Science and Politics in the Work of William Julius Wilson

Stephen Steinberg's most recent book, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy, received the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship by the Race and Ethnicity Section of the American Sociological Association.

THE AUTUMN 1995 ISSUE OF THE Journal of Blacks in Higher Education included an article on "The High Priests of the Black Academic Right." Along with such conservative acolytes as Glenn Lowry, Thomas Sowell, and Shelby Steele appeared the name of William Julius Wilson. I assume that the author of this article, Mark Megalli, a student at Yale Law School, had his tongue bulging in his cheek when he included Wilson in this conservative pantheon. Wilson promptly whisked off a letter to the editor declaring that he was "shocked and dismayed," adding: "I can say without equivocation that nearly all the positions he [Megalli] associates with black conservatives . . . are anathema to me."

I know Bill Wilson (his work, that is), and although he is no friend of mine, I can vouch for the fact that Bill Wilson is no conservative. On occasion Wilson has come out of the academic closet and declared himself a social democrat. He has consistently argued for governmental programs, including an expansion of the welfare state, to assist the "truly disadvantaged." In his new book, When Work Disappears, Wilson advocates a WPA-style jobs program to combat the chronic unemployment that he sees as the root of the tangle of problems that beset black America. This alone would prompt Wilson's excommunication from Megalli's priesthood of the black academic right.

Nevertheless, there are strains of conservatism in his writing that Wilson has been unwilling to confront. His 1979 book, The Declining Significance of Race, gave credence to the idea that this nation solved its "race problem" with the passage of landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s, and that today blacks with the requisite education and skills confront few obstacles on the road to success. Then in The Truly Disadvantaged, published in 1987, Wilson explicitly rejected race-based public policies, including affirmative action, opting instead for class-based approaches that attack structural unemployment and provide improved welfare and social services, including job training, for those who need it. Although many leftists were mesmerized by his emphasis on "class," Wilson's class analysis never amounted to more than a contention that blacks lacked the education and skills to survive in a postindustrial economy. His position is indistinguishable from that of human capital economists who insist that black underrepresentation in the higher occupations is due to deficiencies in their "productive capacities." It is true that Wilson ends up in the liberal camp, arguing for an expansion of the welfare state and the creation of job programs, but as his critics on the right point out, his praxis is logically at odds with some of his core assumptions.

No doubt Megalli's high priests would like to welcome Wilson into their sacred order. After all, he has embraced two key tenets of their conservative faith: 1) that blacks need to stop blaming "racism" for their problems, and 2) that blacks need to acquire the education and job training that will permit them to climb the ladder of success. It is principally Wilson's insistence on governmental interventions that defines him as a liberal.

Of course, it does not really matter what political label we pin on Wilson. What matters is whether his writing advances the cause of racial justice, or whether, as I argued in Turning Back, it provides intellectual fodder and legitimation for those who have taken race off the national agenda. But then again, Wilson would probably reject these decidedly unscientific terms of debate. He might well insist that he is not crusading for even so noble a cause as racial justice, but playing out his role of scholar: which is to ferret out the facts and to speak the truth, no matter how discordant it might be to someone else's political ears. His faith is not with the right or the left, but with positivism. The chief article of this faith is that a truthful reckoning with the facts, however unpleasant that might be, is the indispensable first step to social amelioration.

So let us put politics aside and examine When Work Disappears on its own terms, as a work of scholarship. This requires us, as a first step, to skip over the acknowledgements which list no fewer than 12 foundations that pooled their largess to subsidize the research that Wilson and his colleagues conducted on Chicago's South Side. Presumably these foundations, too, are above politics, so much so that they have been willing to disregard Wilson's disclosure that he is a social democrat, and to place their confidence in his credentials as a scholar.

