May 17, 1954 was a momentous day in the history of the United States, and perhaps of the world. Something happened that afternoon that was all too rare in human history. A great nation voluntarily acknowledged and repudiated its own oppression of part of its own people. The Supreme Court decision that day was announced in an atmosphere of high drama, and some observers said that one of the black-robed Justices sat on the great bench with tears in his eyes.
Brown v. Board of Education was clearly much more than another legal case to go into the long dusty rows of volumes of court decisions. It represented a vision of man and of the world that touched many hearts across the land and around the world. The anger and rancor it immediately provoked also testified to its importance. In a larger historic context, that such an issue should reach the highest court in the land was itself remarkable. In how many places and in how many eras could an ordinary person from a despised race challenge the duly constituted authorities, force them to publicly defend their decisions, retreat, and finally capitulate?
Brown v. Board of Education may have been intended to close the door on an ugly chapter in American history, going back to slavery and including both petty and gross bigotry, blatant discrimination, and violence and terror extending all the way to brutal and sadistic lynchings. Yet it also opened a door to political, constitutional, and human crises. It was not simply a decision but the beginning of a revolution that has not yet run its course, but which has already shown the classic symptoms of a revolution taking a very different path from that envisioned by those who set it in motion.
The civil rights revolution of the past generation has had wide ramifications among a growing variety of groups, and has changed not only the political landscape and social history of the United States, but has also altered the very concept of constitutional law and the role of courts.
Behind the many visible changes has been a change in the way the world is visualized. The civil rights vision is not only a moral vision of the way the world should be in the future, but also a cause-and-effect vision of the way the world is today. This cause-and-effect vision of the way the world works is central to understanding the particular direction of thrust of the civil rights revolution, its achievements, its disappointments, and its sharp changes in meaning that have split its supporters and confounded its critics.
It is far from incidental that the civil rights movement began among black Americans. The basic vision of what was wrong, and of what social effects would follow from what institutional changes, bore the clear imprint of the history of blacks in the United States, though the general principles arrived at were later applied successively to very different groups in American society—to women and the aged, for example, as well as to such disparate racial and ethnic groups as Asians, Hispanics, and American Indians. It is now estimated that 70 percent of the American population is entitled to preferential treatment under “affirmative action.”1 The civil rights vision has even been extended internationally to the plight of the Third World and to racial policies in other nations, such as South Africa.
Ironically, the civil rights revolution began by emphasizing precisely what was unique about the history of black Americans—slavery, Jim Crow laws, and some of the most virulent racism ever seen anywhere. But upon that very uniqueness, general principles of morality and causation were established. These principles constitute the civil rights vision of the world. The extent to which that vision corresponds to reality is crucial for understanding both the successes and failures of the civil rights revolution thus far, and for assessing its future prospects and dangers.
SPECIAL CASES AND GENERAL PRINCIPLES
Because civil rights laws and civil rights concepts are applied generally—to both racial and non-racial groups—their general validity must be examined. The special case of blacks can then be examined precisely as a special case.
One of the most central—and most controversial—premises of the civil rights vision is that statistical disparities in incomes, occupations, education, etc., represent moral inequities, and are caused by “society.” Historically, it was easy to show, for example, that segregated white schools had had several times as much money spent per pupil as in segregated black schools and that this translated into large disparities in physical plant, teacher qualifications, and other indices of educational input. Large differences in educational output, such as test scores, seemed readily attributable to these input differences. How well this model applied to other statistical disparities for other groups is another question entirely. Moreover, even for blacks, the causal link has been established by immediate plausibility rather than by systematic verification of an hypothesis.
Another central premise of the civil rights vision is that belief in innate inferiority explains policies and practices of differential treatment, whether expressed in overt hostility or in institutional policies or individual decisions that result in statistical disparities. Moral defenses or causal explanations of these statistical differences in any other terms tend themselves to fall under suspicion or denunciation as racism, sexism, etc. Again, the question must be raised as to the general validity of these premises, as well as the separate question of their applicability to the special case of blacks.
