Black and white after thirty years - interracial relations - Thirtieth Anniversary Issue

Public Interest, Fall, 1995 by Nathan Glazer

There is nothing that concentrates the mind on an issue more sharply than discovering one has been wrong about it. Twenty years ago, in an article in The Public Interest, I dealt with the subject of the continuing concentration of blacks in American cities and their separation in residence from whites.(*) The article was occasioned by Anthony Downs's 1973 book, Opening Up the Suburbs: An Urban Strategy for America. (This article, in expanded form, became part of my 1975 book, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy.) This apparently historically unique degree of concentration - one could call it "segregation," but I would prefer to reserve that term for state-imposed separation - had been well documented in research of the 1950s and 1960s, and was already under attack in the 1960s and 1970s by a variety of new federal policies, legislative, administrative, and judicial. Anthony Downs had even more extensive policies to propose.

All this, I argued, was unnecessary. Blacks would become residentially more integrated with whites as their economic circumstances improved and their political power increased; in sum, as they drew closer in all respects to whites. And, could we not expect all this to happen as a result of the powerful antidiscrimination legislation of 1964 and 1965? We could so expect.

But whatever the changes that have occurred in the black condition, in this respect, in the degree of concentration of blacks in specific areas of cities, in some selected suburbs, and in the isolation of blacks residentially, there has been no change of any significance in 20 years.

Unrealized expectations

Of course, there are many respects in which the expectations of the 1960s and 1970s in regard to the black condition and black-white relations have not been fulfilled. If any well-informed person had been asked at the time of the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 to project how matters would stand 30 years ahead, it is hard to believe that he would have predicted the degree of separation between blacks and whites - we would now have to say, between blacks and non-blacks, because the growing numbers of Asians and Latinos are almost as separated from blacks as are whites-in residence, in school achievement, in economic conditions, in family patterns, in attitudes, that exists today.

There were good reasons to believe in the mid-1970s, as I did, that the pattern of residential concentration and isolation was going to change for the better and that further governmental intervention - whether to strengthen the prohibition of discrimination in rental and sales and realtor behavior or to impose integration measures on new developments or to integrate through public measures housing projects - was not necessary. We could, argue over such matters, but it seemed to me it was now basically up to the processes of social change, abetted by the expected increased economic and social mobility of blacks, to alter the pattern of black concentration or segregation.

One has to go back 20 years and get a sense of the period to make the case that at the time these views seemed justifiable. In 1975, one still had good reason to believe that the remarkable revolution in civil-rights law of the 1960s would spur the improvement in the economic, educational, housing, and neighborhood conditions of American blacks, which had, to some degree, already been evident in the postwar period.

Ben Wattenberg and others at the time published articles demonstrating the increased percentage of blacks becoming middle class in occupation and earnings. In 1966, Irving Kristol had written an article in the New York Times Magazine, "The Negro Today is like the Immigrant Yesterday," a title that would strike us now with a certain irony but which then made perfect sense. It made sense to me. I had argued the same in Beyond the Melting Pot in 1963. Of course, when we spoke of immigrants in the mid-1960s, we weren't thinking about new immigrants to the United States - we were comparing blacks to the immigrants of the past. Despite the passage of an immigration reform act in 1965, the immigrants were then people of yesterday, and no one expected that mass immigration to the United States would resume in the future.

One had reason in 1966, and perhaps as late as 1975, to expect that indeed the American Negro, as he was then called, would follow the course of previous European immigrants, the "tenement trail," as Sam Lubell labeled it. After all, compared to European immigrants, the American Negro was still a relative newcomer in the cities of the North and West; and now that we had powerful civil-rights legislation, what would prevent his. rise?

There were those who still called for further massive federal measures, greater than those already in place, in education, housing, employment training, income support, and other areas, to improve conditions in cities and for American blacks. But we were already in a period of federal (and state and local) fiscal constraint, from which we have never emerged. In any case, there had already been a great expansion of federal programs in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, in the field of housing segregation alone, there was the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (supplemented in 1974 by the Housing and Community Development Act, which required communities, before they could receive federal grants, to prepare a detailed "housing-assistance plan," taking account of the needs of low-income families); the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, which prohibited discrimination in home lending and required banks to compile information on the race of loan applicants and recipients, a 1976 court order that required three federal agencies to collect racial data on home loan applicants the 1975 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which required banks to report on the neighborhood pattern of their loans, the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, requiring banks to demonstrate that they were providing loans to low-income areas. One could undoubtedly add other measures.