative words (ugly, scary, freaky) with a list of insect names. So far, so easy, right? Most of us like flowers and aren’t crazy about bugs. But what if you reverse it? You are in front of a computer screen and the left half of the screen contains a picture of a spiny poisonous caterpillar and the word “calm,” while on the right hand of the screen is a picture of a tulip and the word “freaky.” When a positive word or an insect name comes up, you press the left arrow. When a negative word or a flower name comes up, you press the right arrow. The second task turns out to be complicated—we don’t generally associate insects with positive words. This com- plication leads us to do worse (react more slowly) on a test that pairs insects with “pretty,” “sweet” and “calm” than one that pairs insects with “ugly,” “scary” and freaky.” By measuring reaction times in tests like these … scientists are able to measure your association of positive words with flowers and negative words with insects. We call the positive association a preference and the negative association a bias.⁹⁶

When administered to test for racial biases, the IATs flash racially identifiable faces on the screen, paired with either positive sounding or negative sounding words, and then compare how quickly associations are made between white or black faces, for instance, and certain words, either positive or negative.⁹⁷ According to the research:

When given a test of unconscious stereotyping, nearly ninety percent of whites who have taken the test implicitly associate the faces of black Americans with negative words and traits such as evil character or failure. That is, they have more trouble linking black faces to pleasant words and positive features than they do for white faces… . In addition, when whites are shown photos of black faces, even for only thirty milliseconds, key areas of their brains that are designed to respond to perceived threats light up automatically.⁹⁸

Interestingly, implicit bias in favor of one’s own group and against others does not appear to be the result of natural in-group/out-group bonding and categorizing. Rather, the results from hundreds of thousands of IATs that have been administered sug- gest that they stem from fairly intense social conditioning. Thus, whites, Latinos and Asians all show similar levels of pro-white and anti-black biases, and blacks, far from demonstrating significant pro-black and anti-white bias, are roughly split between those who have implicit pro-black bias, no apparent bias whatsoever and even implicit pro-white bias.⁹⁹

These studies have found a clear divide between the claims people make about their own biases and the reality of their internalized stereotypes. So, for instance, one study of more than 45,000 people sought to explore the extent to which respondents held implicit biases against indigenous people in the United States. Although most claimed outwardly that they perceived Native Americans as actually being “more American” than whites, IATs discovered that these same individuals most often associated white faces with the concept of being “American,” and were far more likely to do so than to view Native American faces that way.¹⁰⁰

Other research has found a similar split between the non-racist persona that people carry around with them publicly, and the private biases they continue to hold inside. In one classic experiment, a black actor and a white actor engaged in an argument. On the tape shown to one group of whites, the black actor shoves the white actor out of the way. On the tape shown to a second group, it is the white actor who does the shoving. In all other respects the tapes were the same (and the whites viewing the different films had been randomly selected, so they too were functionally no different). Afterward, the white respondents were asked a series of questions about what they had seen. Among them was a question that asked whether they perceived the shove administered at the end of the argument as aggressive or violent. Three out of four whites who had seen the black actor do the shoving answered yes. But only 17 percent of the whites who had seen the white actor administer the exact same kind of shove felt the act had been aggressive or violent.¹⁰¹ Although this study was conducted in the 1970s, there is little reason to believe that time alone would change the way white Americans, at a subconscious level, perceive aggression in blacks as opposed to other whites.

More important, additional studies since that time have found similar results: One found that even as children, whites view blacks as more aggressive than other whites engaged in the very same behavior,¹⁰² and another found that white preschoolers, when looking at pictures of faces that are racially ambiguous and expressing anger, are more likely to classify those faces as black, whereas there is no tendency to over-classify racially ambiguous faces as black when they are smiling.¹⁰³

More recently, in “shoot or hold fire” simulations, in which blacks and whites are shown engaged in a variety of ambiguous activities, participants are quicker to shoot unarmed blacks and to hold fire on whites, even when the latter are armed and dangerous.¹⁰⁴ These tendencies, it should be noted, bear no relationship to the degree of overt racial bias expressed by participants in preinterviews. Rather, they seem tied to implicit, even subconscious biases, which research shows can be easily triggered in situations where common stereotypes of racial groups are made salient.

Even more disturbing, studies have found that whites often fabricate memories of events in ways that fit common racial stereotypes. For instance, in one study, participants were given details of an assault case as if they were in the role of jurors. Asked to remember the case details later, participants overwhelmingly

misremembered aggressive conduct by blacks in the stories, even when such conduct did not occur, and they were far less likely to remember aggressive conduct by whites, even when, in the narratives given to them, it did occur.¹⁰⁵

In another case, participants were shown news stories about crime in which the color of the shown perpetrator was digitally manipulated. By large margins, respondents were more likely to remember the race of the perpetrator when he was black, and often even misremembered the perpetrator as black when he was not.¹⁰⁶ In one particular study, even when the person committing a crime was not shown and his race was not mentioned in the newscast, 42 percent of participants in the study remembered seeing a perpetrator, and of these, two-thirds “remembered” the offender as black.¹⁰⁷ An additional study found that when shown mug shots of blacks, as opposed to whites, respondents were far more likely to presume guilt, even when the available facts in evidence were the same.¹⁰⁸

Here it is worth quoting Linda Hamilton Krieger and Susan Fiske, from their 2006 California Law Review article on implicit bias:

As social psychologists John Bargh and James Uleman, among others, have demonstrated, merely encountering a member of a stereotyped group primes the trait constructs associated with, and in a sense, constituting the stereotype. Once activated, these constructs can function as implicit expectancies, spontaneously shaping the perceiver’s perception, characterization, memory and judgment of the stereotyped target.¹⁰⁹

Disturbingly, advocates of post-racial liberalism ignore or finesse evidence of implicit racial bias, preferring to minimize its importance. Yet, in their denials and dismissals, post-racial liberals say more about their own intellectual dishonesty than they say about the social science in question. To wit, Stanford law professor Richard Thompson Ford, who dismisses the implicit bias research, noting that one of its creators insists the research says nothing about the intent of persons to discriminate and should not be used to suggest otherwise.¹¹⁰ But of course, no one claims the IAT says anything about conscious racist intent. After all, the entire basis of the research is to explore how bias can manifest without conscious intent. That is the entire point, as Ford must surely know. But the fact that much bias is unintentional does not alter the reality that it has the potential to exact real damage.

More Than Just Prejudice: Racial Discrimination in the New Millennium

Of course, the mere fact of implicit (or even explicit) racial bias as a persistent problem within white America does not, in and of itself, suggest the extent to which racial discrimination—actual mistreatment of people of color—is likely to manifest. Some may contend that although prejudice is still with us, the ability of whites to act on that prejudice has been mightily constrained by legal prohibitions against discrimination, and perhaps the increasing social unacceptability of racism and race-based mistreatment since the 1960s. Apparently this is the view of white Americans, by and large. To wit, white responses to an early 2009 ABC News/Washington Post poll, in which 83 percent insisted blacks have just as good a chance as whites to get a job for which they’re qualified, and 81 percent said they believe blacks receive equal treatment in housing.¹¹¹

Yet these post-racial hopes are ill conceived. Evidence of racial discrimination in employment, housing, education and health care, not to mention the criminal justice system, abounds. That advocates of post-racial liberalism so often ignore that evidence says nothing about its persuasiveness.

Racism, Discrimination and Employment

Contributing to the aforementioned employment, income and wealth gaps between whites and people of color is an ongoing pattern of race-based discrimination in the job market. So, for instance, a major national study of more than 160,000 employers found that widespread racial discrimination continues to affect blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans. The study compared employers in particular industries and communities to determine whether there was widespread disparity between the rates at which some of those firms employed persons of color, when compared to others. If an employer was found to significantly underutilize non-whites in their workforce, relative to the population of qualified persons of color in the community and relative to the degree that other firms in the same industry and locale managed to employ them, the study concluded that discrimination was likely the reason. After all, if one is able to find and employ persons of color, there is little reason for one’s competitors not to be able to do the same. Even using this ultimately conservative methodology for ferreting out bias,¹¹² the study found that at least 75,000 establishments nationwide discriminate intentionally against 1.3 million minorities annually. Although there was some good news in the study too—namely, most employers did not appear to engage in overt racist discrimination—several industries were truly egregious in their patterns of unequal treatment, particularly in the medical, drug and other health-related fields.

What’s more, this study (conducted by legal scholars Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen) found that for blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans, there was more than a one in three chance that in any given job search they would face discrimination. Nearly 600,000 blacks, more than 275,000 Latinos and roughly 150,000 Asian Americans each year are subjected to job discrimination according to the study, and for about 90 percent of these, the evidence of discrimination is so blatant—in other words, their utilization by certain companies in certain locales is so substantially below the local and industry norm—that the odds of these outcomes being the result of any factor other than racial bias are only about 1 percent.¹¹³

Other studies have found similar evidence of blatant racial discrimination. And so, according to one now-famous study from economists at MIT and the University of Chicago in 2004, job applicants with “white-sounding names” are about 50 percent more likely to be called back for a job interview than applicants with “black-sounding” names, even when their qualifications are indistinguishable.¹¹⁴ In this study, the researchers discovered that the value of merely having a white-sounding name was equivalent to being black and having eight more years of experience than a white job applicant.

Other research, spearheaded by Princeton sociologist Devah Pager, has found that when equally qualified and matched black, white and Latino male testers are sent to apply for entry-level jobs—and even when these testers have been carefully trained and evince similar communication styles, physical characteristics and demeanor—whites are far more likely to get a callback than applicants of color. Indeed, Pager has found that even white men who claim to have a felony record are slightly more likely to receive a callback than black applicants without such a record.¹¹⁵ It should be noted that in Pager’s studies, three-fourths of the racial disparities that were seen, emerged in the callback phase of the study. This is instructive, since it is precisely this phase where the least personalizing information is available for the applicants, and it is the point at which the ability of applicants to have already made a substantial personal impression is limited. In other words, for disparities to emerge at this stage in the process strongly suggested that employers were making group-based assumptions about applicants, leading them to screen out blacks and screen in whites.¹¹⁶

Recent investigations into particular industries have uncovered substantial evidence of ongoing discriminatory barriers for persons of color. For instance, a 2008 study of the advertising industry discovered that racial discrimination is nearly 40 percent more severe in advertising than in the overall U.S. labor market, and that things have actually gotten worse in that industry, relative to the rest of the economy, over the past three decades. According to the study, black college graduates working in the ad industry with the same qualifications as whites earn 20 percent less than their white counterparts. Furthermore, even when they have equal qualifications, blacks are still only about half as likely as whites to serve as advertising managers and professionals. Large ad firms are 60 percent more likely than firms in the overall labor market to employ no African Americans at all, and even when blacks are present in such companies, they are more than a third less likely than whites to serve in the more powerful, lucrative and creative positions of such firms.¹¹⁷

Another recent study in New York explored racial discrimination in the city’s upscale restaurant industry. According to the researchers, when testers were sent out to apply for jobs with equal qualifications, education, language skills, appearance and demeanor, applicants of color were half as likely as whites to get a job offer, and discrimination occurred in roughly a third of all restaurants tested. Employers were far more likely to enthusiastically describe the available jobs to whites, far more often challenged the résumés of applicants of color, offered better shifts and work schedules to whites and offered whites longer and more detailed interviews.¹¹⁸ Although employers often blamed applicants’ accents as the reason they wouldn’t hire certain persons of color for jobs as waiters, those same employers showed a persistent preference for white waiters with European accents, suggesting it was less the issue of communication and more the preference for whites in the “front of the house” that dictated their decisions.¹¹⁹

