Scholarship in the Post–Civil Rights Era

Although sociologists did not anticipate the emergence of a sustained nonviolent movement for civil rights, they played pivotal roles in three major sets of public policy discussions launched in the mid to late 1960s. A key case in point is Harvard sociologist (then an advisor to the Lyndon B. Johnson administration) Daniel Patrick Moynihan's infamous report, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," issued in 1965. Drawing attention to a growing rate of single-parent female-headed households among blacks, and characterizing this circumstance as correlated with a set of unwanted conditions best understood as "a tangle of pathology," Moynihan ignited a fierce debate on black family life, gender roles, and their influence on issues of black socioeconomic attainment (Rain-water and Yancey, 1967).

In 1966 the massive "Equality of Educational Opportunity" report, prepared under the leadership of sociologist James Coleman and statistician Ernest Campbell, sparked further controversy over the roles of schools and school resources in determining race differences in schooling outcomes. To the surprise of many at the time, the report documented much smaller gaps between black students and white students in school resources and expenditures than anticipated (in part, ironically, because of the NAACP's long-fought and successful legal challenges to "separate but equal" practices, which forced change in many southern states). Moreover, the report undermined the assumption that school expenditures were a key index of school quality, finding instead that family background was much more important to student attainment and achievement.

Then, in 1968, the U.S. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission after former Illinois governor Otto Kerner (1908–1976), who chaired the commission, issued its extensive assessment of the urban riots that so defined major American cities in the summer of 1967. The report characterized the United States as "two nations, black and white, separate and unequal." It went on to unambiguously fault white racism for the great racial schism in the social fabric.

Both the Moynihan report and the Coleman report, as well as, in a fashion, the Kerner Commission report, occasioned intense controversy, often bitterly acrimonious debate, and reevaluation. The disputes over the theoretical interpretation of social science findings and the remarkable intensity of feeling aroused by the reports also raised doubts about the capacity of social science to directly inform public policy. Emblematic of the intellectual intensity of the times was the influential volume The Death of White Sociology (1973), edited by Joyce Ladner. Yet, each of these ambitious reports identified themes, problems, and types of analyses that continue to influence scholarship, and they arguably assumed even greater scholarly importance in the late 1970s and into the present. To wit, this set of studies can be read as defining a still-important spectrum of analyses of racial inequality that sought the main causes of black disadvantage either in the dynamics and function of black families, communities, and culture (Moynihan and Coleman) or in the basic racist structural organization of American society and institutions (Kerner).

Over the course of the 1970s, sociology took a decided turn away from theories of social consensus in general and a focus on prejudice and discrimination in particular as lenses through which to interpret the black experience. Instead, theories of group conflict, internal colonialism, racial oppression, and power and ideology rose to prominence. And sociologists looking at black families and communities increasingly emphasized the resilience and resources of blacks in effectively adapting to the challenges of persistent inequality and racist conditions. Eventually, the research took on a much more structuralist, economy-centered, historical, and often comparative scope. For example, Pierre van den Berghe (1967) and Hubert Blalock (1967) developed important theoretical statements in the 1960s. These came to be focused and amplified in the 1970s by scholars such as Robert Blauner (1972), William Julius Wilson (1973), and Edna Bonacich (1972) who developed analyses of racial antagonism that were focused on the labor market.

This intellectual emphasis on the economy, racism, and structures of racial oppression was decisively reshaped by the publication in 1978 of William Julius Wilson's The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. Adopting a Weberian conception of class and with a focus on the fundamental intersection of the economy and the polity, Wilson boldly declared that the life chances of black Americans were no longer determined by race but rather by the class attributes they brought to the labor market. In a trenchantly argued work, Wilson suggested that three great epochs defined the black experience, with race clearly determining the life chances of most blacks in the first two stages—slavery and the early- and early-modern industrial stages. However, class, rather than race, rose to predominant importance in the third or modern and post-industrial phase.

