People
who wonder why a majority of African Americans do not support
George W. Bush's illegal and immoral invasion and occupation
of Iraq might want to talk to a black gentleman and fellow
Chicagoan I know named Tony. They should also review some
recent and important research on hiring discrimination in
and around Chicago, to be discussed below.
Tony
possesses "only" a High School degree but enjoys
greater political and sociological wisdom than most of America's
college-certified population, including many high academics.
He recently posed an excellent question after relating a media
commentator's remarks to the effect that the US was going
to bring justice and democracy to Iraq. "How," Tony
asked me, "you gonna export something you ain't even
got at home?"
One
does not devalue the moral bases of blacks' skepticism regarding
Bush's foreign policy by noting that African-Americans are
in a special position to see with special clarity through
the disingenuous and narcissistic pretensions of the White
House's declared overseas intentions. Similarly, one can debate
the extent to which America enjoys a functioning democracy
and a serious national commitment to justice. There is no
denying, however, the simple fact that equality remains an
elusive goal for African-Americans more than three and a half
decades after the historic victories of the Civil Rights Movement.
In a nation that possesses the highest poverty rate, and the
largest gaps between rich and poor, in the industrialized
world, blacks are considerably poorer than whites and other
racial and ethnic groups. Economic inequality correlates closely
with race.
Tony's
and my beloved city of Chicago is no exception to the national
pattern. According to a recent analysis of (2000) US census
and state labor market data by the Chicago Urban League:
- The
median income for white families ($62, 680) in Chicago at
the turn of the millennium was nearly twice that of black
families ($32,776).
-
The unemployment rate for black Chicagoans (18.3 percent)
was four times the unemployment rate for white Chicagoans
(4.6 percent).
-
The poverty rate for black Chicago residents was 29 percent,
compared to just 8 percent for white Chicago residents.
-
In the Chicago metropolitan area, blacks live on average
in neighborhoods with incomes just 59 percent as high as
incomes in neighborhoods inhabited by average whites.
Especially
telling, Chicago's black community makes up 37 percent of
Chicago's population but accounts for 58 percent of Chicago's
poor. It makes up 13 percent of the Chicago metropolitan area's
population but contributes 38 percent of the metropolitan
area's poor. It makes up 9 percent of the state's population
but accounts for 25 of the state's poor people.
"We
Made the Corrections"
Despite
abundant factual material demonstrating persistent deep racial
inequality in Chicago and the nation, however, conventional
majority wisdom in America denies that racial discrimination
plays a significant role in American life. "As white
America sees it," note academic researchers Leonard Steinhorn
and Barbara Diggs-Brown, "every effort has been made
to welcome blacks into the American mainstream and now they're
on their own." Predominant American attitudes at the
turn of the millennium are well summarized by the comment
of a white respondent to a survey conducted by Essence
magazine. "No place that I'm aware of," wrote the
respondent, "makes [black] people ride on the back of
the bus or use a different restroom in this day and age. We
got the message; we made the corrections - [now] get on with
it."
The
Smoking Gun: Measuring Pure Racial Bias
A
recent testing study performed by the Legal Assistance Foundation
of Metropolitan Chicago (LAFC), with technical support from
the Chicago Urban League (CUL), suggests a different perspective,
one which acknowledges that many "corrections" continue
to be required. It reveals a "smoking gun" of pure
racial hiring bias in a key and growing metropolitan job
sector, consistent with other recent matched-pair testing
studies. "Current labor market trends - the decline of
manufacturing, the growth in the retail and service sectors,
and the shift of jobs from the City to the suburbs - mean,"
the LAF and CUL note, "that suburban retail and service
firms offer important employment opportunities for urban low-wage
workers. But for low-income urban Blacks, the location and
skills mismatches created by these shifts" are exacerbated
by white employers' racial biases, particularly in jobs requiring
public contact.
The
first "mismatch" refers to African-Americans' disproportionately
great geographic distance from the leading spatial zones of
job growth. The second refers to the relative shortage among
African-Americans of the skills, training, work experience
and education sought by employers in a high-tech post-industrial
age.
To
better understand the role of race in hiring, the LAF conducted
matched-pair testing of employment opportunities for Blacks
in entry-level managerial positions in retail firms in the
Chicago suburbs. Their Black and White job seekers "all
had the appropriate qualifications and experience for the
positions they sought, and none of them faced any transportation
obstacles." Thus, their study "made race, and not
skills or space, the salient difference between Black and
White job-seekers."