Other research has suggested that discrimination is especially persistent in service industry occupations, such as retail establishments. Although some have chalked up inequity in this sector to a skill deficit on the part of blacks—particularly a deficit in so-called “soft skills” concerning communication style—even when researchers have sent out more qualified black testers to apply for such jobs, whites were still more likely to be granted an interview than their black counterparts. In situations where only one member of a black-white testing pair received an interview, whites were on the winning end of the equation almost twice as often as blacks despite being less qualified than the persons of color against whom they were competing.¹²⁰ This discrimination seems to be especially pernicious in suburbs, where blacks are hired at only half the rate at which they are represented in the applicant pool, and whites are hired at a rate 22 percent greater than their share of suburban job applicants.¹²¹

Significantly, this last statistic drives a stake through the heart of much of William Julius Wilson’s “spatial mismatch” theory. Recall that Wilson’s position, articulated consistently for roughly thirty years—and central to the post-racial view of white/black job and income inequality—holds that blacks face worse job and earnings prospects than whites because jobs are mostly in the suburbs, while a disproportionate number of blacks continue to live in urban centers. Thus they are simply unable to access the jobs in the places where the jobs increasingly are emerging. But if blacks are attempting to access those jobs and are applying for them with equal qualifications only to be under-hired even relative to their availability, then “spatial mismatch” cannot possibly be the culprit. Either overt employer bias or a kind of indirect bias—for instance, a type that drives employers to attempt to match workers to the racial makeup of their client and customer base—must be considered operative. Indeed, this latter form, whereby business owners prefer whites not because they are more qualified per se, but because they presume (rightly or wrongly) that their customers would prefer to deal with white store clerks, managers, etc. has been observed on several occasions.¹²² Discrimination has been found to be substantial in temporary employment agencies as well, in part for the same reason: the perception—often an accurate one—that clients (in this case, employers contracting with the temp service) prefer to hire white workers.¹²³

Elsewhere, and even when there is no intent to privilege whites over others, employers may persist in the exclusion of applicants of color by way of hiring networks that are, thanks to past unequal opportunity, disproportionately white. Recent research has found, not surprisingly, that white men receive far better job leads and job-related information from informal networks and word-of-mouth than do either white women or people or color.¹²⁴ But while it is well understood that the most lucrative private sector jobs are often filled by way of networking, what is less recognized is how important racially exclusive networking can also be for the landing of blue-collar positions. Research has shown, for instance, that white foremen on construction jobs tend to hire whites they know over blacks they don’t, irrespective of actual objective qualifications or experience.¹²⁵ Examining white and black men from the same vocational schools, with the same work and educational records, applying for the same jobs, additional research indicates a substantial advantage for whites stemming from greater networking and connections.¹²⁶

In light of the president’s economic stimulus plan, which pumped a considerable amount of monies into construction projects from roads and highways to bridge and other infrastructure repair, this tendency for whites to engage in discrimination within the industry should give us pause as to the benefit of colorblind, race-neutral public policy. To lavish funding on these efforts in the name of job creation or retention, as the president did, is to ignore the racially uneven way in which those jobs will likely be filled. To be blind to the way in which the stimulus, in this fashion, may disproportionately benefit whites is to become complicit in the financing of inequality.

Occasionally, even employers who have no intent to discriminate against job applicants of color, may end up treating those applicants unfairly, thanks to the ingrained, if subtle, biases of those charged with evaluating potential employees. Years of research have indicated a tendency for whites to spot merit most quickly in someone who reminds them of themselves, and that members of dominant social groups have a particularly difficult time fairly evaluating the merit of minority group members. Evidence points to a process whereby whites over-remember stereotype-confirming behavior or tendencies in applicants of color, and ignore the same traits in other whites. So, for instance, if a person of color mispronounces a word, ends a sentence with a preposition, or stumbles while speaking during a job interview, it may trigger what psychologists call a mental schema (or set of ideas that are linked to one another in memory) regarding stereotypes of inadequate black performance and ability. Yet, if a white job applicant did the very same things, it would not trigger remembrance of a stereotypical and negative schema regarding white people (because there are none when it comes to intelligence), and it would likely be forgotten or never even noticed. Because of this, employers could easily conclude that white applicants were more qualified and better “fits” in a given job complex, even though there is no objective basis for the determination, and even though this conclusion may well have been the result of triggered unconscious biases.¹²⁷

Those who are skeptical of claims of prejudice naturally have a ready set of challenges for those who insist the problem is real. First, they point to immigrant success stories as evidence that the United States is well on the way to becoming a racism-free nation. Yet discrimination against immigrants of color is also widespread.

Indeed, according to research from 2007, when comparing workers of equal productivity, similar occupational status and comparable educational attainment, immigrants with the lightest skin shade earn nearly 20 percent more than immigrants with the darkest skin shades.¹²⁸ Second, those who doubt the persistence of racial bias in America often refer to Asian American income data as proof that the United States is an equal opportunity society. But in fact, a closer look at statistics on Asian American income indicates that most are not doing nearly as well as believed. If anything, the data points to continued barriers to equal opportunity for Asian Americans, all claims about their success notwithstanding.

For instance, although median income for Asian Americans is above that of whites, in the aggregate, this is because the Asian American population, on average, has far higher rates of college and post-graduate education than the white population. Because Asian immigration to the United States has been relatively selective, with a disproportionate percentage of Asian immigrants coming with pre-existing educational backgrounds, economic advantages, or the intent to pursue higher education upon arrival, the Asian population as a whole is more highly educated than the white population. As such, they will logically earn more, per capita, than whites with less academic background. But considering how much more education Asian Americans have, on average, relative to their white counterparts, their earnings advantages are much smaller than should be expected.

Whereas fewer than 16 percent of whites had a college degree in 2000, 22.5 percent of Chinese Americans did, as did 31.3 percent of Japanese Americans, 24.4 percent of Korean Americans and Asian Indians, nearly 31 percent of Filipino Americans and

28 percent of Taiwanese Americans. So, although Chinese American income is 17 percent higher than white income, they are 40 percent more likely than whites to have a college degree and 2.3 times more likely to have an advanced degree. Japanese American income is 50 percent higher on average than that for whites; however, Japanese Americans are twice as likely as whites, on average, to have a college degree and 70 percent more likely to have an advanced degree. Asian Indian Americans have 45 percent higher income than whites, on average, but are 60 percent more likely than whites to have a college degree and 3.5 times more likely to have an advanced degree.¹²⁹

In truth, the only statistics that can indicate whether or not Asian Americans truly have equal opportunity are those relating to their earnings, relative to the earnings of whites with the same level of education. And when those comparisons are made, the evidence is clear: Asian Americans earn less than whites with the same educational background in almost every instance. For those without a high school diploma, whites earn 25 percent more than their Asian American counterparts. For those with a diploma but no college degree, whites earn 28 percent more than their Asian American counterparts. For those with a bachelor’s degree but no graduate-level degree, whites earn 14 percent more than their Asian American counterparts—about $7,500 more annually. In other words, and despite attempts to use Asian “success” as a way to dismiss the reality of racism and white privilege, the evidence actually makes clear the advantages of being white in the United States and the disadvantages of being Asian American, irrespective of qualifications.¹³⁰

Additionally, the upward skewing of Asian incomes relative to those of whites is caused by the differential geographic distribution of whites and Asians throughout the United States. Asian Americans are concentrated heavily in the West, which is a higher-income region than other parts of the country. Half of all Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders live in the West (disproportionately in California and Hawaii) compared to less than one-fifth of American whites who do. Conversely, a third of whites live in the lowest-income region, the South, while only 19 percent of Asian Americans do.¹³¹ If one group lives disproportionately in a higher-wage region and another is spread out across the country, naturally the first of these will have higher per capita incomes. But once incomes are examined solely for those whites and Asian Americans living in California, for example, the numbers reverse: Whites earn more than their Asian American counterparts and have much lower poverty rates.¹³² When we look only at the poverty rates in those places where Asians are clustered—rather than comparing them with whites spread far and wide in lower-wage regions—we discover that in places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and even an East Coast metropolis like New York City, Asian American poverty rates are double the rates for whites in the same cities.¹³³

Sadly, the advocates of post-racial liberalism ignore the copious volumes of research demonstrating ongoing job discrimination against people of color. For instance, Richard Thompson Ford has been dismissive of the previously mentioned study on the way black-named job applicants are treated compared to white-named applicants. Yet his critique of the study suggests that he either failed to understand the research or deliberately deceives about its findings, so as to maintain confidence in his post-racial narrative. First, Ford claims that employers who respond negatively to black-sounding names may simply assume they are less capable or qualified. But the study in question involved equally qualified black-named applicants, whose résumés were every bit as impressive as those of their white-named counterparts. If employers overlook this salient fact all because of a name, then they are making a racially biased assumption, in disregard of the actual evidence before them—evidence they apparently refuse to consider. This is about as close to a textbook definition of racism as one can get.

But Ford goes even further in his cavalier dismissal of this groundbreaking research. Because black comedian Bill Cosby has blasted poor African Americans for giving their children names that are identifiably black, the fact that white employers discriminate against such persons can’t be evidence of racism. As Ford explains it: “When Cliff Huxtable can be called a racist, it’s probably time to rethink our terms.”¹³⁴ So if a black person of some notoriety agrees with a racist assumption made regularly by white people, those white people can no longer be thought of as engaging in racism. Which means, by definition, that if even one prominent black person could be found who would defend segregation or enslavement—and of course, such persons existed—neither of those amounted to racism either: a position so intellectually putrid as to merit no further comment.

Racism, Discrimination and Housing

Beyond the realm of employment, there is much evidence to indicate ongoing racial discrimination in housing and mortgage markets. Just as past housing discrimination hampered the ability of black and brown families in mid-century to accumulate assets and wealth, so too, present-day discrimination in housing restricts the ability of younger generations of persons of color to do so. It was 2006, after all, in which the largest number of housing discrimination complaints ever (including race-based complaints) were filed.¹³⁵ Studies have estimated that at least 2 million and perhaps as many as 3.7 million instances of race-based housing discrimination against persons of color take place each year.¹³⁶ Although sometimes this discrimination manifests as outright denial of rental property or denial of mortgage loans to people of color, far more often it takes the shape of racial “steering” (whereby people are relegated to same-race neighborhoods, no matter their own desires for more integrated spaces), or the offering of housing to people of color on terms far less desirable than the terms offered to whites.