Wilson's analysis became the subject of misappropriation from academics and others on the right, great praise and respect from a broad interdisciplinary center, and vituperative attack from those on the left, especially the black left. The latter included a regrettable formal vote of censure against Wilson by the Association of Black Sociologists, which reacted mainly against the title rather than the substance of Wilson's argument. The nearly decade-long debate in sociology on "the declining significance of race thesis" did, however, yield important insights about the need to think in terms of the intersection and interaction of race and class, rather than in terms of analyses that afforded one factor transparent primacy over the other.

In 1980 Wilson issued a second edition of the book, which dealt with some of the early criticism of his work. In particular, he took to task those who offered simplistic readings of the complex argument he had made or who treated racism and discrimination in a monolithic fashion that failed to account for the growing class differentiation within the black community. His rejoinder also signaled his next focus—the urban poor in black America—a subject for which he would once again come to redefine the scholarly agenda across the social sciences (Wilson, 1980).

The 1980s saw the rise to the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1911–2004). This ascendancy of conservative Republicans brought a new prominence and influence for scholars and think tanks on the right. Prominent among these rightwing scholars was Charles Murray, who published Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (1984), an anti-welfare tract putatively rooted in the canons of social science. Although Murray's analysis became the object of much criticism, the book lent legitimacy to a conservative cultural view of a set of social ills dominating public attention and associated with poor, urban, black communities. These problems included steadily rising rates of single-parent female-headed households, juvenile delinquency, high school dropouts, drug use, violent crime, unemployment, poverty, and long-term welfare dependency. Murray, and such fellow conservatives as political scientist Lawrence Mead (1992), faulted the permissive values and social policies of the 1960s' "Great Society" and "War on Poverty" eras for having undermined individual self-reliance and respect for conventional mainstream values.

Among the significant sociological works to appear in his era was Stanley Lieberson's A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants Since 1880 (1980). This broad-ranging work took up the "immigrant analogy" hypothesis, which maintained that blacks would experience the same social mobility as European immigrant groups. The argument was read by many as one variant of a conservative position that saw racism, discrimination, and racial inequality as of steadily and inevitably waning importance in the United States. Lieberson's detailed analysis documented the myriad ways in which African Africans in the mid-1800s through the early decades of the twentieth century were more severely disadvantaged and faced more durable barriers to mobility than various southern, central, and eastern European immigrant groups. His work called into question any easy assumption of parallel trajectories of progress.

Despite Lieberson's convincing analysis, the larger conservative framework still dominated. Many scholars sought to challenge these approaches and the influence they exerted in policy-making circles. The most influential such work again came from William Julius Wilson with the publication in 1987 of The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Wilson spoke directly about issues of crime, out-of-wedlock childbirth, and welfare dependency—the whole complex of problems seen as defining urban inner-city life. Dismissing as outdated the left's analysis from the perspective of racism and discrimination, as well as the right's analysis from the perspective of individual values and culture as ahistorical, factually wrong, and victim-blaming, Wilson developed a three-part argument. He proposed, first, that America's urban centers had witnessed the emergence of a new urban underclass, a truly disadvantaged group. These inner-city black residents, by virtue of historic discrimination, had low skill levels and were not well positioned to respond to profound changes in the structure of the economy.

Second, Wilson argued that inner-city areas were losing the sort of well-paid, low-skill, unionized jobs that once characterized life in the big cities. This was occurring because of the deconcentration of industry as heavy-goods production and manufacturing moved increasingly from proximity to central city cores to suburban and exurban locations. More importantly, this job loss occurred because of the deindustrialization of the American economy, especially in urban centers, as part of a major shift toward service-oriented, information-processing, technologyrelated high-skill work. This confluence of circumstances resulted in a skills/spatial mismatch wherein lowskill, inner-city blacks were less and less competitive for the high-skill, highwage jobs (e.g., in banking, finance, law, communications, etc.) available in central city areas. A major consequence of economic restructuring of this kind and scale was a rising rate of black male joblessness, with long-term unemployment and bleak employment prospects becoming commonplace. Joblessness not only heightened the experience of poverty, but it reduced the likelihood of marriage for both black men and women. Wilson argued that men are reluctant to marry when they cannot provide economically for a family, and women do not find men with severely limited employment prospects to be promising marriage partners.

