Beyond Discrimination: Understanding African American Inequality in the Twenty-First Century

Beyond Discrimination: Understanding African American Inequality in the Twenty-First Century

In November 2007, two reports by distinguished research centers turned African American inequality into national news. Their startling and discomfiting data highlighted both the fragility of African American success and the widening fault lines that divide African Americans from each other. Impressive and authoritative as the reports are, they nonetheless remain incomplete because they do not explain how and why African American inequality has changed during the last several decades or the place of gender and publicly supported work in the new black inequality. These omissions matter because adequate and realistic responses to the issues raised by the reports require grasping the sources of the revolutionary changes that have left blacks at once more and less equal. Black inequality no longer results from powerful and interlocking forms of public and private discrimination and oppression. Rather, it is the product of processes beginning with childhood that sort African Americans into more or less favored statuses, differentiating them by class and gender. This new African American inequality, and the poverty that accompanies it requires policies that identify key points of intervention and reassert a vigorous role for government in the promotion of economic security and upward mobility. In this article, we summarize our research findings about the new African American inequality and comment on its implications. Readers interested in a more fully documented version should consult either our article “The New African American Inequality” in the Journal of American History (June 2005) or book, One Nation Divisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming.

The November 2007 reports by the Pew Research Center and Brookings Institution describe, respectively, growing values gaps among African-Americans and the failure of their increased incomes to match white incomes or assure economic security to their children. The Pew report concluded that “African Americans see a widening gulf between the values of middle class and poor blacks, and nearly four-in-ten say that because of the diversity within their community, blacks can no longer be thought of as a single race.” Black respondents also were less optimistic about black progress than at any time since 1983; lacked confidence in the fairness of the criminal justice system; and believed that “anti-black discrimination is commonplace in everyday life”—views that set them apart from whites. Both blacks and whites, however, agree that in the last decade “values held by blacks and whites” have converged. The good news is that “black and white Americans express very little overt racial animosity.” About eight in ten hold “a favorable view about members of the other group”; most think that blacks and whites get along at least “pretty well”; and “more than 8-in-ten adults in each group also say they know a person of a different race whom they consider a fri...