TROUBLE BEGINS WITH THE TITLE AND SUBTITLE OF WILSON'S BOOK. When Work Disappears is seriously misleading. At a time when Chicago's urban economy is booming, it is hardly accurate to say that work has disappeared. Of course, Wilson means to highlight the fact that blacks who inhabit Chicago's South Side neighborhoods suffer from inordinately high rates of joblessness, and this is certainly the case. Why this is so, however, remains the key unresolved question. As in his previous books, Wilson argues that deindustrialization wiped out the blue-collar jobs that inner-city blacks depended on to escape poverty. This makes intuitive sense, but on closer examination, it does not carry the weight that Wilson assigns to it. In the first place, it has been demonstrated -- most recently, by Roger Waldinger in Still the Promised City -- that blacks were never heavily concentrated in the smokestack industries that have gone asunder -- as a result of pervasive racism on the part of employers and unions alike. Second, deindustrialization cannot explain why so few blacks have been absorbed in those sectors of the service economy which involve low wages and few skills. Third, there are many blue-collar jobs in light industries that still flourish around Chicago's black neighborhoods, but as Wilson found, they rely mostly on immigrant workers. More on this later.

Wilson's subtitle, "The World of the New Urban Poor," is even more problematic. What is "new" about life in Chicago's Black Belt? The world that Wilson describes is little different from the world that St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton describe in their classic study of Chicago, Black Metropolis, published in 1945. Not only did they find that the rate of unemployment for Chicago's blacks was three times that of whites, but they also devoted an entire chapter to documenting the "job ceiling," the entrenched racism that denied blacks access to skilled jobs in major industries. The single exception was in the foundry, where blacks were readily employed in the sweltering, arduous, and dangerous job tending the cauldrons of molten steel. Otherwise, blacks were relegated to "Negro jobs" -- those low-paying and usually servile jobs that nobody else wanted. It takes some hairsplitting to contend, as Wilson does, that there is anything "new" about the condition of blacks on Chicago's South Side.

Wilson makes two points in this regard: 1) that the rate of unemployment has reached an all-time high, surpassing the magical 50% in certain neighborhoods, and 2) that the black middle-class has fled for greener (though not necessarily whiter) neighborhoods elsewhere. But it is one thing to say that unemployment has gotten worse or more concentrated, and another to suggest this amounts to a "new" phenomenon, implying a new or different dynamic and requiring a new or different remedy. When Wilson unveiled his construct at a 1993 symposium at the University of Michigan, Roger Wilkins retorted: "I say that the new American poverty has to be viewed as part of the old American racism."

We can thank this seasoned civil-rights warrior for resurrecting a hoary and forgotten concept: racism. This is the R-word that Wilson has expunged from his lexicon. Not unlike Booker Washington who was catapulted to fame and power when he counseled blacks to stop agitating for political rights, Wilson emerged from obscurity to become arguably the nation's most celebrated sociologist, and a pet of foundations, on the basis of his pronouncement that race was of "declining significance." In saying this, I do not mean to impugn Wilson who was only echoing positions advanced earlier by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Bayard Rustin. His ascent was not his doing, but that of the foundations, editors, and academic elites who amplified his voice and showered him with awards and grants, making an icon of this reputedly unassuming man. Nevertheless, the contraction of racism into an R-word is the hallmark of his work, and Wilson has had to perform some amazing rhetorical feats to plunge into years of research on Chicago's South Side, and to emerge still convinced that racism is not central to the plight of the African American inhabitants of this, the most segregated city in America.

More puzzling than Wilson's personal ascent is the fact that so few of Wilson's readers have recognized the mainly regressive thrust of his work. One reason is that even in its conservatism, Wlson's writing has never smacked of the mean spiritedness and ideological fervor that is typical of the other "high priests of the academic right," black or white. I have heard Wilson speak on television with passion concerning the plight of African Americans, and it was always transparent that the ulterior purpose of his "hidden agenda" was to provide political cover for programs that would reach blacks on the margins. What is at issue, however, is not Wilson the man, his motives or politics, but the theoretical underpinnings of his work which are anything but liberal. Indeed, as I show below, When Work Disappears shares much common ground with Dinesh D'Souza's The End of Racism.

