Chapter 3: Race and the Economy

Some years ago, David Ayón, Latino political scientist then based at Loyola Marymount College, participated in a classroom seminar one of us organized on race and racism.  As the mostly white students in the audience, earnest in their curiosity about how to bridge racial differences, listened, he made a remark that recalled Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the famous 1960s movie with Sidney Poitier: “I don’t really care whether you invite me over to your house for dinner.  I want to own a house.”

The audience was stunned.

What Ayón spoke to, bluntly, was the difference between diversity and equity. The two are by no means mutually exclusive, as  researchers have found  that intergroup contact tends to diminish prejudice and deepen empathy for  “the other”, which is often a stepping stone  for achieving equitable policies. However, as Ayón pointed out, few people want to arrive at the table as a junior partner, particularly since junior partners are often ignored. So, revamping America means setting our sights, clearly, on equity.  


Yet simply reducing prejudice is not enough.  A more diverse America is a positive outcome; a more just America would be even better. Achieving equity will require material as well as psychological progress.  To do so, America needs both an honest examination of the legacy we inherit, the present-day structures we need to transform, and the challenges the future will bring.

Thus, the economy is paramount—and now in a very new and urgent way.  Moreover, calling for racial equity can no longer be considered a plea for special interests.  Rather, it is a cry to right a ship that has gone desperately astray for virtually all Americans, and must be corrected for the least of us to make it work well for most of us.

Since the early 1970s, manufacturing centers have bled unionized jobs—once the stepping stones to individual minority economic improvement—and the middle class has thinned.  The dismantling of production to places in the developing world has been worrisome—but it has been greeted with the admonition that at least we would be keeping the knowledge jobs and thus would be able to survive and consume to our hearts’ content.

But who are we?  It turns out that we’ve thinned the middle. Engineers, scientists, and researchers huddle together, cranking out new ideas at the speed of light while service workers ease the way, making copies, fixing computer problems, networking phone lines, cleaning carpets.  The new ideas that are created in this uneven synergy are turned material in the factories of other countries and returned here for sale.  The occupational and income divide has become sharp—while there are professionals of all ethnicities, the bottom of the jobs ladder often seems delegated to blacks and Latinos.

But what happens when the whole game is up, when the artifice of consumption is ripped away by the reality of debt, when the proliferation of jobs without benefits spreads the worry about inadequate health insurance beyond Latinos and blacks, when the career ladders confronting all Americans miss rungs that many minorities have experienced for decades?  In this sense, America is not simply in a post industrial world—it is in a post-Katrina world where the bitter fruit of our collective disconnection, in which we have left the most vulnerable the least protected, has spilled over into an entire city in the case of a hurricane and an entire nation in the case of the economy.

It all implies that achieving racial equity is central to our common American future. It implies that the civil rights agenda of the 21st century must go beyond traditional concerns to tackle the broad issues of economic opportunity and urban and metropolitan reform.  And it implies that leadership must begin to build a world in which the concerns of what will soon not be the minority become the concerns of all.