A third major premise of the civil rights vision is that political activity is the key to improving the lot of those on the short end of differences in income, “representation” in desirable occupations or institutions, or otherwise disadvantaged. Once more, it is possible to cite such things as dramatic increases in the number of black elected officials after passage of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. But once again, the general validity of the premise for the wide variety of groups covered by civil rights policies must be examined as a separate issue. And once again, even the special case of blacks must be systematically analyzed.
Statistical Disparities
Several unspoken assumptions underlie the principle that statistical disparities imply discrimination. The first, and apparently most obvious, is that discrimination leads to adverse effects on the observable achievements of those who are discriminated against, as compared to the discriminators or to society in general. The second assumption is that the converse of this is equally true—that statistical differences signal, imply and/or measure discrimination. This assumption depends upon a third unspoken premise—that large statistical differences between groups do not usually arise and persist without discrimination. For if they do, then discrimination takes its place as only one cause among many—and inferences from statistical disparities lose their validity as evidence. Discrimination may still exist and be harmful, but the convenient statistical barometer would be lost. Even a disease that is fatal 100 percent of the time provides no automatic explanation of death if there are many other fatal diseases, along with accidents, murder, and suicide. These are the inherent pitfalls of inductive reasoning. Even if A is known to cause Z, we still cannot infer A whenever we find Z, if B, C, D, etc., also cause Z.
How important are other factors besides discrimination in producing vast statistical disparities? The civil rights vision is one of a more or less random statistical distribution of results (income, “representation,” test scores, etc.) in the absence of discrimination of one sort or another. Alternative visions are also conceivable, but the crucial question here is not plausibility but how to test any given vision against observable factual evidence.
There are many decisions wholly within the discretion of those concerned, where discrimination by others is not a factor—the choice of television programs to watch, opinions to express to poll takers, or the age at which to marry, for example. All these show pronounced patterns that differ from group to group—not a random distribution.
A whole industry exists to determine the statistical profile of people who view given television programs, for the differences between the demographic and economic characteristics of the respective audiences for sports events, “soap operas,” cartoon programs, news features, etc., are worth millions of dollars to advertisers and networks. Public opinion polls show similarly wide disparities on many issues by income, education, sex, age, and religion. Marital patterns also differ widely from one group to another. For example, half of all Mexican American wives were married in their teens while only 10 percent of Japanese American wives were married that young.2
People do not move randomly, either within a nation or between nations. The great movement of nineteenth century European immigrants to the United States was largely a movement of young adults.3 So was the great migration of blacks out of the South, beginning in the early twentieth century.4 Of the Chinese immigrants to the United States before the First World War, 60 percent came from only one of 98 districts in one province in southern China.5 Among Japanese immigrants to the United States in 1935, more than 90 percent of those from Okinawa went to Hawaii, while a majority of those from the Hiroshima area went to the mainland of the United States.6 At the same time, Japanese emigrants from the area around Nagasaki went primarily to China and southeast Asia.7 In post-World War II Japan, 70 percent of the emigrants from the Hidaka district settled in Canada, and of these, 90 percent from one village settled in one area of Canada.8 Among German emigrants in the early nineteenth century, a majority went to South America, but from the 1830s to the end of the century, 90 percent went to the United States.9 Among those Germans who emigrated to Chile in the mid-nineteenth century, most came from just one city, Hamburg.10 Among the Jews scattered through the many countries of Latin America today, nearly half live in just one city, Buenos Aires.11
The sex composition of immigrants has also shown great disparities, both within groups and between groups. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, about 80 percent of all emigrants from Italy were male.12 Among Chinese and Japanese immigrants to the United States during the same era, the men outnumbered the women by more than twenty-to-one,13 and there were virtually no children. But among the Irish immigrants to the United States, the sex ratio was roughly even, and in some decades females outnumbered males.14
Statistical disparities extend into every aspect of human life. In major league baseball, for example, black players have hit home runs with significantly greater frequency than white players (in proportion to their respective times at bat) and with nearly twice the frequency of Latin players.15 Of the five highest totals of home runs in a lifetime, three are by black players. But of the ten highest slugging averages ever achieved in a season, seven are by players of German ancestry—indeed, just two players, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Of the five times that someone has stolen 100 or more bases in a season, all were by black players.
