Reaching Beyond Race

National Review, Dec 22, 1997 by John J. DiIulio

Reaching beyond Race, by Paul M. Sniderman and Edward G. Carmines (Harvard, 185 pp., $22.95)

Mr. DiIulio, who teaches political science at Princeton, is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and co-editor (with Frank Thompson) of Medicaid and the States, forthcoming from Brookings.

F BLACK America were a separate nation, it would easily be one of the richest nations in the world, both financially and socially.

From 1995 to 1996, the annual personal income of blacks in the United States rose from $324 billion to $371 billion. This 13 per cent economic vault continued the steady post-1980 march of black purchasing power. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the personal annual income of blacks is 50 per cent greater today than it was in 1980. Average black household spending on new cars, clothes, and computers now outstrips average white household spending. For example, black expenditures for computer hardware and software have doubled every year since 1993, reaching $741 million in

1996. Blacks, 12 per cent of the population, account for a quarter of all spending for online computer services.

In 1996, about 28.4 per cent of black households, versus 13.7 per cent of all households, were below the government's official poverty line ($16,036 for a family of four). But the poverty line does not encompass in-kind government payments to low-income citizens (Food Stamps, Medicaid, public housing). Besides, 28.4 per cent was the lowest proportion of blacks living below the poverty line since the U.S. Census Bureau began keeping such statistics in 1955.

By 1990, three-quarters of the more than 25 million blacks who resided in urban areas lived in Census tracts where 60 per cent or more of the population was above the poverty line. Since 1993, black home ownership has been increasing at nearly twice the rate of white home ownership. Middle-class communities in which a majority of residents belong to racial minorities have become so numerous that a team of researchers at the State University of New York at Albany is now conducting a national study of such neighborhoods, characterizing them as "zones of emergence" and the "flip side of the underclass."

Socially, in terms of religious sentiment and respect for traditional family values, blacks are easily the most resilient of any demographically distinct group of Americans. Looking at decades of survey research, George H. Gallup Jr. has concluded that blacks, without regard to socio-economic status, are "the most religious people in America." For example, 99 per cent of blacks believe in God, and more than 80 per cent believe that faith can help solve social problems. Unlike their white peers, a majority of black college students attend church regularly, and a majority of black teenagers pray frequently.

Little-noticed research begun in 1972 by sociologist Robert B. Hill has documented that blacks have preserved traditional family values in the face of family-destroying forces ranging from slavery and Jim Crow to perverse welfare rules and pornographic gangster rap. For example, the black extended family informally cares for four times as many orphaned or otherwise needy black children as are in the custody of government child-care agencies. An estimated 85 per cent of black unwed teenaged mothers live with their parents or with other adult relatives after their babies are born. Perhaps for that reason, rates of child abuse and drug abuse are lower in single-parent black families than in single-parent white families. Black families of all income levels have high educational aspirations for their children (higher, in fact, than those of Italian-Americans and several other white ethnic groups). And blacks are more tradition-minded than whites on issues such as divorce, abortion, and homosexual rights.

But despite the substantial social health and growing financial wealth of most blacks, both the overall condition of blacks and the state of black - white race relations in America remain full of empirical puzzles and moral challenges.

Most black baby-boomers and their children are indeed now living the American Dream. Yet the material poverty and social pathology of some blacks -- as much as a fifth to a third of the total black population, heavily concentrated in the crime-is-commerce, father-free wastelands called the inner cities -- is empirically undeniable and morally unbearable.

Folded inside the story of black material progress is the story of black social resentment. Most blacks, from the richest to the poorest, from PhDs to high-school dropouts, believe that they and their children remain victims of racial discrimination at the hands of whites, and that they are still not treated fairly with respect to obtaining employment, education, and housing; getting cabs, bank loans, and good seats in restaurants; avoiding speeding tickets, jail terms, or the electric chair; and so on.

But folded inside the story of black social resentment is the story of dawning black - white racial harmony. A June 1997 report by the Gallup Organization, "Black/White Relations in the United States," reveals both that most blacks still feel that they are treated unfairly, and that more blacks and whites than ever (sizable majorities of both races) say they want to live, work, go to school, and engage in recreation together, and that they vote for the best candidate regardless of race.