Third, these circumstances resulted in the profound social disorganization of communities, according to Wilson, because the underclass suffered great isolation from mainstream social values. Underclass communities involved areas of extremely high concentrations of poverty, where 40 percent or more of the residents were below the poverty level. Contributing to this growing isolation for the underclass was a greater mobility for middle-class and skilled working-class blacks who were able to leave inner-city ghetto communities due to opportunities afforded by the successes of affirmative action and the civil rights movement. Those left behind were the poorest of the poor. This is the mix that Wilson associated with welfare dependency, out-of-wedlock childbirths, juvenile delinquency, and crime.

The Truly Disadvantaged initiated a wave of research on ghetto poverty; predictably, Wilson's book also garnered intense controversy. Urban ethnographers, theorists, survey researchers, and economists all tackled aspects of Wilson's call for a focus on the new urban poverty. Three aspects of the subsequent research and controversy are worthy of extended consideration in this entry because they came to change the intellectual landscape. One of the first lines of sustained critique of Wilson came from Herbert Gans (1995), who took strong objection to the use of the term underclass, suggesting that it was merely another stigmatizing epithet that encouraged focusing on the behavior of individuals rather than the structural circumstance of groups and communities. And certainly there were many commentators on the right who used Wilson's terminology in this fashion, ignoring much of the rich sociological context and argumentation he advanced. Wilson ultimately moved away from using the term under-class, preferring instead the ghetto poor or ghetto poverty, in an effort to emphasize the properties of such structural placements in the economy.

A second major line of criticism faulted Wilson for failing to deal with racial residential segregation. In a major book, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (1993), sociologists Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton argued that the racial segregation of communities was the key factor in the rise of concentrated ghetto poverty. On the basis of careful historical, demographic, and econometric simulation analyses, they showed how the emergence and maintenance of racial barriers in the housing market were critical to the development of extremely disadvantaged inner-city communities. As a result, they also pointed out the strong contemporary relevance of racial discrimination in the housing market to larger patterns of modern inequality, thereby resuscitating a focus on processes of discrimination.

A third line of scholarship pointed to the modern potency (not merely historic effects) of racial discrimination in many domains of social life, including the labor market. Ironically, even Wilson's own "Urban Poverty and Family Life Survey of Chicago" (1987) conducted extensive inter-views with employers in Chicago and found them to hold clearly negative stereotypes of black workers, especially black men. Employers also engaged in a series of practices to limit or exclude black workers. Careful auditing studies, which involved sending out matched pairs of black job applicants and white job applicants with equivalent resumes, showed significant anti-black (and anti-Latino/a) bias. Sociologist Joe Feagin identified numerous other domains, such as stores, restaurants, and other public spaces, where African Americans reported experiencing racial bias (Feagin and Sikes, 1994; Feagin 2000).

Entrenched ghetto poverty, persistent racial residential segregation and the housing discrimination critical to its maintenance, and ongoing racial bias in the labor market and other spheres of life prompted renewed attention to negative racial attitudes, prejudice, and stereotyping. Thus, a major study carried out by the General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago pointed to the persistence of negative images of blacks among whites (see Bobo, Kluegel, and Smith, 1997), with such negative stereotypes playing an important role in public thinking about how social policy should (or should not) respond to inequality (Bobo and Kluegel, 1993; Gilens, 1999). This survey would be reinforced by scholarship in social psychology pointing to the widespread but deeply implicit and often unconscious basis of negative racial stereotypes.

Another analytical innovation in the 1990s involved renewed attention to matters of wealth inequality as central to the modern problem of racial inequality. The most important and influential work in this area was Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro's Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (1995). Oliver and Shapiro argued that wealth, the accumulated financial assets a person has, is more important to the capacity to maintain a particular standard of living than income or earnings per se. Critically, they documented that, as of the late 1980s, a vast gap of nearly 12-to-1 separated the median financial assets of blacks from those of whites. To wit, for roughly every ten cents of wealth in black hands, whites had slightly more than a dollar. Oliver and Shapiro also reported that in 1989 the median net worth of black households in the United States was approximately $3,700, as compared to $43,800 for white households. The figures for net financial assets, with debts subtracted, were $6,999 for whites and effectively $0 for blacks.