In the toy industry, firms do not spend their annual television advertising budgets evenly—that is, 25 percent in each quarter of the year. Some of the best known toy manufacturers spend upwards of three-quarters or four-fifths of their annual television advertising budget in the last quarter.16
In short, statistical disparities are commonplace among human beings. Many historical and cultural reasons underlie the peculiar patterns observed. But the even “representation” of groups chosen as a baseline for measuring discrimination is a myth rather than an established fact. It is significant that those who have assumed that baseline have seldom, if ever, been challenged to produce evidence.
The civil rights vision focuses on groups adversely affected in statistical disparities. Here the relationship between discrimination and economic, educational, and other disadvantages is taken as virtually axiomatic. But if this apparently obvious proposition is taken as an hypothesis to be tested, rather than an axiom to be accepted, a very different picture emerges. Groups with a demonstrable history of being discriminated against have, in many countries and in many periods of history, had higher incomes, better educational performance, and more “representation” in high-level positions than those doing the discriminating.
Throughout southeast Asia, for several centuries, the Chinese minority has been—and continues to be—the target of explicit, legalized discrimination in various occupations, in admission to institutions of higher learning, and suffers bans and restrictions on land ownership and places of residence. Nowhere in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, or the Philippines have the Chinese ever experienced equal opportunity. Yet in all these countries the Chinese minority—about 5 percent of the population of southeast Asia—owns a majority of the nation’s total investments in key industries. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Chinese owned 75 percent of the rice mills in the Philippines, and between 80 and 90 percent of the rice mills in Thailand.17 They conducted more than 70 percent of the retail trade in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Malaysia.18 In Malaysia, where the anti-Chinese discrimination is written into the Constitution, is embodied in preferential quotas for Malays in government and private industry alike, and extends to admissions and scholarships at the universities, the average Chinese continues to earn twice the income of the average Malay.19
Nor are the Chinese minorities in southeast Asia unique. Much the same story could be told of the Jews in many countries around the world and in many periods of history.20 A similar pattern could also be found among East Indians in Africa, southeast Asia and parts of the western hemisphere, or among Armenians in the Middle East, Africa, and the United States. Italian immigrants to Argentina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also encountered discrimination, but nevertheless rose from poverty to affluence, surpassing the Argentine majority. Around the turn of the century, when Italians were 14 percent of the Argentine population, they owned more than twice as many food and drinking establishments in Buenos Aires as the native Argentines. They also owned more than three times as many shoe stores and more than ten times as many barbershops.21 Japanese immigrants to the United States also encountered persistent and escalating discrimination, culminating in their mass internment during World War II, but by 1959 they had about equaled the income of whites and by 1969 Japanese American families were earning nearly one-third higher incomes than the average American family.22
In short, two key assumptions behind the civil rights vision do not stand up as general principles. The first is that discrimination leads to poverty and other adverse social consequences, and the second is the converse—that adverse statistical disparities imply discrimination. How well these assumptions hold up in the special case of American Negroes is a separate question to be dealt with in Chapter 4.
Innate Inferiority
The civil rights vision tends to dichotomize the spectrum of possible reasons for group differences into (1) discrimination and (2) innate inferiority. Rejecting the latter, they are left with the former. Moreover, others who reject the former are regarded as believing the latter. Finally, institutional practices that either differentiate explicitly (as between men and women, for example) or have differential impact (test scores of blacks vs. whites) are attributed to their proponents’ overt or tacit belief in innate inferiority. Historically, the innate inferiority doctrine has of course been most prominent in issues revolving around blacks, even though the reasoning has been extended to other contexts. But the more general question is the extent to which it explains intergroup hostility, discrimination, oppression, and violence.
