Problem of the Century: Racial Stratification in the United States (review)

Problem of the Century: Racial Stratification in the United States. Edited by Elijah Anderson and Douglas Massey. Russell Sage Foundation, 2001. 470 pp. Cloth, $42.50.

When Dubois lamented in The Souls of Black Folk that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," his bleak take on the future of race relations here in the U.S. was grounded in his assessment of the social and economic progress of blacks after the Civil War. DuBois characterized the period as one of racial progress overshadowed by racial oppression. Because blacks had been granted citizenship yet enjoyed few of the benefits associated with this status, DuBois predicted that tumultuous relations between blacks and whites would dominate the American agenda for the remainder of the century.

In Problem of the Century, the editors and their colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have assembled an exhaustive collection of thought-proving essays, most of which address the permanence of black-white boundaries. Collins begins the theoretical section with an elegant macro-historical model of the social construction of ethnicity. By focusing on the boundary-work of states (rather than the citizens within them), he develops a "state-centered theory of ethnicity to go along with state-centered theories of revolution." Zuberi relies on demographic data to outline the social construction of race over time. He argues that consensus on the social meaning of race affects how we interpret quantitative depictions of various racial groups. Anderson examines how black executives manage their interactions with white and black coworkers in a corporate environment. Black professionals' ability to negotiate these relationships is correlated with their status in the organization and with their white coworkers' views on affirmative action. Using national data on adolescents, Kao reveals how differences by race in their friends' attitudes toward school affect their academic performance. While these chapters focus on issues of identity construction and negotiation, a second set of essays adds to our understanding of the processes underlying racial exclusion.

Consistent with the book's focus, this core group of essays explores intergroup conflict. More specifically, these chapters examine differential access to resources by race. Berg determines that racial inequality in the present period is inextricably bound to a long history in the U.S. of allocating privileges and resources to preferred racial and ethnic groups while denying such resources to denigrated groups. Thus, "the group rights accorded to minorities under recent affirmative action programs ought not to be treated as bizarre examples of modern legal novelties." Morawska turns Blumer's theory of group position on its head, applying the framework to minority group members to explain how their sense of proprietary claim to specific jobs and neighborhood institutions varies from one city to another. For example, blacks enjoy a competitive edge over Latinos in the public sector in New York because this sector has long served as an ethnic niche for blacks. Elo and Preston are concerned with the consequences of census undercounts of blacks for congressional representation and the distribution of federal funding. They reconstruct existing demographic models in order to accurately portray the black population. Leidner develops a theoretical framework to explain how the goals and ideology of feminist movements repel women of color and working-class women. "The situation here is that the polity wishes to include people who do not wish to join." Chapters by Charles, Madden, and Aiken and Sloane, point to troubling consequences of persistent segregation. Charles finds that blacks and Hispanics remain residentially segregated from whites in Los Angeles notwithstanding their class position. Examining competing explanations for differences in economic outcomes by race, Madden shows that income inequality is explained by current discrimination, not spatial models such as the underclass explanation or the spatial mismatch hypothesis. Aiken and Sloane point to racial disparities in access to treatment among AIDS patients; blacks have less access than whites to effective drugs and are less likely than whites...