NO DOUBT THIS CLAIM WILL STRIKE MOST READERS AS PREPOSTEROUS, and before Wilson whisks off another letter protesting that D'Souza's positions are anathema to him, let me state the obvious. D'Souza is a right-wing ideologue who has no interest in race except to use it to tweak the noses of his ideological enemies, and he takes positions in his book that are mind-boggling in their mischief. For example, D'Souza rejects the equation of slavery with racism as facile, on the grounds that a small number of free blacks and Indians owned slaves, and most whites did not. D'Souza scoffs at the idea of reparations, on the premise that but for slavery, blacks would be worse off in Africa (this, remember, was a common refrain during slavery). D'Souza stops short of calling for a repeal of the Thirteenth Amendment, but he would repeal those sections of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that curtail the right of individuals to freely discriminate against people whom they find objectionable. The presumption is that if blacks underwent a "civilizational renewal" and developed the moral and cultural virtues that are prized in American society, they would suffer no ill from whites. Thus, he ends The End of Racism with an exhortation to blacks to become "the truest and noblest exemplars of Western civilization."

Without doubt, all of this right-wing blather is anathema to Wilson, as well as the many liberals who have had a field day trashing The End of Racism while heaping praise on When Work Disappears. My point, to repeat, is that the two works share similar theoretical underpinnings, even though the authors end up in different places in terms of politics and public policy. Specifically, the D'Souza/Wilson axis revolves around three critical concepts:

1) Institutionalized Racism. D'Souza dismisses institutionalized racism as "a nonsense phrase," accusing civil rights activists of "radicalizing the definition of racism to locate it in the very structures of the American workplace." His premise is not wrong. "Institutionalized racism," coined by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in Black Power, was the most important conceptual innovation to emerge from the cross-fertilization of racial militancy and radical politics during the 1960s. It challenged the prevailing paradigm within social science that reduced racism to the racial beliefs and practices of individuals, instead focussing on the systemic basis of racism and the imperative for attacking racism systematically. Indeed, affirmative action policy is predicated on the argument that the exclusion of blacks from coveted job sectors was ipso facto proof of institutionalized racism. By implication, racism was to be measured by results, not attitudes.

It is only D'Souza's rejection of institutionalized racism that allows him to reach the conclusion that "the end of racism" is at hand. But the same can be said of Wilson's The Declining Significance of Race. The very fact that they struck the same theme -- waning racism -- reflects the fact that they both define racism not in terms of unequal outcomes, but in terms of beliefs and practices based on racial animus. When one looks up "racism" in the index of The Declining Significance of Race, one is referred to the entry on "racial belief systems."

Nor does the term "institutionalized racism" appear in the index of When Work Disappears or, for that matter, receive so much as passing mention in the text. This is why Wilson can immerse himself in years of research on Chicago's South Side, and fail to see racism. It is a startling failure of sociological imagination, an inability to see the forest for the trees.

The point is that Chicago's South Side as a whole is racist, in its sheer existence and in its social constitution. Ghettos have become so familiar a part of the American landscape that they are accepted as normal. But ghettos are the ecological embodiment of racism, and this is true no matter what the attitudes, and no matter what the melanin, of the politicians, bankers, police, social workers, teachers, and employers who are implicated in their production and reproduction. As any scholar trained in the tradition of Durkheim should know, racism is a social fact, not reducible to the attributes of discrete actors.

2) Oppositional Culture. Long before notions of biological inferiority came on stream at the end of the 19th century, it was argued that Africans were heathen and uncivilized, and this was used to give moral legitimacy to slavery. The repudiation of scientific racism -- the idea that blacks were innately inferior -- has paradoxically given new life to the theory that culture, not genes, explains black subordination. This theory has gone through a series of iterations, beginning with the "cultural deprivation" school in the 1950s, the "culture of poverty" theorists in the 1960s and 70s, and the enormous "underclass" discourse in the 1980s. In recent years yet another cultural theory has come on stream, this time with a left twist. Influenced by such theorists as Pierre Bourdieu and Paul Willis, it is now argued that the poor develop an "oppositional culture," born out of "resistance" to their oppression. Like Oscar Lewis, another self-identified progressive, these cultural theorists hold that oppositional culture has its origins in political economy. But like Lewis, they go on to argue that oppositional culture assumes "a life of its own," both exacerbating and perpetuating marginality. In this way the poor become implicated in the reproduction of inequality.