It is difficult to know in what units to measure degrees of hostility or hatred, but overt violence, and especially lethal violence, leave factual records. For example, as many as 161 blacks have been lynched in one year in the United States.23 How does this compare, historically, with violence against groups who were not widely viewed as innately inferior?
Many of the groups most subject to violence have not been generally viewed as innately inferior. Indeed, many have been hated precisely because of superior performances as economic competitors. That has been especially true of “middleman minorities” such as the Chinese in southeast Asia, and the Jews, East Indians, and Armenians in a number of countries around the world. All have been subjected to mass expulsions by various governments and to mass violence by the surrounding populace, sometimes aided and abetted by government. The number of Chinese killed within a few days, at various times in the history of southeast Asia, has on a number of occasions exceeded all the blacks ever lynched in the history of the United States.24 Similarly with the massive slaughter of the Armenians in Turkey in the early twentieth century, and numerous massacres of Jews in Europe over the centuries, culminating in the Nazi Holocaust.
Even the enslavement of blacks was not the result of a doctrine of innate inferiority. On the contrary, this doctrine developed as a rationalization of slavery already in existence and under fire from both moral and political critics. Moreover, innate inferiority was not even the first rationalization used. Religious rationalizations—enslaving “heathens” for their own spiritual good—were first used and then abandoned as more slaves became Christians, and the innate inferiority doctrine was then substituted. This pattern was common both to the United States and to South Africa, though it was East Indians who were enslaved by South African whites. Moreover, in Brazil, the largest importer of slaves into the western hemisphere, the innate inferiority doctrine was rarely used.25
In short, belief in the innate inferiority doctrine has been neither necessary nor sufficient to explain intergroup hostility, oppression, violence, or enslavement.
Ironically, the innate inferiority doctrine and the opposite “equal representation” doctrine proceed on the same intellectual premise—that one can go from innate ability to observed result without major concern for intervening cultural factors. Unexplained residual differences between groups, after controlling for such gross differences as education or parental income, are attributed by one vision to discrimination and by the other to genetics. (As one who has opposed both doctrines,26 it is particularly striking to me that so few have noticed their essential similarity of reasoning.)
Just how far the civil rights vision can take this line of reasoning was demonstrated by Supreme Court Justices in the Bakke and Weber cases. Alan Bakke could not have outperformed minority candidates applying to the same medical school if it were not for prior discrimination against these minority candidates, according to four of the Justices.27 Similarly, Brian Weber would not have been able to compete successfully with black workers applying for the same training program, for “any lack of skill” on the black workers’ part resulted from “purposeful discrimination in the past.”28 There are apparently no other reasons for differences in skill or capability other than discrimination, which is illegal, or innate inferiority, which is rejected. Or so it appears in the civil rights vision.
The extension of this kind of reasoning to sex differences is particularly arbitrary. In many instances, the desire to separate men from women is based on the premise that both sexes behave differently when together than when apart—regardless of whether either performs better or worse than the other. All-male and all-female schools and colleges, for example, may be established on the premise that either can be educated more effectively without the distracting or inhibiting presence of the other. The extent to which this is true, and for what kinds of students, is a separate question. The point here is simply that its basis has nothing to do with innate inferiority. Likewise, employers drawing upon a largely male labor pool may prefer an all-male work force, rather than one in which one or two women become the focus of male attentions to the detriment of the work, even if the women themselves are fully as productive as the men. Whatever the empirical validity or social policy implications of such employer preferences, innate inferiority is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain them.
Police departments, fire departments, the military and other organizations, where life-and-death decisions must be made, often seek a level of discipline, morale, and dedication to organizational purposes that they do not want compromised by powerful emotional attachments that can develop and cut across these organizational objectives. For this reason, such organizations may be particularly resistant to the introduction of women, as well as homosexuals, or even to members of the same family serving on active duty side by side. Again, inferiority doctrines are neither necessary nor sufficient to explain their position.
