Race:
An Economic Reality­ not a Biological Reality

With the Democratic National Convention showcasing Boston to the world and with the Big Dig knocking down literal and social barriers to once insulated, self-contained neighborhoods, much has been made of the new Boston. But, as Callie Crossley, a producer and regular panelist on PBS Boston affiliate WGBH’s “Beat the Press,” reminded us in a convention-week editorial, racial tension lies just below the surface. “Boston’s reputation as racist persists even as the mayor proclaims diversity is the strength of the city,” but, says Crossley, “the population has always been diverse; that is not the issue.” The issue is about having a place and an equal voice at the tables of power. Crossley notes that the heroism of Crispus Attucks makes him “part of the very foundation of this city. Yet his descendants have yet to find a permanent place in the decision-making structure here. Asians and Latinos, too, are nearly invisible in the top ranks of business and political leadership. It is still unusual to see crossfertilization of the races in any business or social setting.” Creating a true new Boston is “about changing Boston’s reality.” And increasingly researchers are finding that that reality, the reality of racism, not only in Boston but across the nation, has its deepest roots in economics.

In one of the profound ironies that make race such a complex and inextricable part of our national psyche, the Declaration of Independence gave rise to the idea of race. Because the economy of the colonies depended primarily on slavery, and because a significant number of the signers of the Declaration were themselves slave owners, the declaration that “All men are created equal” was, to say the least, problematic for our founders. By establishing whites as superior and “proving” that some men were, in effect, not men after all, the idea of race helped reconcile the Declaration of Independence with the inequities of colonial society. It institutionalized racial practices, justified them as natural, god-given. As the United States grew as a nation, those practices became more widespread and more imbedded in our culture. (So imbedded, in fact, that, in his essay “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” Ralph Ellison noted that “one of the first epithets that many European immigrants learned when they got off the boat was the term nigger—it made them feel instantly American.”)

Much of the information in the preceding paragraph comes from numbers 7 and 8 of “Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Race,” background information for RACE: The Power of an Illusion, a three-part PBS documentary that came out in 2003. Filmmaker Llew Smith ’72 produced the third part of that series, “The House We Live In,” an examination of the “racialized nature of our laws, courts, customs, and, perhaps most pertinently, housing.” The film shows that, while slavery has passed, racism has not lost its economic roots. Says Llew, “The big challenge is not small groups burning crosses. The big challenge is invisible, institutions that apply values based on race.” The centerpiece of the documentary is a stunning example of this invisible, institutionalized racism: the inequalities that prevailed in the 20th-century housing boom, especially after World War II. From 1934 to 1962 the federal government underwrote $120 billion in new home loans but nonwhites received less than 2 percent of those loans. While the economic fortunes of whites soared with the housing markets, nonwhites lived in neighborhoods classified, or “redlined,” by the government and by lenders as bad risks. This monumental inequity set in motion a terrible spiral effect of inequities. Confined to “bad risk” neighborhoods, nonwhites were unable to secure credit for starting businesses or buying homes; they could not build equity. Lack of equity meant lower tax base which meant weaker funding for schools which meant fewer resources in the classroom which meant weaker education which meant less likelihood of advancement to higher education which meant less likelihood of reaching the earning power needed to buy out of the ‘bad risk’ neighborhood.

Income vs. wealth
But even nonwhites who do manage to break the cycle of redlining face significant obstacles. In a 2002 article by the National Education Association, entitled “The Wealth Factor,” Dalton Conley, sociologist and author of Being Black, Living in the Red, drew a sharp distinction between income and wealth. Income is the money families earn; wealth includes everything a family owns: a home, other property, stocks, savings, etc. Wealth provides deeper economic security than income. Young adults from families with wealth can borrow from their parents to begin the process of accumulating their own wealth. Families with wealth have a cushion against hard times. They have assets to draw on if a breadwinner loses a job or if a family member faces serious illness. With those assets they can continue to pay the mortgage and build equity. In a background interview for RACE: The Power of an Illusion, sociologist Melvin Oliver called assets “the social capital that makes life easier for the next generation.” Income, he said, “feeds your stomach, but assets change your head. That is, you really do act differently when you have a cushion of assets so that you can strategize around important opportunities in life.