The dangers of this theoretical position become apparent when it is appropriated by the likes of Dinesh D'Souza, who concedes that "black culture emerged out of the crucible of racism and historical oppression directed specifically at blacks." Like Lewis and other cultural theorists, D'Souza goes on to argue that the adaptations of one generation become the entrenched culture of the next, and "what we have now is a downward spiral produced by dysfunctional cultural orientations and destructive social policies." According to D'Souza, most of the problems that confront black America can be traced to the cultural pathology that has reached the stage of "a civilizational crisis." The remedy, as was trumpeted by the Million Man March as well, is for blacks to get their own cultural house in order.

WILSON, TOO, HOLDS THAT THE PROBLEM BEGINS WITH SUCH EXTERNAL FACTORS as joblessness that prevent blacks from living according to the canons of middle-class culture. However, like these other theorists, Wilson sees prolonged and concentrated poverty as setting cultural forces into motion, resulting in cultural patterns and trends that assume a dynamic all their own. Quoting Ulf Hannerz's 1969 study (a clear throwback to the culture-of-poverty literature), Wilson writes that this ghetto-related behavior becomes "not only convenient but also morally appropriate." Finally, in an echo of Oscar Lewis, Wilson argues that this culture is reproduced through the normal processes of cultural transmission:

Individuals in the inner-city ghetto can hardly avoid exposure to many kinds of recurrent and open ghetto-related behavior in the daily interactions and contacts with the people of their community. . . . Through cultural transmission, individuals develop a cultural repertoire that includes discrete elements that are relevant to a variety of respective situations.

Thus do the adaptive responses of one generation become the inherited culture of the next.

For Wilson, the culturally regenerative effects of poverty play themselves out most critically in the realm of work. What happens to the work ethic in "the world of the new urban poor"? Wilson reasons as follows:

. . . where jobs are scarce, where people rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to help their friends and neighbors find jobs. . . many people eventually lose their feeling of connectedness to work in the formal economy; they no longer expect work to be a regular, and regulating, force in their lives. In the case of young people, they may grow up in an environment that lacks the idea of work as a central experience of adult life -- they have little or no labor force attachment.

Strip away the academese and what we are left with is the stereotypical image of ghetto men hanging out on the stoop, with no expectation or need to engage in that exotic behavior known in the rest of the world as "work."

Yet later in the same chapter Wilson reports contradictory evidence from a large survey of blacks living in ghetto poverty census tracks: "nearly all the black respondents felt that plain hard work is either very important or somewhat important for getting ahead." Wilson is not the first social scientist to discover that even blacks down and out in Los Angeles and Chicago subscribe to ordinary societal values regarding work. Instead of questioning their assumptions, however, these men and women of science have contrived some rhetorical flimflam to explain away these unexpected and inconvenient facts. Culture, they now argue, consists of more than the values that people espouse. Here Wilson draws on a 1986 article by Ann Swidler entitled "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies":

Students of culture keep looking for cultural values that will explain what is distinctive about the behavior of groups or societies, and neglect other distinctively cultural phenomena which offer greater promise of explaining patterns of action. These factors are better described as culturally shaped skills, habits, and styles than as values or preferences.

So, now culture consists not of values or preferences, but of actions. But how are the unemployed supposed to act on their values regarding work? In effect, joblessness is defined as culture, and then this so-called culture is posited as the cause of joblessness! With this circular reasoning, blaming-of-the-victim is carried to a new height of rhetorical guile.

Here we arrive at a major methodological shortcoming in Wilson's research. Although the surveys and ethnographies conducted by Wilson and his colleagues included questions concerning work experiences, Wilson presents the reader with only a superficial and threadbare account of their actual experiences in the job market. As an illuminating counterexample, consider Jay MacLeod's book, Ain't No Making It, published in its first edition in 1987 and passed over by Wilson as he reached back to the culture-of-poverty literature of the l960s.