Potential hostility, as well as affinity, is among the reasons for separating various groups. Nineteenth-century American employers discovered to their loss that having Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics working together and living together on such projects as building railroads and digging canals was an open invitation to violence.29 Later, they discovered the same to be true when the work gangs included Italians from different parts of Italy.30 Some drinking establishments in nineteenth-century England became the exclusive domain of Irish immigrants from a given county in Ireland, because of the dangers of violence even among Irish Catholics from different counties.31 Nor is violence necessary to cause segregation, especially in social activities. In late nineteenth-century Prague, for example, Czechs and Germans had separate pubs.32
In the United States, black-white separation has historically also included severe discrimination against blacks. “Separate but equal” was a transparent legal fiction. Yet discrimination cannot be generalized from separation. Even in the special case of blacks, the discrimination that accompanied segregation was much more prevalent and more severe in some situations than in others. At this point, however, the issue is simply whether separation necessarily implies discrimination and an innate inferiority doctrine—as general principles. It does not, either in logic or experience.
Those who dichotomize the reasons for intergroup differences into discrimination and innate inferiority not only ignore many other specific reasons, but more generally proceed as if “society” shapes groups themselves, in addition to making biased decisions about them. A series of landmark civil rights cases have declared illegal various mental tests, voting qualifications, and other standards—even when applied impartially—on the ground that society itself has made it much more difficult for some groups to acquire the skills in question, or even to stay out of jail, where employers have refused to hire people with a criminal record.33
Once again, the special case of blacks must be distinguished from the general principles of the civil rights vision, as it applies to 70 percent of the population. To what extent has “society” shaped groups—and in what sense? If the whole range of causal factors are dichotomized into heredity and environment, then all who are not racists or sexists are led by the logic of the argument to the view, expressed long ago by Locke, that people enter the world with their minds as blank pages on which society writes what it will. But the momentous consequences of this vision require it to be examined more closely.
What is “environment”? If it consists only of immediate surrounding circumstances, then the causal and moral responsibilities of a given society are quite different from what they would be if environment includes behavior patterns that go back for centuries, that originated in other countries thousands of miles away, and that follow each group wherever it settles around the world. In this latter case, it would be strange indeed if merely crossing the political boundaries of the United States were to magically homogenize groups that are so different everywhere else. Blacks may have lost much of their African culture in the centuries of slavery, but the question is whether that unique history provides a general principle.
It is not a foregone conclusion but an empirical question whether the Irish, the Chinese, the Germans, etc., in various lands are more like the other peoples of those lands or more like the people in their respective countries of origins and their kinsmen elsewhere around the globe.
A number of studies over the years have shown Irish Americans to have higher rates of alcohol consumption than Americans as a whole, and correspondingly higher rates of alcohol-related diseases. Nor are these differences small. For example, one study found the rate of alcoholic psychosis among Irish Americans to be 5 times that among Italian Americans and 50 times that among Jewish Americans.34 Those who see society as the cause of such phenomena would be hard pressed to find in the history of Irish Americans sufficient traumas not suffered by Jewish and Italian Americans as well to explain such differences. Moreover, high rates of alcohol consumption in Ireland go back for centuries. Today Ireland spends a higher percentage of its income on alcohol than any other nation in Europe.35 People of Irish ancestry are only 7 percent of the population of Birmingham, England, but they constitute 60 percent of those arrested for drunkenness.36 By contrast, both the Jewish and Italian cultures in Europe have historically featured the drinking of wine—not hard liquor, as in Ireland—and both cultures have made drunkenness taboo. These patterns existed before American society existed.
