Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage

Introduction

>> 1 Introduction At the beginning of Barack Obama’s second term, the image of a black man against the backdrop of grand marble and the stately appointments of the Oval Office seems quite routine and unremarkable. Photographs and footage show a man very much at home in the White House. Even at the beginning of his first term, Obama moved easily and comfortably through the halls of power, in contrast to other relative newcomers to insider Washington, like Jimmy Carter for instance. Contemplating Obama’s reelection, we might all too easily forget that not too far from the White House, just east of the Anacostia River in fact, sits the Capitol’s historic ghetto. Abandoned houses sit sentry on either side of the street. Barbed wire surrounds the neighborhood’s few parking lots. Buildings are boarded up, and few streets show any signs of economic activity. Libraries, public schools, and health clinics are nowhere to be seen. Anacostia residents are almost all African American. It wasn’t 2 > 3 At the bottom of the spectrum, poverty falls disproportionately hard on people of color, much as it has over the last few decades. Poverty rates themselves have risen and fallen over the last sixty years. But the gap between races has remained huge, with Latino and black rates of poverty registering between two and half and four times the rates for whites. Likewise, homeownership rates have demonstrated dramatic racial differences, with 26- and 30-point differences in rates of ownership between whites on the one hand and blacks and Latinos on the other, respectively. Not surprisingly, the one-two punch of the real-estate market and the economic recession has hit people of color at the bottom particularly hard. Latinos were the most affected by the crash, and wealth gaps have doubled in the aftermath. Latino wealth fell 66 percent between 2005 and 2009, compared to just 16 percent for whites. White to black wealth ratios went from eleven to one to nineteen to one, and Latino ratios almost doubled, from seven to one to fifteen to one. Currently, wealth gaps are the highest they have been during the last thirty years. How much money are we talking about with regard to those wealth gaps? As of 2009, blacks had a median net worth (excluding homes) of $2,200, the lowest recorded for the last thirty years, where whites’ median wealth registered at $97,900, 44.5 times the median wealth for blacks. Over the last three decades, blacks have consistently held a small fraction—roughly 20 percent—of white wealth. Researchers’ estimates may vary somewhat, but all agree that wealth gaps are dramatic and quite persistent. What about education? Conventional wisdom teaches that education is the great equalizer across race and class difference. But race and class differences themselves blunt the force of the great equalizer. Schools have largely resegregated along racial and class lines. Poor and workingclass black and Latino students attend schools that are grossly underfunded , relative to white schools. When research takes into account men who have been incarcerated, the statistics show that young Latino and black men drop out at roughly twice the rate that young white men do (20.2 percent and 23.4 percent, respectively, versus 10.9 percent). The 4 > 5 gaps would still persist, because those gaps are produced by the everyday decisions that structure our social, political, and economic interactions. Put another way, racial inequality may now have become “locked in.” Light on this subject comes from a most unexpected place—innovative work by a group of scholars on a phenomenon called “lock-in.” Economists like Brian Arthur have developed the “lock-in model” to explain why an early lead for one technology can sometimes persist for extended periods even when the technology faces competition from a superior alternative. The lock-in model focuses on the way that competitive advantage can begin to automatically reproduce itself over time until the advantage eventually becomes insurmountable or, in a phrase, locked in. A story about Microsoft will help to illustrate the key features of the lock-in model. In the mid-1990s, the US government charged that Microsoft had acted illegally to gain an unfair monopoly in the operating systems market, in violation of US antitrust law. According to the allegations, Microsoft engaged in a range of very bad (and illegal) behavior that pushed computer manufacturers to buy Microsoft’s operating system, Windows. For example, the complaint noted that manufacturer contracts with Microsoft...