Beyond Discrimination: Racial Inequality in a Post-Racist Era

Chapter 2. The American State as an Agent of Race Equity: The Systemic Limits of Shock and Awe in Domestic Policy

73 Chapter 2    The American State as an Agent of Race Equity: The Systemic Limits of Shock and Awe in Domestic Policy Desmond King The historical infirmity of the American state in ameliorating the nation ’s searing racial inequalities is notable. It is even more striking when set against the same state’s gargantuan military, fiscal, cultural, ideological , and political capacities, which have enabled the United States to dominate modern affairs since the Second World War and to maintain legitimacy at home. These raw capacities are described in this chapter as ”shock and awe,” a shorthand for the set of formidable policy measures and resources the U.S. political executive draws on to set the agenda and sometimes to achieve policy priorities (Weir and Skocpol 1985; Posner and Vermeule 2010, 11–12). The announcement may be more dramatic than the execution, but the aura of massive policy attack is irrefragable. Such engagements as Harry Truman’s Hiroshima, Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty , and George W. Bush’s ”war” on terrorism exemplify what James Scott (1998) memorably terms ”seeing like a state,” with its implied allocation of state power. Yet this American state rarely sees profound race inequality as a priority for national action. The multiple material inequalities documented in this volume and elsewhere (Cohen 2010; Smith and King 2009) in African American housing and education opportunities and encounters with the criminal justice system, for instance, are grounds for a national restorative policy, but none is forthcoming. These unequal patterns are not construed as crises by the American state at present. Historically, it is the exclusion of 74    Beyond Discrimination African Americans from equality instead of ameliorating inequities that attracts state support (Katznelson 2005). The American state’s ample resources to intervene in U.S. society were deployed from the 1880s to the 1950s to maintain race inequity in the separate-­ but-­ equal governance institutions. In the mid-­ 1960s, in the wake of the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson’s adviser, the Harvard professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, wrote a famous report declaring that legal equality for African Americans was crucial but needed immediately to be followed with a plan of “national action” to destroy material legacies of America’s history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation (Moynihan 1965). Moynihan’s imperative reached President Johnson. In his Howard University commencement speech, “To Fulfill These Rights,” drafted by Moynihan and delivered in June 1965, Johnson conceded that freedom is not enough to rectify the searing damage of centuries of race inequality and systemic discrimination: “In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope.” National action, in Moynihan’s view, meant at least a guaranteed family allowance, a massive employment program guaranteeing jobs, proper adoption and family planning services, and education and housing initiatives (Johnson 1965). Moynihan’s call for national action and Johnson’s admission about the feeble policy response to enduring material inequities followed the culmination of decades of protests, which produced the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Johnson’s and Moynihan’s entreaties predated by a couple of months’ enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Combined, these two laws created the potential for a postracial America, establishing equal rights of legal and democratic citizenship; however, the persistence of entrenched discrimination and systemic inequality precluded this possibility. One less important explanation is the content and reception of the so-­ called Moynihan Report, published in 1965, entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Moynihan 1965). As is well known, the report, intended by its author Moynihan, who was then based in the U.S. Department of Labor, and President Johnson to formulate a comprehensive strategy for helping African Americans, became mired in controversy about its characterization of African American families. The report’s apparent judgmentalism on African American family structures overshadowed its policy recommendations , and these latter rapidly receded from the pool of American state actions. In understanding the challenge, Moynihan emphasized that the sudden granting of equal rights of citizenship could not be taken as equivalent to providing equal material income or future opportunity. But the sociologi- American State as an Agent of Race Equity    75 cal evidence he compiled while writing the report shifted his focus to the African American family structure and what he unhelpfully came to term the “tangle of pathology”: “The Negro...