The Chinese have established reputations for working hard and long, in countries around the world, and for not being stopped by the stigma of “menial” work. In nineteenth-century Siam, the rickshaws were virtually all pulled by Chinese, for the Siamese would not stoop to such work.37 The Chinese were also known as the first to get up in the morning in Bangkok,38 and throughout southeast Asia they worked incredibly long hours often under exhausting conditions.39 They did most of the hard industrial work and mining in Malaya.40 They were imported en masse into South Africa for similar work, in the early twentieth century, and were later sent home after clamor by white workers who could not compete with them.41 In the United States, Chinese immigrants were used in many arduous jobs—including building railroad tracks through the rugged Sierra mountains, a task which most white workers either abandoned shortly after being hired or else refused to do at the outset, once they were at the site and saw what was expected of them.42
In intellectual as well as manual work, the Chinese have been disproportionately represented in the difficult and demanding fields such as mathematics, science, and technology. In Malaysia, where Malay college students outnumber the Chinese three-to-one in liberal arts, the Chinese outnumber the Malays eight-to-one in science and fifteen-to-one in engineering.43 In the United States, more than half of all Chinese faculty members teach engineering and the natural sciences,44 and outside the academic profession, Chinese are similarly concentrated in the same fields.45 Yet this has been blamed on American society’s excluding them from other fields.46 It is a tribute to the power of the civil rights vision that this could be said in all seriousness, even though (1) other fields are generally less well paid than science and engineering, and (2) Chinese Americans as a group earn higher incomes than white Americans.
Germans have historically been notable in the fields of family farming and of industrial technology—both in Germany and in other countries to which they immigrated. German peasants became in the United States the most successful and most numerous of American farmers.47 They were generally self-employed family farmers, rather than either agricultural laborers or plantation owners. They achieved similarly striking success in family farming in Brazil, Australia, Ireland, and Mexico.48 Craftsmanship, technology, and science have also been the hallmarks of Germans in Germany—and in the United States, Brazil, Australia, Czechoslovakia, and Chile, among other places.49 Germans established the piano industry in the United States—and in Australia and in England.50 In Brazil, the German minority came to own nearly half the industrial enterprises in the southern states, compared to only one-fifth owned by Brazilians of Portuguese ancestry, the majority of the population.51
The civil rights vision tends to view group characteristics as mere “stereotypes” and concentrates on changing the public’s “perceptions” or raising the public’s “consciousness.” Yet the reality of group patterns that transcend any given society cannot be denied. Jewish peddlers followed in the wake of the Roman legions and sold goods in the conquered territories.52 How surprising is it to find Jewish peddlers on the American frontier or on the sidewalks of New York 2,000 years later—or in many other places in between? No one needs to believe that Jews are genetically peddlers. But it does suggest that cultural patterns do not readily disappear, either with the passage of time or with social engineering. The very fact that there are still Jews in the world, after centuries of determined efforts to absorb them by church and state alike, implies that environmental influences extend well beyond immediate circumstances—and might better be described as cultural inheritance.
Politics
Given the civil rights premise that statistical disparities are moral inequities and are caused by social institutions, with group characteristics being derivative from the surrounding society, it follows that the solutions are basically political—changing laws and public perceptions. Political activity thus becomes crucial, with political here being broadly defined to include courts and administrative agencies as well as legislatures, and private institutional activity as well as government policy. As with so many conclusions in this area, the fact that it follows logically from the civil rights vision has largely precluded any apparent need for empirical verification.
Once more looking at this as a general principle, rather than as a projection of the special case of blacks, the question is whether political activity has generally been an important factor in the rise of groups from poverty to prosperity, or in their increased social acceptance. Again, it is an empirical question rather than a foregone conclusion.
Among the groups that have gone into other countries, begun at the bottom and later rose past the original or majority inhabitants are the Chinese in southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and the United States.53 In all these very different settings, the Chinese have studiously avoided politics. In some countries, such as Malaysia, they have been kept out of politics, but even where political careers were possible the Chinese community leaders have opted to stay out of office-seeking or political agitation. In country after country, they have maintained their own community institutions to adjudicate disputes, care for their needy, and otherwise minimize recourse to the institutions of the surrounding society.54 After achieving affluence and acceptance, some individual Chinese have gone into politics, but typically as representatives of the general population, rather than as ethnic spokesmen. But political activity has played little, if any, role in the often dramatic rises of the Chinese from poverty to affluence.
