The Color of Opportunity: Pathways to Family, Welfare, and Work (review)

The Color of Opportunity: Pathways to Family, Welfare, and Work. By Haya Stier and Marta Tienda. University of Chicago Press, 2001. 289 pp. Cloth, $32.50.

Color matters. The Color of Opportunity documents the interrelationships between opportunities, outcomes, and group membership using an innovative life-course perspective to establish the cumulative effects of early experiences with poverty, single parents, childbirth, and high school. Based primarily on a survey of parents in Chicago's poor neighborhoods with comparisons to a national urban sample, the study provides convincing evidence of racial and ethnic differences in early life experiences, transitions into family roles, poverty, human capital development, welfare participation, work, and earnings. By studying jointly the topics of family formation, human capital, public assistance, and work, the authors provide an impressively comprehensive view of racial and ethnic realities in urban areas.

In this study, Haya Stier and Marta Tienda address two fundamental questions: whether racial or ethnic group membership restricts opportunities; and whether the behavior of the inner-city poor differs from that of the urban poor. They demonstrate that nonmarital births and withdrawal from high school are routes through which group disparities in childhood disadvantages can perpetuate across generations. They conclude that early life experiences can explain much of the differences in welfare participation and work. They also show that although outcomes tend to be worse in areas with high concentrations of poverty, the behavior of Chicago's inner-city poor does not differ substantially from that of the urban poor nationally.

Yet the study also indicates that statistical analysis of relationships between opportunities, experiences, and outcomes leaves a role for race and ethnicity that cannot be explained by observable individual differences in life experiences and human capital. In the chapter on families, for example, we learn that even after controlling for all observable differences, Hispanics were less likely to complete high school and that blacks were more likely to have nonmarital births. Likewise, Puerto Rican and black parents were less likely to work and more likely than similar whites and Mexicans to receive welfare. The authors ascribe these remaining differences to residential segregation and discrimination. With the exception of a few citations to other studies, this study provides little convincing evidence to explain the importance of group membership once the observable differences have been accounted for.

The study's research design has several advantages for investigating the role of group membership in defining opportunity. The Urban Poverty and Family Life Survey (UPFLS) and its supplement, the Social Opportunity Survey, include retrospective life histories with information on early family experiences, detailed information on work and welfare histories, open-ended responses that allow further interpretation of statistical results, and a sample design that permits analysis of whites, blacks, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans. For the purpose of drawing conclusions about opportunity, however, the data survey is flawed in ways that are not fully acknowledged in the text. Because many successful people have left poor neighborhoods in which they were raised, any survey that interviews only the people that remain cannot provide an unbiased sense of high school completion, nonmarital births, and other outcomes for the population raised in those neighborhoods. However, interpretation problems arising from this self-selection are diminished by the similar results between the Chicago sample and the national urban sample.

As acknowledged in the final pages, much has changed since the period covered by this study, 1970 to 1990. Recent economic expansions have increased economic opportunity differentially for whites, blacks, and Hispanics. Welfare reform has changed the nature of program participation, especially in relation to duration and work incentives. And immigration, particularly from Mexico and Central America, continues to increase the population of low-skilled Hispanics both in Chicago and nationally. Nevertheless, this study offers a valuable picture of racial and ethnic realities in the late twentieth century. As times change, the book will provide a critical benchmark against which progress can be judged.