As a doctoral student at the University of Chicago (to repeat: Chicago!), MacLeod studied two groups of young men -- one white, the other black -- who lived in a notorious housing project. The whites -- dubbed the Hallway Hangers came from disorganized families, messed up in school, got in trouble with the police, engaged in a lot of self-destructive behavior, and by the age of 18, were resigned to defeat. Like Wilson, MacLeod traces their problems to the job market; the difference is that MacLeod provides this detailed account of his subjects' experience in the job market:

The occupational histories of the Hallway Hangers between 1984 and 1991 reflect the shift from a manufacturing to a service-based economy. They have been employed as janitors, garbage collectors, cooks, caterers, couriers, cleaners, carpet layers, landscapers, inventory keepers, movers, packers, plumbers' assistants, groundsmen, soldiers, and store clerks. They have worked at car washes, junkyards, hotels, and restaurants. Although the Hallways Hangers have labored in the construction industry, most of these jobs were "off the books" and approximated service work rather than traditional blue-collar employment in terms of earnings, job security, and working conditions.

As MacLeod's study makes clear, it is not work that has disappeared in the so-called "jobless ghetto," but rather jobs that pay a living wage. Like Wilson, MacLeod builds on the work of resistance theorists to explore the cultural responses to this situation. However, MacLeod does not stop with Wilson's bald disclaimer that so-called "ghetto-related behavior" must be discussed "not in isolation but in relation to the constraints and opportunities that shape and provide the context for this action." Rather, MacLeod offers a textured ethnographic account that establishes the linkages between those remote structures and the culture and behavior that is so much in evidence.

Compared to the Hallway Hangers, the black youth in MacLeod's study -- the Brothers -- are like choir boys. Because their families recently moved up from the South, and because they believe that racism is on the wane, they are more hopeful about their futures, more respectful of their teachers, and more likely to stay out of trouble. Yet all this cultural capital counted for little when the Brothers confronted the perils of the job market. Here is MacLeod's summary of their work experience:

Even more so than the Hallway Hangers, the Brothers have been employed in the service sector of the economy. They have bagged groceries, stocked shelves, flipped hamburgers, delivered pizzas, repaired cars, serviced airplanes, cleaned buildings, moved furniture, driven tow trucks, pumped gas, delivered auto parts, and washed dishes. They have also worked as mail carriers, cooks, clerks, computer operators, bank tellers, busboys, models, office photocopiers, laborers, soldiers, baggage handlers, security guards, and customer service agents.

Again we see that even "jobless" people work. Typically they work at a wide range of jobs that have one thing in common: low wages. Why then dissect the cultural "values" and the "skills, habits, and styles" of people who have no other resort than to work at these jobs? What do we really learn by turning up some individuals, so battered by their experiences in the job market, that they have lost all hope and, like the men on Tally's Corner, pretend to live by a cultural code that salvages a few shreds of their tattered egos? And finally, what is the rationale of a WPA-style jobs program that would, by Wilson's own reckoning, produce jobs that pay less than a minimum wage?

IT IS WILSON'S FAILURE, DESPITE HIS STATED INTENTIONS, to anchor the cultural responses of his subjects in the reality of job structures, as well as his embrace of the culture-of-poverty axiom that culture assumes "a life of its own," that leave him open to attack from critics on the right. In his review of When Work Disappears in the New Republic (October 28, 1996), Joe Klein derides Wilson's use of such terms as "concentration effects" and "ghetto-related behavior." To quote Klein: "These, of course, are desperate euphemisms for the 'culture of poverty' that Wilson considers a neoconservative slur." Klein goes on to assail Wilson on the grounds that his "ideology is at war with his data." He is not wrong here. Wilson goes to great lengths to show that there are deep cultural pathologies in the ghetto that assume a life all their own, and then he proposes a massive government jobs program to remedy the problem. He has left himself wide open to Klein's rejoinder:

. . . it would be a fantasy to believe that even a rigorous, lavishly funded jobs program would have much impact on the doom and devastation of the inner cities. The cultural forces pulling in the opposite direction are simply too powerful."

3) Rational discrimination. Having implicitly denied the existence of "institutionalized racism," and having given credence to the idea that a culture-of-poverty (by whatever name) exists in the ghettos across America, Wilson is positioned to embrace another of D'Souza's theoretical assumptions: rational discrimination. According to D'Souza, taxi drivers who refuse to pick up a black patron (for example, a black male with a hooded sweatshirt) are not acting out of irrational bigotry, but are responding to a reality based on hard experience. The same is true of employers who are unwilling to hire black youth, based on their negative perceptions and experiences. In other words, it is not because of "racism" that blacks are not employed, but because they are unproductive workers.

