More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City

An internationally renowned Harvard sociology professor, author William Julius Wilson has nonetheless had “unforgettable experiences” that tell him that as a black male in America, he is feared. The portrayal of black men in the media and their famously high rates of incarceration contribute to negative and racist perceptions of black males. This is especially problematic when employers assess black males’ suitability for jobs and is exacerbated for low-skilled black males. As a social scientist, Wilson sets out to identify the leading structural contributors to the lack of economic and social opportunity for African American males. Since the Jim Crow segregation era, progress has been made. However, among the legacies of historic racial oppression in America are high levels of criminality among black males. Such problems will not be addressed, Wilson argues, if we are not willing to discuss the reasons why poverty persists for so many African Americans.

Social scientists have yet to agree on the complex and interconnected factors that continue to contribute to racial inequality, including the two main contributors: social structure and culture. These factors have also affected Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, but in this book Williams will use research on inner-city black men to elaborate his contribution to the structure-versus-culture debate. The consideration of culture will likely generate controversy because of fears that such analysis might be construed as “blaming the victim” (4).

Williams reexamines not only the ways in which social scientists discuss the independent contributions of social structure and culture, but also how these factors interact to contribute to inequality. Williams claims, “ideology is embedded in organizational arrangements” (5). Indirect contributors to racial group outcomes include political acts but also impersonal economic forces that reinforce longstanding racial inequalities because they affect vulnerable populations more severely. Indirect contributors to inequality have been less widely explored by sociologists and are thus deserving of examination in this consideration of differential outcomes along racial lines.

The economic fate of African Americans is intimately connected with much broader, global economic shifts, which, together with the technological revolution, are making manual jobs obsolete. This is particularly problematic for African Americans who have traditionally occupied such positions. Vivienne Henderson writes: “racism put blacks in their economic place, but changes in the modern economy make the place in which they find themselves more and more precarious” (7). Even before the nation’s economic restructuring due to the technological revolution and globalization, low-skilled African Americans were at the end of the employment line.

The employment-to-population ratio for those without a high school diploma was 52% in 1962, falling to 37% by 1990. Alan Krueger argues that the payoff of higher education has increased since the 1980s. International trade has increased since the 1960s, resulting in downward pressure on the wages of unskilled Americans. Due to the concentration of low-skilled African American workers in relevant industries—for example, 40% of textile workers are African American, even though blacks make up only about 13% of the general population—this trend is likely to have a greater impact on African Americans’ experience in the labor market. Social mobility has been severely impeded by racial discrimination, which has also resulted in inequalities in education funding for black students.

People of color tend to reside in areas with lower levels of employment growth and lack access to areas of higher employment growth. As businesses have relocated to the suburbs, inhabitants of inner-city ghettoes have become isolated from employment. For those who cannot afford an automobile, lengthy commutes become prohibitive. Although discrimination exacerbates the labor-market problems of low-skilled African Americans, many of these problems are driven by economic shifts. Between 1947 and the early 1970s, all American income groups prospered. In the early 1970s, Americans in the top 20% for income continued to enjoy steadily increasing income gains, adjusting for inflation, but those in the lower income bracket experienced declining income levels. Government policies and a strong union movement were integral to protecting low-income workers in the 1960s. In the 1970s, macroeconomic policy was no longer geared toward tight labor markets but to combatting inflation due to the supply-side economics of the Reagan era. In a slack labor market, discrimination increases. In 2001, the economic prosperity that characterized the Clinton era came to an abrupt halt.

Cultural factors are also important. While overt racism is much diminished in the US, “laissez faire racism,” or the idea that blacks are responsible for their disadvantaged state, persists (16). In 2001, just one in five whites agreed that the federal government had a responsibility to redress the discrimination that has caused suffering for African Americans for so many years. This notion perpetuates negative perceptions around and poverty within inner-city black communities. Furthermore, “in-group meaning making,” the development of informal codes that regulate behavior within black ghettoes, is typically not conducive to social mobility (17). In the absence of personal actualization, young black men are drawn to alternative forms of garnering respect. This is a cultural adaptation to a profound lack of trust for social systems. “Street” cultural codes ultimately hinder integration into wider society and contribute to poverty.

Harvard University sociologist Orlando Patterson claims that social scientists have shied away from cultural explanations of negative social outcomes in fear of blaming the victim. Kathryn Neckerman argues that African Americans lose faith in inner-city schools that introduce and enforce segregation. Culture, however, also enables people to change their behavior. The issue of fatherhood in poor black neighborhoods, for instance, will be most effectively resolved by reframing norms and behaviors. This will only be possible when black fathers are able to support their families financially, enabling them to become more family oriented.

In the social structure-versus-culture debate, Conservatives often emphasize cultural factors, while liberals emphasize structural influences. Williams proposes a framework for understanding racial inequality that integrates cultural factors with two different types of structural forces: those that reflect explicit bias and those that do not. In the following chapters, Williams applies this conceptual framework to the three topics pertaining to the inner-city African American experience that have generated the most intense debates. Understanding race in the United States calls for a “bold new perspective” that incorporates cultural factors, and it is this perspective that Williams sets out to provide in More Than Just Race (24).