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RACE
IN THE SCHOOLS
Perpetuating White Dominance?
Judith R. Blau
with Elizabeth Stearns
and collaborators
Jenifer Hamil-Luker
Nathan Hamilton
Lyle V. Jones
Vicki Lamb
Steve Lippmann
Stephanie Moller
Lisa Pellerin
LYN NE
R I E N N E R
P U B L I S H E R S
B O U L D E R .
L O N D O N

Paperback edition published in the United States of America in 2004 by
Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301
www.rienner.com
and in the United Kingdom by
Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU
Published in hardcover in 2003.
© 2003 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved
ISBN 1-58826-333-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Printed and bound in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements
(oo) of the American National Standard for Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.
5 4 3 2

To Charles V. Willie
Steadfast in his conviction that pluralism
is the essence of fairness and quality schooling

CONTENTS
List of Tables and Figures ix
Preface xiii
1 The Study: Theory and Methods 1
2 Economic Inequalities and Moral Fences 21
3 Locating Difference 47
4 Encountering Character 79
5 Getting into Trouble 97
6 Tracking the Curricula 133
7 Social Learning 159
8 Going to College 177
9 Conclusion 203
Bibliography 217
Index 229
About the Book 237
vii

TABLES AND FIGURES
Tables
3.1 Educational Values, by Black and White Students 58
3.2 Educational Aspirations, by Black and White Students 61
3.3 Importance of Success, by Black and White Students 65
3.4 Importance of Future Relationships, by Black and
White Students 67
3.5 Percentage of Black and White Seniors Who Rate
Social Responsibilities as Extremely Important 70
4.1 Integrity Scale and Baseline Controls (Definitions) 84
4.2 Means for Integrity Scale for Race and Ethnic Group 85
4.3 Additional Control Factors Used (Definitions) 88
4.4 Means for Integrity Scale, Adjusted by Factors 90
4.5 Multiple Classification Analysis 91
5.1 GIT Scales, Race/Ethnicity, and Individual-Level
Independent Variables 102
5.1a Means and Standard Deviations of Student-Level
Variables 122
5.1b ANOVA Estimates of Variance for Outcomes 122
5.1c HLM Between-Neighborhood Model for GIT Scales 122
5.2a HLM Estimates on Unengaged Friends 123
5.2b HLM Estimates on Unprepared for Class 124
5.2c HLM Estimates on Cutting Classes 125
5.2d HLM Estimates on Discipline Problems 126
5.2e HLM Estimates on Substance Use 127
6.1 Means and Standard Deviations, Interracial Friendliness 138
6.2 ANOVA Estimates for Interracial Friendliness 138
6.3 HLM Coefficients of School Effects, Interracial Friendliness 139
6.4 Within-School Slopes and Intercepts, Interracial Friendliness 141
ix

X Tables and Figures
6.5 Factors Used in Correspondence Analyses 148
7.1 Means and Standard Deviations, Gain Analysis 164
7.2 HLM Coefficients, Within-School Models of Gains 166
7.3 ANOVA Estimates for Gains 168
7.4 HLM Estimates of Effects on Predictors of Gains 168
8.1 Means on Importance of Education, Black and
White Students 182
8.2 Means on Importance of Education, Low, Middle,
and High Scorers 183
8.3 Means and Standard Deviations for Variables Used in
Hierarchical Analyses 186
8.4 Individual-Level Coefficients for Becoming a PSI Student 187
8.5 HLM Regressions on Becoming a PSI Student 190
8.6 Logistic Regressions of One-Year, Associate's, and
BA Programs 193
8.7 Logistic Regression of Becoming a PSI Student, with
Class Rank 196
Figures
2.1 Mean Income for White and Black Male Workers, 1970-2000 33
2.2 Unemployment Rates for White and Black Males, 1972-2001 34
2.3 Earnings Disparities, 1970-1988 36
2.4 Percentage of Whites and Blacks with High School Degrees,
1940-1999 39
2.5 Percentage of Black and White High School Graduates
in College, 1976-1999 41
3.1 Probability of Having Been Retained in Elementary School 56
3.2 White and Black Students' Residential Distributions by
Composition of Neighborhood 73
5.1 Race and Ethnic Differences on GIT Scales 104
5.2 Relationships Between Neighborhood Diversity and
GIT Means 110
5.3 Relationships Between Neighborhood Consolidated
Inequality and GIT Means 111
5.4 Relationships Between Neighborhood Poverty and
GIT Means 112
5.5 Effects of Low and High Diversity on Cutting Classes 115
5.6 Effects of Low and High Consolidated Inequality on
Unengaged Friends 117

Tables and Figures xi
5.7 Effects of Low and High Consolidated Inequality on
Substance Use 118
5.8 Other Effects of Low and High Poverty 120
6.1 Interracial Friendliness by Diversity and Enrollment Size 140
6.2 Interracial Friendliness by White/Nonwhite and Low/
High Track 143
6.3 Correspondence Analysis, Excluding Arts, with All Labels 149
6.4 Correspondence Analysis, Excluding Arts, Suppressing
Most Labels 150
6.5 Correspondence Analysis: Performing Arts 151
6.6 Correspondence Analysis: Musical Arts 152
6.7 Correspondence Analysis: Studio Arts 153
7.1 Effects of Consolidated Inequality on Average Gain Scores 170
8.1 Probability of Becoming a Student at a PSI 189
8.2 Probability of Becoming a Bachelor's Student 195

PREFACE
Race is powerful in contemporary America in the phenomenological sense;
the meanings people attach to race and racial differences pervade everyday
life, shape social action, and are a dynamic component of interpersonal
relations. It is precisely because of its phenomenological power that the
study of race simultaneously opens up some doors for our understanding
of American society and closes other doors. That is, the sheer phenomeno-
logical or subjective power of the categories of race and ethnicity—espe-
cially, black and white—means that we can unravel many puzzles when we
take these categories into account, including, for example, how economic
inequalities are patterned. Yet these categories bedevil our communications
because the language categories we use—black, African American, white,
Caucasian—are conflated with many meanings that we collectively, indi-
vidually, and autobiographically attach to them. It may not be possible to
overcome this perplexing dilemma, but it helps if we are self-reflective and
self-critical and place contemporary racial relations into a historical con-
text. Whites have advantages and privileges about which they are often
unaware, as they are also often unaware of processes whereby racial advan-
tage and privilege are reproduced over time and over social space, that is,
from one situation to another and from one social institution to another.
In this book, the result of more than a decade of research, I inquire
about the significance of racial and ethnic differences for the members of a
cohort of American adolescents who began high school in 1990 and were in
their mid-20s in 2000. I framed the research questions mostly to compare
black and white students because black-white relations are most emblem-
atic of the complexities involving intergroup relations in the United States.
Racial constructions and practices are by no means constant, and American
institutions and normative structures that affect racial practices are also
dynamic. The youth in the study grew up during the transition from an
industrial society into what is sometimes termed the postindustrial society
xiii

xiv Preface
or the New Economy. This transition also accompanied great changes in
intergroup relations and intergroup perceptions.
I draw conclusions from the results of quantitative analyses using large
datasets for adolescents, schools, and neighborhoods. An advantage offered
by such analyses is that they allow rigorous, systematic comparisons and
hypotheses testing, but the price can be that conceptual richness is sealed
off by the formality of the analytical techniques that these data require. To
overcome this problem, I have drawn extensively from the work of ethnog-
raphers and theorists to give the reader interpretative opportunities and to
create open-ended conceptual possibilities for the important comparisons I
make. My main focus, again, is on the complicated comparison involving
whites and blacks, but many analyses include Asians and Latinos as well.
The research is based on analyses of data from the National Educa-
tional Longitudinal Study (NELS) and its metropolitan companion, the
High School Effectiveness Study (HSES), which were designed and carried
out by the U.S. Department of Education. The NELS is widely used by re-
searchers because of the high quality of the design of its questionnaires and
the data collection procedures and also its breadth and scope. Chapter 1
provides an introduction to the research methods. Chapter 2 summarizes
my argument about how contemporary racism is deeply embedded in an
ideology that is acceptable to white Americans, making racism difficult to
overcome. In Chapters 3 through 5 , 1 inquire about race and ethnic differ-
ences in various respects, including in educational values (Chapter 3,
"Locating Difference"), in integrity and honesty (Chapter 4, "Encounter-
ing Character"), and in delinquency (Chapter 5, "Getting into Trouble").
Chapter 6 ("Tracking the Curricula") examines the ways that school struc-
tures promote or impair interracial relations; Chapter 7 is about gains on
social studies tests ("Social Learning") and the final analytical chapter
("Going to College") presents an analysis of black and white probabilities
of pursuing education past high school.
A premise of this book is that liberalism, a core component of the Amer-
ican historical experience, culture, and institutions, has evolved over recent
decades into a decidedly selfish neoliberalism that has altered the nature of
racism and racialization. Liberalism has become an ideology, a defense used
by white Americans to maintain their dominance. However, social values are
never static, and I argue that neoliberalism, which accompanied the brief
transition from an industrial society to postindustrialism, is not compatible
with contemporary economic and social conditions. The New Economy
encourages less hierarchical authority but more contingency, informality, and
in-group preferences. Therefore, existing racial privileges and inequalities are
easily reproduced and reinforced. This premise informs the study, but the
results help to support it. The analyses reveal that white American youths are
caught in these contradictions and that they are themselves harmed by white

Preface xv
liberalism, just as the ideology of liberalism more obviously harms youths of
color. Without practical support, no ideological construction can be expected
to last. For this reason, it is not implausible to assume that American institu-
tions will become more democratic, representative, and pluralistic. My opti-
mism is in part grounded in my teaching experiences and the great changes I
have observed among white students over the past decade or so. They are
working hard and earnestly and, in collaboration with their brothers and sis-
ters of color, understanding and undoing racial barriers.
The research was carried out under the umbrella of a training program,
Researching Adolescent Pathways (RAP). I was exceedingly fortunate to
have an excellent team of graduate and postdoctoral students who worked
with me on the data analyses. In the initial stages of RAP, I worked with
Rory McVeigh and Ken Land on a study of junior colleges and black stu-
dent outcomes. Then Vicki Lamb, Lisa Pellerin, and I began using multi-
level analysis to study contextual effects on adolescent outcomes, which
became useful for many of the analyses presented in this book. When Vicki
accepted a research position at Duke University and Lisa a teaching posi-
tion at Ball State University, Elizabeth Stearns took over most of the
responsibility for data analysis. Other students who participated on the
larger project include Berhane Araia, John Hipp, Tracy Holloway, Keri
Iyall, Natalie Spring, and, as a postdoctoral student, Gladys Mutangandura.
More directly involved in data analyses for book chapters were Nathan
Hamilton, who carried out much of the statistical analyses in Chapter 5, and
Steve Lippmann, who carried out the analyses reported in Chapter 6. He
also helped with the descriptive analyses reported in Chapter 3, as did
Jenifer Hamil-Luker and Stephanie Moller. Lyle V. Jones, a psychometri-
cian affiliated with my university's psychology department, contributed
immensely to the project through his superior knowledge of the Department
of Education's datasets and variable construction.
Chapters 4 through 8 are collaborative. Elizabeth in particular devoted
considerable time to the project from 1998 to 2001 as a graduate research
assistant, and then from 2001 to 2003 as a postdoctoral fellow while she
was also affiliated with the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke
University. Elizabeth helped to coordinate the final analyses as I began to
write the book. Throughout, I distinguish between myself ("I") as author
and research director, and all of us ("we") who participated in decisions
about measurement and statistical modeling. The computer work was com-
pleted by student researchers. This research received funding over six years
from a variety of funding agencies. I am extremely grateful for support
from the Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer
Foundation, and the American Educational Research Association.
Living in one of Chicago's most impoverished ghettos ("the other side
of the Midway"), later a black middle-class community (after "it had