Regarding the current housing meltdown and the ongoing subprime mortgage mess, it was people of color who were disproportionately roped into high-cost loans, made to pay more for properties than they would have been had they been white. By 2006, mortgages sold to Latinos and blacks were 2.5 to 3 times more likely to be subprime than mortgages sold to whites. While these disparities sometimes reflect factors of creditworthiness and collateral, research indicates that persons of color—black, Latino, indigenous and occasionally Asian—are more likely to be steered to a subprime loan at higher cost than are whites with the same income and credit scores. One study in 2006 found that even high-income black and Latino borrowers were more likely than low-income whites to wind up with a high-cost loan,¹³⁷ and up to half of the subprime loans given out over the past several years went to persons who could have (and should have) qualified for lower rates.¹³⁸ In New York City, as just one example, black households with annual incomes of $68,000 or more are five times more likely to have a subprime mortgage than white households with similar or even less income. On a mid-range loan of $350,000, this means that black borrowers will end up paying, on average, over $250,000 more in interest over the life of the loan than their white counterparts.¹³⁹

Warnings about subprime lending and its consequences for people of color have been sounded for years, with little attention paid until the impacts began to affect the overall economy. It was in the early 2000s, for instance, that the North Carolina–based Community Reinvestment Coalition exposed Citigroup’s subprime lender, Citi, for making excess profits on the backs of poor, mostly African American families, ultimately roping into high-cost loans 90,000 borrowers who could have qualified for regular mortgages. These borrowers were then charged so much excess interest that, on average, families would have had to pay more than $100,000 in additional cost over the life of their mortgages. This predatory gouging amounted to over $5.7 billion in excess charges, for the benefit of Citi and to the detriment of the borrowers.¹⁴⁰

Earlier this year, when the Baltimore NAACP sued Wells Fargo for targeting black communities with subprime loans, former bank employees admitted in court affidavits that loan officers regularly referred to black customers as “mud people,” called the loans sold to them “ghetto loans,” and offered financial bonuses to loan officers who successfully pushed subprime loans in minority neighborhoods. According to one former employee who had once been Wells Fargo’s top-producing subprime loan officer, the bank specifically steered blacks who could have qualified for lower-rate loans into the high-cost instruments. According to the affidavits, loan officers would alter the credit information of black borrowers on their applications and even cut-and-paste bad credit information from one borrower onto the applications of black borrowers with good credit, in order to flip the loan from the prime to the subprime category.¹⁴¹

The black and brown face of the subprime lending debacle is not the result of people of color desiring such instruments, nor because laws required the giving of loans to low-income people of color. This latter argument, made often by conservatives, is entirely without merit. Lenders that aren’t even covered by fair-lending laws gave out most of the high-cost, risky loans. And loans given out under fair-lending laws like the Community Reinvestment Act actually tend to perform better, and have far lower foreclosure rates than loans written by the largely unregulated mortgage brokers who engaged in predatory lending with abandon.¹⁴² If anything, imposing more fair-lending regulations and extending those regulations to all lending institutions (which, by definition would have required a rejection of post-racial rhetoric and race-blind/racism-blind policy making) could have helped prevent at least some of the current housing crisis.

Additionally, the colorblind approach to dealing with racial disparities in housing—which seeks to treat the matter as one of class inequity alone, in which “concentrated poverty” is viewed as a separate phenomenon, apart from racism—is inadequate, given the ongoing barriers to housing access faced by even those persons of color who are not poor. So, for instance, affluent black households are every bit as racially isolated (in black and heavily poor areas) as poor blacks are.¹⁴³ And whereas having greater levels of education and higher incomes tends to correlate with living in neighborhoods with lower crime rates and higher property values when one is white, this correlation disappears for blacks.¹⁴⁴ Even with greater economic and educational success, ongoing housing discrimination blocks blacks from the housing they might well procure were they simply white.

The most recent study (as of this writing), conducted in Pittsburgh, found that even when black families have better credit, higher incomes, more savings and less debt than white families applying for loans, they are likely to be discriminated against. In the study in question, black applicants were treated worse than their white counterparts nearly 60 percent of the time. They were more likely to be actively discouraged by the lender and told they would not be able to afford a home, and were given less information about loans or home availability. In addition, black testers were quoted an interest rate a full quarter-point higher than their less-qualified white counterparts, on average.¹⁴⁵

Racism, Discrimination and Education

Closely related to the matter of housing inequity, educational inequity continues to plague the lives of millions of students of color. Though working-class and low-income students of all colors face inadequate educational resources due to economic status alone, explicitly racial forms of marginalization are very much in play for non-whites, above and beyond class standing. To the extent children of color and their families too often live in residentially isolated communities where rates of poverty are higher—and this because of race-based discrimination in housing over many generations—black and Latino kids face the double-whammy of economic and racial marginalization in schools located in those communities.

Young people face intense racial and economic segregation in America today. About 70 percent of students of color attend majority-minority schools, half of all black students are in schools that are at least three-fourths people of color, and a third of both blacks and Latinos attend schools where the student bodies are virtually all black and brown.¹⁴⁶ In large urban areas, these data are even more extreme. So, for instance, in Chicago, the average black student attends an 86 percent black school, while in New York City, six in ten black students attend a school where 90 percent or more of all students are black.¹⁴⁷ In large urban areas generally, two-thirds of black and Latino students attend schools where enrollment is at least 90 percent black and brown.¹⁴⁸ These majority–people of color schools are anywhere from eleven to thirteen times more likely than mostly white schools to be places with high levels of concentrated poverty among their students.¹⁴⁹ Concentrated poverty then complicates the task of delivering a high-quality education to students, as their families will face disproportionate rates of unemployment, inadequate nutrition and growing up in isolated, crowded spaces, largely cut off from the larger social opportunity structure.

The effects of being concentrated in such schools cannot be overstated. First, it is often lower-income schools of color in which the least experienced teachers are placed, as those with more experience seek out teaching assignments in wealthier and whiter communities. In fact, recent research has found that independent of neighborhood factors and quality, teachers with the most experience, highest levels of certification and best track records in terms of boosting the achievement of their students, choose to leave schools when the numbers of black students enrolled begin to increase.¹⁵⁰ In California, schools where more than half the teachers lack credentials in the fields they teach have, on average, 98 percent students of color.¹⁵¹ Because the most experienced teachers often have tenure and power within the teachers’ unions, they are able to get placement in other communities, in whiter schools, while less experienced and younger teachers get placed in the schools with the greatest challenges. So nationally, in schools serving mostly people of color, students have less than a fifty-fifty chance of ending up with a math or science teacher with a degree in the field, or who is licensed to teach those subjects specifically. And new teachers at mostly black and brown schools are five times more likely to be unlicensed in the field they teach than are newly hired teachers in mostly white schools. Overall, students of color are half as likely as white students to be taught by the most experienced and qualified teachers, and twice as likely to be taught by the least experienced and least qualified teachers.¹⁵²

Exposure to low-quality educational resources, as so often occurs in hyper-segregated schools, can then have a profound effect on cognitive development. Indeed, children can lose several points on a standard IQ test for every year they are subjected to substandard resources, instruction and facilities.¹⁵³ As for exposure to less-qualified teachers, this too has a specific and deleterious impact on students of color. Research from Texas shows that students who start out ahead academically but are then exposed to less-qualified teachers experience a rapid drop in performance, while those who start out behind but have highly qualified instruction can catch up with those who started ahead, and even surpass them.¹⁵⁴

It should be noted that the concentration of students of color in high-density, majority-minority and low-income schools is not only an issue for poor and working-class students and families of color, however. Indeed, even blacks with incomes higher than those of whites are less likely to attend high-quality schools and more likely to live in low-income neighborhoods than whites are.¹⁵⁵ According to one study in Philadelphia, African American children from affluent families typically attend schools with three times as many low-achieving poor students as affluent white children do.¹⁵⁶ To the extent the concentration of poverty has tended to have a racialized face—specifically a black and brown one—it seems unlikely that mere universal programs of educational uplift could address the persistent inequities that result. Even if educational policy were reformed overnight, such that additional monies were pumped into all schools that were struggling, the racial gaps created by residential segregation and selective teacher assignments would likely persist.

In keeping with the notion that race-specific injury confounds the ability of colorblind universalism to rectify persistent racial inequities in the realm of education, consider the evidence of discriminatory treatment in schools themselves. Research has found that students of color, especially African Americans, are disproportionately likely to be classified and labeled as learning disabled and placed in special education programs. This is especially the case for more subjective categories of disorder and disability, like emotional disturbance, rather than for medically diagnosable disabilities. The tendency to categorize students of color in this way owes less to genuinely greater levels of disorder in such students than to the racial dynamics of the schools they attend. For instance, in Arizona public schools, males of color at mostly white schools are two-thirds more likely to be labeled as emotionally disturbed or learning disabled than minority males at mostly minority schools, even though the latter are far more likely to have grown up in poverty, and thus could be expected to occasionally demonstrate emotional or cognitive impairment. This suggests that at whiter schools, teachers are more apt to see dysfunction in black and brown students, not because they necessarily demonstrate more of it, but because of the teachers’ own inabilities to relate to the students of color, or because of various subconscious biases.¹⁵⁷

Nationally, black students are anywhere from 1.5 times to four times more likely than whites to be classified as mentally handicapped or emotionally disturbed: a range so broad as to suggest significant imprecision, subjectivity and likely bias in the evaluation process.¹⁵⁸ After all, why would one state have a ratio of impaired black students that was four times the rate for whites, while another state, possibly next door, would only have a ratio of 1.5 to one?

This labeling of students has a profound effect on their future educational attainment. Indeed, students labeled as learning disabled are 20 percent more likely to drop out than students not labeled in this way, and those labeled emotionally disturbed are three times more likely to quit school than students with physical disabilities.¹⁵⁹ Although the labeling itself is not the cause of the students’ failure to complete their schooling, it creates a set of expectations and stigmas for those so labeled that can suppress the drive to achieve academically. Nationally, for instance, research has found that students labeled as mentally handicapped or emotionally disturbed are likely to be placed in restricted learning environments, despite evidence indicating that such students need exactly the opposite in order to thrive. And once labeled and removed from normal classroom environments, students of color receive less intensive services and support than whites who have been similarly labeled.¹⁶⁰

Although it might be easy to attribute the mistreatment in these cases to class factors, rather than race—and thus to assume that colorblind universalism might be sufficient for addressing the issue—the research has found that students of color who are not poor and live in affluent districts are far more likely to be labeled mentally handicapped or emotionally disturbed than their white classmates. Furthermore, the over-diagnosis appears only in the entirely subjective arenas of intellectual capacity and emotional disturbance, rather than in the areas of specific learning disabilities or medically supportable diagnoses, suggesting that much of the classification process is imprecise and given to tacit if not explicit racial bias.

Likewise, and in keeping with this notion that disability labeling can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, consider the practice and impact of so-called academic “ability tracking.” On the one hand, studies have long found that blacks and Latinos are far more likely than white students to be placed in lower-track remedial-level classes and far less likely to be placed in honors courses than whites, even when their prior academic performance would justify different placement.¹⁶¹ Oftentimes, this placement is due to structural inequities such as the fact that schools attended mostly by students of color are much less likely to have advanced placement (AP) or honors courses offered. Nationally, schools disproportionately serving students of color have about one-third as many advanced courses offered, per capita, as schools serving mostly whites.¹⁶² In California, for instance, there are more than 125 high schools without a single AP class. Overwhelmingly, these schools serve student bodies that are mostly black and brown.¹⁶³ This disparity in secondary schools further promotes racial inequity in higher education as well. So, for instance, as of the late 1990s the median grade-point average of entering first-year students at UCLA was 4.15 on a standard 4-point scale. Of course, the only way to receive a GPA of more than 4.0 is to earn a bonus by taking AP classes. Which means that there are thousands of black and Latino kids in California who have no chance to earn the kind of GPA received by the typical white student at UCLA, no matter how hard they work, simply because of the unavailability of such classes in their schools.¹⁶⁴

Significantly, evidence suggests that ability tracking actually hampers the literacy and academic accomplishments of students of color at lower levels of prior ability, while failing to boost the performance of more advanced students. In other words, tracking fails to deliver the benefits it promises, either for those at the bottom or those at the top of the academic spectrum.¹⁶⁵ Indeed, those labeled as slower learners often suffer from reduced self-esteem and a lowered sense of their own efficacy, which compromises their academic success and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, whereby their track becomes their destiny in school.¹⁶⁶

Those assigned to teach lower-track students actually admit their own low expectations for the children in their academic care. As Jeannie Oakes noted in her classic text on the subject, low-track teachers typically eschew a focus on academic advancement or mastery of material for their students, focusing instead on maintaining discipline, respect for authority, punctuality and simple task completion. Furthermore, they emphasize how to be less outspoken and more compliant with rules and regulations as set by authority figures (be they teachers or future bosses). There is very little room within remedial-track classes for development of critical thinking skills or for moving up the school ladder.¹⁶⁷

Students tracked lower also receive less direct instruction than their higher-tracked counterparts. Higher-tracked English students spend about 15 percent more time receiving direct instruction than students in lower tracks, while higher-tracked math students spend about 22 percent more time receiving instruction than those in lower-tracked math classes. In all, the instructional differences amount to nearly forty hours less actual instruction for those in lower-tracked classes each year.¹⁶⁸ Students of color, who are being shunted into these remedial-level classes most often, are thus being deprived of the ability to learn, and the gap between them and their whiter counterparts in advanced classes continues to grow.

