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 schools.

A half century ago, America's color also began to change. In October 1965, at a ceremony at the base of the Statue of Liberty, Johnson signed the Hart-Cellar Act, which lifted immigration restrictions that favored newcomers from northern and western Europe. That year, close to nine in ten Americans were white. The percentage of foreign-born in the United States was at a near low. Unless you lived in California's Central Valley or along the Rio Grande, or found yourself in a handful of neighborhoods like New York's East Harlem, Miami's Little Havana, or East Los Angeles, Hispanics were mostly invisible. The Asian-descended population was vanishingly small, clustered in a few Chinatowns, Little Manilas, and a handful of other enclaves, only a few outside of California.

"The land flourished," stated Johnson, "because it was fed from so many sources — because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples." What Johnson had not anticipated was that the nation would be nourished by new cultures and traditions, fewer with European origins. Fifty years after Johnson took office, there were more than 41 million foreign-born people living in the United States, most of them from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia.

Today, whites comprise only 64 percent of the population of the United States. African Americans make up about 13 percent, a slight increase from the civil rights era, in part because of the growth of immigration from the Caribbean and Africa. About half of black Americans live in the South. Most others are concentrated in large metropolitan areas, mainly in the former industrial belt in the Northeast and Midwest.

Nothing has changed the color of America more than the dramatic increase in the Hispanic population. In 1970, 9.6 million Hispanics lived in the United States — about 4 percent of the population. In 2010, that population had increased to 51 million — about 16 percent of the population. It is hard to generalize about Hispanics. The category encompasses people with origins in some twenty countries across three continents and the Caribbean. Hispanic (a term that came into official use in the mid-1970s) is not a racial category. Hispanics, by census definition, can be black (like the descendants of enslaved Africans brought to the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, or Cuba), white (Spaniards or the descendants of Spanish colonists), American Indian (like Mayans from Mexico or Honduras), or Asian (including Japanese Peruvians or Chinese Cubans). They can also fall into the category "other race." A majority of Hispanics consider themselves white, but in the 2010 census, more Hispanics than ever checked the box "other race," signaling their dissatisfaction with existing racial categories.

Sixty-five percent of Hispanics in the United States today are of Mexican descent and another 9 percent hail from Puerto Rico. The next largest groups — Cubans, Salvadorans, Dominicans, and Guatemalans — together make up another 14 percent. Their reasons for coming to the United States are as diverse as their national origins. Some Mexicans came to the United States as migratory farmworkers and, on a smaller scale, industrial workers in the twentieth century, though many were temporary sojourners in the United States, often part of a circular migration between Mexico and the United States. A small number of Hispanics within the boundaries of the United States descend from families that date back to the Spanish empire (sometimes called Tejanos, Hispanos, and Californios). Cubans almost all came as refugees, some airlifted to the United States, others (more recently) fleeing their homeland by boat or raft. Overall, Hispanic migrants and immigrants tend to be quite heterogeneous in terms of their national origins, their places of arrival, their educational capital, and their place in the racial hierarchy of the United States.

Hispanics live in every state, with some of the fastest growth happening in places remote from the traditional immigrant gateways of California, Texas, and Florida. Guatemalans work in the chicken processing plants of North Carolina; Mexicans in the meatpacking factories of Iowa and Kansas; Hondurans and Mexicans as landscapers and construction workers in central New Jersey. Hardly any neighborhood on Chicago's North and West Sides does not have an immigrant-run taqueria or a corner bodega.

The aggregate statistics do not reflect significant regional variation. The western states (particularly California) are far more diverse than other parts of the United States. Forty-seven percent of residents of that region are nonwhite. The population of the Midwest is the least diverse, but still 22 percent of its population is nonwhite. Between the two are the Northeast (31 percent nonwhite) and the South (40 percent nonwhite). Metropolitan areas with populations of a half million or more are also far more diverse than smaller cities and towns.