xv¡ Preface
tipped"), and participating in an integration project in Chicago's South Side
provided me with a range of experiences in black communities that whites
rarely have. In one frightening incident, when national guardsmen mistak-
enly assumed I was a black resident, I had a moment's experience with
cruel, raw, racial hatred. I am aware that such experiences provided an
incentive for me to do this research and no doubt helped to shape the re-
search questions.
Participating in classes and seminars at the University of North Car-
olina at Chapel Hill, in which I was the only white person, has been invalu-
able; nonwhite undergraduates have openly shared their experiences and
feelings with me, for which I am grateful. William (Sandy) Darity and
Henry Frierson provided me with opportunities to teach in the university's
summer Minority Undergraduate Research Assistant Program (MURAP).
Students shared with me their humiliating experiences with discrimination,
racism, and racial profiling, but they also shared with me the value of wit,
irony, and solidarities when coping with such humiliation. Graduate stu-
dents reflected less about race as a lived experience and more within a
scholarly discourse. For sharing their ideas with me, I thank John Dye, Nate
French, Ellington Graves, Chandra Guinn, Alison Roberts, and Demetrius
Semien. In particular, I thank Keri Iyall, whose insights about the cultural
rights of indigenous groups were helpful to me when considering other
American minorities.
Most especially, I am grateful for the support and encouragement of
my colleague Rachel Rosenfeld. We had common research interests in edu-
cation and inequality. She was also a friend, and her death last year was a
great loss to me. Sociology of education is populated with many good citi-
zens who promote the development of the field as well as provide support
to those who work in it. I especially want to thank the following: Eduardo
Bonilla-Silva, Claudia Buchmann, Roslyn Mickelson, Jeannie Murdoch,
Rubén Rumbaut, Barbara Schneider, Larry Suter, Charles Thompson, Ken-
neth Dodge, and the other members of the Duke-UNC Spencer Consortium,
as well as Joseph E. Schwartz, a dear friend who was always generous
when I asked him for statistical advice. I am also grateful to staff members
in the Department of Education, especially Ralph Lee and Jeffrey Owings.
I feel especially fortunate having Karolyn Tyson as a colleague. Draw-
ing on observations in her school studies, and interviews with children,
adolescents, and teachers, Karolyn was generous with her time and ideas. I
am indebted to her for reflections and frank comments. Edward Reeves and
Carol Wright provided valuable comments on an earlier draft of the manu-
script and I thank them for their astute and insightful criticisms. Shea Far-
rell's professionalism and efficiency with manuscript preparation is gratefully
acknowledged. As we have transitioned together over the years from DOS to
Windows, Pine to Netscape, and from unzipped to zipped documents, she has

Preface xvii
been the better and more accomplished teammate, patient when I have lost
and misnamed files, and correcting my botched formatting. The entire
process of manuscript preparation and revision went extraordinarily well,
and for this I thank Bridget Julian, Lynne Rienner, Lesli Athanasoulis, and
most especially, Alan McClare. He was my coach, adviser, and support
team all rolled into one.
I experienced some difficulty plunging into writing this book during the
summer of 2002, and were it not for my commitments to the graduate stu-
dents who had carried out the analyses, I may not have completed it. Peter,
my husband of, as he would have put it, "just over one third and a third of a
century," was hospitalized with pneumonia in late February and died mid-
March. Together we had shared many summers when one of us was buried
with a book project. We took it for granted that both would share the same
isolation and that social life—theater, concerts, travel, even eating out—
would come to a standstill until the manuscript was completed. Over drinks
and dinner, the one not immersed in writing was responsible for updating the
other about the world outside, that is, domestic and international news, and
the one who was writing would sketch out what was on the schedule for the
next day. No chapter left the house without at least some rewriting in
response to the other's criticisms. Still, writing this book I had a cheerlead-
ing team: my daughters, Reva and Pammy, my sister, Merilee, and my
father, Harold. Although they were not underfoot, they approved the
progress and were very poor critics.
Charles V. Willie's reflections on youth and development and his writ-
ings in the fields of race, education, families, and communities played a
major role in my deciding to carry out this research. He stresses the idea
that it takes a team to prepare and educate young people. Parents, mostly,
but also teachers, neighbors, siblings, and kin are the members of that team
and together, much by way of example, they instill among youths a deep
respect for the dignity of others and the understanding that it is difference
that makes sharing and reciprocity possible. With great admiration for Dr.
Willie and in appreciation for his wisdom about matters of race and school-
ing, I dedicate this book to him.

I
THE STUDY:
THEORY AND METHODS
Demographically, the United States is a multiracial and multiethnic society,
but it is not a pluralistic one: white Americans have not easily accommo-
dated the nation's growing population diversity. Achieving a robust civil
society is always challenging, but it is particularly so when economically
advantaged and politically dominant groups hedge on their responsibility to
be inclusive. Excluded groups include Native Americans and Latinos,
whose ancestors occupied territory in North America before whites arrived,
and African Americans, descendents of whites' slaves. With increasing im-
migration from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the Carib-
bean, white Americans should be reflective about how to help advance plu-
ralism and representative institutions. Extraordinary economic inequalities
between whites and nonwhites and the spatial isolation of whites present
major obstacles. Both impede intercultural exchanges and the achievement
of social equality.
So long as whites see themselves as the criterion group that others must
emulate, pluralism will be impossible to attain. I recognize that white—or
any other—cultural identity is not singular. There is a great fluidity of
social identities and roles. Many values are widely shared among different
groups, and there is considerable overlap in group interests, tastes, and con-
ventions. Nevertheless, dominant social, governmental, economic, and
political institutions are neither pluralistic nor inclusive in any genuine
sense. Instead, these institutions are racialized settings and hierarchies that
reproduce white advantage. To the extent that this is the case, it harms indi-
viduals, communities, and social relations.
My main purpose is to inquire about features of white culture by study-
ing differences between white and other adolescents in the context of their
schools and neighborhoods. My general conclusion is that whites' cultural
dominance harms white adolescents as well as—more obviously—harming
adolescents of color. This book is organized around topics that are central
I

2 Roce in the Schools
in schooling and important in young people's lives, including attitudes
about integrity and cheating, behavioral problems ("getting into trouble"),
interracial relations, learning (primarily social learning, but also learning in
mathematics, science, and reading), and going to college.
To study these topics, I selected two datasets developed by the Depart-
ment of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES): the
National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) and its metropolitan sup-
plement, the High School Effectiveness Study (HSES).1
A main reason I
selected NELS is because it is so highly regarded by researchers for its
scope and quality, and HSES provides unique opportunities for research
inquiry about adolescents who live in the inner cities and suburbs of highly
diverse metropolitan communities. Both datasets allow linkage with school
data and geocoded community data to analyze social contexts.
An interesting feature of these data is that they provide opportunities
for studying a sample of youngsters who were born about a decade after
Congress affirmed blacks' legal rights under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Social and legal turmoil marked the ensuing decades and created a climate
of conflict in schools and neighborhoods and, no doubt, confusion for many
children and adolescents. The ink was barely dry on the congressional act
when opponents of school integration prevailed and resegregation of
schools increased in the 1970s.2
Thus, members of this cohort were famil-
iar with blacks' legal protections, but they also experienced the backlash of
resegregation, white flight, and the intensification of the private school
movement.
They were also growing up during the incipient stages of what we now
refer to variously as the postindustrial economy, the New Economy, or the
global economy. The economic transformations of the 1970s and the 1980s
had dramatic consequences for their parents' employment and their fami-
lies' level of economic security and directly affected the NELS students
themselves. Under the conditions of this new economy, it became virtually
imperative to complete high school and acquire some advanced training or
education. The decline of industry and the expansion of the service sector
were accompanied by an intensification of academic credentialism that was
consistent with other meritocratic trends in the United States, such as the
greater emphasis on testing of achievement and aptitude.
A drawback of these datasets, at least for my purposes, is that they
were designed not so much to study race and ethnic and cultural differences
as to study individual variation in educational outcomes and the extent to
which variation depended on characteristics of families, teachers, and
schools. This, however, turned out to be useful. The empirical data and
study design put constraints on my assumptions and speculations about
adolescents' experiences with race and how they constructed their racial
identities. I could not overtheorize about the differences between whites

The Study: Theory and Methods 3
and others when the empirical results told me that my hunches and hypothe-
ses were wrong, and I could not push for certain conclusions when the ana-
lytical findings did not justify them.
My theoretical assumptions were evolving as I laid out the analytical
problems on which we were working, and because I and the other members
of the research team were situated within a paradigmatic subspecialty—the
sociology of education—I had to position my assumptions about culture
within that subspecialty. Fortunately, there is a rich ethnographic literature
based on studies of youth, schooling, and families that was immensely
helpful in my thinking about the cultural significance of racial differences.
Moreover, new theory on liberalism and pluralism helped to provide a con-
ceptual framework for the analyses we were doing. In the remainder of this
chapter, I introduce the scaffolding of this conceptual framework and
describe the datasets and some of the methodological approaches that we
adopted for these analyses.
Difference and Race
For Americans, realities of cultural difference seem distant, like something
college students discover in study-abroad programs or in the Peace Corps.
Cultural differences are cloaked in a discourse of the advantaged and dis-
advantaged, of the privileged and the underprivileged, and more recently, of
the foreigner or immigrant and the American. My objective in this project
was to find differences—not disparities or distinctions—between the
advantaged and disadvantaged and to determine how these differences are
relevant for educational aspirations and attitudes about school and attend-
ing college. The paradigmatic division in the United States, as many
authors have stressed, is the one between blacks and whites, and I believe
that once white Americans come to understand this division they will learn
how to overcome their role in sustaining it. This requires a new under-
standing about working with others to achieve a more pluralistic society.
Euro-Americans and African Americans share a complex historical experi-
ence in which Euro-Americans have been the oppressors and African Amer-
icans the oppressed. In our times, African Americans, compared with Euro-
Americans, have less adequate health care, are inadequately represented in
government, live in underserved communities, are often charged more by
banks and lending institutions, and receive less fair treatment in the crimi-
nal justice system.
Whites for the most part know that these racial disparities exist.
Accounts of them are presented in college social science courses and doc-
umented in newspapers and television programs. Whites frequently express
the view that these inequalities will disappear once blacks embrace white

4 Race in the Schools
values and act like whites. This response, as Immanuel Wallerstein and
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva suggest, is rooted in the long-standing liberal tradi-
tion that emphasizes that society is an aggregation of individuals and pur-
ports that the same rules and conventions apply equally to all.3
Liberalism
cannot easily accommodate cultural diversity and group differences. It is
instead a quest for rights for individuals as detached individuals, and does
not concern itself with individuals' rights to identity, group membership,
and social roots. Whites who consider themselves liberals repudiate racism—
or they do if they are consistent—but nevertheless may believe that blacks,
and often Latinos and Native Americans, do not appropriately relate to
dominant white institutions.
I do not wish to imply an unintended essentialism. Race has no biolog-
ical or genetic basis; this is the conclusion of scientists who worked on the
Human Genome Project and is the official position of the American Socio-
logical Association.4
I agree with the understanding that prevails in U.S.
sociology that race is a powerful social construction that has far-reaching con-
sequences for inequalities of all kinds. De-essentializing race is important
because essentialism is the basis of oppression and racialism. According to
Kwame Anthony Appiah, racialism is the belief "that there are heritable
characteristics possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide
them into a small set of races, in such a way that all of the members of
these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do
not share with members of any other races."5
Paradoxically, however, from
a social science perspective racialism will be overcome only when we rec-
ognize how it is relevant for understanding existing racial differences in
social, cultural, economic, health, and other outcomes. In that sense, I
believe that we must acknowledge race, just as we do gender, as an ideo-
logically contested social construction. This is a prime vehicle for progres-
sive social change.
Therefore, the repudiation of essentialism does not preclude the view
that there are differences between black and white culture owing to blacks'
and whites' different structural positions and blacks' ongoing historical
struggle to achieve equality. Oppression has real consequences both for
oppressed people and for the oppressors. One of the most astute observers
of the dynamics and effects of oppression in the United States was W. E. B.
Du Bois. Writing a century ago and drawing on his training in Berlin, Du
Bois described the phenomenological and experiential aspects of racial
oppression.6
To explain the distinctive experience of being black in the United
States, Du Bois used the metaphor of "the veil" and described how blacks
experience "twoness." His rich conceptualizations are difficult to summa-
rize, but my own interpretation of the veil is that it is the symbol and objec-
tification of the exclusion of blacks from white society. The veil is also a
screen that whites cannot easily penetrate and that therefore shields black