In a survey of employers in the Chicago area, Wilson found that most were unwilling to hire blacks. Perhaps because these employers felt a need to justify their actions, they spewed forth their negative views of black workers. Here is Wilson's summary:

Employers' comments about inner-city black males revealed a wide range of complaints, including assertions that they procrastinate, are lazy, belligerent, and dangerous, and have high rates of tardiness and absenteeism, carry employment histories with many job turnovers, and frequently fail to pass drug screening tests.

Wilson admonishes the reader not to jump to any conclusions: "many readers will interpret the negative comments of the employers as indicative of the larger problem of racism and racial discrimination in American society." But, he avers: "the degree to which this perception is based on racial bias or represents an objective assessment of worker qualifications is not easy to determine."

Note that Wilson's many studies provide no empirical basis for testing the "objectivity" of the employers' assessment of black workers. He has not observed workers on the job in particular work sites or industries. Nor does he query his black subjects about their attitudes toward employers or their experiences with racism. Nevertheless, Wilson reaches the startling conclusion that "the issues are complex and cannot be reduced to the simple notion of employer racism."

This statement prompted me to retrieve Gordon Allport's The Nature of Prejudice from a dusty bookshelf. On page 8 one encounters the following definition of prejudice:

An avertive or hostile attitude toward a person who belongs to a group, simply because he belongs to that group, and is therefore presumed to have the objectionable qualities ascribed to the group.

Allport allows that real differences exist among groups in the frequency of particular attributes. Indeed, this is the stuff of social science. But the nature of prejudice is when preconceived judgments about groups are applied to particular individuals so as "to place the object of prejudice at some disadvantage not merited by his own misconduct." In effect, Wilson has had to define prejudice out of existence in order to reach the conclusion that the patently discriminatory behavior of employers is not racist. Once again, he has engaged in a rhetorical shill game in order to defend his paradigm from the discrepant facts churned up in his own research.

The clincher to Wilson's argument is his finding that 12 of the 15 African-American employers who turned up in his sample expressed negative views of inner-city blacks. Asked on the Charlie Rose Show whether employer racism might not be a problem, Wilson triumphantly cited his finding about his 12 black employers. When I reported this same finding to my class at Queens College, a black student sitting in the front-row-enter broke into a cynical smile. "They're just on the same side as the white employers," he commented. Indeed, if we learned anything from the Million Man March, it is that the perceptions and judgments of the black middle class represent no benchmark of truth.

WHILE WILSON'S EMPLOYERS DISPARAGED BLACK WORKERS, THEY EXTOLLED THE VIRTUES of immigrant workers. Wilson also takes these claims at face value, repeating the familiar argument that immigrants are willing to work harder for less money because the wages, however low, compare favorably to wages in their countries of origin. Once again, Wilson's data are not so accommodating. His survey of inner-city residents found that "jobless black men have a lower 'reservation wage' than the jobless men in the other ethnic groups." Unemployed black men were willing to settle for less than $6.00 an hour, whereas their Mexican and Puerto Rican counterparts demanded $6.20 and $7.20, respectively. Unemployed whites demanded over $9.00 an hour. Thus, Wilson's data do not support the conventional wisdom that blacks are unwilling to work at the same paltry wages as immigrants. This calls again for some artful hairsplitting.

"But," cautions Wilson, "surveys are not the best way to get at underlying attitudes and values." To gain a better grasp at the "cultural issues," he turns to Richard Taub's ethnographic study that found that black men are more "hostile" than Mexican men, less compliant, and less hard-working. In other words, it is not enough that these ghetto blacks, tenth-generation Americans, are willing to work for less money than Third World immigrants. The problem, it would seem, is that they have forgotten how to shuffle and smile the way their forebears did during slavery and Jim Crow.