Although the premise of “No Child Left Behind” (the Bush administration’s signature education bill) is that racial achievement gaps should be closed completely within ten years, the legislation never came with the kind of resource supports needed to make that goal achievable. Although No Child Left Behind requires certain outcomes, it does not mandate that schools must equalize the resources available to all students in order to make those more equitable outcomes likely. Nor did the law—which has so far been continued under the Obama administration, with very little functional change in its specific policy formulations—seek to put an end to the pernicious tracking practices in our schools that all but guarantee the leaving behind of children. In fact, many states have adopted norm-referenced tests as determinants of their “annual yearly progress” (mandated by the law), failing to appreciate that norm-referenced tests by definition produce a distribution where half of all test-takers will fall below the 50-percentile mark and thus be considered below average.¹⁶⁹ In other words, tests that mandate failure and inequity in achievement are being used under a law intended to promote success and reduce inequity! To advocate equity but maintain structures that, by definition, create inequity is the ultimate contradiction.

As a result of No Child Left Behind, schools have been under intense pressure to meet federal guidelines for test scores, so as not to be sanctioned by the Department of Education. This pressure has been especially intense for schools serving mostly students of color, causing many such schools to emphasize teaching to the test, simply to meet federal and even state standards, rather than teaching the kinds of high-level materials given to students in suburbs and private schools.¹⁷⁰ High-stakes testing has also created incentives for schools to push lower-achieving students out, rather than keep them in the schools, attempt to educate them and suffer the possible penalty if they fail, in terms of meeting testing requirements.¹⁷¹ In Chicago, for instance, schools have been expelling low-achieving students even by the age of 16, under the pretense that their academic achievement or attendance records make it unlikely that they would graduate by the age of 21. Rather than resolve to educate such students—almost all of whom are students of color—the schools give up, remove the students and thus boost their test-score profile as a result, with blacks banished from the schools at three times the rate of whites or Latinos.¹⁷²

In post-Katrina New Orleans, supposedly “open enrollment” charter schools—intended to inject competition into the city’s previously failing school system and lauded as having done so—have been pre-screening students to determine which of them are unlikely to pass a state required test the following year. Then the students who fail in the pre-test are pushed out, so as to protect the school’s test scores in line with state and federal mandates. Others have counseled parents of lower-achieving students, or those with inconsistent attendance, to voluntarily withdraw from charter schools or face expulsion. Once these students are removed, the charters are left with the supposedly “better” students, which allows them to meet federal and state standards by selecting their student bodies. Needless to say, virtually all students being pushed out are black.¹⁷³

Also under No Child Left Behind, schools must demonstrate the elimination of performance gaps between those who have limited English proficiency (LEP) and those for whom English is their native language. Although this is an admirable goal, it cannot be met in most cases for one simple reason: namely, in most districts, once students demonstrate English proficiency, they are removed from the LEP group and their scores are no longer considered part of the LEP group averages. Thus, by definition, the only persons remaining in the LEP group will be those who are not proficient in the language of the test, and who therefore will not likely perform well on it.¹⁷⁴

In addition to unequal instruction and regulations under No Child Left Behind that all but ensure disparate racial outcomes in schooling, there is also a substantial amount of evidence demonstrating profoundly unequal discipline meted out to students of color as compared to whites. Nationally, fourteen separate studies have found clear racial disparities in rates of suspension and expulsion from school. Black students are two to three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than whites, even though they do not, contrary to popular belief, violate school rules disproportionately, relative to white students.¹⁷⁵ Indeed, when it comes to some of the most serious school rule infractions, whites often lead the pack, and they certainly violate those rules at least as often as black and brown students do, from possession of drugs to drinking and smoking.¹⁷⁶ Most of the infractions for which students of color are punished are vague, highly subjective offenses—far more given to interpretation and thus implicit bias on the part of teachers—such as “disrespect for authority,” “making excessive noise” or loitering.¹⁷⁷

Significantly, the research suggests that unequal discipline is not due to mere class bias against lower-income students. In fact, even when comparing only blacks and whites of the same economic status, black students face disproportionate suspensions and expulsions relative to rates of misbehavior. As Russell Skiba, a professor at Indiana University, notes:

Contrary to the socioeconomic hypothesis, the current investigation demonstrates that significant racial disparities in school discipline remain even after controlling for socio-economic status. In this sample, an index of socioeconomic status had virtually no effect when used as a covariate in a test of racial differences in office referrals and suspensions. Indeed, disciplinary disproportionality by socioeconomic status appears to be a somewhat less robust finding than gender or racial disparity.¹⁷⁸

As with so much of the evidence regarding racial inequity in the educational system, this suggests that colorblind universalism as a way to reduce racial disparities will prove inadequate. There is simply too much race-specific injury occurring to allow for post-racialism (at the level of ideology or policy) to suffice. Unfortunately, teachers often go out of their way to be colorblind— or what educational theorist Mica Pollock calls “colormute”—by failing to discuss race, or even to use basic and benign racial descriptors to describe their students. As a result, educators replicate inequities by failing to get to the bottom of their own biases or the structural impediments to equal opportunity within their schools.¹⁷⁹

Racism, Discrimination and Health Care

Just as racial disparity exists in income, wealth and educational attainment, so too in terms of basic health there are large and seemingly intractable gaps between whites and people of color. Whether regarding life expectancy, infant mortality rates, rates of low birth weight for newborns or the rates at which adults die from largely preventable diseases, whites are in far better shape than those who are black or brown. Indeed, it is estimated that nearly 100,000 blacks die each year who wouldn’t, if black mortality rates were equal to those of whites.¹⁸⁰

In addressing these racial disparities, there are largely three schools of thought as to both the diagnosis of the problem, and the recommendations put forward for solving it. The first argues that racial health gaps are largely the result of economic inequity. According to this line of reasoning, people of color, especially African Americans, disproportionately populate the bottom of the class structure; thus, since poorer people typically have worse health than the more affluent, black/white differences in health outcomes will manifest. The second school of thought argues that differential health outcomes reflect different lifestyles and choices made by whites as opposed to people of color: If blacks engage in less healthy lifestyles (worse diets, less exercise, etc.), they will naturally have worse health outcomes. And finally, some argue that racial disparities in health reflect a bit of economic and behavioral factors, but also racism itself: first, the health effects of society-wide racism and discrimination, which accumulate over time, and second, racially disparate treatment by physicians themselves, even those with no intent to injure people of color but who are influenced, like everyone else, by implicit biases.

Post-racial liberalism typically embraces one of the first two explanations, and occasionally a combination of those two. Its proponents argue that blacks and other people of color are victims of bad economic status and are less likely to have health insurance coverage (especially high-quality preventive care through an employer, for instance), and so this can explain much of the racial health gap. They further suggest that lifestyle choices regarding food and exercise play a role in worse health outcomes for people of color. As candidate Obama himself said on the campaign trail, black folks need more exercise and access to fresh food in their neighborhoods. By and large the president has eschewed any direct discussion of racial gaps and strategies for closing them, however. When asked the question directly, as he was in the summer of 2008 while still campaigning, he deftly pivoted back to the need for universal coverage. And in his book The Audacity of Hope he insisted that universal coverage would do more to reduce racial disparities in health than any race-targeted effort ever could.

But despite his insistence and optimism about the efficacy of universal and colorblind public policy to solve race-specific injury, there is reason to believe that such an approach will fall well short of its proclaimed benefits (and this, assuming universal coverage will even be implemented, which at the time of this writing seems a remote possibility at best).

Contrary to popular belief, racial disparities in health outcomes are not merely, or even mostly, about disparities in income or health care coverage. Indeed, some of the largest racial gaps—especially, for instance, for hypertension—manifest at the upper end of the income spectrum, between whites and blacks that have high incomes and occupational status, college degrees and good health insurance.¹⁸¹ Among the indicators that racial health gaps are about more than mere economics and health care affordability—and thus that universal coverage is inadequate to the task of remedying them—consider:

• Black women with a bachelor’s or higher-level degree have a higher rate of infant mortality for their newborns and infants than white women who dropped out before entering high school.¹⁸² When comparing black and white women with college degrees, the infant mortality rate for children born to black women is nearly three times higher than the rate for children born to similar white women.¹⁸³
• Black households with annual incomes of $35,000 or more have higher rates of infant mortality than white households with annual incomes of less than $10,000.¹⁸⁴
• Black women who received early prenatal care have infant mortality rates that are nearly double the rate for white women who received late or no prenatal care at all.¹⁸⁵
• White women who start out in life poor but move up the ladder show improved birth outcomes for their children, while black mothers largely see no improvement in outcome, even if they are upwardly mobile. Likewise, as Latina immigrant moms remain in the United States and improve their economic condition, their health declines; and South Asian Indian women with economic profiles similar to white women nonetheless have birth outcomes for their kids (low birth weight and infant mortality) comparable to those of poor black women.¹⁸⁶

Significantly, these racial gaps are not due to behavioral or lifestyle differences or genetic factors specific to black women and their children. Even black women who don’t smoke, for instance, have higher rates of infant mortality for their children than white women who do smoke, and foreign-born blacks (including continental Africans) have infant mortality rates and rates of low–birth weight babies that are far lower than their African American counterparts, and in line with white averages.¹⁸⁷ But once African women immigrate to the United States, within one generation, their daughters have a much higher risk of pre-term and/or low–birth weight babies, approaching the elevated levels for other African American women.¹⁸⁸ Likewise, although black immigrants from majority-black nations and regions of the world come to the United States on balance healthier than blacks from mostly white areas (or the United States itself), after a short time in America, their health status erodes and drops to match that of less healthy blacks.¹⁸⁹ This too suggests that there is something about being black in the United States, and not something about blackness biologically, that explains disparate health outcomes.

So what is it about the experience of being black in the United States that seems to make such a difference in the health outcomes experienced by African Americans as opposed to whites? Typically there are two explanations: the effects of discrimination on black health over time, in a variety of settings; and differential treatment at the hands of physicians.