When you are living from paycheck to paycheck, you just think about how you are making the next day or the next week or the next month happen. But, when you have a set of resources that allow you to think about your future in a positive way, you can strategize about the future, create and take advantage of opportunity.” On the other hand, families without assets, who depend solely on income, have no economic resilience; they can be wiped out by a job loss. Without income to pay the mortgage, they can lose the house and end up renting in a much poorer neighborhood. To many sociologists, the exclusion of nonwhites from wealth continues to form the core of modern-day racism. Conley found that black families actually save more of their income than whites, yet they own less. A 1998 study showed that nonwhite families have less than one fifth the median net worth of white families. Says Conley, “Wealth is both the pot at the end of the rainbow and the means for getting there.” It is no accident that a revival of A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 chronicle of a black family’s struggles with identity and property, riveted audiences this year, more than 40 years after it first appeared on Broadway. Not much has changed. Or as Prince writes in his new song “Dear Mr. Man,” “Same song with a different name/Might not be in the back of the bus/But it sho’ feel just the same.”

The ‘extra cost’ of blackness
Patricia Williams, a lawyer, a Columbia University professor of law, a columnist for the Nation, and winner of a MacArthur genius grant, described buying a house in a speech to the DuBois Institute in 1997. Because Professor Williams was “not only middle class but matched the stereotype of a good white person,” the loan officer at the bank, who had never met her, checked the box for white on the Fair Housing form. When Professor Williams then returned the form with white crossed out and black checked off, “the deal came to a screeching halt. The bank wanted more money as a down payment, they wanted me to pay more points…they wanted to raise the rate of interest.” And when, in response to these changes, Professor Williams threatened to sue under the Fair Housing Act, she came face to face with what she calls “the new rhetoric of racism.” It was not a matter of race, she was told, it was a matter of financial risk, of economics. Demographics show that, when blacks move into a neighborhood, whites leave, taking municipal resources with them, and property values drop. To compensate for this anticipated drop in value, banks charge blacks higher prices. So, the new rhetoric goes, even though race is never mentioned, “the ingredient of blackness is cast not just as a social toll, but as an actual tax, a fee, an extra contribution at the door, an admission price, the higher costs of handling my dangerous propensities, my inherently unsavory properties.” Some researchers and intellectuals could point to Professor Williams and her career as proof positive that racial injustice no longer exists, but her story shows that there are still powerful forces working against equality. Says Llew, “It’s not so much a conspiracy to elevate white Americans. It’s that we have so long made assumptions about parity. We have to realize its mythology.”

Race: no genetic basis
In RACE: The Power of an Illusion, we learn that there is no biological basis for race, that, in fact, two people of different skin color might have more in common genetically than two people of the same skin color. Race, then, is a social construct. In a background interview for “The House We Live In,” John Powell, director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in the Americas at Ohio State University, notes that in the United States during the 1700s and 1800s blackness varied from state to state. In one state, you were black if you looked black. In others, you were black if you had onequarter black in your lineage. “There’s this curious thing about the way we’ve defined race in the U.S., where a white woman can have a black child but a black woman can’t have a white child. Obviously, that’s a social construction; it doesn’t make any sense biologically.” Dalton Conley’s research on wealth points to another way in which blacks and whites are more similar than different. Debunking the “achievement gap” between black and white students, Conley found that, while black students are more likely to be expelled from school than white students, that difference “evaporates” when comparing families with similar wealth and parental education. Similarly, black students are overall much less likely than whites to graduate from college, but, when family wealth is similar, they are more likely than whites to graduate. In short, economic and social factors, not biology, predict success.

This new way of analyzing race, of seeing it as an economic, social reality, extends into medicine and health. Troy Duster, professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley and New York University, looks carefully at the biological effects of racism. Is it that blacks have a genetic predisposition for certain diseases or is it that, because of unfair housing practices, diminished educational opportunities, etc., blacks are, as Llew Smith puts it, “in an ocean where the water is polluted?” Is it possible to calculate the psychological and physiological toll that widespread, often invisible, racial prejudice takes on the nonwhite communities? Duster would argue that, on a number of significant levels, race is a health issue. He cautions that we should not assume that racism magically disappears just because race does not have biological origins. In fact, he says, we can better understand the full reality of institutionalized racism by examining its biological consequences. “Health disparities between different groups must be studied more…Prostate and breast cancers constitute biological conditions that might well be affected by societal forces and conditions, from different patterns of nutritional intake to systematic exposure to toxic waste.” In other words, where you are able to live and what you are able to eat can have significant impact on your health. Seen in this light, the insidious, far-reaching impact of inequitable practices like redlining become even more disturbing. In his article “Unlikely Mix—Race, Biology, and Drugs” for the San Francisco Chronicle, Duster cites research by Michael Klag that further corroborates the notion of the polluted ocean. Klag found that “the darker the skin color, the higher the rate of hypertension for American blacks, even inside the African-American community.” Seemingly race-specific health issues were “not biological or genetic in origin, but biological in effect (my italics) due to stress related outcomes of reduced access to valued goods such as employment, promotion, housing stock, etc.” Health issues, then, could be laid directly at the feet of social and economic issues.