culture. Du Bois describes this culture in various ways, drawing from his
understanding that the black experience includes the qualities of idealism,
faith, collective struggle, and high aspirations. My interpretation of Du Bois's
concept of twoness is that blacks learn white culture in order to protect them-
selves and to navigate in white society while participating in their own com-
munities and social institutions.7
On the other hand, whites' privileges con-
strict their own ability to perceive the ominous aspects of racialized power,
and this impairs their consciousness of the full range of human experience.
One of the earliest writers to consider the complexities of whites'
moral quandary in the United States was Alexis de Tocqueville. Writing
after his 1831 visit to the United States, he contended that the "calamity"
white Americans would face after the abolition of slavery would be racial
prejudice of a very high order that would be exceedingly difficult to cure.8
Race relations and racism in the United States have many layers of com-
plexity. I started this study with the objective of understanding how a plu-
ralistic civil society and multicultural public spaces can emerge that reflect
the dynamic demographic composition of the nation.
The Euro-centered and Western biases that dominated Americans'
views during earlier periods of high immigration, around 1880 to 1910,
made it possible to sustain Anglo-dominated social institutions. Germans,
Norwegians, Italians, Russians, and others privatized their cultures and par-
ticipated in public life as white Americans as they assimilated into work
organizations, political life, and communities.
Liberalism
Along with the slave trade and colonization, the nascent political and social
doctrine of liberalism developed in England and other European nations. This
doctrine accompanied slavery in the United States. Yet it was primarily in the
United States that political and social strands of liberalism became con-
founded with ideas about ownership and economic rights, which in turn laid
the foundations for tenacious racism and a racial hierarchy. Why was this so?
Two general interpretations emphasizing the importance of ideas and ideol-
ogy address this puzzle. The first is that the Hobbesian version of liberalism
prevailed over the Lockean version in the nineteenth century. More specifi-
cally, economic rights became central in early industrial capitalism, and in a
crude sense liberalism became the cover of legitimacy for colonists and
slaveholders. According to this interpretation, it was the economic interests of
colonists and slave owners, and therefore the economic interests of nations as
well, that helped to legitimize a doctrine of white supremacy. This interpre-
tation stresses that liberalism is a doctrine about economic rights.9
The other interpretation draws on the Lockean conception of liberalism
that prevailed in political theory in the late eighteenth century; it stresses

the social dimensions of rights. Specifically, this conception is about the
importance of individualism, universalism, rationality, and reason. While
it did not justify white supremacy, it did assume that those who were
"underdeveloped" would have to emulate and adopt the ways of "devel-
oped" people.10
This liberal doctrine about universalism, rationality, and reason, which
predated U.S. independence from England, is most clearly articulated in the
Bill of Rights and has recently been infused with the individualistic ethos
of late capitalism. The doctrine is now under strain as the peoples of new
nations, freed from colonial rule, are finding that their own cultural and
social identities are not those of Europeans or Americans, and as the expan-
sion of capitalism brings on frighteningly high levels of economic inequal-
ity throughout the world. Accompanying these shifts are intense scrutiny of
the term underdeveloped and increasing criticism of the ruthless exploita-
tion of labor by multinational firms in countries on the periphery of
advanced capitalism.
Whites in the United States interrogate and judge others from their own
perspective, unaware that others may not share that perspective. Whites fail
to be reflective about the privileges they enjoy, the power they possess, the
entitlements they claim, and the extent to which their institutions dominate
others. The suggestion that whites routinely oppress others is at odds with
white Americans' conception of themselves as being tolerant of the under-
privileged and with their pride in the nation's historical experiences with
the assimilation of immigrants. However, white Americans fail the test
when it comes to people of color, especially American blacks, Latinos, and
Native Americans. The national story about tolerance and assimilation is an
account mostly about European immigrants, and even then the story is more
coherent when the Catholic Irish, Sicilians, Muslims, and some other
groups are excluded from the narrative.
Racist thinking rests on a ludicrous contradiction. Racists believe that
blacks do not strive to achieve, but they criticize blacks who do strive to
achieve. They contend that blacks do not have initiative and do not apply
themselves, but they treat blacks as though they are not ready for responsi-
bility and react as though assertive blacks are uppity and do not know their
place. Black adolescents with whom I have talked describe the strategies
they deliberately use to give the impression that they are neither under-
motivated nor overmotivated, that they strive neither too little nor too much.
As a result of instabilities in the economy and high rates of immigra-
tion, rapid changes are occurring in the United States. Among white college
students with whom I discussed race and racial differences, there was
greater reflectivity compared with even a decade ago, but also considerable
confusion. I can draw only on anecdotes to describe this change, however,
as the surveys have not yet been carried out to support the observations I
have made about my discussions with students on college campuses.

The Study in Historical Context
This book is about the cohort of young people mostly born in 1974 and com-
pleting high school in 1992. As I was doing this research from the late 1990s
through 2002, I devoted considerable effort to reconstruct my own experi-
ences with college students in this cohort, as well as with slightly younger
and older students. Teaching at Hunter College, New York University, and the
State University of New York in Albany in the 1980s, I was aware of the
stark differences between Hunter students and those at the other two schools.
Economic struggles facing the Hunter students took precedence over racial
differences, although being beautiful and black was as important as being
determined and female. At NYU and Albany, middle-class black students did
not articulate, at least in my classes, anything about having distinctive iden-
tities, and middle-class white students considered themselves color blind,
something about which I have more to say in Chapter 2. In the late 1980s and
early 1990s, black students began to sit at the front of the class, lead off in
discussions, and outnumber white students in my office hours.
These were the years in which Black Studies, African American Stud-
ies, and African Studies programs were beginning to mature. On the Chapel
Hill campus of the University of North Carolina (UNC), and no doubt else-
where, these programs provided marvelous intellectual opportunities for
our black students and greatly enhanced their confidence. And this was
about the time that many of the NELS seniors were starting college.
Blacks, and stigmatized minorities generally, must negotiate dominant
institutions and learn the mainstream culture. It is, therefore, socially and
psychologically important for black adolescents to protect their own culture
and to nurture those aspects of that culture that fit them especially well. For
example, it is important for black adolescents in high school and college to
learn about the beauty and distinctiveness of gospel and other music of the
black church, to encounter the complex tradition of contemporary black lit-
erature and its roots, to keep up with the rapid changes in urban black
music, and to reaffirm African styles of dress and coiffure.
By the early 1990s black culture, especially music, slang, and stylized
mannerisms, had begun to be cool, and many white adolescents, puzzled
perhaps as to why black culture was considered subordinate by white
adults, began imitating black styles—from hip-hop to handshakes, from the
prison-pants look to dreadlocks and Malcolm X watch fobs. Many white
parents, teachers, and school administrators became alarmed, concluding
that white youth were under the "bad influence" of black youth. The con-
sequences of these perceptions, in the aggregate, fueled the school-choice,
private-school, and homeschooling movements and accelerated the rate of
white segregation. Had more white and black youth had an opportunity to
work out cross-cultural understandings during this period, U.S. public cul-
ture today might be more vibrant and civil than it is.

Some educators began to recognize that U.S. schooling was becoming
increasingly impoverished as schools and neighborhoods became highly
segregated and U.S. culture was polarized. There was growing concern in
some communities and schools that racial polarization was becoming
alarmingly high, and this led to a variety of experiments to counteract it.
Many reform experiments of the 1990s remain a story as yet untold.11
These experiments included the establishment of community-school part-
nerships, charter schools, magnet high schools in large cities, and integrated
learning environments in predominately black and minority neighborhoods.
Although these programs helped to promote multicultural curricula and
opportunities for interracial contact, they failed to generally promote inter-
cultural pluralism, at least on any broad scale.
College students sometimes discuss with me the discontinuities be-
tween their experiences in high schools with student bodies that were sep-
arate-though-integrated (as distinct from separate-and-nonintegrated) and
their experiences as young adults in university settings. White and black
students who attended multiracial schools, even those with a multicultural
emphasis, describe the lack of genuine intergroup contact, particularly in
large schools in which elaborate tracking systems kept racial groups mostly
separate.
At an early fall orientation camp, I talked with a white college fresh-
man who said that because he had grown up in a mostly white and Asian
suburb of a large southern city and had attended white elementary schools,
he had chosen to attend the city's downtown magnet school instead of
another school closer to his home that was predominately white. However,
he said, his classes were so segregated because of tracking policies that he
had few close contacts with black students and no black friends. He had
decided to attend UNC because of its reputation as a good university for
both blacks and whites. Although he is unusually articulate, this student is
not entirely atypical of white students these days. While poverty, disadvan-
tage, and low achievement remain largely color coded in the United States,
in the South and in the nation as a whole white students are increasingly
searching for more varied expressions of culture. For this reason, race figures
into many class discussions and into campus life generally these days. White
students are searching for schools with students of ethnicities other than their
own, and this, I believe, will help to promote a more pluralistic and openly
democratic society, as well as to liberate white students from the bondage
of late-twentieth-century liberalism.
Some remarkable class discussions in recent years indicate to me that
black-white relations are dynamic and that increasingly students wish to
explore issues related to racial identities as well as racial differences. Stu-
dents in one of my classes put on an outdoor campus performance of
Mitchell Duneier's Sidewalk,12
an ethnographic account of black male street

vendors and panhandlers in New York City. We dressed our parts, and some
panhandled or vended for UNICEF, while others harassed the panhandlers.
As it turned out, many black students chose white parts—police officers,
business people, and residents—and white, Middle Eastern, and Asian stu-
dents took black parts. With expert coaching, an East Indian student who
had grown up in Liberia mastered a black Brooklyn dialect. With a few
props, including an oversized coat and cap, this student might easily have
been taken by a casual observer as a New York City panhandler.
A southern African American student who had been mostly responsible
for coordinating the behind-the-scenes activities for the improvised perform-
ance played the role of Mitch Duneier, the ethnographer-sociologist-author.
He did so with extraordinary savoir faire while also giving "stage direc-
tions" whenever the performance began to stall a little. At the next class
meeting, one student volunteered to facilitate the class discussion about the
performance and what students had gotten out of it. During that discussion
a white student who had played a black role remarked how difficult it must
be to maintain dignity and humanness while working the streets. A black
student who had played the part of a white policeman remarked about the
strangeness of "being white" and bossing around "whitey"—namely, whites
miming homeless blacks. Collectively, we had turned a corner, although it
is true that not everyone had made the turn.
When a white student in another class of mine remarked that "Mexi-
cans farmworkers don't use initiative," several white students responded at
once with disapproval. Not only did they disagree with his summarily judg-
mental statement, but they countered his premise with details: the working
and living conditions of farmworkers, the problems of seasonal employ-
ment, the financial value of workers' remittance payments, the health haz-
ards of pesticides, the lack of medical care, and the effects of migratory
work on family lives. I only had to glance at the student I considered the
wisest in the class—a returning college student, a somewhat older black
male—to confirm my hunch about this exchange. A big grin was on his
face, and up went his thumb in the air for me to see. I knew that we had
turned another corner, although it is true that—as in the earlier semester—
not everyone had made the turn. I had seen extraordinary transformations
take place in our southern university in the past decade. A motive for doing
this research was to gain leverage on the positive changes I had seen among
many of our white college students during the previous few years.
However, I do not wish to gloss over the problems. White students
exclude black students from informal networks and groups that serve such
purposes as sharing information. Whites have traditionally monopolized
such information in predominately white universities, including lore about
courses and student government. Of course, black students also exclude white
students from their networks and groups, but it is more about preserving their

autonomy than about monopolizing resources that other students would
wish to access. White students interrupt black students in classroom dis-
cussions, and sometimes a white student says things to a black student that
conveys the belief that the black student comes from a poor or female-
headed household. Such generalizations and assumptions are insulting, and
outside of class black students deal with it by drawing on a repertoire of
jokes. Teaching during the summer in classes with all nonwhite students
helped immensely to raise my awareness of the healthy yet careful and per-
ceptive ways students of color respond to slights and insults. It is not easy.
In Chapter 2,1 will develop the themes about historical change and lib-
eralism that I have briefly mentioned here, and in Chapter 3,1 will draw on
other studies as well as our own to provide some descriptive background
for the queries that are posed in the remaining chapters. In the next sections
of this chapter, I will describe the data and the research procedures, partic-
ularly stressing the usefulness of contextual or multilevel analysis. Though
multilevel analysis is intuitively clear to social scientists because of our
long-standing interest in the macro-micro intersections in social life, it is
not everyone's cup of tea. Like statistical methods in general, it is analyti-
cal, abstracting dimensions of variation from social reality and processes,
and it therefore denies holistic realism to social life and processes. How-
ever, quantitative research that uses statistical methodologies is valuable,
if not essential, for testing the insights of ethnographers through the use of
large samples and controlling for factors that offer alternative explanations
for what is being examined or explained.
Before I review the major statistical procedures used in this study and
summarize the datasets, I will clarify how ethnographic and quantitative
research traditions helped to motivate both this study as a whole and the
division of responsibilities within the research team that composed Re-
searching Adolescent Pathways (RAP).
Research Questions, Research Process, and Collaboration
Quantitative and Ethnographic Research Traditions
and the Role of Critical Theory
Some research topics lend themselves particularly well to interactive re-
search processes that require the interests and skills of both ethnographers
and quantitative researchers. The reason I started the present study, under
the umbrella of RAP, was that I was challenged by the idea of bridging two
research traditions that flourished in the mid-1990s but were relatively
independent of one another. Sociology of education is an older, established