In the past several years, more than a hundred studies have found a relationship between racial discrimination and negative physical health outcomes for people of color. Research has found that experiences with racial discrimination increase stress levels among persons of color, thereby elevating blood pressure and correlating directly with worse health.¹⁹⁰ Being the target of racial bigotry causes the brain’s hypothalamus to send an alert to the adrenal glands, resulting in a release of adrenaline along with the release of endorphins in the brain and cortisol (a stress-related hormone) throughout the body. Over time, these experiences can damage the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.¹⁹¹ As the research explains:

A normally functioning HPA systematically releases appropriate amounts of adrenaline and cortisol to address the threat of stress. In contrast, when the HPA has been overloaded by ongoing, durable experiences of racial discrimination, the intermittent release of adrenaline and cortisol can cause harm. An excess of adrenaline may cause surges in blood pressure that, in turn, cause scars in arteries where plaque can build and hamper the flow of blood throughout the body, thus increasing the risk of heart attack, stroke, and/or heart disease. In short, chronic exposure to racial discrimination may damage the HPA axis so severely that the secretion of cortisol and adrenaline are never again normal.¹⁹²

Researchers have developed a theory to explain the unique effects of race-related stress on women of color and the association between that stress and pre-term birth and low birth weight. To wit, the concept of the allostatic load, which refers to the cumulative physiological burden imposed by excess stress:

It may be that the standard set of socioeconomic factors fails to explain the full meaning of being African-American… . Experiences of being discriminated against as a person of color are everyday occurrences at once painful and threatening. This chronic strain may have an effect more insidious and powerful than is captured by our customary models… . The hypothesis that a woman’s experience of chronic threat before pregnancy affects pregnancy outcome rests on the concept of allostatic load… . [Allostasis] refers to the ability of the body to achieve stability through change, such that the autonomic nervous system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and cardiovascular, metabolic, and immune systems protect the body by responding to internal and external stress. The price of this accommodation to stress can be allostatic load, which is the wear-and-tear from chronic overactivity or underactivity of the allostatic system. We theorize that frequent stress whether concurrent, feared, or remembered, increases allostatic load. Thus, we propose that a woman’s chronic exposure to racism or violence creates an allostatic load that imprints itself upon her HPA axis prior to conception, altering the endocrine milieu in which the placenta is established, and potentially changing the hormonal interaction between fetus, placenta and mother.¹⁹³

Studies of allostatic load markers (including levels of epinephrine and cortisol, which are released in response to stress, as well as blood pressure levels and levels of glycated hemoglobin), have found that blacks in all age groups have evidence of elevated allostatic loading, with young black adults nearly 1.5 times more likely to demonstrate a high score on measures of allostatic load, and blacks 55 to 64 about 2.3 times more likely than their white counterparts to demonstrate this level of stress loading. Interestingly, poor whites display lower scores on measures of allostatic load than non-poor blacks, suggesting that the racial differences in high stress effects are not the result of economic disparity but rather are related to race-specific stresses experienced by people of color, irrespective of class status.¹⁹⁴

There is an increasing body of medical literature to suggest that this “weathering” effect, which comes from steady and repeated exposure to racial mistreatment, begins to affect people of color at very young ages, first as they learn of the attitudes that are commonly held about their group by members of the dominant society, then as they become exposed to acts of discrimination. In children, this stress can decrease self-esteem and foster anger, depression and even violent acting out. When these stresses accumulate over time, the impact on the physical, mental and emotional health of those experiencing the stress can be dramatic, and can prime the body for all kinds of debilitating conditions later in life.¹⁹⁵ Indeed, the cumulative effect helps explain why racial differences in hypertension begin to dramatically emerge after the age of 30.¹⁹⁶

Camara P. Jones, MD, a director of research at the Centers for Disease Control, explains:

By the time you get into the 25–44-year-old group you start to see changes. We have evidence that in white folks, blood pressure is dropping at night, but not in black people… . There’s a kind of stress, like you’re gunning your cardiovascular engine constantly if you’re black, that results from dealing with people who are underestimating you, limiting your options… . It results from little things like going to a store and if there are two people at the counter—one black and one white—the white person will be first approached. If you have stress from other sources, like a bad marriage, it’s not something you think about constantly. But the stresses associated with racism are chronic and unrelenting.

The kind of daily indignities to which people of color are exposed were discussed by black women in a focus group filmed as part of the California Newsreel documentary Unnatural Causes.¹⁹⁷ The women, brought together by researchers at Emory University, explained:

I think constantly, having to internalize the racism that we experience every day. It’s like, to me, where do you escape to? My daughter, she’s real open and friendly, and so, you know, she’ll run up to the white children and say, “Can I play with you?” And then they don’t even answer; they just look at her and run away. It’s heartbreaking for me to see that.

You have a doctor that comes in that doesn’t really pay attention to what it is you’re saying, that invalidates what it is you’re saying.

No matter how many times I made it to the final interview, or how many programs come out of my research, it’s just not enough. And I think it’s unfortunate, but it does something to me internally. I’ve taken jobs, I mean, getting paid way less than the people that I know don’t have as much education. I don’t know what kind of résumé to write at this point. So, you know, I’m scared to give people a résumé.

Likewise, a recent report on black male college graduates, who are experiencing elevated levels of unemployment well above those of their white counterparts, noted how many such men are changing their names to sound less identifiably black, or altering their résumés to remove any references that might tip off potential employers to their race. They recount experiences of obtaining interviews from enthusiastic firms, only to watch their chances evaporate as soon as they walk in the room and the prospective employers see the color of their skin.¹⁹⁸ This kind of racial incident, subtle though it may be—and none of the men claim to have been the targets of overt or hostile racism in these cases—can have a terrible impact. In fact, studies have found that overt racism is actually less distressing, mentally, than more subtle forms of bias. When the brain has to expend valuable cognitive resources merely determining whether or not a racially discriminatory act has occurred, there is more stress associated with the process than in those cases where the cognitive analysis of a situation is far easier.¹⁹⁹

Although there are certainly class-related forces that add to stress levels and the allostatic load of marginalized persons, the special marginalization experienced by persons of color exacts a unique toll as well. Indeed, the impact of racial discrimination, independent of these other factors like economic or lifestyle variables, has as much, if not more impact on blood pressure than smoking, lack of exercise and a high-fat, high-sodium diet.²⁰⁰ Additionally, research by Sherman James of Duke University indicates a tendency for persons exposed to racism to resort to what is known as high-effort coping, meaning exerting additional and special effort to prove one’s competence, over and above existing racist stereotypes.²⁰¹ Although this kind of response to mistreatment might seem laudable—indeed it conjures long-worn social tropes about hard work and initiative, and refusing to be a victim—it comes with a cost. Having to be “twice as good” to get half as far, even when one manages to pull it off, can easily devolve into a real-life “John Henryism,” in which, like the folk legend about the steel-driving man who wanted to prove he could pound rail ties as well as a machine, individuals who fall prey to it prove themselves, only to die early from over-stress. Again, this suggests that colorblind universalism will prove inadequate for eliminating racial health disparities, since such a large portion of that disparity is due to experiences with racism itself.

In addition to the effects of racism on black and brown health generally, there is also a growing body of evidence to suggest that patients of color receive unequal and discriminatory treatment at the hands of physicians, making colorblind universalism even more inadequate for narrowing racial health gaps. For instance, when comparing only Medicare patients of the same age, gender and income, African American women are 25 percent less likely to receive mammography screening, and even when comparing patients of the same age, gender and severity of disease, living in the same geographic location and with the same access to cardiac facilities, blacks are 60 percent less likely to be referred for, and to receive coronary angioplasty or bypass surgery.²⁰² A 2005 study found that black cardiac patients are less likely than whites to receive particular lifesaving interventions, even when all patients are on Medicare and indistinguishable in other background characteristics. In another study in 2007, researchers at Harvard gave doctors a hypothetical vignette in which a patient with chest pain comes to the hospital and is found to have suffered a heart attack. When the vignette was matched with a picture of a black male patient, the doctors were much less likely to recommend life-saving drugs than when the picture of the “patient” was white.²⁰³ In a review of studies comparing the quality of cardiac care received by white and black patients, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the American College of Cardiology Foundation found that out of eighty-one such studies, nearly seventy indicated that blacks received inferior treatment.²⁰⁴ Another study by researchers from the University of Washington looked at patients in 1,500 different physicians’ practices and found a significant difference in the way white doctors communicated with patients of color, the kind of treatment they recommended and the degree to which they coor- dinated care regimens with their patients, especially with Asian Pacific Islanders. These differences persisted even when the patients had the same kind of insurance and other background factors.²⁰⁵

Though there is little evidence to suggest a significant degree of overt racial bias on the part of physicians—no more nor less, for example, than in the general population—there is research suggesting a substantial amount of subconscious racial bias in favor of whites and against blacks. For instance, research from Harvard medical school tested physicians for unconscious bias and the extent to which that bias predicted differential treatment of white and black patients. The results were clear: There was a substantial degree of implicit bias among white physicians, and this bias was directly correlated with greater levels of disparate treatment of patients.²⁰⁶ An additional study presented doctors with videos of actors whom they believed to be real patients. Some of the actor/patients were black and others were white. They presented the same symptoms, had the same background characteristics, and in every way but race were indistinguishable. Yet when asked to reflect on the “patients,” the doctors said they perceived those who were black to be less intelligent, less likely to fully participate in treatment and more likely to miss scheduled appointments. They also perceived the black actor/patients as less likely than whites to benefit from various invasive procedures, even though the symptoms for both the black and white actor-patients were identical.²⁰⁷

Between 2004 and 2006, tests were administered to more than 2,500 doctors to test for implicit racial bias. The outcome demonstrated that white, Latino and Asian physicians have significant implicit pro-white, anti-black biases, while black physicians present no consistent evidence of racial bias.²⁰⁸ Importantly, implicit biases were two to three times more prevalent than self-reported and overt biases, suggesting that there is a substantial difference between how people portray themselves (and perhaps think of themselves) and the way their minds actually work when it comes to race.

Obviously, if physicians are dispensing unequal and discriminatory care, especially as the result of implicit and subconscious biases, colorblind universalism cannot possibly remedy the problem. Even if health care access were made more affordable and universal coverage the norm, if patients of color are treated differently, and worse than whites, the cost of the care received won’t matter much: Cheaper racist care is still racist care. Likewise, if people of color are being battered by racism in other realms of everyday life, the fact that they will have health care coverage and be able to see a doctor when they need one will hardly change the fact that their health will continue to suffer. They’ll have access to physicians, but they’ll also need them far more often.

None of this is to say that universal health care coverage is unimportant. Nor is it to suggest that addressing basic economic inequities or even personal unhealthy behaviors is not important. All of these are vital aspects of improving the health of the American people. But unless we also address the specific racial components of ill health, from discriminatory care delivery to the effects of racism in society generally (and the next chapter will discuss some ways to do this), racial disparities will remain intact.

In fact, the issues of racism, economic inequity and personal behaviors are more interrelated than we might at first believe. After all, even when racial health gaps are related to economic disparities between whites and blacks, those disparities often have race-specific roots. So, for instance, residential isolation of African

Americans in highly concentrated, poorer neighborhoods has a direct relationship to inferior health outcomes for blacks, due to the health effects of living in older buildings with bad insulation, poor weatherization, lead paint exposure and exposure to other toxins.²⁰⁹ But that isolation is the result of race-specific barriers to housing access in whiter, more affluent communities, such as overt discrimination or more subtle steering practices. To solve racial disparities related to geographic concentration of blacks in congested urban spaces, policy makers will have to address the uniquely racial barriers to full and equal housing access. Merely having a job or having health care coverage will not address those kinds of problems. Increasingly, medical experts recognize the importance of looking specifically at the impacts of racism on racial health disparities. As Vickie and Brenda Shavers explain in the Journal of the National Medical Association:

The failure to address differences in the behavior towards and opportunities afforded to racial/ethnic minorities contributes to the inability to eliminate racial/ethnic disparities in health. Too often, programs designed to eliminate disparities focus on educating the community without regard for their environment and other circumstances that restrict their freedom of choice and opportunities. Addressing racism as it relates to racial/ethnic health disparities requires an assessment of its prevalence and an understanding of the specific manner in which it operates, not only in the social environment, but in healthcare delivery systems as well.²¹⁰

Likewise, when health gaps are, in part, due to behavioral and lifestyle differences, these too may be rooted in experiences with racial discrimination. For instance, multiple studies have found that detrimental and high-risk behaviors such as drug use, cigarette smoking, violence and alcohol consumption are directly correlated with being victimized by racism.²¹¹ So addressing the health consequences of these behaviors and “choices” will require more than just a focus on the behavior itself; it will necessitate an examination of the social determinants of those choices, which is to say, a race-conscious approach.