This pattern has likewise been characteristic of the Germans in the United States, Brazil and Australia. In colonial America, many Germans began as indentured servants, working for years to pay off the cost of their passage across the Atlantic. Most then worked as dirt farmers on frontier land. They were notorious for their nonparticipation in politics in colonial Pennsylvania, where they constituted one-third of the population.55 Only after Germans had risen to prosperity did prominent German political leaders arise. The Muhlenbergs, Carl Schurz, and John Peter Altgeld were the best known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Herbert Hoover and Dwight D. Eisenhower in the twentieth century. But as in the case of the Chinese, most of these leaders were by no means primarily spokesmen for German ethnic interests. More important, Germans had risen economically first. The same non-political path to economic advancement was followed by Germans in Brazil and in Australia.56
In Argentina, the English immigrants have historically been very successful economically and played a major role in the development of the Argentine economy—but almost no role in Argentine politics.57
Jews were for centuries kept out of political rule in a number of countries, either by law, by custom, or by anti-Semitic feelings in the elite or the populace. But even where political careers were at least theoretically open to them, as in the United States, Jews only belatedly sought public office, and in the United States were at first wholly subservient to Irish political bosses. While some Jewish political leaders championed special Jewish causes, the most prominent (Herbert Lehman, and Jacob Javits, for example) were basically spokesmen for more general political causes—and again, by the time that Jews developed political power, they were already well on their way economically. In South Africa, Jews are more prosperous than the ruling Afrikaners, whose policies they have generally opposed, with the result that Jews hold no important political power—certainly none such as could explain their economic advantages. Even in such a free nation as Great Britain, it was the middle of the nineteenth century before the first practicing Jew sat in Parliament, though such converted Jews as Ricardo and Disraeli had been in Parliament earlier in the same century. Yet prosperous Jews were commonplace in Britain long before then.
Until relatively recently, Italians were notorious for non-participation in American politics, and for readily supporting non-Italian candidates over Italian candidates. Even the most famous Italian American politician, Fiorello H. La Guardia, lost the Italian vote to his Irish opponent in 1940,58 as have other Italian candidates in Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere.59 In Argentina as well, Italians took little part in political life during their rise from poverty to affluence, though they achieved economic dominance in a number of industries and skilled occupations.60
Empirically, political activity and political success have been neither necessary nor sufficient for economic advancement. Nor has eager political participation or outstanding success in politics been translated into faster group achievement. The Irish have been perhaps the most striking example of political success in an ethnic minority, but their rise from poverty was much slower than that of other groups who were nowhere near being their political equals. Irish-run political machines dominated many big city governments in America, beginning in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but the great bulk of the Irish populace remained unskilled laborers and domestic servants into the late nineteenth century. The Irish were fiercely loyal to each other, electing, appointing, and promoting their own kind, not only in the political arena but also in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. This had little effect on the average Irish American, who began to reach economic prosperity in the twentieth century at about the time when the Irish political machines began to decline and when the Irish control of the Catholic Church was increasingly challenged by other ethnic groups.
It would perhaps be easier to find an inverse correlation between political activity and economic success than a direct correlation. Groups that have the skills for other things seldom concentrate in politics. Moreover, politics has special disadvantages for ethnic minority groups, however much it may benefit individual ethnic leaders. Public displays of ethnic solidarity and/or chauvinism are the life blood of ethnic politics. Yet chauvinism almost invariably provokes counter-chauvinism.