The
results suggest that the deck still remains stacked against
blacks. When LAF sent resumes of qualified Black and White
job applicants to employers who advertised positions, employers
contacted nearly one-third of the White applicants for interviews,
but only one-fourth of the Black applicants - giving Whites
a 21% higher chance of being contacted for an interview.
When
the LAF sent matched pairs of Black and White women to apply
for jobs in person, Whites received job offers 81% of the
time, while Blacks received offers 70% of the time - giving
Whites a 16% higher chance of getting a job offer. Moreover,
when job offers specified the numbers of hours an employee
would be needed, Whites were offered an average of 36 hours
of work a week, while Blacks were offered only 28 hours. At
the average wage paid by the employers tested ($8.86/hour),
that difference translates into a pay difference of almost
$4,000 a year. (See Chicago Urban League and Legal Assistance
Foundation of Chicago, Racial
Preferences and Suburban Employment Opportunities, April 2003.)
These
findings of anti-black hiring bias are consistent with other
and larger employment testing projects. Researchers Marianne
Bertrand of the University of Chicago's (UC) School of Business
and Sendhil Mullainathan of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) recently sent out over 5,000 resumes testing
1,300 job openings in Boston and Chicago. Using birth records
to determine the most prevalent black and white sounding names,
they found that resumes with white-sounding names received
50 percent more callbacks compared to black-sounding
names. Also interesting: white applicants with better credentials
received 30 percent more callbacks for white applicants overall,
but better credentials did not improve the rate of callbacks
for black applicants. (Sendhill Mullainathan and Marianne
Bertrand, "Are
Emily and Brendan More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?
A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,"
National Bureau of Economic Research, 2002).
Behind
the Smoking Gun: The Color (and Gender) of the Spatial, Skill
and Criminal Record Gaps
I
can already hear the howls of derision from America's army
of racism-deniers - a group that includes some African Americans
(e.g. the Manhattan Institute's John McWhorter, the black
author of * Losing The Race: Self Sabotage in Black America
* (NY: Free Press, 2000). The members of this army surely
see the sort of research reported here as a futile and last-ditch
attempt to twist statistics in defense of the archaic and
"self-sabotaging" (for blacks) notion that skin
color still matters in "the world's greatest multiracial
democracy."
Timing
and Network Complications
The
truth, however, is that matched-pair employment testing as
conducted in these studies actually understates the
extent to which deeply entrenched institutional racism still
blocks equal opportunity for blacks in the labor market. The
tests conducted by the LAF and CUL, it should be noted, were
carried out at the end of the long 1990s economic boom, under
conditions of atypically high labor demand. Since hiring discrimination
increases dramatically with the size of the unemployed reserve
army of labor, the testing project certainly underestimates
the current extent of racial discrimination in hiring.
At the same time, by testing only jobs that were advertised
in the newspaper, on the Internet, or on signs in store windows,
LAF necessarily filtered out employers' whose preference for
white employees leads them to rely exclusively on informal
job networks and to shun open recruitment avenues.
The
Matter of Gender
Then
there's LAF and CUL's exclusive use of female testers, appropriate
given the job sector they were examining. In his landmark
study When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban
Poor, sociologist William Julius Wilson found that employer
bias against African-American workers in the Chicago area
was highly informed by gender. He cited the University of
Chicago's Urban Poverty and Family Life Study (UPFL), which
interviewed 179 employers in Chicago and Cook County. "Although
black women also suffer as a consequence of the negative attitudes
held by employers," Wilson reported, "in an overwhelming
majority of cases in which inner-city black males and females
are compared, the employers preferred black women." When
UPFL researchers asked for employers' opinions concerning
differences between these two categories, nearly half of the
employers claimed that black females are better than black
males at finding and retaining employment. As is clear from
the numerous long employer quotations presented in the chilling
fifth chapter of When Work Disappears, Chicago area
employers interviewed by the UPFL were much more likely to
hire black females than black males.
A
Statistical Illusion: Not-So "Color Blind" Social
and Policy Disparities
The
LAFC-CUL and the UC/MIT studies rest fundamentally upon the
creation of a statistical illusion - an ideal situation in
which black and white job seekers are equally matched to labor
market opportunities, employers' needs, and employers' preferences
in every area but race. The real world is different, of course,
thanks, among other things, to the aforementioned "mismatches."
Academic
and civil rights analysts make a critical error when they
see the skills and spatial mismatches as "color-blind"
structural and socioeconomic rivals to race and racism as
the main barrier to black labor market inequality. That's
because these gaps are themselves heavily racialized, reflecting
public policies that work to the disadvantage of African-Americans.
