Equality

Barack Obama’s election to the presidency highlights a profound paradox at the heart of American race relations. After centuries of exclusion, black Americans have been almost wholly accepted into the public sphere of American life, and they are central to the nation’s definition of itself as a political and social community. Obama’s presidency is the culmination of this amazing national transformation. Today we find racial equality in its political, civic, and cultural forms at a level that far exceeds any other advanced society, or even any of the large plural societies of the developing world. The National Urban League, one of the nation’s preeminent African American interest groups, has documented this achievement in its annual State of Black America’s Equality Index, a composite “measure of the relative status between blacks and whites in America.” The one bright spot is in the area of “Civic Engagement,” which it claims “is the only area in which African Americans exceed whites.”</p>

Yet, at the same time, black Americans remain remarkably excluded from most regions of the nation’s private sphere: They are now more segregated than ever, have astonishingly few intimate friendships with non-blacks, and are the most endogamous group in the nation. The Equality Index shows either stagnation or decline in economic, educational, health, and social justice measurements comparing blacks and whites. This apartness prevents America from achieving true equality, and it has worsened even as blacks’ public integration has progressed apace, a contradiction magnified by the policies of the Bush years. Will things change with Obama’s election?

African Americans have always been critical to any assessment of American equality. As Gunnar Myrdal observed 64 years ago, the condition of blacks posed a terrible dilemma for the nation’s founding creed, namely that America was a land of equality and respect for individual rights. Myrdal would have been gratified by the extraordinary progress America has made in living up to its creed in the public sphere. But he would have been dismayed by the persistence of segregation and apartness in private life. Separate, Myrdal strongly believed, always meant unequal, a belief that undergirded the civil rights movement and the great legislative and legal progress of the 1950s and ‘60s. And it would have shocked and puzzled Myrdal to learn that many black Americans have now embraced the notion that separation and equality are compatible goals.

The paradox began with the founding of the nation: the fact that a government based on the principle of equality nonetheless held more than a sixth of the nation in slavery. The abolition of slavery, however, merely liberated individual slaves from individual masters. It did not topple the culture of slavery and the attitudes held toward blacks as quintessential outsiders. Jim Crow in the South institutionalized the condition of black Americans as a group apart, excluding them from both the public and private spheres of the dominant white society and polity. Even in the North, where Jim Crow laws were largely absent, they were truly invisible, of little or no consequence in public life and culture, and nearly totally segregated from the neighborhoods and daily personal lives of white Americans. To the degree that they served a national function–beyond being exploited in the most demeaning of work–it was to define what constituted whiteness. The positional good that became America’s most precious cultural commodity was largely a negation defined in terms of what one was not: black.

The civil rights movement marked the triumph of early-twentieth-century efforts to overcome black exclusion in the public sphere. And it was, by any reckoning, a revolution. Within less than a generation, the entire institutional infrastructure of Jim Crow was dismantled. Blacks achieved legal equality and soon became a constituent element of the nation’s political life. The rise of a genuine black middle class, including their acceptance in the chief executive roles of some of the nation’s mightiest corporations, is perhaps the most important aspect of this public integration, facilitating other areas of public inclusion, such as the military. This public inclusion is also dramatically reflected in the nation’s popular and elite culture, where the black presence is pronounced and, in some areas, dominant.

However, a closer look at the black middle class reveals problems that point to the other side of our paradox: the persisting apartness of blacks from the nation’s private life. There was substantial absolute growth in black median household income between the 1960s and mid-1990s. But when we closely compare different quintile segments of the black and white income spectrum even over this period, we find only very modest relative improvement in the middle quintiles, no change in the upper quintile and an actual worsening of the relative position of the poorest black group.

This has worsened still during the Bush years, as the already modest narrowing of the racial income gap halted, accompanied by an absolute decline in black income. Thus between 2003 and 2005 white income inched up by only $130 (to $49,554) while that of blacks actually declined by $552, to $30,945. The poverty rate for blacks, having declined during the Clinton years from 32.9 percent in 1992 to 21.2 percent in 2000 (the lowest on record), climbed to 24.5 percent in 2007. During this period the non-Hispanic white rate, in contrast, rose by only 0.4 percent.

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