The Study: Theory and Methods
field in the United States and has recently benefited from, and indeed has
advanced, contextual analyses using multilevel statistical techniques. Con-
textual analysis is ideally suited to examining how outcomes of students are
affected by their school and classroom characteristics when taking into
account their family and other background characteristics. Maureen T. Hal-
linan and her collaborators and Alan C. Kerckhoff provided the early
conceptual foundations for subsequent statistical advances in multilevel
analysis by focusing on school organization and its impact on student out-
comes.13
This sociology of education tradition best lends itself to analyzing
individual-level and school-level characteristics.
Study of race and ethnicity was vitalized in the 1990s and accompanied
much interest in the role of cultural differences in families and communities.
Some of this work on youth was carried out by anthropologists who com-
bined empirical analyses with qualitative techniques, such as Carola and
Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, and some was pursued by sociologists who used
large samples and combined description with analytical techniques, such as
Rubén G. Rumbaut, Alejandro Portes, and Grace Kao and her collaborators.14
Working within both traditions in this study of adolescents poses two
interesting challenges. First, cultural orientations and identities are difficult
to incorporate into statistical analyses. The values of the variable race or
ethnicity are easy to use as dichotomies or categorical variables in, for
example, regression analyses, but they are difficult to employ within an
interpretative framework that retains the rigorous assumptions of statistical
analysis. Second, while ethnographic researchers recognize the importance
of controlling for confounding variables in, say, a study of adolescent out-
comes, social class, and English-language skills, it is difficult to take many
of them into account simultaneously because of the small numbers of cases
in most such ethnographic studies. However, this ethnographic tradition is,
in my view, every bit as rigorous as quantitative research because of the
care ethnographic researchers take to ensure that their conclusions are
robust. Ethnographers' studies require rigorous logic and thoughtfulness
about possible unexplored bias.
Critical theory is different from the quantitative and qualitative tradi-
tions in that it starts with the premise that the social sciences, just as the
humanities, are rooted in a system of meanings and values. It is often the
case, according to critical theorists, that we fail to examine what these
meanings and values are. That is, we uncritically accept our own identi-
ties—our gender, race, class, and citizenship—and privilege these identities
in our work without scrutiny or reflection. Sociology has long had a lively
critical tradition that stressed the viciousness of elites and the exercise of
class power, represented in, for example, the works of Karl Marx, C. Wright
Mills, and Robert and Helen Lynd. Currently, the heirs of the critical tradition

in sociology focus especially on the harms of white privilege and power,
and they include, for example, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Joe R. Feagin and
Hernán Vera, David Wellman, Walda Katz-Fishman, Patricia Hill Collins,
and Howard Winant. Critical race theory encourages whites to reflect on
their privileges and advantages. For this research I chose to carry out quan-
titative analyses while incorporating the insights and conclusions of ethno-
graphic, qualitative researchers into the study design and asking questions
from the perspective of critical theory.
Contextual Analysis, Data, Measurement Issues
Contextual Analysis
In many analyses of sociological problems, individuals are considered as
embedded in contexts—as members of groups, organizations, or networks,
or as people living with others in the same locale or community. From an
analytical point of view, a context is relevant only when many share it. For
example, the extended family, peer group, and summer camp may all be
important contexts for a young person, but to study these contexts one
needs a sufficient number of members to study whether the context affects
everyone the same way or affects some individuals differently than others.
In formal models, researchers study within-group (individual) variation,
between-group (contextual) variation, and the extent to which there are
cross-level effects and to which social context affects all individuals or only
some. Analyzing cross-level effects helps us to distinguish the uncondi-
tional effects of social context from the conditional effects that impact only
some individuals because of their particular characteristics. A simple exam-
ple is that extremely hot weather may be unhealthy for all people, but espe-
cially for tiny babies and older people. More generally, contextual analysis
(also called multilevel or hierarchical level modeling) focuses on the effects
of the social context on individual outcomes.15
Researchers in the sociology
of education have made considerable use of multilevel analyses because
schools and residential neighborhoods are unambiguous contexts for young
people.16
For interested readers, there are some excellent descriptions of the
procedures and techniques of multilevel analysis, sometimes referred to as
hierarchical level models (HLM).17
To give a hypothetical example, let us suppose that we wish to do a
study of students' differing involvement in various activities on college
campuses. To do this study we would need to have a representative sample
of colleges and within each a representative sample of students. At the con-
text level, the mean level of involvement, hypothetically, probably relates
to college size, whether the college is located in a city or not, and, say,

whether it is a private or a public college. At the individual level, it is plau-
sible that the level of involvement depends on gender, race, and ethnicity,
whether the student attends school full-time or part-time, and, say, the stu-
dent's social class. The procedural steps for a multilevel analysis are as fol-
lows: (1) obtain an individual-level estimate predicting student involvement
from regressions within each school, using individual-level variables; (2)
obtain a context-level estimate predicting mean level of student involve-
ment across all colleges, using college-level variables; (3) obtain an esti-
mate of the extent to which individual-level involvement is predicted by
individual-level variables and by school-level variables, independently of
each other; and (4) obtain estimates of the extent to which school-level
characteristics affect individuals' levels of involvement differently, depend-
ing on individuals' own characteristics.
The final step (4) is termed "slopes as outcomes" or "cross-level inter-
actions." It is the most interesting step because it addresses the question of
whether contextual effects are uniform for different individuals. In my
example, we might learn that part-time students are less involved in school
activities generally but that the larger the college is, the greater the effect of
being a part-time student. We might also learn that average involvement is
higher in private schools, but that students with high socioeconomic back-
grounds are more involved than others are, regardless of whether the school
is private or public.
Although the principles of contextual analyses are hardly new, the main
technical problem that has faced researchers has been that of estimating
standard errors within the contextual unit. The elements within a unit typi-
cally have yielded a distribution with underestimated standard errors, and it
is only within the last decade or so that computer programs have been
developed to correct for this problem. We used the HLM program created
by Anthony S. Bryk and Stephen W. Raudenbush.18
Analysts make certain decisions depending on their assumptions, and it
is useful to review here the assumptions that I made. In our work, we stan-
dardized the contextual variables so that their values were each measured in
standard deviation units from their mean. This allowed for the size of the
effects to be comparable across the context measures.19
Another set of
decisions involved how we would make comparisons for individuals and
interpret individual-level effects. In some instances we did not adjust indi-
vidual values, but left them to vary as uncentered variables. In other appli-
cations, it was appropriate to compare individuals to the entire sample or to
compare individuals within each given context. When the comparison was
within the entire sample, we used population centering; that is, we meas-
ured the degree of deviation from the grand mean. When the comparison
was within the context, we used group centering; that is, we measured the
degree of deviation from the context (school or neighborhood) mean.

When we wanted to evaluate the interaction between contextual vari-
ables and individual variables, we used a random intercept, one with a ran-
domly distributed error term, so that the intercept varied across schools or
neighborhoods. When we were not interested in these interactions or when
a random intercept would cause instabilities, we left the intercept as fixed,
with no error term, so that the intercept was constant across all schools. For
example, if we were interested in how school size affects individuals'
involvement in campus activities depending on their ethnicity, we would
treat ethnicity as having a random intercept. If we were not interested in
this, we gained statistical flexibility by defining ethnicity as a fixed vari-
able. Another issue relates to the number of individual respondents required
within a context to regard the contextual unit as one that has sufficient
internal variation. Following conventional guidelines we included a case if
there were at least five respondents.20
We used sample weights at each of the individual and context levels,
according to standard practice in education research,21
except in multilevel
nonlinear (binomial and multinomial) analyses, in which second-level data
cannot be weighted according to the sample design.22
My solution for non-
linear analyses was to use equal-weighted individual and school data and to
replicate individual-level analyses with weighted data. To reassure our-
selves that the results were robust, we carried out one-level and two-level
analyses when possible with both weighted and unweighted data. With such
large numbers of cases we found that the results led to identical conclusions
across both specifications.
A final general point is that the measurement solution for some com-
plex indicators, such as population diversity, is principal components analy-
sis. This involves carrying out a factor analysis on all of the items consid-
ered as measures of the indicator. Such a factor analysis produces factors,
or dimensions, and what is essentially a set of correlations—loadings—
between each item and each factor.23
For the purpose of illustration, let us
suppose a researcher was interested in measuring healthy lifestyle choices.
The researcher could carry out a principal components analysis of items
that reflect healthy and unhealthy lifestyle choices. Hypothetically, the
first dimension may be defined by items, such as eating vegetables and
drinking milk, that have high positive loadings and by items, such as eat-
ing pizza and drinking Coke, that have high negative loadings. That means
that people who eat vegetables also tend to drink milk, and those who eat
pizza also tend to drink Coke. This then defines our first dimension. But
independent of the first dimension there may be yet a second or even more
dimensions. Let us say we find the makings of a second dimension for
which walking daily has a high positive loading and watching television
has a high negative loading. If my hunches are correct, then, healthy
lifestyle choices are not cut of one cloth, but actually involve two relatively

independent dimensions. One dimension has to do with eating and the other
has to do with exercise.
To obtain a score for each individual on the first dimension, the healthy
eating scale, the individual's response on each item is multiplied by the
item's loading on the first dimension. These product values are then added
up. The same procedure applied to all of the items for the second dimension
would yield individual scores on a scale for healthy exercise lifestyle. In
other words, the conceptual framework helps to select the items that go into
the scale, and the principal components analysis both yields an empirical
indication of whether the concept can be operationalized and provides the
procedures for assigning scores.
Other statistical techniques were also employed, including multiple
classification analysis (a specialized form of variance analysis) and corre-
spondence analysis. I describe them when they are introduced in given
chapters.
Data
The first wave or base year of NELS data collection was in 1988, with
follow-ups of the same students in 1990, 1992, and 1994. That is, the
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) surveyed youths in their
eighth, tenth, and twelfth grades, and two years after their scheduled high
school graduation. (Another follow-up occurred in 2000 but was not
included in our analyses.) NCES designed the study as a nationally repre-
sentative sample of eighth graders, and the study initially included 26,000
students. In the base year, there were questionnaires for students, teachers,
parents, and school principals. Teachers and school administrators were
resurveyed in the 1990 and 1992 waves, and parents in 1992.
The HSES sample comprises the sample in the first follow-up in 1990 of
eighth-grade NELS students who attended schools in the thirty largest U.S.
metropolitan areas. In order to achieve sufficient intraschool variability, this
sample was augmented with a random sample of students from the same
schools. Like NELS, HSES has data for students, teachers, and school admin-
istrators from 1990 and 1992, and parents from 1992. The student and school
weights that we used permit generalizing to the 1990 tenth graders who com-
pleted twelfth grade in the schools of these thirty metropolitan areas. This
sampling frame is advantageous for particular analytical problems because
the dataset includes sufficiently large numbers of immigrant, black, and white
students from the largest U.S. central cities and their suburbs. Metropolitan
schools are ideal for many of the study's purposes because of the range of
neighborhood conditions, from very affluent to very poor, and from racially
integrated to highly segregated. That is, there is great within- and between-
context variation at the level of both the school and the neighborhood.