These
gaps are technically exogenous to the hiring process. They
are not legally actionable in the same way as pure racial
hiring discrimination. But they are not exogenous to race
and they are not unrelated to policy and law.
It
is no simple accident or tragic legacy of past racism
and segregation that 98 percent of the Chicago metropolitan
area's job growth (as measured by the Illinois Department
of Employment Security) during the 1990s occurred in the suburbs,
outside Chicago. Just 2 percent occurred within the city,
which happens to house more than two-thirds (68 percent) of
the metropolitan area's black population. A large number of
living breathing contemporary public practices and policies
go a long way towards explaining the disproportionate spatial
separation between African-American residence and job growth
patterns in the Chicago metropolitan area and across the nation.
The
relevant practices and policies are richly documented by a
number of respectable civic organizations and academics. They
include the still widely documented and technically illegal
practices of racial steering, whereby real estate agents tend
to direct black house and apartment seekers away from white
majority communities, and racial discrimination in the granting
of home mortgage loans. The public privileging of private
auto over public transit combines with various zoning rules
and the nation's regressive school funding formula to keep
African-Americans out of more job-rich white majority suburban
communities.
A
similar and related point cries out to be made about the skill
mismatch, intimately related to the much-bemoaned black-white
school achievement gap. There's a fair amount of publicity
given to depressing numbers showing that blacks score lower
on standardized tests, are much less likely to finish high
school and to attend and graduate from college than are whites
in Chicago, Illinois and the nation. These numbers have huge
significance for the black-white employment and earnings gaps
in an age when the college earnings premium is at its highest
and powerful forces are dedicated to rolling back affirmative
action in higher education.
What
we don't hear nearly enough about is the significant extent
to which these gaps are created, reinforced and sustained
by active contemporary public policy. The public school black-white
Dissimilarity Score for the Chicago metropolitan era is 84,
meaning that 84 percent of black public school students there
would have to move to a different school if blacks were to
be evenly distributed throughout the area. The average African-American
public school student in the Chicago metropolitan area attends
a school that is 78.2 percent black.
The
schools remain unequal as well as separate, reflecting profound
school funding inequities that are inherent in America's decision
to finance education largely out of local property taxes.
In the Chicago area as throughout the nation, elementary analysis
of the relationship between local school funding and schools'
level of need shows that the most privileged communities tend
to receive the greatest level of funding and the most impoverished
schools receive considerably less per student.
Compared
to the predominantly white suburban school districts that
send kids to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Chicago's predominantly black and Hispanic inner city schools
are poorly funded, over-crowded, and over-burdened with kids
from severely impoverished backgrounds. They are disproportionately
staffed with under-certified teachers and tend to lack an
adequate measure of computer-age instructional technologies.
Reflecting metropolitan residential hyper-segregation and
the inextricably linked relationships between race, wealth,
and local property tax base, the best funded school districts
in the Chicago metropolitan area - those with the most to
offer students - tend to be very disproportionately white.
The
white suburban school funding and school quality advantages
might be alleviated to some extent if the heavily minority
Chicago public school district was permitted to include nearby
suburbs in its desegregation plan. In 1974, the United States
Supreme Court declared inter-district desegregation unconstitutional.
The high court thereby legitimized de facto segregation as
a legal means of keeping black and white students separate
and unequal. It entrenched and codified the suburban white
educational advantage, writing into law the right, even the
duty, of public authorities to ensure that school racial compositions
reflect the racially segregated demographics of city and suburbs.
When
it comes to older black youths and young adults, particularly
males, government authorities in Illinois seem more interested
in incapacitating their labor market chances through an expensive
investment in incarceration than in preparing them for meaningful
labor market attachment. It costs $20,637 a year to house
an adult prisoner and $50, 286 to incarcerate a juvenile in
Illinois. The cost of incarcerating one adult in Illinois
is equal to more than four and a half times the state's legally
mandated public education "foundation level" of
$4,560 - the minimum expenditure legally required to meet
the educational needs of a single child. The cost of incarcerating
a juvenile is more than five times the cost of sending them
as full time students to the University of Illinois at Chicago.
It
is especially disturbing, in light of these statistics, to
learn that, as the Chicago Urban League discovered last year,
there were nearly 20,000 more black males in the Illinois
state prison system than enrolled in the state's public universities
in the summer of 2001. In fact, there were more black males
in the state's correctional facilities just on drug charges
than the total number of black males enrolled in undergraduate
degree programs in Illinois state universities.