Wilson's "findings" on immigrants and blacks have been seized upon by reviewers. Joe Klein comments: "Don't the Mexican immigrants -- and all the other immigrants, including West Indian blacks -- demonstrate that there are decisive differences of belief and behavior within the same low-end labor force? And doesn't this mean that underclass poverty is more a normative problem than an economic one?" In her review in Commentary (November 1996), Leslie Lenkowsky, president of the Hudson Institute, also noted with undisguised glee that Wilson found that Mexicans have more positive attitudes toward family and work than did blacks. Her conclusion: "This suggests that curing the inner-city culture of its ills is the sine qua non for economic and social mobility, and not the other way around." Wilson may protest that he is being misread, and that his position gives primacy to jobs. However, he has advanced a weak and contradictory case, and provided his ideological adversaries with the ammunition that they need to jettison his WPA-style jobs program.

FINALLY, LET US EXAMINE WILSON'S PRAXIS. Here we confront the policy repercussions of his theoretical axioms. Wilson has no basis in theory for advocating anti-racist public policy, either in the form of more vigorous enforcement of Title V barring employment discrimination or in the form of affirmative action mandates that would pry open the doors that are currently shut. He is silent about the open and pervasive discrimination by local employers since he does not believe that they can fairly be accused of racism. He proposes a system of car pools to ferry ghetto blacks to jobs in the distant suburbs, without explaining why suburban employers would be any more willing to employ these racial pariahs than their urban counterparts.

We come now to the centerpiece of Wilson's policy agenda: a WPA-style jobs program originally proposed by Mickey Kaus in his neoconservative tract, The End of Equality. Wilson likes the "universal" aspect of the proposal: that anyone (yes, folks, no restrictions whatsoever) can sign up for work on the government payroll. To help rebuild the crumbling infrastructure, compensate for government cutbacks in library services and garbage collection, clean parks and playgrounds, and otherwise contribute to the common weal. There is only one hitch: the pay would be pegged at less than minimum wage. Otherwise too many people would flock into the program, and workers would have no incentive to enter the more lucrative jobs that await them in the private sector.

Though Wilson would like to supplement these low-wage jobs with universal health insurance, a child care program, and earned income tax credits, he knows that such programs have no realistic chance of being implemented in the present political climate. Nevertheless, he insists that these jobs, precisely because they are low-wage, would not only reach the poorest of the poor, but would also put ghetto neighborhoods on the road to reconstruction. Here it is best to let Wilson speak for himself:

As more people become employed, crime, including violent crime, and drug use will subside; families will be strengthened and welfare receipt will decline significantly; ghetto-related culture and behavior, no longer sustained and nourished by persistent joblessness, will gradually fade. As more people become employed and gain work experience, they will have a better chance of finding jobs in the private sector when they become available. The attitudes of employers toward inner-city workers will undergo change, in part because they would be dealing with job applicants who have steady work experience and would furnish references from previous supervisors.

Here Wilson commits that archetypal liberal fallacy of failing to distinguish between a palliative and a remedy. It is not that the creation of even minimum-wage jobs might not bring welcome relief to people who have no better options. But to pretend that this will "break the cycle of joblessness" and place these communities on the road to reconstruction is sheer delusion. Small wonder that when liberal programs fail to deliver on their inflated promises that reaction sets in, as people conclude that "liberalism has failed" and that we need to "try something else," like abolishing entitlements and chucking welfare mothers and their children out into the cold to fend for themselves.

There is another grievous flaw in Wilson's proposal for a public-sector jobs program, and it is clearly spelled out in a 1974 book by Arthur Fletcher, The Silent Sellout. As Assistant Secretary of Labor, Fletcher was the moving force behind the affirmative action initiatives that were implemented during Nixon's first term. The context was 1969, a year when memories were still fresh of the ghetto uprisings that followed King's assassination a year earlier, when black militancy reached fervid heights, and when grass-roots groups angrily challenged the lily-white buildings trades in such cities as Chicago, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. Fletcher, along with Labor Secretary George Shultz, convinced Nixon to resurrect the Philadelphia Plan that had been formulated during the Johnson Administration, but shelved soon after Humphrey's defeat in 1968.