Sources of school data for NELS and HSES include surveys of princi-
pals that accompanied the student surveys, as well as the NCES's Common
Core of Data,24
an annual compilation of information on all schools and a
useful supplement to the information in the principals' survey. NELS is
a public-use dataset, but linkage to schools and neighborhoods requires a
license through the U.S. Department of Education. HSES is available only
as a licensed dataset.
Schools are social contexts for adolescents, and so are neighborhoods.
Depending on the question being asked, we used schools or neighborhoods
and sometimes both in multilevel analyses. There is a long-standing debate
about how to define the boundaries of communities and neighborhoods.25
Ideally, of course, we would be able to combine ecological data for neigh-
borhoods from secondary sources with additional data from primary
sources—namely, residents' accounts of how they define and characterize
their neighborhoods—but this is prohibitive for any large-scale survey. The
conventional solution is to use the smallest geographical entity possible.
Given the option between school zip codes (provided by the NCES) and
counties, we used zip codes to define communities. We extracted zip code
level data from 1990 census files, acquiring a precise match with the 1990
data on high school tenth graders.26
The black-white comparisons for the NELS students are comparable to
those reported by others using nationally representative samples. The aver-
age income of black households is about half that of white households,27
and the black students live in poorer communities.28
Black students also
have educational disadvantages in that they attend larger schools, on aver-
age, compared with white students (the mean enrollments for the NELS
sample are 1,352 and 1,084, respectively), and they attend schools with
more poor students (the mean percentages in the NELS sample on the free-
lunch program are 32.7 and 15.1, respectively).
In our research we took into account the contrast between growing up
in a poor household and growing up in a nonpoor household—that is,
socioeconomic status (SES), the focus of much social science research.29
We also used indicators of poverty in our analyses at the neighborhood
level. However, we discovered early that the contrasts between the poor and
affluent at the neighborhood level are not always the most important ones;
we singled out the significance of two additional neighborhood dimensions.
One dimension was the extent to which neighborhoods are diverse or rela-
tively uniform in terms of racial and ethnic composition. Diversity offers
unique advantages over homogeneity in that it provides cosmopolitan
opportunities for youngsters. Although we can imagine that most parents,
white and black, believe that young children feel more secure in neighbor-
hoods where other people are similar to themselves, we will show that
teenagers benefit from cross-cultural challenges. The second dimension

was the extent to which race and economic resources confound one another
at the neighborhood level, that is, the extent to which whites have superior
resources and blacks and other nonwhite groups do not.
Measurement Issues
Although we used many variables in only one or a few analyses, we used
other variables in many or all of them. Race and ethnicity, as reported by
students, are categorized as follows: Asian or Pacific Islander; Hispanic;
Black, not of Hispanic origin; and White, not of Hispanic origin. There
were too few American Indians and Alaskan natives to yield stable esti-
mates so we excluded them from analyses of individual groups, but they
were included in counts of the total number of students. Often we excluded
Asians and Pacific Islanders and Hispanics as individual groups because
these groups are highly heterogeneous. There are conventions, although
fuzzy, that suggest that African American and black are synonyms, as are
Hispanic and Latino. Race and ethnic categories are far from clear and
unambiguous when we recognize that race is itself a social construction and
all people have mixed race and ethnic backgrounds. For example, some
Latinos have mostly African origins whereas others have mostly indigenous
or Spanish origins, and virtually all African Americans have white ances-
tors. However, in social settings, a person's account of his or her own race
or ethnic identity tends to be stable and reflect his or her own assessments
as well as others' perceptions. In other words, these distinctions are clear
and unambiguous in the sense that students use categories that are socially
constructed and institutionalized.
The decision about whether or not to contrast poor with nonpoor
households, that is, whether to use socioeconomic status, was often based
on precedents in the literature pertaining to a specific analytical problem,
and sometimes on the results of our exploratory analyses. Socioeconomic
status is a continuous variable that the NCES constructs as a composite of
male and female parents' or guardians' occupation and education30
and
family income. If the students' parents did not complete a parental ques-
tionnaire, the NCES substituted student data to construct the SES compos-
ite. In this case, the NCES used a ranking of material items present in the
household in place of the measure of family income. When we use poor
versus nonpoor, the contrast is between values in the lowest quartile of the
SES measure and values in the top three quartiles.
At both the school and the neighborhood level, we were interested in
racial and ethnic diversity. We employed the Gibbs-Martin Index, which is
widely used in sociological applications.31
It captures the degree of het-
erogeneity in a population when there is a set of mutually exclusive cate-
gories. Another measure that we used to describe neighborhood variation

is consolidated inequality, which captures the extent to which there are
white-nonwhite inequalities in household resources. It matters considerably
to adolescents whether they live in communities in which there are great
white-nonwhite disparities in household resources or in communities in
which there are few disparities. It matters in a different way, of course, to
whites than it does to nonwhites. I define consolidated inequality in Chap-
ter 5, and it is part of the analyses presented in Chapters 5 and 7.
Before I present the results of our various analyses, it is necessary to
ground my observations and assumptions in a larger historical and theoret-
ical framework and to indicate how we tested them, at least in a preliminary
way. This I do in Chapters 2 and 3.
Notes
1. National Center for Education Statistics, National Education Longitudinal
Study (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational
Research and Improvement, 1988-1994), CD-ROM; National Center for Education
Statistics, High School Effectiveness Study (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of
Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 1990-1992), CD-ROM.
2. Amy Stuart Wells and Robert L. Crain, Stepping over the Color Line (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).
3. Immanuel Wallerstein, After Liberalism (New York: New Press, 1995);
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era
(Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2001).
4. American Sociological Association, Task Force Report, "Importance of
Collecting Data and Doing Scientific Research on Race," adopted by the ASA
Council, August 2002.
5. Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Racisms," in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David T.
Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1990), 4—5.
6. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1965
[1903]).
7. Judith R. Blau and Eric S. Brown, "Du Bois and Diasporic Identity: The
Veil and the Unveiling Project," Sociological Theory 19 (2001): 219-233.
8. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1945), 357.
9. See Alan Pendleton Grimes, American Political Thought (New York: Henry
Holt, 1955).
10. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Immanuel
Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein, (New York: The New Press, 2000).
11. See Jeffrey R. Henig, Richard C. Hula, Marion Orr, and Desiree S. Pedscle-
aux, The Color of School Reform (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1999).
12. Mitchell Duneier, Sidewalk (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).
13. Maureen T. Hallinan, ed., The Social Organization of Schools (New York:
Plenum, 1987); Alan C. Kerckhoff, Diverging Pathways (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993).
14. Carola Suärez-Orozco and Marcelo Suärez-Orozco, Transformations: Mi-
gration, Family Life, and Achievement Motivation Among Hispanic Adolescents

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Rubén G. Rumbaut, "The Crucible
Within: Ethnic Identity, Self-Esteem, and Segmented Assimilation Among Children
of Immigrants," International Migration Review 28, no. 4 (1994): 748-794; Alejan-
dro Portes, ed., The New Second Generation (New York: Russell Sage Foundation,
1996); Grace Kao, Marta Tienda, and Barbara Schneider, "Racial and Ethnic Varia-
tion in Academic Performance," Research in Sociology of Education and Socializa-
tion 11 (1996): 263-297.
15. Valerie E. Lee, "Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling to Study Social Con-
text: The Case of School Effects," Educational Psychologist 35, no. 2 (2000):
125-141; Valerie E. Lee and Anthony S. Bryk, "A Multilevel Model of the Social
Distribution of High School Achievement," Sociology of Education 62 (1989):
172-192; Kenneth A. Frank, "Quantitative Methods for Studying Social Context in
Multilevel and Through Interpersonal Relations," Review of Educational Research
23 (1998): 171-216; Anthony S. Bryk and Yeow Meng Thum, "The Effects of High
School Organization on Dropping Out." American Education Research Journal 26,
no. 3 (1989): 353-383.
16. Anthony S. Bryk and Stephen W. Raudenbush, Hierarchical Linear Models
(Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1992); Ita Kreft and Jan de Leeuw, Introducing Mul-
tilevel Modeling (London: Sage, 1998); Tom Snijders and Roel Bosker, Multilevel
Analysis: An Introduction to Basic and Advanced Multilevel Modeling (London:
Sage, 1999).
17. See Anthony S. Bryk, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Richard T. Congdon,
HLM: Hierarchical Linear and Nonlinear Modeling with the HLM/2L and HLM/3L
Programs (Chicago: Scientific Software International, 1996); Stephen W. Rauden-
bush, Anthony S. Bryk, Yuk Fail Cheong, and Richard T. Congdon Jr., HLM Man-
ual (Lincolnwood, 111.: Scientific Software International, 2000).
18. Carolyn L. Arnold, "Methods, Plainly Speaking: An Introduction to Hier-
archical Linear Models," Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Devel-
opment 25, no. 1 (1992): 58-90.
19. Valerie E. Lee, Todd K. Chow-Hoy, David K. Burkam, Douglas Geverdt,
and Becky A. Smerdon, "Sector Differences in High School Course Taking," Soci-
ology of Education 71 (1998): 314-335.
20. Weights are applied for the purpose of generalizing to the larger population,
which in this study is the nation's eighth graders in 1988, and for HSES is the pop-
ulation of tenth graders in 1990 attending school in the thirty largest metropolitan
areas. Nevertheless, weighting is somewhat controversial because of the possibility
that sampling errors confound estimated effects; see Christopher Winship and Larry
Radbill, "Sampling Weights and Regression Analysis," Sociological Methods and
Research 23, no. 2 (1994): 230-257.
21. Guang Guo and Hongxin Zhao, "Multilevel Modeling for Binary Data,"
Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 441-462.
22. See George H. Dunteman, Principal Components Analysis (Newbury Park,
Calif.: Sage, 1989).
23. National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improve-
ment, 1991), CD-ROM.
24. Scott Greer, "Urbanism Reconsidered: A Comparative Study of Local
Areas in a Metropolis," American Sociological Review 21 (1956): 19-25.
25. The source of zip code data is the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of
Population and Housing, 1990: Summary Tape File 3B [data for zip codes] (Wash-
ington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1991).

26. The mean income for NELS black households is $13,749; that for NELS
white households is $27,500. This information is not available in HSES. Questions
about household composition were phrased differently in the NELS and HSES sur-
veys and are therefore difficult to compare. About equal percentages of black and
white NELS students reported that they lived in a single-parent household, 14 per-
cent for whites and 15 percent for blacks. HSES parents were asked about the num-
ber of adults in the household, and 16 percent of whites and 47 percent of blacks
reported one adult in the household. These contrasts may be explained by the dif-
ferences in the wording of the question, the sources of the answers, and actual dif-
ferences between metropolitan households and those throughout the nation.
27. For the metropolitan HSES sample, the black and white means are signifi-
cantly different on major indications (from the US census) of neighborhood disad-
vantage: percent unemployed, 8.8 and 4.9, respectively; percent single-parent fam-
ilies, 35.7 and 17.7; percent in poverty, 17.0 and 7.5; and per capita income,
$13,478 and $19,132. However, blacks live in more diverse neighborhoods than
whites. On leading indicators of neighborhood diversity, the means for blacks and
whites are: percent of neighborhood residents foreign-born, 17.1 and 9.2, respec-
tively; and percent bilingual adults, 17.8 and 11.1. The mean differences for the
NELS sample are not as pronounced, but they are comparable.
28. For example, see Sheldon Danziger and Jane Waldfogel, ed., Securing the
Future (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000).
29. In Chapter 6, we use biological parents. We discovered through replication
that however measured, family structure, a control variable, had trivial effects on
our dependent variables.
30. The equation for the Gibbs-Martin Index is 1 where the pi is the per-
cent in each category; see Jack P. Gibbs and Walter T. Martin, "Urbanization, Tech-
nology, and the Division of Labor," American Sociological Review 26 (1962):
667-677.

ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES
AND MORAL FENCES
Compared with nonwhite children, white children grow up with abundant
opportunities and material advantages and have considerable freedom to
enjoy their years of childhood. They generally have access to relatively
good, if not excellent, schools with qualified teachers, up-to-date computer
and science labs, enriched curricula, and career counseling and other serv-
ices. These early educational opportunities prepare them for college, and
white children anticipate having rewarding jobs and financial security. Of
course, not all white children are equally privileged, but collectively they
have great advantages over children of color.
It is easy to make a persuasive case for the importance of greater equal-
ity of educational opportunities. Talent loss in the school years leads to tal-
ent loss in adulthood, and to limited access to productive employment, and
these are both personal and societal harms. Good educational experiences in
elementary and secondary schools usually lead to postsecondary training, a
virtual necessity in the contemporary economy. Americans pride themselves
on a national tradition of providing schooling opportunities for children from
all class backgrounds—for children of economically disadvantaged homes as
well as for children of middle-class and affluent homes. This is fair to indi-
viduals, and it is important for the vitality of a democratic society.
However, owing to the character of racial stratification in the United
States, the problem is not simply one of creating educational opportunities
for the economically disadvantaged, but also one of creating educational
opportunities for children of color. White Americans have difficulty under-
standing this challenge because they trace their own economic success to
their personal efforts and often fail to understand the nature of entrenched
institutional racism and the extent to which their skin color is responsible
for their advantaged position.
My thesis is not simply that racial practices harm youth of color; rather, it
is that racial practices harm both white youth and youth of color. I consider a
21

variety of consequences of such practices, including their effect on stu-
dents' values and attitudes, behavioral problems, educational aspirations,
and likelihood to enroll in college. I also consider the extent to which racial
and ethnic diversity in schools and neighborhoods benefit youngsters. Con-
siderable research has shown that when schools affirm the distinctive worth
of children's racial and ethnic backgrounds, minority children's self-esteem
and confidence is enhanced, thereby promoting their engagement with
school.1
There is powerful evidence that multicultural education and diverse,
pluralistic environments benefit nonwhite children.2
The research findings
presented in this book support that conclusion, but I also show that multi-
cultural educational settings and pluralistic environments benefit white
children as well.
White youth, paradoxically, live in a precarious world. They are
expected by their parents and relatives to "do better" than their brown and
black classmates, and, indeed, the system works best for them. However,
many white American youth recognize the contradictions that underlie
racialized hierarchies and are themselves unsure whether or not they merit
what they receive. Even if this assertion assumes too much about the moral
conscience or social awareness of white adolescents, I assert that many
white students are aware that students of color possess underrecognized and
underrewarded talents and skills. Moreover, white teen culture reflects far
more the rich textures, sounds, and images of diversity than do American
schools. My general argument is that white and nonwhite students fare bet-
ter in pluralistic educational settings than in monocultural ones. As
philosopher Amy Gutmann encourages us to consider, greater pluralism in
U.S. schools would advance a more inclusive democracy and enhance the
quality of U.S. civil society.3
The Study Cohort
The members of any age cohort have much in common because they expe-
rience the same major events and the same large-scale social, economic,
and political transformations at the same time and at the same age. For
example, all U.S. children who grew up during the Great Depression,
regardless of differences among them, shared experiences of deprivation
and frugality that affected their attitudes and perceptions throughout their
adult lives.4
Likewise, the youths of the cohort of 1974 share certain experiences,
two of which are particularly notable. The first is the transition from the
Old Economy to the New Economy that was part of the global economic
restructuring of production and labor. It entailed massive changes in work

Economic Inequalities and Moral Fences 23
organization and communications technologies, and it led to the expansion
of the service sector. Beginning in the early 1970s, this transition affected
all U.S. households to some degree.
The second shared experience is the transformation in black-white rela-
tions after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although the
NELS children were born a decade later, they experienced the confusing
attempts to implement civil rights legislation, notably affirmative action
and busing and other efforts to integrate schools. During this era there was
a shift in white American attitudes and values that was in part a response to
the demands of the emerging economy and in part a response to the for-
malization of rights for African Americans.
Economic Transformation
The New Economy saw plant closings, downsizing, mergers, and rapid tech-
nological change, and these, in turn, were responsible for massive layoffs,
the stagnation of wages, and the deterioration of pension and benefit plans.5
It also entailed a dramatic increase in economic inequality. In the United
States, the salaries and overall compensation of executives increased many
times over while the take-home pay of most workers declined. Overall, the
income of the top-earning 20 percent of Americans increased, and that of
middle-income workers stagnated; the lowest-earning 20 percent of Amer-
icans experienced declining income and growing poverty. A disproportion-
ate percentage of the growing number of poor people were black.
Increases in earnings inequality were accompanied by even greater
increases in the inequality of assets and wealth. In her analysis of the
changing distribution of wealth in the last decades of the twentieth century,
Lisa A. Keister uses separate indicators of net worth (assets) and financial
worth (liquid assets) to estimate changes in wealth distribution in the
United States over time. She describes the dramatically increased concen-
tration of net worth and financial worth through the 1970s, 1980s, and
1990s. By 1995, the top 20 percent of households owned nearly 84 percent
of net worth and 93 percent of financial wealth, whereas the remaining 80
percent of households owned only 16 percent of net worth and 7 percent of
financial wealth.6
Elsewhere, Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro
document the extent to which white households dominated in this dramatic
increase in wealth.7
The economic returns on education increased dramatically in the
1980s. In summing up the change between 1979 and 1989, Richard B. Free-
man and Lawrence F. Katz reported that the pay differential between young
males with a college degree and young males with a high school degree

increased 30 percent. In a typical large city in the late 1980s, a college
graduate earned, on average, about double what a high school graduate
earned.8
Later I will compare earnings and educational attainment for
blacks and whites, but the point I wish to make here is that these economic
transformations created uncertainties for most U.S. families.
With the dismantling of job ladders, company downsizing, and factory
closings, traditional forms of worker solidarity declined and individual
competitiveness increased. As workers lost their pension and benefit plans,
there was growing unease about retirement and financial security. Parents,
quite understandably, were especially eager that their children acquire the
education that "good jobs" increasingly required. Perhaps an indicator of
the overall toll these pressures had on whites was a dramatic upturn in rates
of divorce among whites, accompanied by a tendency to delay marriage.9
I suggest that economic and cultural factors have confounded effects,
and together altered the dynamics of racial prejudice. During much of the
1970s and through the 1980s, as Barbara Ehrenreich describes, low- and
middle-income whites had considerable anxiety that they would lose their
jobs and fall into poverty.10
Because poverty, like welfare, is racialized in
the United States, whites consider it to be the plight of blacks, not of peo-
ple of their own race. This anxiety expressed itself in many ways and per-
haps most especially in vehement opposition to affirmative action programs
and set-aside provisions for minority applicants to colleges and universities.
Yet, in spite of whites' fears about "becoming poor like blacks," white
poverty did not increase substantially during this period. Black poverty did.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act had greatly raised the expectations and
hopes of black Americans, but the economic transformations beginning in
the same decade brought increasing poverty and economic declines that
tragically undercut these expectations. In relative terms, white families did
not experience great material declines, mostly because white mothers took
jobs and white males worked longer hours. However, among low- and mid-
die-income white families there was a perception that the boundary
between themselves and traditionally poor blacks, which once was firm,
had now become weak and porous. Therefore, I conclude, underlying the
racializing processes associated with changes in the economy was whites'
reification of white-black differences and racial categories. The Civil
Rights Act had presumably eradicated the boundary between blacks and
whites, but as whites became increasingly anxious over their own economic
well-being, they engaged in moral fence building to further enhance differ-
ences between themselves and blacks in an effort to distance themselves
from poverty. The group of white and nonwhite youngsters we studied grew
up with special concerns about their education and a changing economy.
During this time, a race-coded line between poor and nonpoor aggravated
racism by whites against nonwhites.

Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 affirmed the legal rights of blacks as individ-
uals without undoing the inequalities of group membership.11
That is, it
prohibited discrimination in employment and made it illegal for public
facilities, including public schools, to exclude people because of their race
or skin color, as well as their gender and nationality. It prescribed the legal
equality of individuals, but had no particular implications for the moral
equality of groups. Whites, in turn, fashioned symbolic and moral fences
between themselves and blacks.
As the NELS children were growing up, adults denied they were racist
while U.S. institutions, as Richard A. Wasserstrom stated, were "infected
with racism."12
To clarify this, I draw from critical race theory, and in par-
ticular from the writings of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, David Carroll Cochran,
Andrew Kemohan, David T. Wellman, and Joe R. Feagin and Hernán Vera.13
Whereas old racism under Jim Crow was a relatively straightforward ideol-
ogy about the superiority of whites that was justified by legal boundaries
separating whites and blacks, in the post-civil rights period whites no longer
have legal grounds on which to make distinctions between themselves and
blacks. The new ideology that emerged was that of color-blindness, which
involves the racialization of attributes that have nothing to do with race. It
allows whites to say they are impartial about race while justifying their
racist attitudes in terms of what they think black people tend to be like.14
Racialization and color-blindness are compatible with traditional U.S. val-
ues relating to liberalism and thus can appear noncontradictory to whites.
Liberalism
In the U.S. context, modern liberalism, which has its roots in English and
Continental doctrine and practice, places great emphasis on the value of free
individual expression and the maintenance of social and political institutions
that support personal freedoms.15
Shifts in liberal thought during the twen-
tieth century, initially accompanying the Great Depression, allowed for the
development of greater state involvement in individuals' lives, but by the
close of the century, there was a major shift back toward laissez-faire liber-
alism, which made it all that easier for racism to infect social institutions.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a liberal piece of legislation in that it
was rooted in the long-standing Western political commitment to individual
rights. Liberalism is by no means incompatible with the idea that there are
natural inequalities and with the conception that some are more gifted than
others. In a capitalist society, economic liberalism and political liberalism
reinforce one another so that freedom to compete accompanies a belief in

the legitimacy of unequal outcomes. The moral standard of liberalism thus
hinges on success, and whether it is a group or an individual that fails to
succeed, the ensuing inequalities are considered fair and just.
Liberalism entails much that is attractive from the perspective of indi-
vidual human rights. In principle, the liberal ideal affirms the impartial and
universalistic treatment of individuals. It is the belief that individuals ought
to receive fair and equal treatment. However, as Iris Marion Young notes,
the impartiality ideal of liberalism leads to the suppression of difference
and provides those with power the basis on which to generalize from their
own experience when making rules and moral evaluations.16
At its core,
liberalism is monoculturalist, and in the U.S. context it is a doctrine about
assimilation. Because it centers attention on individual autonomy and free-
dom, liberal thought tends to support meritocratic principles: the conception
of a person's moral worth depends on natural abilities, talents, and accom-
plishments, which justify unequal returns. The distributional processes that
yield inequalities of wealth, income, and status can therefore be construed
by many people as fair and just. Advantage amplifies inequality and inequal-
ity tends to reinforce advantage. Whites often consider this process impar-
tial. Yet disadvantage has a black face to it.
According to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, color-blind liberalism denies the
relevance of racial differences and thereby fails to recognize the contradic-
tion that the institutions it promotes are fashioned along the lines of white
culture. It furthers the myth that U.S. institutions are the consequence of the
autonomous efforts of individuals, rather than historically evolving arrange-
ments in which particular interests play the dominant role.17
I would also
add that because social life became increasingly easy to analogize in com-
petitive market terms, whites could legitimize superior occupational and
earnings outcomes as being the consequences of many good personal
choices. Thus the racialization of U.S. institutions accompanies the racial-
ization of the boundary between poor people and others. Whites justify
racial inequalities as therefore being fair while considering themselves to
be blind to color.
I depart somewhat from the cultural premises of critical race theory by
contending that large-scale economic changes beginning in the 1970s
played a role in the changing racial dynamics in the United States. While
blacks were experiencing considerable overall losses, most whites failed to
make overall gains and they experienced great anxieties about their jobs
and careers during this period. Still, the initial economic advantages that
whites enjoyed in the early 1970s, at the onset of these economic changes,
allowed them considerable flexibility during the turbulent final decades of
the twentieth century.
In sum, the sources of contemporary racism are complex partly because
they are an expression of whites' anxiety about the uncertainties of the New

