In the reading for today, you will find four different explanations for the persistence of the racial divide. In this sense, Lipsitz and Sugrue can be seen as integrationists who blame federal, state and local governments for missing the opportunity to pursue public policies that would have greatly reduced the wealth and opportunity gaps between whites and blacks. Both the Abelson and Cole New York Times articles are written in a similar vein.

In contrast, Robinson, while not a racial separatist, pursues an analysis that is much more heavily influenced by the black nationalist view that white supremacy has been woven into the very fabric of American society since the nation's founding. For Robinson, the main barriers to racial justice come not from the failed public policies of the last 25 years, but the extent to which black Americans have accepted and even internalized white America's racist views of their character and capacities. African-Americans will only receive their just share of American wealth and opportunities when they began to reject tokenized and symbolic signs of racial inclusion as insufficient remedies to the historical legacy of slavery, segregation and discrimination.

Finally, the Thernstrom's return us to the laissez-faire viewpoints of Robert Park and the Chicago school and Nathan Glazer. Like Park's view of immigrant ghettoes in the 1920's and Glazer's view of black southern migrants during the 1960's and 1970's, the Thernstrom's believe that over the course of another 1-2 generations black americans will be able, as a result of their own efforts, to achieve that levels of success and inclusion that other immigrant ethnic groups have achieved to this point.

To the extent that individual blacks are unable to reach that goal, they argue, it will be the result of their own cultural deficits and/or of the white hostility that is the inevitable result of government policies like affirmative action that violate the national commitment to colorblindness by giving advantages to blacks based solely on their race. For the Thernstroms, programs like affirmative action not only violate the American ideal of a colorblind society, as laid out by Myrdal’s American creed, they also worsen race relations by understandably promoting white resentment of black racial privilege. (Sugrue p. 267)

What I want you to pay particular attention to is the way that each of these authors' policy recommendations and the ways that they organize their arguments for their position are structured by their view of the history of American racism and of efforts to combat that racism. Once again, the way that one views and writes the nation's racial past is directly connected to one's prescriptions for the future.

If, as the Thernstroms argue, systematic racial oppression is a thing of the past that was completely wiped out by the legislative and moral achievement so the early civil rights movement than adopting a hands-off racial policy becomes the best mechanism for protecting the rights and interests of all Americans, black and white.

If you believe, as Lipsitz and Sugrue imply in their work, that government (and business) policies are the prime cause of racial inequality and that they play a central role in reproducing racist attitudes and other racial tensions (what Lipsitz calls Resistance, Refusal and Negotiation-- colorblindness as defense of achievements in housing, education and employment that were acquired under a racist system, while the courts rule that anti-racist remedies are a violation of individual rights), then fundamental changes in government policies must be seen as feasible and necessary to the creation of more positive race relations and racial structures in our society. In other words, they don't see RACISM AS INHERENT TO AMERICAN SOCIETY, but rather as a product of what Lipsitz calls the possesive investment in whiteness-- the set of privileges that accrue only to whites but tend to be seen as part of the fundamental rights of white Americans. And, they imply, what government and corporate decision-making have helped to build, they can undo by pursuing policies that redress past discrimination and challenge the sense of white entitlement to the historical legacy of white privilege.

Of course, Sugrue’s analysis of the causes of persistent black poverty differs in detail from Lipsitz's. While Lipsitz emphasizes the failure of government agencies and the political process to follow through on their commitment to effectively outlaw racial discrimination, Sugrue's focus is on the structural causes of urban inequality and poverty. In other words, he argues that black poverty in cities like Detroit was the result of changes in the local economy combined with the failure of government efforts to redress racial discrimination, not black behaviors or the growth of welfare. What is perhaps most interesting about Sugrue’s argument is that he argues that the origins of these economic changes were not in the 70s & 80’s– when the Arab oil embargo and Japanese competition so damaged the Detroit auto industry-- but in the supposedly prosperous 50s when the focus of auto production shifted from aging plants in the center of Detroit to modernized facilities in the suburbs and small towns of the Midwest, West, and South. The importance of this chronological shift is to suggest that inner-city poverty is not the product of unavoidable changes in the global economy but specific corporate and government decision-making processes that both intentionally and unintentionally disadvantaged black workers and their families.

As a structuralist, Sugrue argues that "capitalism generates economic inequality and... African-Americans have disproportionately borne the impact of that inequality." But, he views the second half of that equation as a product not of market processes but of political decisions made by a range of actors from corporate and government leaders to real estate brokers and white neighborhood activists to rank-and-file workers and working class homeowners-- all of whom were acting out of combination of self-interest and racial bias.

As importantly, Sugrue is attempting to rewrite the narrative of declining white working class support for the Democratic Party. In contrast to the usual view that the emergence of so-called Reagan democrats as a product of liberal Democrats’ supposed appeasement of excessive black demands, Sugrue argues that the white flight from the Democrats began as early as 1940’s, at least in local elections in which racial issues were central.

Sugrue is particularly effective in challenging the notion that white northern voters were supportive of black civil rights until black demands became excessive. He shows that the roots of the white backlash lay in opposition to civil rights activists’ efforts to win enforcement of the most basic anti-discrimination laws.

I should point out that what Lipsitz and Sugrue actually mean by integration differs somewhat. As Lipsitz writes on page 34 of today's reading, desegregation of neighborhoods, schools, and jobs is less about blacks achieving "physical proximity to whites" than about gaining access to obtain "the same… resources and opportunities routinely provided to whites." For Sugrue, in contrast, integration of white and blacks, at least into the same urban and suburban municipalities, is crucial to the achievement of substantive racial equality in U.S. society. So long as most urban areas are majority black and most whites live in all-white or nearly all-white suburban, race relations in the U.S. will be plagued by the unequal distribution of tax revenues, social welfare and educational costs, and the disparate impact of the black-white gap in property values.

For Robinson, in contrast, recent government policy is a less important factor in establishing current structures of racial inequality and racial tensions than the historical legacy of slavery and segregation. For Robinson, ideas of racial superiority and inferiority are the products of the historical legacy of slavery and segregation, not recent government policy-- they are thus a fundamental part of fabric of American society and daily life-- and can only be changed through a fundamental rewriting of the U.S. historical narrative. Only a narrative that celebrates the achievements of pre-colonial African-- in other words, that puts African and African-American achievements on par with those of Europeans and white Americans-- and that puts the labor of Africans and African-Americans at the center of the story of American economic advancement will cause of Americans of all colors to rethink their racial beliefs and, most importantly, encourage African-Americans to seek out and demand the full privileges of being an American citizen. For Robinson, reparations are less about changing government policies towards the poor than about acknowledging the African-American presence at the center of American history and thus repairing the long-term psychic damage. Only through such a collective acknowledgement of the nation's past, can the nation began to remove race from the structure of American society and to work towards establishing an American ethos that is truly colorblind. And can blacks began to break through sense of collective inferiority, P. 74, p. 85, 94, 107

To Summarize: one's view of the (racial) past is directly correlated with racial policies advocated in the present.

A Footnote: do you notice the converage between the racial conservativism of the Thernstroms and the Robinson's nationalist influenced critique of current racial politics. Thogh for very different reasons and purposes, both view black behaviors and attitudes as the primary cause of persistent black poverty. A long history of nationalist-white conservative cooperation on racial issues. Washington-Segregationists, Garvery and NOI and KKK.