DISPENSING WITH VICTIM-BLAMING: THE INADEQUACY OF CULTURE-OF-POVERTY THINKING

Unfortunately this last admonition—to examine the social determinants of individual and group behaviors—is something of a rarity in the modern era. Instead, conservatives and far too many “post-racial” liberals (like William Julius Wilson, for instance) are given to criticizing people of color, especially those with low income, for what they perceive to be pathological and deviant cultural norms: from single-parenting, to de-emphasizing the importance of education, to welfare dependency. Because of these behavioral norms, African Americans remain behind white families in terms of well-being, or so the theory goes. More than racism and discrimination, cultural norms within black and brown communities are the cause of ongoing racial disparities, according to this view.

While the liberal version of this argument tends to be more forgiving than the conservative version—it at least recognizes that cultural norms have a material basis and can be directly influenced by access to the opportunity structure, or the lack thereof—both versions largely blame racial inequities on the behavior of those victimized by the racial caste system. However much more ecumenical it may sound when compared to the right-wing version of the same argument, it is still a narrative that blames those on the bottom of the class and caste hierarchy for being there.

And as with the conservative culture-of-poverty analysis, the liberal version is filled with inaccuracies. Whether from Moynihan, Wilson, Ford or Obama—all of whom have articulated one or another aspect of the behavioral narrative as a way to explain racial inequities—the argument essentially boils down to this: Black families, because of a history of racist oppression, have adapted to their conditions in ways that are often dysfunctional. According to this perspective, black families are far too accepting of single parenthood, black children and families place too little emphasis on education, and they are too willing to live on public assistance, as opposed to working for a living. To hear the advocates of this argument tell it, if black behavioral norms were more like those of whites, much of the racial disparity written up to discrimination would vanish.

But in fact, changes in the structure of the black family are not the reason for the rise in racial inequity: Indeed, according to a study in the 1990s by the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, even if black family structure had not changed at all since the late 1960s, at least 80 percent of the existing income and poverty-rate differences between whites and blacks would have remained the same.²¹² Even when black folks are married, racial gaps in well-being remain significant. According to U.S. Census data, black married couples are nearly twice as likely as their white counterparts to be poor, and Latino married couples are more than four times as likely as white married couples to be poor.²¹³ And black and Latina single mothers are 2.5 times as likely to be poor as white single mothers.²¹⁴ Likewise, racial disparities in school achievement remain roughly the same, regardless of single-parent household status, once we compare families of like economic condition.²¹⁵ In other words, it is not single-parenthood per se, or a lack of “intact” two-parent homes that explains the relative deprivation experienced by persons of color in the United States.

Although it is true that rates of out-of-wedlock childbirth in the black community have increased dramatically since the 1960s, this fact has nothing to do with a change in the sexual behaviors of black men and women, or a cultural pathology regarding “responsible” and “irresponsible” procreative activity. Indeed, the increase in the rate of out-of-wedlock childbirth is almost entirely the result of one factor: namely, the drop in childbirth rates among married black women.²¹⁶ Since married black couples are having far fewer children than in past generations, the percentage of births in the black community that will end up being to single moms will go up, even though fertility rates have barely budged, and in some cases have dropped precipitously among African American women. It is not that single black women are having more babies than ever before; it is that married black women are having fewer. Thus, as a percentage of the whole, the share that represents so-called illegitimacy will rise. But this says nothing about cultural pathology; it is a mere statistical artifice. Additionally, part of the apparent increase in out-of-wedlock childbirth among black women is due to a change in the way the Census Bureau does its accounting. Prior to the 1980s, single mothers living in extended family arrangements—for instance, with their own parents or other relatives—were not counted separately by the Census as single mothers with kids. Since that time, however, they have been counted separately, thereby causing the numbers of black single moms to suddenly “explode,” even though this increase is due not to actual behavioral changes over time but merely to a bureaucratic alteration in the way the government counts its citizens.²¹⁷

As for the notion that black families and culture place too little emphasis on education—an argument made often to explain higher dropout rates for African Americans, or worse educational performance—this too is an argument rooted more in myth than fact. To begin with, once family economic background is held constant (so that we are only comparing like families, in terms of income and asset status), blacks are actually more likely than whites to finish high school and equally likely to finish college—certainly not evidence that blacks as a group place too little emphasis on schooling. In other words, whatever gaps in graduation rates we see are entirely the result of economic status factors, not a difference in values vis-à-vis whites.²¹⁸

Substantial survey data also indicates that black youth values regarding education are hardly different from white youth values, and are sometimes even more consistent with educational success. Studies have found, for instance, that black youth value doing well in school every bit as much as whites and often place an even greater emphasis on academic success than whites, despite the barriers they face to equal opportunity. Black tenth graders, for example, are much more likely than their white counterparts to discuss grades with their parents and to report that school is important to their peers. They are also more likely than similar whites to say that attending class regularly is important to their friends, that studying is important to their friends, and that getting good grades is important to their friends.²¹⁹

Although many in the post-racial liberal camp, including President Obama, have made reference to the supposed tendency for black youth to deride other blacks who do well in school for “acting white,” this slander upon the educational aspirations of black students bears little relationship to the real world of African American young people. Actual research—as opposed to the anecdotal reports of individual teachers or talking heads—has found that black students suffer no greater peer-based social penalty for doing well in school than students who are white.²²⁰ Although black and Latino/a students have been found to often reject certain dress, music and speech styles as “acting white,” they are no less likely than whites to value behaviors conducive to educational success,²²¹ such as studying or maintaining regular attendance.

One study from the Minority Student Achievement Network examined 40,000 students in grades seven through eleven and found no evidence that black students placed less value on education than their white peers. Black males were found to actually place greater emphasis on getting good grades than whites or Asians; in fact, white males were the least likely to say good grades were “very important” to them.²²² According to an examination of longitudinal data by sociologist Judith Blau of the University of North Carolina, low-income blacks are far more likely than low-income whites to discuss grades with parents, to say getting an education past high school is important to them, and to say that studying and good grades are important to their peer group. Furthermore, among students generally, blacks and Latino/as are less likely than whites to believe it is acceptable to be late for school, to skip classes, to copy someone else’s homework or to talk back to teachers. In fact, high-income whites have the lowest scores on measures of academic ethics and integrity and are far more likely than low-income persons of color to endorse cheating and various forms of corner cutting to get ahead in school.²²³ In other words, suggesting that blacks place inadequate emphasis on schooling, and less of an emphasis than whites—a key argument within both conservative and post-racial liberal analysis—is demonstrably false.

As for so-called welfare dependence, though rates of public assistance are higher in communities of color than in white communities—as would be expected, since persons of color are disproportionately poor and thus more able to qualify for assistance—it is untrue that welfare receipt, let alone dependence, is a normative behavior for people of color. For instance, at any given moment, 86 percent of blacks and 92 percent of Latinos are receiving no cash welfare assistance, only one in eight blacks are receiving any form of housing assistance, and prior to the latest economic downturn (which has forced many millions of all races to turn to nutritional assistance), only one in six were receiving food stamps. Among Latinos, only about one in twelve are receiving cash, one in twenty receive housing assistance, and only one in eight were receiving food stamps before the recent downturn.²²⁴

Furthermore, when comparing only white and black poor folks of truly comparable economic condition—since, after all, there are varying degrees of poverty and deprivation, and different degrees to which the poor possess certain assets or reserve resources upon which to draw in a crisis—the black poor are actually less likely to receive public assistance than the white poor.²²⁵ And con- trary to claims that persons receiving welfare (especially African Americans) receive assistance intergenerationally, two-thirds of women who received assistance as children will never receive aid as adults.²²⁶ Likewise, 81 percent of those whose mothers received assistance will never themselves receive a penny of so-called welfare money once they become parents.²²⁷

So while the discussion about anti-poverty policy is an important one—and decent people can obviously disagree on the proper response to poverty—it is simply not the case that racial disparities between whites and people of color are principally due to cultural factors associated with poverty itself. Racial disparities manifest even when only comparing whites, blacks and Latino/as of similar class status and family composition. And for some disparities, like those that manifest in terms of health, the disparities are greatest at the upper end of the economic spectrum. Taken together, this is simply another reason why post-racial liberalism, with its rhetoric of racial transcendence and public policy agenda of colorblind universalism is inadequate for remedying racial divisions in America.

HOW COLORBLINDNESS CAN MAKE RACISM WORSE

Often those who advocate the policy agenda of colorblind universalism employ the metaphor of a “rising tide lifting all boats.” President Obama himself, as mentioned earlier, used this imagery when asked if he had any plans to address the particular difficulties being faced by African Americans in the midst of the current economic crisis. Indeed, he had previously made the same argu- ment in his book The Audacity of Hope. The position holds that if the economy is growing and adequate investments are being made in education and job training, all will benefit. Indeed, according to the proponents of this view, those at the bottom will benefit disproportionately, since, having so much more to gain from public investments, they will reap the lion’s share of the rewards.

While there is certainly some truth to this view—for instance, there is no doubt that economic growth in the post–World War II era and throughout the 1960s boosted the economic profile of most all Americans, including those of color—it is also a troubling metaphor. After all, boats do not merely rise and ebb with the tide, in a vertical fashion. Boats also move horizontally. And when boats are locked in a race—as people in the United States are, for jobs, education, housing, etc.—the relative position of the boats is every bit as important as the mere fact of floating.

Furthermore, the rising tide metaphor is horribly simplistic. As with post–World War II economic growth, for instance, so too was the civil rights struggle important for opening the doors of opportunity to previously excluded people of color. Neither growth nor the movement alone would have likely produced the combined benefits that the two brought forward together. In fact, from the 1940s until the early to mid 1960s—during which time “universal” policies were implemented that largely ignored issues of racial discrimination and the impacts of bias on people of color—gaps in income between whites and blacks actually increased.²²⁸ It was only after civil rights activism and race-conscious liberalism led to the inclusion of African Americans in previously whites-only, class-based efforts that those gaps began to narrow. This trend would then continue throughout the first few years of the 1970s, especially as affirmative action programs began to break down certain barriers in skilled trades and in management and professional positions.

More recent economic growth has been a bit different, though. Although the 1990s boom did “lift all boats” to an extent (in that, for instance, black poverty rates fell from 32 to 23 percent and black unemployment dropped significantly), the gaps between whites and blacks in terms of poverty, unemployment, net worth and other categories barely budged.²²⁹ Indeed, in terms of wealth and assets, the gap increased, simply because whites, having started out with so much more of it, were able to transfer more of it to their children. And wealth, unlike income, tends to grow exponentially. Thus, in the 1990s when both whites and blacks were witnessing growing net worth and wealth, racial gaps continued to grow by over $16,000, on average, between the typical white and typical black family.²³⁰ So yes, blacks were doing better than they had been, but whites were too, and the relative gains of whites tended to keep pace with, if not surpass, the relative gains made by people of color.

But even in light of such facts, perhaps there are those who would say, so what? Perhaps they would think it sufficient that everyone is doing better from year to year and generation to generation. To such persons, racial gaps don’t matter, so long as everyone has enough to provide for themselves and their families. They might even suggest that to focus on the question of who has more than someone else is an exercise in futility, or even class envy.

