This book emerges from the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures which I delivered at Harvard University in April 2000. I wish to thank Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., Director of the Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard, and his colleagues, for the invitation to give those lectures.
However, this book has been gestating for many years. It grows out of my efforts over nearly three decades to understand the causes of black Americans’ social and economic marginality, and to find possible remedies for this situation. The first chapter of my doctoral dissertation (submitted in 1976 to the Economics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and written under the inspiring supervision of Prof. Robert M. Solow) was called “A Dynamic Theory of Racial Income Differences.” Ideas from this early work underlie many of the arguments to be found in Chapters 3 and 4. More recently, in 1993, I collaborated with Stephen Coate of Cornell University on a paper entitled “Will Affirmative Action Policies Eliminate Negative Stereotypes?” which appeared in the American Economic Review. Much of the analysis in Chapter 2 derives from this collaborative research.
Then, in 1997 (with the full support of my university’s administration, for which I am grateful), I founded the Institute on Race and Social Division at Boston University (IRSD), in order to encourage the exchange of ideas on these themes among scholars working in the humanities and the social sciences. It has been both my privilege and a source of great pleasure to observe an outstanding interdisciplinary community of researchers coalesce around IRSD over these past four years. Exposure to these creative and learned colleagues has broadened and deepened my understanding of the subject and has contributed to my own thinking in ways too many and too subtle to enumerate. I should say, however, that my theory of “racial stigma” sketched in Chapter 3 and my critique offered in Chapter 4 of “race-blindness” as a moral ideal would never have come to fruition without the constant encouragement and periodic provocations of this extraordinary group of scholars.
I am also grateful to the many individuals who read and commented upon earlier drafts of this book. It has certainly benefited from their criticism—especially that of Henry Aaron, Marcellus Andrews, William Bowen, Samuel Bowles, Kerwin Charles, Jorge Garcia, Nathan Glazer, Mark Kleiman, Linda Datcher Loury, Jane Mansbridge, Deirdre McCloskey, Robert Nozick, Orlando Patterson, Steven Pinker, John Skrentny, Steven Teles, Ajume Wingo, and Christopher Winship. I would also like to express my appreciation for the financial support of the work reflected here that has been provided by the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.
Finally, I must acknowledge my intellectual indebtedness to a great economist, Thomas C. Schelling, to whom this book is dedicated. Shortly after arriving at Harvard in 1982 as a newly appointed Professor of Economics and of Afro-American Studies, I began to despair of the possibility that I could successfully integrate my love of economic science with my passion for thinking broadly and writing usefully about the issue of race in contemporary America. How, I wondered, could one do rigorous theoretical work in economics while remaining relevant to an issue that seemed so fraught with political, cultural, and psychological dimensions? Tom Schelling not only convinced me that this was possible; he took me by the hand and showed the way. The intellectual style reflected in this book developed under his tutelage. My first insights into the problem of “racial classification” emerged in lecture halls at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where, for several years in the 1980s, Tom and I co-taught a course we called “Public Policies in Divided Societies.” Tom Schelling’s creative and playful mind, his incredible breadth of interests, and his unparalleled mastery of strategic analysis opened up a new world of intellectual possibilities for me. I will always be grateful to him.