Economy. Anxious about their economic well-being, whites recast a seem-
ingly benign set of foundational U.S. values centered on individual success,
using evidence of that success—homeownership, a steady job, a college
diploma—to support their assumptions and claims about their superior
efforts and attitudes.
Later in this chapter, I summarize some historical trends that have
bearing on the changing nature of racial inequality. However, I first provide
an overview of two influential twentieth-century social science contribu-
tions that, in my view, aggravated racism by reifying black and white dif-
ferences in terms of the moral categories of liberalism. Then I consider the
writings of William Julius Wilson, an African American sociologist, who,
though many black intellectuals criticize him for trivializing racism, sensi-
tizes our understanding of racism by historicizing the selective effects of
economic restructuring on blacks and whites.
Twentieth-Century Liberal Social Science
Three prominent social science contributions illustrate how liberal ideas
evolved within the social sciences and influenced public policy on race in
the last decades of the twentieth century. The first two, by James S. Cole-
man and by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, reflect the view that the United
States ought be a single culture and that black assimilation is incomplete.
The third is William Julius Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner
City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Wilson begins by agreeing with
Moynihan that the black inner city is a "tangle of poverty,"18
but his expla-
nation is an economic one, not a cultural one, as he shows that the eco-
nomic restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s had particularly adverse con-
sequences for urban black Americans.
The contrast between Moynihan and Coleman, on the one hand, and
Wilson, on the other, is helpful because their positions illustrate different
aspects of the liberal perspective on racial inequality. Moynihan and Cole-
man asserted that blacks' cultural values impaired their assimilation,
whereas Wilson appealed to the promises of civil rights legislation, namely
those of equal opportunity and racial fairness. Moynihan's and Coleman's
vision of blacks' assimilation persists in popular thought and provides
whites with justification for exclusion and discrimination. Wilson's contri-
bution and its implications are more complex. The Truly Disadvantaged
clarified, as few other social science contributions did, the ways in which
the New Economy systematically disadvantaged blacks. However, Wilson
drew inferences about the cultural consequences of black poverty that dif-
fer little from those of Coleman and Moynihan. In support of his argument
about the development of a cultural underclass, he asserted that poor blacks

"develop behavioral norms that diverge from mainstream areas of life."19
He gave racism short shrift.20
The Liberal Defense of School Segregation
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated a survey to assess the "lack of
availability of equal educational opportunities for individuals by reason of
race, color, religion or national origin in public educational institutions."
Congress commissioned sociologist James S. Coleman to carry out the sur-
vey, and he and his collaborators subsequently produced a report, Equality
of Educational Opportunity, which came to be known simply as the Cole-
man Report.21
Although the congressional mandate was to assess variation
in schooling quality and opportunities for blacks and whites, Coleman and
the members of his research team reframed the question to focus instead on
variation in achievement, or "outputs." They concluded that racial variation
in educational achievement was due not to differences in school practices,
but rather to inadequate parenting. Coleman summarized the conclusions of
the report in this way: "The sources of inequality of educational opportu-
nity appear to lie first in the home itself and the cultural influences imme-
diately surrounding the home; then they lie in the schools' ineffectiveness to
free achievement from the impact of the home."22
In short, according to Coleman and his collaborators, the black family
and the black community, not schools, were responsible for black children's
slow progress. The Coleman Report concluded that differences in the
schools that blacks and whites attended made virtually no difference for
student outcomes. The report surprised courts and educators with its con-
clusion that blacks' schools were not inferior to whites' because there was
abundant evidence that they were. The conclusion disappointed proponents
of school integration and busing. It appalled civil rights advocates who had
witnessed brutal racist practices in the South and increasing segregation in
the North. The report was also controversial among statisticians, some of
whom noted that the statistical analyses did not adequately separate fam-
ily, community, and school effects.23
As subsequent developments have
shown, the methods used by Coleman and his colleagues were flawed.24
Around the time that Congress commissioned the school report, Har-
vard professor of education Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant secre-
tary of the U.S. Department of Labor, analyzed 1960 census data on black
and white households. His 1965 report, The Case for National Action: The
Negro Family, became known as the Moynihan Report. His interpretation
focused on the "pathology" of the black family, namely, the disproportion-
ate number of female-headed households. His argument was that illegiti-
macy and female-headed households, combined with the fatalistic orienta-
tions of black mothers, helped to perpetuate poverty and joblessness. In

other words, like Coleman he alluded to a culture of poverty for which
blacks were themselves responsible. "At the heart of the deterioration of the
fabric of Negro society," he wrote, "is the deterioration of the Negro fam-
ily. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at
the present time."25
As William Ryan noted, Moynihan blamed slum residents and not slum
landlords, the unemployed and not employers who discriminated. He
blamed mothers for their children's lack of school progress and not city
governments that failed to provide adequate funding for schools in black
neighborhoods.26
Moynihan's own data, Andrew Billingsley pointed out,
showed that 75 percent of all black families, the vast majority, were not
female-headed.27
Other studies yielded results that contradicted those
reported by Moynihan. For example, Charles V. Willie found in his research
that family instability was a better predictor of delinquency among whites,
whereas economic insecurity played the greater role among blacks.28
The
press gave considerable coverage to Moynihan's official report but paid lit-
tle attention to Moynihan's critics or to contradictory evidence.29
Both Coleman and Moynihan contrasted mainstream white culture—
with its individualistic achievement and performance orientation—with
black culture and its deficiencies in these respects. Both problematized
black culture and assumed that it would disappear as blacks drew more on
white models. Although Coleman and Moynihan were criticized at the time
for "blaming the victim," social scientists still draw to a certain extent on
the same model, specifically citing characteristics of blacks' families and
communities to account for why black children have lower achievement
test scores and higher school dropout rates. By adopting voluntaristic prem-
ises, the liberal argument makes it seem that cultural values are a matter of
choice and that there are good and bad choices. By adopting assimilation-
ist premises, the liberal model makes assumptions about the moral worth of
cultural values. In these respects, the Coleman and Moynihan studies pro-
vide textbook cases of how white liberals contended with racial inequalities
by emphasizing that black culture was deficient, though remediable. The
goal, according to Moynihan, was to "bring the Negro American to full and
equal sharing in the responsibilities and rewards of citizenship."30
The Liberal Account of Economic Inequalities
Crucial in shaping a social science perspective and public discourse during
the late 1970s and early 1980s were two books by William Julius Wilson.
In The Declining Significance of Race (originally published in 1978) he
contended that fundamental changes in race relations accompanied civil
rights legislation and that there had been an important shift from "black
oppression" to "economic class subordination."31
He also suggested that

economic transformations systematically disadvantaged blacks. In The
Truly Disadvantaged (1987) he returned to the theme of class differences
by focusing on the selective effects of deindustrialization—the initial stages
of the New Economy—on urban blacks. For Wilson it was not racism but
rather the larger structural forces of the national economy that accelerated
the rise in black poverty, joblessness, and homelessness.32
In the early decades of the twentieth century, blacks migrated from the
rural South to northern cities to find jobs in precisely those urban industries
that would close or go elsewhere beginning in the early 1970s. Wilson's
1987 book has had a major impact on all subsequent research on black
poverty, and it continues to do so long after its publication.33
Nevertheless,
The Truly Disadvantaged was controversial. Wilson minimized the impor-
tance of racism and discrimination, undercut arguments for more radical
transformation of U.S. institutions, and allowed little space in his economic
analyses for recognizing black experiences.
I believe racism plays a greater role than Wilson contended. I also sug-
gest that what he described as pathologies, notably delinquency, crime, and
out-of-wedlock births (or what one might consider early family formation),
are normal responses of people who live in neighborhoods in which more
than 40 percent of households are below the poverty line while poverty lev-
els elsewhere in the city are trivial. However, his contributions to an under-
standing of the macroeconomic foundations of black-white inequalities are
tremendously important, and I draw from his analyses in sections of this
chapter.
Wilson described the initial phases of structural dislocation caused by
economic restructuring—the out-migration of industry from the United
States, and especially from old industrial centers in the Northeast and Mid-
west—and the implications for the black and white labor markets. At about
the time that sociologist Wilson wrote The Truly Disadvantaged, economists
were beginning to investigate these dramatic economic dislocations nation-
wide34
and, later, worldwide.35
Wilson's distinctive contribution was to show
how selective the effects of these dislocations were for black workers.
Racial Economic Inequalities
Wilson attributed job loss among urban black males in the 1970s and early
1980s to the dramatic decline of manufacturing and other industries. Firms
were relocating from high-wage communities in the Northeast and Midwest
to low-wage communities in the South and overseas. It has since become
clearer that this was not merely a glitch in the U.S. economy, but instead the
beginning of a long process involving the larger global economy. The process
became evident in the early 1970s with the collapse of the international

financial regulatory system, the emergence of highly efficient technologies
of production (outsourcing, subcontracting, just-in-time ordering, and other
flexible production techniques), the development of new methods of coor-
dinating the global labor force, and rapid advances in telecommunications.
Production industries pursued cheap labor, and cheap labor was available
off U.S. shores.
In the United States, manufacturing dramatically declined and job
growth occurred in the largely nonunion, low-wage service sector. Wages
remained virtually stagnant from the early 1970s through the end of the
century. White families maintained their standard of living through in-
creases in female labor market participation and increases in the number of
hours individuals worked. During this period there was also retrenchment
in federal programs—notably Aid to Families with Dependent Children
(AFDC), but also the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA)
and legal aid assistance programs—that had provided the most vulnerable
with some protections.
In the broadest sense, Wilson's hypothesis is that black workers were
in the wrong place at the wrong time—working as unskilled laborers in
metropolitan industrial establishments in the early 1970s. In my view, he
underestimated the extent to which service-sector employers were discrim-
inatory. Urban blacks, particularly males, were left without job opportuni-
ties at a time when the service sector was growing and the industrial sector
was shrinking. And he minimized the role of racism generally.
My supplementary argument is that although some whites became
extremely rich during this period, most whites experienced job uncertainty
and stagnant or declining earnings. Such uncertainties, combined with the
rhetoric and the realities of intensified competition in labor markets, pro-
vided a platform for racism that was different from that in the earlier econ-
omy and in the years before the 1964 civil rights legislation. It was easier
for whites to blame affirmative action policies for white job loss than to
blame macroeconomic transformations, just as it was easier for whites to
blame blacks for their moral failings than to critique emerging microeco-
nomic practices.
Thus, racism has a psychological component, as whites' displace their
deep-seated anxieties about the changing economy. But racism also draws
from the newly transformed liberal ideology. This liberal ideology, rooted in
long-standing U.S. traditions about work and individual success, is increas-
ingly fashioned by the neoliberal character of the marketplace. Neoliberal-
ism stresses the importance of individual choices and win-or-lose outcomes
and minimizes the importance of fair rules. Losers are considered deficient.
With a focus on the NELS 1974 cohort, it is useful to compare the long-
term trends in black and white incomes, unemployment, and education to
see how people fared through this period of economic transition. My purpose

is to examine the larger context that affected NELS children. The trend
lines for economic indicators and educational attainment are especially use-
ful because they reveal the overall contrasting experiences of black and
white youth as they were growing up. They also provide a background for
analyses I later present on social values and attitudes about education
among black and white adolescents.
Black and White Incomes and Unemployment
Figure 2.1 shows mean incomes in constant dollars for black and white year-
round workers from 1970 to 2000. This is the period in which the New Econ-
omy was transforming U.S. labor markets and the individualistic logic of the
post-civil rights era was unfolding. Mean income—unlike median income—
increased over this period, largely because increasing incomes among the rel-
atively few at the top of the income distribution had a strong effect on the
mean. Especially in the 1990s the incomes of black professionals were grow-
ing, although not nearly as fast as those of white professionals.36
What is important to note, besides the increases in mean incomes, is
the growing gap between white and black mean incomes. In 1970 this gap
was $3,681, and three decades later, in 2000, it was $15,756. The gap grew
at a steady pace. Taking five-year intervals, beginning with 1970, these dol-
lar amounts are: $3,681, $4,887, $6,863, $8,980, $11,488, $12,420, and, as
noted, nearly $16,000 in 2000.37
For another perspective on black-white economic differences, we can
examine unemployment rates. Following William Julius Wilson, I use rates
for males. Figure 2.2 presents unemployment rates for the period of 1972-
2001 for males twenty years of age and older. The shapes of the two curves
tend to be similar since both respond to recessions and the periods of struc-
tural unemployment that economists attribute to plant closings and other
sources of concentrated joblessness. However, black male unemployment
rates always exceed those of white males, and modest increases in white
male unemployment always accompany dramatic surges in black male
unemployment. For example, in 1976 black male unemployment was twice
that of whites, in 1983 it was three times greater, and in 1992 it was again
twice as high. Of particular note is that the smallest gap was around 1975—
before the New Economy had taken hold in most labor markets. Wilson's
conclusions about the unprecedented levels of black male joblessness in the
1980s are evident in this longer time series.
Earnings Discrimination
To restate Wilson's core hypothesis simply: "Blacks were in the wrong
place at the wrong time." That is, they worked in the industries in large