But in fact, racial gaps matter, and for reasons that shouldn’t be particularly difficult to understand. First, there is the issue of fairness itself. For whites to have such a relative advantage over people of color, and in such large measure because of the inertia carried over from past unequal opportunity, as well as ongoing discrimination, is unjust. These advantages are not earned, and thus to benefit from them is ethically dubious. Even more, those head starts allow whites to have advantages in multiple arenas of life, from jobs to education to housing, that will continue to place future generations of color at a disadvantage. In other words, the relative positions of whites and those of color will too often be transmitted across generational lines, having little to do with personal merit, hard work or effort.

Second, to the extent racial gaps persist—even if people of color do better from year to year thanks to universal policies of uplift—persons of color will continue to be priced out of the market for better housing and schools. So, for instance, as the society becomes wealthier, prices for things from college to health care to housing will increase. But if whites are gaining as much as (or more than) people of color—since all boats, after all, are rising—persons of color will be largely blocked from acquiring or gaining access to those more valuable assets. People of color will have more money, but whites will have that much more, and still be able to access goods and opportunities off-limits to everyone else. Even though people of color may be better off than their parents, their ability to truly compete with whites will remain stunted unless racial gaps themselves are narrowed.

Third, if racial gaps in well-being remain, racist thinking may actually be reinforced or made worse. For instance, if we say that race is of declining significance and that universal policies of uplift can reduce whatever disparities remain, but at the end of the day serious inequities persist (given the race-specific injuries that colorblind universalism cannot address), it will become almost rational to adopt racist views to explain those gaps. Such a conclusion would fit perfectly with the notion of meritocracy that is already quite prevalent in the culture, after all. Since racism is by definition about relative thinking—i.e., that members of group x are superior to group y—and given the embrace of meritocracy (the idea that anyone can make it if they try hard enough and that success results from superior talent), it shouldn’t be surprising that persons confronted by racial disparities in income, housing, health and assets might conclude there were inherent reasons of superiority and inferiority that explain the relative positions of those different groups. This already happens far too often, which is why a book like The Bell Curve—which argues that blacks are biologically and genetically given to less intelligence than whites and Asians—could become a best-seller in the mid-1990s. But such thinking could become even more widespread were the politics of post-racial liberalism to succeed in shutting down conversation about ongoing racial discrimination and racism. Deprived of the critical context needed to understand the disparities we see, it would be all too easy for us to then embrace the individualistic and meritocratic narrative with which virtually all Americans were raised. Were we to do so, however, the consequences could be tragic—an actual intensification of racist thinking as a result of colorblindness: the ultimate irony.

Yet it is not only in the realm of racist thinking that colorblind universalism may present a problem. So too, the success of the post-racial narrative and colorblind policy making could reinforce institutional and structural racial inequities. After all, if the rhetoric of racial transcendence, which has been so instrumental to the political success of President Obama, manages to convince enough individuals of the need for colorblindness in public life, might it not also encourage colorblindness in the private realm? And by that I mean on the part of businesses, schools, doctors and others? And might not that colorblindness, by encouraging teachers, physicians, employers and others to ignore or downplay race, actually result in their ill-serving the needs of people who are confronted by racism, thereby actually helping to replicate it?

So, for instance, consider employers. Although for many years businesses have been engaged in efforts to enhance workplace diversity and equity—some doing far better than others, to be sure—if the logic of post-racial policy and colorblindness were to become increasingly popularized, it is conceivable that employers may abandon such efforts, sacrificing them on the altar of racial transcendence. No more deliberate efforts to recruit qualified people of color who may otherwise be overlooked. No more consideration of how the racialized opportunity structure— which under colorblindness is hardly recognized at all—may have shaped the formal résumés of job applicants, and yet not really tell an employer all they need to know about an applicant’s abilities. Under a paradigm of colorblindness, employers would be encouraged to take résumés at face value, to ignore the role of old boys’ networks in the procurement of so many jobs—and especially to ignore those networks’ racial dynamic—and to act as though race doesn’t matter, even as it will have impacted the experiences of the people applying for work with the particular employer, and those who ultimately come to work there.

Likewise teachers. If teachers are encouraged to downplay the role of racism in society and to be “colorblind” vis-à-vis their stu- dents, there is little doubt that they will underserve those students’ needs. Research has found that black students are about 50 percent more likely than white students to say that teacher encouragement is critical to them, and a key determiner of how hard they work in school.²³¹ The reason for such a phenomena is not particularly difficult to discern. After all, black students are contending with any number of messages, from media and occasionally from educators, that they are less capable and not as smart. So for students experiencing so much discouragement—unlike whites who are typically perceived in far better terms and receive multiply reinforcing positive messages about their aptitude and ability—to have teachers express a belief in their abilities becomes a critical shot in the arm and incentivizes hard work. Yet if teachers operate on the basis of a colorblind mentality—one that says they shouldn’t think about race, or the different impacts of race on their students—those teachers will likely not think to act on the basis of what this research tells us. They will likely teach without a conscious commitment to providing positive feedback, because the dominant group (of which they themselves will most often be a part) is not in need of encouragement in the same way.

Additionally, a colorblind mentality, taken to its logical conclusion in schools, would mean that educators would take little account of whether their curriculum was multicultural and inclusive of multiple voices and perspectives. To be colorblind, after all, is to not think about such things. Worse, colorblindness can also cause those who raise such matters, in violation of colorblind normalcy, to be accused of injecting race into arenas where it doesn’t belong, and of violating a commitment to so-called universalism. Several years ago, when San Francisco public schools were discussing revising their literature curricula, this very thing happened: White parents, upset at the thought of replacing some of “the classics” with literature by authors of color—and ignoring that classics only became classics because certain people, almost all of them white, decided that they were the best writing—argued that the work of non-whites, while perhaps good literature, would be “too narrow” in its themes and wouldn’t speak to the “universal” condition in the same way as, say, a fourteenth-century European like Geoffrey Chaucer. Colorblindness would only make this kind of thinking more common, resulting in schools that were less willing than ever to engage a critical analysis about what they teach and how they teach it.

Colorblindness would also reduce the likelihood of addressing racial disparities in discipline or tracking, not because these practices would suddenly vanish, but because we would be discouraged from keeping track of such troublesome information, or thinking about it at all. Validating colorblind thinking would make it more difficult to raise the issues, present the data and call for policy changes, since doing so would require profound color-consciousness and a willingness to utterly reject the rhetoric of racial transcendence.

Or consider physicians. Already the evidence, as presented above, suggests that doctors, despite their best intentions, too often dispense unequal care to their patients based on race. Often-times, this is the result of implicit racial biases. Recent research is beginning to show us the impacts of these disparities and the importance of taking race into consideration in the clinical setting so as to properly respond to the needs of patients of color. If black and brown patients are presenting symptoms that are in part the result of racialized stresses accumulated over time, a responsive physician will need to understand that truth, consider that factor and be trained on how to address issues of race and racism with patients. In short, they will need to see racism and discrimination as public health issues. But under a mentality of colorblindness, they will easily retreat back into the formalized and formulaic training that looks merely at symptoms themselves, and assumes that the causes of those symptoms are the same for everyone. For health professionals to be colorblind and look past race and racism will be to maintain or even deepen the existing injustice perpetrated against persons of color in terms of health.

TALKING CLASS, HEARING RACE: WHY POST-RACIAL LIBERALISM FAILS ON ITS OWN TERMS

But despite the evidence that race-based subordination and prejudice continue, that universal colorblindness cannot adequately address them, and that post-racial approaches could possibly make racism worse, proponents of the new paradigm have a ready fall-back position. Namely, they suggest that however imperfect a colorblind stance may be, it is the only politically viable path for progressive social policy. Even if colorblind universalism is inadequate as a tool for eradicating racial injustice, and even if the rhetoric of racial transcendence is dishonest, political reality is such that most whites simply will not get behind any remotely progressive policy regarding jobs, education or health care without a race-neutral approach, and so long as they believe such efforts are really about achieving racial equity. Those who subscribe to this view believe that we must, in effect, hide our commitment to racial justice behind a patina of universalism. At least by doing so, the advocates of post-racial liberalism hope, the society can make some progress toward social justice, even if imperfect and incomplete. In other words, it’s better than nothing.

Putting aside the cynicism of such an approach, this argument—the ultimate realpolitik defense of post-racial liberalism—is rooted in assumptions that, upon careful examination, are unsupported and even contradicted by the evidence. In short, post-racial liberalism fails on its own terms.

The Racialization of Social Policy

There are several reasons why colorblind policy, at this point in time, cannot garner the political support for universal and progressive programs of uplift, which it claims to be able to deliver. First and foremost is the simple reality that the public, and particularly the white public, already views government spending on behalf of the have-nots or have-lessers, in racialized terms. In other words, post-racial liberals like President Obama may say that they are advocating colorblind universal programs to help all in need, but most white Americans apparently hear something else altogether. And once whites perceive that these universal efforts are really about racial redistribution, their opposition skyrockets. While there are certainly non-racial reasons that individuals may oppose efforts aimed at benefiting those at the bottom of the economic hierarchy—be they specified as people of color or not—re-search has found that there is a significant correlation between anti-black prejudice and such opposition.²³²

Studies confirm that perceptions of black laziness are central to white attitudes about spending on social programs and the extent to which such efforts are likely to be supported or rejected.²³³ One comprehensive study of public assistance spending in the United States found that hostility to programs aimed at helping those in need is largely due to white racial resentment, specifically, the belief that persons of color will be the ones to benefit from said spending. Indeed, the study found that racial hostility to people of color, who are perceived as taking advantage of such programs, is more important to public opposition to these efforts than any other economic or political variable.²³⁴ In other words, white perceptions about who the beneficiaries of social spending will be, impact the extent to which they are willing to get behind those efforts.

Apparently, the tendency for whites to hear race, and specifically “black people,” when in fact neither race nor black people have even been mentioned, is quite common. In the case of any number of issues only tangentially related to race, the mere raising of said issues prompts white racial bias and triggers apparent implicit prejudices. As UCLA law professor Gary Blasi explains:

The basic research on stereotyping suggests … any debate about placing restrictions on song lyrics will be affected by the indirect connection to race through rap music. Any reference to an urban issue, including such apparently neutral issues as parks or mass transit, will be affected by the underlying association of “urban” to “minority.” Indeed, research suggests that race may be doing the most work in those public policy arenas where it has not been explicitly mentioned.²³⁵

These findings have profound implications for colorblind public policy efforts and those supporting such efforts. If public policies with even a remote connection to racial issues are likely to be viewed through a racial lens anyway, then the ability of colorblind efforts and the rhetoric of racial transcendence to effectively finesse white racial antipathy, or circumvent it in the interest of progressive social policy, is likely to be compromised. Given this reality, proposing so-called universal efforts to provide jobs, health care, better education and better housing opportunities for those without them, though it may be done in a “race-neutral” policy frame, may still prompt visions of racial others in the minds of the white public, thereby rendering the benefits of colorblindness moot. This isn’t to say that such policies should not be supported, attempted and ultimately implemented. It is merely to say that they should not serve as an alternative to addressing racial inequity specifically. If the white public perceives any social program effort as racially coded anyway, better to raise the issues outright, rather than to be viewed as engaging in subterfuge to cover up some secretive racial redistribution scheme.