By the late nineteenth century, the Chinese minority in southeast Asia lived more or less at peace with the majority populations of the various countries of that region. But in the early twentieth century, a new nationalism in China reached out to the overseas Chinese, among other things offering them Chinese citizenship wherever they might live, and interceding on their behalf with the governments of their respective countries of residence. Many of these Chinese had thought of themselves for generations as Siamese, Burmese, etc., but now the resurgent nationalism of China under Sun Yat-sen became their creed as well. Within a few years, the nationalism of China provoked a counter-nationalism among its neighbors in the region, setting in motion increased discrimination and renewed persecution of their Chinese minorities. Successive Chinese governments under Chiang Kai-shek, then Mao-Tse-tung and his successors, have continued this process, provoking continued hostility to the Chinese minorities, culminating in the tragic fate of the “boat people”—most of whom were Chinese—who could find little refuge anywhere because of the general animosity toward them in southeast Asia.
The dialectic of chauvinism and counter-chauvinism was also played out in a very different setting in nineteenth-century Prague, then capital of Bohemia. Here a mixed population—mostly Czech and German—initially thought of themselves simply as Bohemians. But the rise of Czech nationalism and decades of political agitation for specifically Czech causes eventually roused the Germans to abandon their cosmopolitan view of themselves as Bohemians and to organize for specifically German causes.61 The Czechs won out in the political struggles, especially after the creation of Czechoslovakia following World War I. But the nationalism they had aroused in the Germans came back to haunt them. The politicization and protests of the Sudeten Germans provided the pretext for Hitler’s annexation of the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia as a result of the Munich agreement, which set the stage for World War II.
Polarization by ethnic politics has proven to be easy to achieve in other settings as well, but no comparably easy way has been found to de-polarize peoples. Guyana went from an ethnic coalition government elected in 1953 to a virtually all-black government in 1969, ruling a nation that was half East Indian and only 43 percent black. The rise of counter-extremism among East Indians produced violent clashes in the streets requiring troops to restore order.62 Blacks and East Indians in Trinidad likewise went from coalition to confrontation in a few years.63 In the early centuries of Islam, religious minorities were much more tolerated than in later centuries, after the religious zeal of Christians had led to the persecution and expulsion of Muslim communities in Christian lands.64 In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the militant, paramilitary Ribbon societies of the Irish Catholic migrants flourished only in those British cities where the militant, paramilitary Orange lodges of the Irish Protestants flourished. Neither became prominent in London, for example, despite a large Irish population there.65 Chauvinism has bred counter-chauvinism in many historical contexts.
The politicization of race has proven to be explosive, in countries around the world and down through history. Sometimes it is a case of chauvinism provoking counter-chauvinism. At other times, one side may go from quiescence to violence in a very short time, as history is measured. Jews in Germany were so well accepted during the 1920s that they not only achieved many high-level positions but more than half their marriages were with non-Jewish Germans.66 Yet, just one decade later, resurgent anti-Semitism under the Nazis drove masses of Jews from the country and marked millions of others for the horrors of the Holocaust.
Nor were these merely peculiar depravities of Germans. Historically, Jews had been treated better in Germany than in most of Europe, and German Jews in other countries settled among the German minorities of those countries, where they were welcomed into the cultural and social life of German enclaves.67 Germans in the United States were also noted historically for their ability to get along with the Indians,68 and for their opposition to slavery69 and even support of rights for blacks.70 If the politicization of race could lead to barbarism and genocide among Germans, no other peoples or society can be presumed to be immune.
However catastrophic the politicization of race may be in the long run, from the point of view of individual leaders it is a highly successful way to rise from obscurity to prominence and power. Those who promoted Czech nationalism in the nineteenth century were typically people from modest social backgrounds,71 who achieved personal success at the long-run cost of their country’s dismemberment and subjugation. Those who have stridently—and sometimes violently—promoted local group preferences in India have likewise typically been from newly educated classes on the rise.72 Fomenting intergroup hostility has likewise raised many other obscure figures to power in many other countries, from “redneck” politicians in the American South to Idi Amin in Uganda and—the classic example—Adolf Hitler.
In short, despite the unpromising record of politics as a means of raising a group from poverty to affluence, and despite the dangers of politicizing race, there are built-in incentives for individual political leaders to do just that.