A slight digression is in order here. The argument has been put forth, most prominently by Hugh Davis Graham, author of the influential The Civil Rights Era, that Nixon revived the Philadelphia Plan in order to drive a wedge between labor unions, blacks, and Jews, thereby fragmenting the liberal coalition that elected Democrats to the White House. In my view, this is a myth spun by liberals to provide ideological cover for their retreat from affirmative action. A different story emerges from a recent history by John David Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action. Shultz and Nixon saw the Philadelphia Plan as a useful way to manage the crisis that was brewing in ghettos across America, while one-upping the Democrats with a distinctively Republican civil rights initiative that opened up jobs for blacks in the private sector. Obviously, the fact that Democratic unions were targeted for what came to be known as affirmative action meant that the political risks were minimal (of course, the opposite was true for Democrats). Nixon expended a great deal of political capital fighting off an attempt by Congressional Democrats, responding to pressure from labor unions, to nip the Philadelphia Plan in the bud, and later John Mitchell's Department of Justice successfully defended the Plan before the Supreme Court. However, once the popular backlash against "quotas" became explosive politically, Nixon flip-flopped and demagogically attacked the very "quotas" that he had put into place.

THE "SILENT SELLOUT" THAT FLETCHER ALLUDED TO IN HIS BOOK was the failure in the Johnson Administration to enforce Title V of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and to make headway in attacking the pervasive racism in job markets. In arguing for the Philadelphia Plan, Fletcher presents a forceful and eloquent case against precisely the kind of government jobs program that Wilson has proposed. It is worth quoting at length:

Work opportunities can be provided within the existing institutions of the American economic, social and political system. All of us are skeptical and suspicious of "make work" programs, or "special employment projects" which do not play a part in the basic economic system of the nation. These are usually failures. They produce "training programs" which do not lead to jobs. Worse than that, they are viewed by many blacks as attempts by the white man to buy the black man off cheaply. Thus, they are not taken seriously as work opportunities. The failure of most of such programs is testimony to the fact that a solution to the civil rights problem is the opening up of the existing institutions to minorities. Devising special "preserves" or "reserves" for blacks appears only as a sop to a noisy political minority, not as a recognition of the right and dignity of each as an American citizen. Only our massive economic system can supply the employment opportunities necessary to establish the individual equality which the civil rights concept requires.

Fletcher's vigorous defense of integrating black workers into existing job structures and his advocacy of affirmative action to drive a wedge into the wall of occupational segregation have been vindicated by history. More than any other policy, affirmative action has led to the desegregation of major labor markets, in blue-collar occupations as well as the professions and corporate management, and in the public sector where over one-quarter of blacks are employed. Indeed, affirmative action is the major factor behind the significant economic gains that blacks have reaped during the post-civil-rights era.

There is of course sobering irony in the fact that affirmative action was advanced by a Republican administration over the heated opposition of most liberals and without notable support of the civil rights establishment. And there is the other sobering irony that the policy that has done the most to advance the cause of racial and economic justice is the one that has received only equivocal support from the man who is the personification of racial liberalism.

Despite the conceptual muddle, Wilson is right in his central argument that there is a job crisis in black America, and that it is at the root of the manifold problems that beset black communities. He is fatally wrong, however, in portraying this job crisis as the result of colorblind economic forces that can be remedied through colorblind public policy. This is a message that appeals to a nation that craves to get "beyond race," not through an honest reckoning with the legacy of slavery, but by pretending that it acquitted itself of political and moral responsibility with the grudging passage of civil rights laws. Crucial as this legislation was, it did little or nothing to alter the racial division of labor that is the quintessence of institutionalized racism, past and present. Indeed, it was the failure of Title V to significantly curb employment discrimination that led, a decade later to the gradual implementation of affirmative action policy.

Although engulfed in controversy since its inception, affirmative action achieved its principal policy objective: the rapid integration of blacks into major occupational sectors where they had been historically excluded. Ironically, this is precisely the race-specific approach that Wilson has opposed in his last three books. Instead of criticizing affirmative action for primarily helping the middle class (as though they do not need and deserve such help), Wilson could have argued for broadening affirmative action to reach precisely the workers, like those on Chicago's South Side, who have been excluded from industrial and service jobs in the local economy. Now that affirmative action has been virtually gutted, Wilson will have to live with the consequences of his triumphant crusade against race-specific public policy.

Contents of No. 22