In fact, research has found that white racial resentment is likely to be activated in policy discussions only when it is allowed to remain sublimated and implicit. In other words, whites are primed to think in racialized terms—and negatively about blacks—only when the racial element of a policy consideration is subtle. When it is made explicit, whites do not act on their racial resentments as often, because to do so would conflict with their self-professed and stated commitments to fairness. As University of Texas professor Ismail White explains:

Mendelberg (2001) argues that racial priming works because the racial cues present in these messages make racial schema (in this case, whites’ attitudes about African Americans) more accessible in memory. Those schema are then used automatically in subsequent evaluations of candidates or policy issues. What makes Mendelberg’s theory of racial priming unique, however, is her contention that, to have any impact on opinion, racial priming must function at an implicit level. At work … is a conflict for white Americans between their belief in the norm of equality on the one hand and their resentment toward blacks on the other. Awareness of the racial nature of a message, she argues, will lead most whites to reject that message because they would not want to violate the equality norm.²³⁶

For our purposes, this means that the Obama administration and others who claim to support progressive social policy should not shrink from discussing race, racism and racial inequity. If anything, they should talk about it more, and drag implicit racial biases that animate much opposition to those efforts into the light of day. Only in this manner can the contradiction between professed ideals and implicit biases be made salient. And only by exposing that contradiction can we hope to beat back reactionary priming of white racial resentment in public policy discussions.

The Messenger Matters: Seeing Obama as an Agent of Racial Redistribution

With regard to President Obama’s agenda on health care, for example, there is evidence that many whites may perceive his efforts in racialized terms, no matter how universal the rhetoric with which he has tried to sell them, and no matter that he has specifically eschewed any discussion of, or focus on, racial disparity in health care per se. This could even be due to his rhetorical use of the term “public option” to describe the part of the reform initiative that would fall to the government. After all, use of the term “public” conjures images of other public amenities, like public transportation or public housing, both of which are so often seen as urban or “inner city” institutions utilized by people of color.

So, according to polling data from late 2008, whites with above-average levels of racial resentment toward blacks were less than half as likely as those with below-average resentment to support health care reform. Fewer than one in five whites for whom high prejudice and racial resentment manifested in the surveys supported reforming the nation’s health care system; this, as opposed to about half of whites in the low-prejudice, low-resentment group who supported reform. Interestingly, these correlations between racial resentment and opposition to health care reform did not exist during the Clinton administration’s attempts to reform health care, suggesting that there is something about the presence of Obama himself, as a man of color, that pushes racial buttons for large numbers of whites.²³⁷

In keeping with that notion, another study has found that a high level of racial bias against blacks is directly correlated with opposition to President Obama’s health care proposals, boosting opposition among whites by about a third relative to those with low prejudice. Those with high levels of racial bias were just as likely as those with low bias to support Obama’s proposals for reform if they were presented as Bill Clinton’s plan, but when whites were told the proposal in front of them was Obama’s, only whites with high levels of prejudice registered a drop in support, from 65 percent in favor, down to a mere 41 percent!²³⁸

The question then, for proponents of colorblind universalism is this: if the white public, due to years of conditioning, perceives race-neutral public policy in race-specific terms—as some form of racial handout, and thus as something to be opposed—what is the political benefit to be derived from sticking with the rhetoric and policy agenda of post-racial liberalism? If the political upside of such a strategy is questionable, because of white racial resentment and implicit bias, then what reasons remain for finessing issues as important as racial inequity and discrimination? Might it not be better to call those things out directly, challenge white racial conditioning, and make the closing of racial gaps a national mission, in keeping with the very philosophical tradition to which the president so often appealed in his campaign? Might it not be better to explain why racial inequity needs to be addressed, as both a moral and practical national imperative? Furthermore, given the research on racial priming and white racial resentment—which indicates that only when race is allowed to remain implicit does priming it succeed²³⁹—might it not be strategically wiser to explicitly call out the racial aspects of opposition to health care reform and other progressive initiatives?

If whites are already thinking in racialized terms, why not seek to steer that cognitive process in a constructive direction, rather than allowing it to fester unmolested thanks to a strategic silence, which, in the end, isn’t really all that strategic?

Post-Racialism as Unilateral Disarmament in the Face of Right-Wing Attacks

The need for this constructive steering is especially apparent, given the way in which the political opponents of progressive social policy seem committed to capitalizing on white resentment in order to torpedo any efforts to reduce inequities, be they racial or economic. Knowing how the public often perceives spending on social programs—having effectively played on white hostility to such efforts all throughout the 1980s and 1990s—conservatives have consistently injected racial symbolism and linguistic memes into the political conversation about President Obama and his policy agenda.

Glenn Beck, as previously noted, has repeatedly suggested that President Obama’s push for health care reform is really about obtaining reparations for blacks. That he would make such a claim even when Obama’s plan has never included any specific policies for addressing racial inequity, and even when he has repeatedly avoided even discussing, let alone trying to solve those disparities, indicates the extent to which conservatives are prepared to deploy race and racial resentment against the president.²⁴⁰ Beyond commentators like Beck, more “respectable” outlets for conservatism have also played the racial resentment card against the president. So, for instance, an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily referred to health care reform as “affirmative action on steroids” and also suggested that it amounted to a form of racial reparations for slavery.²⁴¹

Indeed, the amount of blatantly race-based invective aimed at Obama since his inauguration has been extraordinary. Consider Rush Limbaugh, who in the midst of a recent diatribe against the president, threw in a complaint that among the nation’s biggest problems is that we’re “so multicultured and fractured.” Not divided by racism and prejudice of course, but by multiculturalism itself, and presumably the failure of all groups to accept dominant white cultural narratives and norms.²⁴² Tree days later, in keeping with this theme, Limbaugh lambasted the left (of which he presumes the president to be a chief resident, naturally), for “celebrating diversity” and thereby endangering a “distinct American culture.”²⁴³

Elsewhere, discussing the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Limbaugh said, “They [minorities] want to use their power as a means of retribution. That’s what Obama is all about.”²⁴⁴ In a long rant about the nomination, in which he lamented the supposed timidity of the Republican Party in the face of what Limbaugh perceives as an all-out racial assault against whites, he went even further:

How do you get promoted in the Barack Obama administration? By hating white people … make white people the new oppressed minority … and they’re [the Republican Party] going right along with it ’cuz they’re shutting up, moving to the back of the bus. They’re saying “I can’t use that drinking fountain, OK! I can’t use that restroom, OK!”²⁴⁵

Discussing the arrest of African American scholar Henry Louis Gates in Cambridge, Massachusetts (and Obama’s mild criticism of the officer who arrested him after Gates became angry at the insinuation that he might have been breaking into his own home), Limbaugh bellowed that “white policemen are under as- sault” by the president,²⁴⁶ and that “here you have a black president trying to destroy a white policeman.”²⁴⁷ In response to the same incident—in which the president suggested the Cambridge police acted “stupidly” in arresting Gates (a true statement given the law in Massachusetts, under which Gates had not been guilty of the crime for which he was arrested)²⁴⁸—Beck claimed that Obama’s comment proved the president was a “racist” who “has a deep-seated hatred for white people or white culture.”²⁴⁹

To Limbaugh too, Obama’s anti-white animus extends much further than merely to white law enforcement officers. Thus, his September 15, 2009, rant in which he all but blamed President Obama for a fight on a school bus in Illinois, in which two black students attacked a white student. Although police determined the incident had nothing to do with race or racial animus between the attackers and the victim, Limbaugh told his listeners, “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.”²⁵⁰

Throughout the summer, during some of the most intense commentary on proposed health care reform, Limbaugh elevated his racial resentment and fear-mongering to new heights, consistently pushing comparisons between president Obama and Adolf Hitler, as if to suggest that Obama was a racially driven, perhaps even totalitarian leader. To wit, his remarks that the “Obama health care logo is damn close to a Nazi swastika logo,” and that “Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, ruled by dictate,”²⁵¹ or to the effect that there are several “similarities between the Democrat Party of today and the Nazi Party in Germany.”²⁵² The Hitler/Nazi meme was also advanced by Glenn Beck, who said in April 2009 that the country today reminds him of “the early days of Adolf Hitler.”²⁵³

Additionally, Limbaugh has insisted that Obama’s “entire economic program is reparations”²⁵⁴—seconding Beck’s claims regarding the president’s health care plan—and that Obama “is more African in his roots than he is American,” and is “behaving like an African colonial despot.”²⁵⁵ Meanwhile, one of the main figures in the conservative and libertarian “Tea Party” movement, Mark Williams, referred to the president on his blog as an “Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug.”²⁵⁶

Sadly, these race-based attacks against the president are all too common, even among the general public. Thus, one can read references to Obama’s daughter Malia, posted on the popular conservative Web site Free Republic, as “ghetto trash,” “street trash” and a “typical street whore”—posts to which almost no one on the site objected in the least.²⁵⁷ Or consider the post on the Facebook page of Young Republican leader Audra Shay—which Shay herself laughed about at the time—in which one of Shay’s friends, Eric Pike, wrote, “Obama Bin Lauden is the new terrorist… . Muslim is on there side … need to take this country back from all of these mad coons … and illegals.”²⁵⁸

Elsewhere, Republican and conservative activists have likened Michelle Obama to an ape,²⁵⁹ distributed e-mails condemning “Obamacare” that picture the president dressed as a witch doctor with a bone through his nose,²⁶⁰ and appeared at rallies with signs suggesting health care reform will take money from senior citizens to give care to undocumented Mexicans.²⁶¹ Other prominent signs at these rallies have announced that Obama intends to put white people in slavery²⁶² or have pictured the president with a Hitler mustache. Still others have featured swastikas and called into question the president’s nationality, most insisting he is a Kenyan or, as one sign put it, a “Lyin’ African.”²⁶³ At another rally, white audience members cheered when a white man assaulted a black woman and ripped up her poster of Rosa Parks.²⁶⁴

That right-wing leaders are so willing to deploy—and the public so willing to accept—racist rhetoric and other invective aimed at stoking white resentment and fear, even against a president who almost never discusses race at all, suggests the likely inadequacy of post-racialism as a paradigm for fighting racial inequities. The rhetoric of racial transcendence so critical to advocates of post-racial liberalism—which has already been shown to rest on a foundation of untruth, given the reality of persistent racism—cannot possibly drown out the hateful and often unhinged rantings of those insistent on painting the president as an anti-white bigot. Likewise, the policy agenda of colorblind universalism—which despite its race neutrality is still seen by so many as a veiled attempt at racial redistribution—will not likely gain sufficient political support for it to be successful, even on its own terms (those of political expedience), to say nothing of being successful at reducing the racial disparities against which it is being deployed.

Unfortunately, the president’s refusal to fight back against these tactics—and he has studiously denied any racial motivation for even the most blatantly racial attacks to which he has been subjected—appears unlikely to alter the trajectory of reactionary tactics and rhetoric. Obama has, again and again, sought to be as racially unthreatening as possible to white Americans, distancing himself from his Attorney General when the latter noted that the United States had often been a “nation of cowards” when it came to discussing race,²⁶⁵ backtracking on his criticism of the Cambridge police after they arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates²⁶⁶—and this, again, even though his comment had been accurate, given the law in that state—and disagreeing with former president Carter when the latter suggested that some of the attacks against President Obama were rooted in white racial antipathy toward him as a black man.²⁶⁷ Despite Obama’s aversion to even discussing race, white conservatives have consistently deployed the rhetoric of white resentment against him.

To refuse to fight back, far from disarming these forces of bigotry or depriving them of a point of attack, has done nothing to blunt their efforts. Indeed, it may have emboldened them. It may, in the end, amount to little more than unilateral disarmament. Rather than responding to white fear-mongering with straight talk and challenging white Americans to live up to the creed they claim to embrace, Obama and others in the camp of post-racial liberalism seem content to “take the high road.” What they fail to realize, sadly, is that the road they walk leads nowhere. It will not lead to political success, and it will not reduce racial disparities in any walk of national life. It is not a workable paradigm for thought or action. It needs to be abandoned.