"The
Criminal Record "Mismatch"
The
most spectacular and yet least well-known way in which living
racially disparate law and public policy generates racial
labor market inequality behind the smoking gun in the Chicago
area relates to the criminal justice system. Thanks to the
regime of racially disparate mass surveillance, arrest and
incarceration that has emerged largely under the auspices
of the War on Drugs during the last 25-30 years, Black male
ex-felons are equivalent in number to 42 percent of the black
male workforce in the Chicago area. This is a fact of no small
significance for labor market inequality by race - something
that other scholars and I have written about in other venues
(see especially The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Community
and Jobs in Chicago, Illinois and The Nation, Chicago:
Chicago Urban League, October 2002, available online at www.cul-chicago.org,
click on "Research Reports Available Online"). Reviewing
the negative labor market consequences of mass incarceration
- including its artificial suppression of the true black male
unemployment rate, which stood at 39 percent in the mid-1990s
when prisoners were factored in (which they are not in government
calculations) - Princeton sociologist Bruce Western has recently
concluded that:
the
penal system has a pervasive influence on the life chances
of disadvantaged minorities ... Although typically the preserve
of criminology, incarceration appears to shape aspects of
inequality that are of traditional interest to stratification
researchers.
It
seems likely that status attainment, school-to-work transitions,
and family structure are all influenced, perhaps even routinely,
by the penal system in the current period of high incarceration.
From this perspective, the usual list of institutional influences
on social stratification - schools, the families, and social
policy - should be expanded to consider the coercive redistribution
of life chances through incarceration.
Racism's
Different Levels
The
main problem with majority white racial attitudes at the turn
of the Millennium is a failure to distinguish between overt
and covert racism. The first variety has a long and sordid
history in the United States. It includes such actions, policies
and practices as the burning of black homes and black churches,
the public use of derogatory racial slurs and epithets, the
open banning of blacks from numerous occupations, the open
political disenfranchisement of blacks and the open segregation
of public facilities by race.
The
first variety of racism is largely defeated, outlawed
and discredited in the US. Witness the rapid public humiliation
and political demotion of Trent Lott, who lost his position
as Senate Majority Leader after verbally embracing the openly
segregationist 1948 Presidential campaign of Strom Thurmond.
The
second variety involves the more impersonal operation of social
and institutional forces and processes in ways that produce
deep black disadvantage in the labor market and numerous other
sectors of American life. It includes racially segregated
real estate practices, racial discrimination in hiring and
promotion, the systematic under-funding and under-equipping
of schools predominantly attended by blacks relative to schools
predominantly attended by whites, the disproportionate surveillance,
arrest and incarceration of blacks and much more. Richly enabled
by policymakers who commonly declare allegiance to anti-racist
ideals, it has an equally ancient history that has outlived
the explicit, open and public racism of the past and the passage
of civil rights legislation.
It
may actually be deepened by these civil rights victories insofar
as those victories encourage the illusion of racism's disappearance
and the strongly related notion that the only barriers left
to African-American success and equality are internal to individual
blacks and their community. As Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown note,
"it is hard to blame people" for falsely believing
that racial discrimination has been essentially abolished
in America "when our public life is filled with repeated
affirmations of the integration ideal and our ostensible progress
towards achieving it." Episodes like the recent demotion
of Trent Lott may actually offer a potentially dangerous new
opportunity for the nation to pat itself on the back for advancing
beyond the primitive state of level-one racism while digging
the hole of the deeper racism yet deeper.
In
seeking to expose that persistent deep racism, it is crucial
to realize that it continues to operate against African-Americans
who have overcome or avoided some of the society's broader
racially disparate structural forces by attaining the skills
and credentials required to access modern labor market opportunities.
This is the great contribution of matched-pair employment
testing. We need, however, to go yet deeper, behind the smoking
gun of pure discrimination to see that spatial, skill, and
criminal record "mismatches" are themselves deeply
colored by and expressive of a covert racism that involves
special white fear and loathing toward males within the African-American
population.
Paul
Street is Vice President for Research and Planning at the
Chicago Urban League. His articles and essays have appeared
in Z Magazine, Monthly Review, the Journal of
American Ethnic History and Dissent. He is the author
of The Color of Opportunity: Race, Place, Policy and
Labor Market Inequality in the Chicago Metropolitan Area.
(See also, Chicago Urban League and Legal Assistance Foundation
of Chicago, Racial
Preferences and Suburban Employment Opportunities, April
2003.)