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interests of the others they might infect. But everywhere we are
confronted with this situation: There are no special hospitals for this
class of diseases; few general hospitals receive them in the early,
curable stage; still fewer have special venereal wards; even the
dispensary services are not organized with special adaption to the
needs of venereal cases; few have night classes, so that working
people who go to the dispensary must lose half a day, which often
means the sacrifice of their employment. As a consequence they
resort to quacks or the use of nostrums (secret or quack medicines).
They are not cured, but go on spreading the seeds of contagion.”
This is the condition as far as hospitals are concerned in the matter
of venereal diseases. And in relation to private practice the average
person's position is still more deplorable. Take, for example, the
story of a girl who came under my care some years ago, after
having suffered three years with the disease. She had been refused
attendance in public hospitals in three different cities while she was
working her way to New York. At different times she consulted
physicians, only to learn that to be cured she must be treated
regularly, and to be so treated would require money. Different
estimates were quoted from $150 to $500 for treatment. As the
amount of money left over after she had paid her expenses each
week was never over $2, the possibility of a cure looked hopeless.
She concluded to purchase patent medicines whenever she could,
but her condition became worse, until she was picked up by a
charitable organization, who cared for her until she died. When I
saw her all her hair, eyebrows and eyelashes were gone, her nose
and upper lip were almost entirely eaten away, most of her teeth
were gone—in fact, to try to describe her condition would be almost
impossible.
This is only one case, but there are thousands of syphilitics who are
wandering around unable to pay the prices which the physician asks
to treat this disease. The same can be said of gonorrhoea, and the
same physician who clamors against the prices of the so-called
quack, forgets that the price he asks of the public is exorbitant in the
extreme. So the only course for the individual to take, if he cannot

pay the price, is to remain a menace to society. The physician
assumes no responsibility toward society to find out if the patient is
under treatment elsewhere; the patient can do as he pleases with
his disease when he closes the doctor's door. This, then is the
situation as regards society's attitude toward the venereal subject:
Society seems to take a different attitude towards other contagious
and infectious diseases, such as measles, chicken pox, diphtheria,
etc. In these diseases, a physician has some responsibility toward
society; he must report each case as it comes to his attention, to the
Board of Health, who in turn assume some responsibility by isolating
the disease.
If this is necessary in these comparatively simple diseases, how
much more important should it be to register and isolate patients
suffering from the venereal diseases.

CHAPTER VII.
MENOPAUSE OR CHANGE OF LIFE
In the previous chapter on Puberty, it was stated that the menstrual
function began in the average girl at fifteen years of age and
continued until the forty-fifth or fiftieth year.
At this later age it ceases, together with her sexual or child-bearing
capabilities and is known as the Menopause or Change of Life.
This constitutes a period from the beginning of irregularities in the
appearance of the menstrual flow, until it has actually ceased, which
period usually lasts two and one-half to three years.
Thousands of women know nothing of the period which, like
puberty, they must pass through, but are entirely ignorant of the
process.
It is usual for them to look toward this age with dread and
foreboding; where a little knowledge of the nature of the process
would enable them to enter upon this period physically prepared,
which would insure their safe arrival through this dreaded and much-
feared period.
The greatest change occurring in the woman at this time is that
which goes on in the ovaries. They cease to do their work and
ovulation stops.
The first indication that the woman has, that this is likely to occur, is
by the ceasing of the menses or monthlies.
Ovulation, however, very often continues for several months, even a
year after menstruation has entirely ceased.

The glandular tissues of the uterus, tubes and ovaries degenerate,
which is said to account for the Menopause, and that of the ovaries
occurs later than the tubes and uterus, which explains the
continuance of ovulation after the menses have stopped.
In a few women the Menopause is accompanied by very little or
almost no discomfort at all, just a sudden stopping of the monthlies
announces to them that this period has come.
The majority, however, do not pass through this time so easily, but
suffer for the entire period with one affliction or another.
Among those symptoms most common are flushings or flashes,
which are mostly confined to head, face and neck, are increased by
heat and motion and followed by profuse sweating, giddiness,
backache, headache, sleeplessness, disturbances of digestion like
diarrhoea or constipation, blueness, depression of spirits, shortness
of breath, palpitation and nervous irritability.
But the most alarming symptom of the Menopause is hemorrhage.
This is too often considered lightly and classed with the minor
symptoms of this period.
Whenever there is excessive bleeding, there is surely a cause and
calls for special and immediate attention. It may be caused by an
inflamed condition of the lining of the uterus (womb), ulceration,
general diseases of the heart, lungs and kidneys can also be the
cause of excessive bleeding at this period. Some authorities claim
that it also has its cause in early or profuse menstruation, too
frequent and difficult labors, abortions and alcoholic drinking, but
the most common cause of hemmorhage at this time is cancer. It is
a fact that cancer in women, from the age of 40 to 50 is more
common that at any other age.
Perhaps it is not generally known that cancer is now known to begin
as a local disease, and if taken in time it can be removed so
completely that a radical cure follows. No wonder then, that
hemmorhage should be an alarming symptom, for if care is not
taken and the dreaded disease, cancer, is allowed to take root, the

results are too generally known to dwell upon. At the first signs of
hemorrhages or excessive flow, a woman should place herself under
the care of a gynecologist (specialist in the diseases of woman), just
as a pregnant woman is under the care of a physician until she is
entirely free from the dangers of childbirth.
Women have heretofore looked to this period with dread, on account
of the consequences which neglect has caused. It need not be
dreaded for assuring word comes from prominent physicians who
have made this special period a study, that the natural symptoms of
the Menopause do not portend loss of life, reason or health. It is a
period as natural to the woman as menstruation and with little care,
these symptoms or ailments will cease in a few years, leaving the
woman to enjoy years of good health.
When the period is delayed beyond the fiftieth year, it calls for the
same attention as excessive flow. These are two important signs of
disease, and should receive immediate care. The period is, however,
often brought about at an earlier age than is normal, by mental or
physical shock, illness, operations, etc.
The age at which it occurs often differs with climate, race and
according to Kisch, social relations, who claims, that the sexual
function is “generally abolished earlier in the laboring classes, who
are compelled to work hard and have many cares,” and further
states that a vigorous vitality causes prolongation of the menstrual
process.
In the average woman it does not cease at once, but has two or
three periods of cessation, returns again for an irregular period and
continues in this irregularity for the entire time of two and one-half
to three years. It is important to know that the changes which are
going on in the organs of the woman are exactly opposite from
those which occur at puberty.
At puberty the organs are increasing with life, vigor, and vitality,
while at the Menopause they are receding or going backward.

The generative organs gradually but surely shrink or atrophy after
menstruation stops. The uterus becomes small. The vagina, whose
walls were formerly corrugated or wrinkled, now become smooth.
The orifice or opening of the vagina, becomes shrunken, unless it
has been previously enlarged by child-bearing. The whole process
tends to show that the child-bearing period is at an end, which in
fact has caused much mental anxiety and disturbance among
women to the extent of melancholy and insanity.
It seems a very small things to give to every woman, going through
this disagreeable period of life—a complete change of climate and
rest, until the change has become established. Certainly she has
served society to the best of her knowledge, often “entering into the
valley of the shadow of death”; many times fearlessly, to give the
best of herself to the race. It is a small thing to give in return.
Tilt believes that unmarried women suffer less at this period than
married women, and says: “As at puberty, from the ignorance in
which it is still thought right to leave young women, so at the
change of life, women often suffer from ignorance of what may
occur, or from exaggerated notions of the perils which await them.”
All that is needed is to keep guard on one's self—watch the diet and
bowels. A light vegetable diet seems best at this time unless very
actively engaged in physical exercise, then meat once a day. Keep
free from foods difficult to digest, cheese, fried foods, hot bread,
etc., drink plenty of water and eat fruit to keep the bowels open;
slight exercise in the open air, rest, sleep and freedom from mental
anxiety are the simple rules which are generally prescribed for
women at this time.
Tilt says: “The best way to avoid the danger of this critical time is to
meet its approach with a healthy constitution.” And again says, “All
complaints remain chronic because there is not stamina enough to
carry them through their stages.”
It is the opinion of the foremost medical men that if women at the
first sign of irregularities, consult a gynecologist, it would be the

means of saving thousands of lives every year, and would prepare
women to enter upon the post-climatic period in health and
happiness.

CONCLUSION
In conclusion I cannot refrain from saying that women must come to
recognize there is some function of womanhood other than being a
child-bearing machine. Too long have they allowed themselves to
become this, bowing to the yoke of motherhood from puberty to the
grave. No other thought has entered the mind except to be a good
mother—which has usually meant a slave-mother. This has been her
only use, her only wish and hope—and when the age arrives where
she cannot perform this function longer, she considers herself
useless. No wonder she becomes melancholic or even insane.
Fortunately the woman of today is gradually ridding herself of such
archaic notions. More and more is she realizing that motherhood is
only one of her capabilities; that there are certain individuals more
fitted for motherhood than others, just as individuals are better
fitted for nursing, teaching, etc.
And further must she realize that though she is past the age of
motherhood, yet she is still a woman with all the instincts and
experiences which motherhood has bestowed upon her, and she can
now begin a new development, based upon these valuable
experiences, she can now enter into public life unhampered by the
details of kitchen and babies, for as she completes her work and
passes on, others come in to take her place.
Being free from domestic and maternal cares enables her to give to
society the benefit of her matured thought, seasoned and enriched
by these experiences.

She often does enjoy the best health of her life after the Menopause
and this, together with a vista of a future of usefulness, should open
to the woman in the post-climateric period, a new life—a new world.
In completing this series of articles I cannot refrain from uttering
just a word about the relation of the entire subject I have been
discussing to the economic problem. It is impossible to separate the
ignorance of parents, prostitution, venereal diseases, or the silence
of the medical profession from the great economic question that the
world is facing today. It is here ever before us, and the more we
look into the so-called evils of the day the more we realize that the
whole structure of the present day society is built upon a rotten and
decaying foundation. Until capitalism is swept away, there is no hope
for young girls to live a beautiful life during their girlhood. There is
no hope for boys or girls to build up strong and sturdy bodies. There
is no hope that a woman can live in the family relation and have
children without sacrificing every vestige of individual development.
There is no hope that prostitution will cease, as long as there is
hunger. There is no hope for a strong race as long as venereal
diseases exist. And they will exist until women rise in one big
sisterhood to fight this capitalist society which compels a woman to
serve as a sex implement for man's use.
Education is necessary—education is the need of the people. For this
will soon enable one to see that knowledge alone does not suffice,
but that it is only through economic security that the man and the
woman will emerge in a future civilization.
(The end.)
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