Furthermore, Oliver and Shapiro showed that even young, dual-income black couples lagged far behind whites in wealth (hence, even post–civil rights movement, high-achieving blacks suffered an enormous wealth gap with whites). This was true even though blacks and whites saved at roughly the same rates and even when matched in occupational or educational attainment. The critical reason for this disparity is that much wealth is inherited, not earned via an individual's schooling or wages from work. Oliver and Shapiro attributed the black/white wealth gap to: (1) racialized state policies that systematically excluded African Americans from many opportunities for government-sponsored asset-building opportunities that many whites benefited from (e.g., home mortgage discrimination practices in the 1930s through 1950s); (2) violence and other acts of bias directed at successful black entrepreneurship; and (3) the sedimentation of inequality whereby disadvantages are reinforced and accumulate over time.

Greater attention to theorizing race and racism also started to assume prominence in the later 1980s. A key work here was Michael Omi and Howard Winant's Racial Formation in the United States (1986). They suggested that racial phenomena were historically contingent and "made" as part of racializing projects, a theme now broadly resonant in the field. Their work, along with that of other scholars, such as Jonathan Stone and David Theo Goldberg, helped to elevate the examination of race and ethnicity to new theoretical prominence within the discipline.

The 1990s also witnessed the emergence of a whole new line of scholarship focusing on whiteness. Whiteness studies took up historical tracing of the development of whiteness as a privileged social status. Sometimes focused on particular ethnic whites (Ignatiev, 1995), the working class in general (Roediger, 1991), or European ethnics in general (Jacobson, 1998; Allen, 1994 and 1997), scholars traced how would-be peers and allies of blacks embraced the offer of skin-privilege in the American racial hierarchy instead. The work has helped to refocus scholarly attention beyond the circumstances of blacks and black communities to a larger perspective on how race itself is enacted and experienced on both sides of the color line.

Another important trend of the 1990s involved examinations of the place of African Americans in increasingly multiethnic, multiracial urban spaces. To some degree, this work developed in response to instances of overt conflict and tension, such as occurred between African-American communities and immigrant Korean merchants in a number of communities. These tensions were, of course, one of the simmering resentments set aflame in Los Angeles in 1992 following the acquittal of the four white police officers who were video-taped beating black motorist Rodney King. But this expanded scope was also accelerated by such developments as the introduction by the U.S. Census Bureau of the option of identifying with more than one race, arguably lending even greater legitimacy to those attempting to claim a mixed- or multiracial identity. And immigration was also serving to make the country's African-ancestry population more diverse as blacks from the Caribbean and Africa continued to immigrate to the United States.

Over the twentieth century, sociology moved very far from the posture of paying little or no attention to matters of race and offering unreflective acceptance of prevailing racist assumptions. Indeed, matters of race moved to a place of increasing prominence in the discipline, with a number of scholars becoming major students of race and ethnic relations; these scholars included Wilson, Lieberson, Massey, and Feagin, all of whom served as president of the American Sociological Association. Sociology also became one of the primary sites of intellectual analysis and critique of racism. And scholars in the field occupy a far more prominent place in public and policy-making discourse than they typically held in the past.

The study of issues of race, especially the African-merican experience, remains a site of controversy. Debates and contestation continue over how to conceptualize race and racism; over the relative weight to attach to prejudice and discrimination as compared to economic, political, and other structural constraints; and, of course, over the extent to which persistent racial inequality is traceable to the choices, behavior, and culture of African Americans as compared to the structures and ideology of racial oppression. While there is no consensus theory of race, the approach to issues of race in sociology is more central, seasoned, empirically grounded, influential, and informed by the work of minority as well as nonminority scholars than ever before. Given other trends in the discipline toward the use of multiple-method designs and comparative scope, there are grounds to be optimistic about future theory development and about the likelihood of sociology having a significant impact on public policy and producing important societal outcomes.

See also Economic Condition, U.S.; Educational Psychology and Psychologists; Education in the United States; Kerner Report; Social Psychology, Psychologists, and Race

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lawrence d. bobo (2005)