Johnson and his contemporaries could not have imagined America's new polychromatic landscape. Latino, white, and Asian teenagers intermingle in shopping malls in Orange County, California, a place that had been a haven for hundreds of thousands of whites fleeing Los Angeles during the 1950s and 1960s. The sight of black-and-white couples holding hands is no longer scandalous in Atlanta. When a firm in Detroit hires new black workers, whites do not engage in wildcat strikes as they did during and after World War II. Real estate brokers in Seattle can show houses to Chinese American homebuyers without fear of alienating their white customers.

One of the most unexpected changes over the past half century has been the rise of suburban diversity. More than half of all Latin American immigrants reside in suburbs. The diverse Asian population — dominated by immigrants from China, India, and Vietnam — comprises 5 percent of U.S. residents. They too have scattered far and wide, most living in the suburbs. African American suburbanization has also increased steadily during this period, with 51 percent living in the suburbs today. No one in 1964 could have predicted that postwar suburbs, which had been built on the foundation of white racial exclusivity, would become polychromatic and multilingual.

The America that dawned in the 1960s is far more diverse, but it is far from inclusive or equal. Lifting the formal barriers of discrimination did not necessarily make institutions more inclusive, neighborhoods and schools more integrated, or workplaces more representative of the nation's diverse population. The subsequent half century was one of gains and setbacks, of expanding opportunities and still-wrenching injustices, of disadvantages by race and ethnicity sometimes overcome, but just as often intensified and compounded. If the arc of history bent toward justice, it just as often veered off course. To complete the unfinished business of the 1960s means coming to grips with what has changed and what has not, to be attentive to the paradoxes of diversity and inequality, of inclusion and exclusion, of integration and fragmentation.

Where We Live: Still Separate and Unequal

Americans may value diversity as a principle, but in practice they continue to live separate lives. Rates of residential segregation by race and ethnicity have remained stubbornly high in most American metropolitan areas, particularly in areas with large populations of African Americans. Sixty years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, public schools are resegregating by black and white. Latinos face less residential segregation than African Americans, but are now more likely to be concentrated in separate schools, unequal and impoverished. By nearly every measure, educational and residential segregation ensures that racial inequality in the United States has remained durable.

The segregation of populations by race and income reinforces inequalities through the uneven distribution of public goods, economic resources, hazards, and political power across space. In the United States, where you live determines your access to jobs, your transit options, the quality of public services and how much you pay for them in the form of taxes, your health, and your personal security. Residential segregation by race has contributed to the most durable of inequalities in modern America: the huge racial gaps in household wealth. The result is durable inequalities in academic achievement. Segregation and separation can sometimes be a communal resource, solidifying group bonds and fostering a sense of commonality, but they also exacerbate intergroup conflict, misinformation, and distrust.

Black and White: Enduring Residential Segregation

Blacks and whites in the United States still live largely separate lives. Between the 1920s and the 1990s, the residential segregation of blacks and whites worsened in nearly every American metropolitan area, despite the passage of federal, state, and local laws that forbade discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, and even though public opinion surveys since the 1960s have shown significant, positive shifts in every measure of racial "toleration," including the willingness to live in racially mixed neighborhoods, to support racially diverse schools, and to accept interracial marriage. Since the 1960s, it has become commonplace for Americans to express support for the ideal of "colorblindness," but when it comes to housing and neighborhoods, color still matters greatly.

Segregation did not have a single cause. In the postwar years, it resulted from a combination of public policy and private practices. Federal homeownership programs — the Home Owners Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Veterans Administration — made insured mortgages available at a low cost to whites, but discouraged lending in neighborhoods that had even a small number of nonwhites. Real estate brokers openly discriminated against people of color. After 1968, civil rights legislation forbade discrimination in home sales, rentals, and lending, but dozens of studies showed that minorities and whites had very different experiences with the real estate market.

African American homebuyers were likely to be steered to neighborhoods of older housing stock, often in declining central cities or fading suburbs, places where housing values often stagnated or depreciated. Since the 1970s, audit studies (with matched pairs of white and minority testers) have shown that steering has remained a persistent issue. Explicit discrimination — being turned away by brokers or landlords — is less common, but a recent Department of Housing and Urban Development study shows that about one in four African Americans report that they have faced discrimination in the rental or purchase of a home. African Americans inquiring about homes or apartments are sometimes rebuffed because of their accents.