Less Separate, Still Unequal: Diversity and Equality in "Post–Civil Rights" America

[Thomas J. Sugrue

The Paradox of Diversity, Toleration, and Inequality

It is now a commonplace assertion that the United States will be majority nonwhite in a few decades. But that prediction tells us nothing about what diversity will mean, which identities will be salient and which will fade from significance, or how diversity will shape Americans' lives from where they go to school to where and how they live, where they work, what they are paid, if they are healthy or prone to illness, and whether throughout their lives they are treated with dignity and respect. Throughout American history, racial and ethnic categories have profoundly structured educational opportunities, jobs and financial security or insecurity, access to political representation and public goods, and nearly every aspect of the life course, from birth outcomes to health to mortality.

The relationship between race or ethnicity and opportunity is not fixed, however. It has changed at critical junctures during moments of disruption and possibility. When it comes to diversity and equality, the United States now stands at one of those critical junctures, a period when new demographic realities have destabilized old racial categories, when the ideal of diversity and inclusion clashes with xenophobia and exclusion, and when many minorities still suffer constricted opportunities as the result of deeply entrenched historical patterns.

The United States is a more diverse and, at least superficially, a more tolerant society today than it was a half century ago. Overt expressions of racism are less common, even if they have yet to disappear, particularly in the anonymous recesses of the Internet. It is a sign of dramatic change that public figures who express racial biases can expect to be exposed and criticized publicly. Americans have come to expect diversity in the top ranks of government, in newsrooms, and on university faculties, even if those expectations are not always met. College admissions websites regularly feature photos of students of different backgrounds. Both major political parties engage in outreach to nonwhites, with varying degrees of success. Diversity, however, is not a precondition for inclusion or equality. "Increasingly the term diversity is paired with the term inclusion as if both terms imply each other," the demographer Marta Tienda argues, but "the presumption is unwarranted." Diversity is necessary but far from sufficient to ensure a more just and equal society.

Amidst a shift in professed attitudes and in the public representation of group differences, the United States remains riven by deep patterns of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic separation and inequality. Residential segregation remains a distinctive feature of the American landscape, even if the forms it takes have changed over the past fifty years. Even if American schools are more diverse than ever (only 54 percent of primary and secondary school students in 2010 were white), public education has resegregated since 1990. Racial and ethnic gaps in education, employment, income and poverty, household wealth, health and access to health care, personal security, and incarceration are deep and persistent. The sociologist Charles Tilly coined the phrase durable inequalities to describe the persistence of differences in opportunity across time. Durable inequalities perpetuate social hierarchies. They reinforce advantages for some segments of the population and exacerbate disadvantages for others.

We must account for the paradox that, despite a growing acceptance of the principle of diversity in the United States, American metropolitan areas remain (with regional variation) quite segregated by race and ethnicity and increasingly segregated by income. Those patterns of segregation affect opportunities at every stage of the life course, including access to a high-quality education from primary school through university, job opportunities, household assets, and life expectancies. Segregation has negative feedback loop effects that reinforce inequalities across generations. This paradox raises some troubling questions with normative implications: Is toleration irrelevant to inequality? Does the widely accepted celebration of diversity mask inequality? Do spatialized inequalities — the separation of groups spatially by race and income — impinge on the goal of creating a more unified society?

When the Color of America Changed: Civil Rights and Immigration Reform

To understand the entanglement of growing diversity and entrenched inequality requires a look backward to the last critical juncture in American history when notions of race and citizenship, diversity and tolerance shifted — the civil rights revolution. Within a few years in the mid-1960s, America's long-standing racial order, one that systematically privileged whites, saw its legislative and legal underpinnings crumble. In July 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed landmark civil rights legislation, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, sex, religion, and age. That legislation was a first step. In 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act; in 1968, he and Congress drafted and enacted a law that forbade discrimination in the sale and rental of housing.

Johnson's civil rights laws were not self-enforcing: their success depended on executive orders, federal regulations, and voluntary efforts to break down racial barriers, not to mention the efforts of civil rights groups and often-disruptive protestors to press for change. Nearly every element of the civil rights revolution met with fierce opposition and resistance, as judges, politicians, and policy makers attempted to weaken or roll back civil rights laws, and as ordinary citizens fought against what many called "forced" integration, whether it be efforts to open housing markets, desegregate public schools, or diversify workplaces and colleges. Still, Johnson's law signaled a robust national commitment to the ideals of formal equality and contributed to unprecedented — if often halting — diversification of labor markets, institutions of higher education, and some neighborhoods and...