Experiencing whiteness
As the post–World War II housing boom described in “The House We Live In” would indicate, any consideration about race must also take into account what the documentary calls the “unmarked” race: whiteness. For instance, affirmative action, Smith says, “makes most sense when you understand how other communities have been supported. It’s not just who gets locked out; it’s who gets promoted.” A 1997 conference “The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness” held at the University of California at Berkeley examined “how white people experience and maintain their social positions in a nation deeply fragmented by inequality” and “how whiteness underpins racial division and inequality in the U.S. and in the global economy.” “An important starting point,” the conference report noted, “is to acknowledge that the color of your skin, your gender, and the status of your job (or lack of one) largely determine your place in society. All too often, whites fail to recognize that their whiteness is a racial category that carries with it a number of unspoken and largely unchallenged social benefits…As a racial group, whites, even those who are not actively prejudicial or discriminatory, are the passive inheritors of a system of privilege and wealth.” In an interview that served as background for RACE: The Power of an Illusion, Beverly Daniel Tatum, president of Spelman College, observed that whites “sometimes struggle with the concept of white privilege…If you are a person who has that privilege, you don’t necessarily notice it. It is sometimes taken for granted.” Using the example of racial profiling, Tatum muses that a white person does not pull into his driveway at the end of a drive and say, “Gee, I wasn’t randomly stopped today.” Nor, after renting an apartment, does he say, “Gee, I benefited from being white today. I got that apartment I wanted.” As the Berkeley conference report stated, “That the reality of these privileges is often not accepted or understood is due partly to the fact that this uneven distribution has been around for so long that no one can be held directly responsible for making it.”

So what is to be done? In her editorial about the underlying racism of Boston, Callie Crossley states that meaningful, long-lasting change requires not “tidying up” but “deep cleaning.” Both Colorblind Racism by Sally Lehrman and Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Colorblind Society, coauthored by Troy Duster, look pointedly at “the legacy of accumulated preferential treatment” for whites. The Whitewashing authors cite George Lipsitz, who argues that the myriad benefits of being white encourage white Americans, knowingly or unknowingly, “to invest in whiteness as if it were a form of venture capital and to work at increasing its value. When it comes to race, white Americans’ social choices are very often molded by the relationship between whiteness and accumulated racial advantages.” For Beverly Tatum the issue is not “Are you racist?” but “Are you actively working against that system of advantage”? In Race Matters, author and professor Cornel West advocates a grassroots politics of conversion “among the toiling everyday people.” He says that we must replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning: Is it fair? That notion of fairness should, in turn, dictate institutional practice. The authors of the Berkeley conference report believe that research is the key: “it can lead whites of all classes to conclude that the social and psychic tolls of social inequality are too costly for whites to sustain…But, clearly, ignoring or dismissing race and class is not the answer—withdrawal gets us nowhere. Another and more productive option is to reject both guilt and denial and instead make space for ongoing public discussion about the social relations that divide us all.” Llew Smith credits Duster with bringing these imbedded, too long unspoken, advantages and prejudices to light. “The research is tremendous. He’s arguing for a different view of race. It’s a matter of looking closely at the statistics. The one thing I’m seeing in this whole question is that inequalities are continuing in ways that we are only beginning to understand.” It is important, adds Llew, for all of us “to step up, to become part of the discourse.” Documentaries like “The House We Live In” show the way. They bring us closer to the realities of economic practice and racism and, in so doing, closer to a necessary understanding of who we really are.

Reach Llew at Llewsmith@yahoo.com.

Rod Skinner ’72

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