REMEMBER THE PRESIDENT'S RACE INITIATIVE? Bill Clinton waxed on in 1997 about its importance for how he wanted his administration to be remembered.¹ The initiative featured a series of publicly staged "conversations" around the country -- a classically Clintonesque combo of psychobabble talk-show and televangelical faith-healing, dressed up as serious reflection on public issues. Because this serial spectacle was hyped as originating from the White House, it seemed to imply far-reaching, if unexpressed, consequences for policy even though the "conversations" themselves reduced to the standard talk-show fare of pain, sensitivity, victimization, difference, healing and understanding. This sense was fueled by the President's gravitas in discussing his Initiative, which extended to his appointing a high-profile advisory board to shape and orchestrate it all.

There were rumors of disaffection among prominent advisory board members who had been seduced by Bipartisan Bill's cooing and cajolery, only to find their recommendations tightly constrained by the President's watchdog staffers overseeing the Initiative. The rule of thumb seemed to be to preempt any proposal that would cost anything or otherwise offend conservatives.

Then there were the moments when the public conversations veered to approximate the Jerry Springer show. Right-wing, professional anti-affirmative action shills like Ward Connerly and Abigail Thernstrom, showed up to let loose their predictable bombasts.

After all this hoopla dissipated what remained was a well-known formula. The Race Initiative staff commissioned the National Research Council of the National Academies to produce a study to -- in the words of Christopher Edley, Jr., the President's special advisor to the Initiative (that is, its commissar) -- "provide the nation with an authoritative assessment of where we are."

WELL, THE STUDY WAS RELEASED AND ANNOUNCED at a symposium in New York in March, 2001. America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences is published by the National Academies Press and edited by prominent sociologists Neil Smelser and William Julius Wilson and Faith Mitchell, Director of the Division on Social and Economic Studies of the National Academies' Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. America Becoming contains nearly nine hundred pages in two volumes and features twenty- nine articles by a plethora of respected scholars on such topics as immigration, racial attitudes, and trends in education, neighborhood and geographic characteristics, criminal justice, health, labor force, income, wealth and welfare.

Putting to one side for the moment its merits and specific provenance, America Becoming is the latest installation of a familiar genre -- the "scientific" (read ostensibly apolitical) study of American race relations commissioned by government or major philanthropic organizations. The most famous, comprehensive and consequential of these was An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, commissioned by the Swedish sociologist and economist Gunnar Myrdal in 1937 by the Carnegie Corporation and published in 1944.² Though it has become known as the Myrdal study, An American Dilemma was the product of contributions by a phalanx of scholars who submitted lengthy, topical memoranda which Myrdal and his assistants then massaged into a coherent, fourteen hundred page document.

In 1985 the National Research Council and its Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education commissioned a Committee on the Status of Black Americans to conduct a research project that would update the Myrdal study. The result was A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society, edited by economist Gerald D. Jaynes and sociologist Robin M. Williams, Jr. and published by the National Academy Press in 1989. A Common Destiny, often described as "Myrdal II," was produced in a fashion somewhat similar to its predecessor. The raw material for the more than five hundred fifty page volume was generated by panels of scholars who produced research papers on education, employment, income and occupations, health and demography, political participation and justice administration, and social and cultural change and continuity. The editors and their staff constructed the volume from those research reports.

If A Common Destiny was Myrdal II, then America Becoming might be seen as Myrdal III, though its editors make no such claim. The new volume differs significantly from both the original and the update. It does not attempt to present a singular, coherent statement, and it reaches beyond the black/white dichotomy, presenting studies on conditions among American Indians (the study's conventional term of reference), Hispanics (likewise the reference of choice) and Asian and Pacific Islanders. Nevertheless, this lone substantive result of the ballyhooed Clinton Race Initiative shares more fundamental features with a long lineage of race relations studies. Among these features is a naïve, often evasive pursuit of a notion of scientific objectivity that eschews political discussion of the sources of inequality.

Concern with the appearance of absolute impartiality had much to do with Myrdal's selection to direct the landmark study. The Carnegie Corporation explicitly sought a non-American -- preferably a Swiss or Scandinavian -- scholar to head the effort, on the partly strategic, partly academic premise that a foreign scholar would be free of obvious value commitments on the issue.³

In fact, the original Myrdal study wasn't even the first to be organized around that premise. In 1933 the Julius Rosenwald Fund commissioned Bertram F. O. Schrieke, a Dutch East Indies colonial official and anthropologist, to study black American life and education. The sponsors treated as a plus the fact that he, as he notes in the book's introduction, "had never visited the United States nor met an American Negro." Three years later he published Alien Americans: A Study of Race Relations,⁴ which went beyond the original charge to include chapters on other populations of non-European origin in the U.S.

Not all these studies have gone to such obsessive lengths to project impartiality. A National Interracial Conference of sixteen philanthropic organizations, in concert with the Social Science Research Council, commissioned black sociologist Charles S. Johnson to conduct what was published in 1930 as The Negro in American Civilization: A Study of Negro Life and Race Relations in the Light of Social Research.⁵

In the 1960s, reflecting both the victory of the liberal approach to race relations propagated by An American Dilemma and the urgency of the moment, the strictures on maintaining appearances of rigid neutrality loosened dramatically, even in studies initiated and funded by the federal government. The most important expression of the genre during that period, the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (commonly known as the Kerner Commission Report, after the Commission's chairman, then Illinois Governor Otto Kerner), in 1968 unhesitatingly identified "white racism" and persistent racial inequality and injustice as the ultimate causes of the previous several years' wave of civil disturbances in inner-cities.⁶

THUS IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT to get too excited about America Becoming even under the most exigent circumstances and if it laid out the boldest analysis or prescriptions. It is one of a long line of such projects, the vast majority of which have come and gone without leaving a trace.

The other studies and reports were sparked by perceptions of social turmoil and upheaval -- race riots in Chicago in 1919 and New York in 1934, the tremendous shift in racial demography wrought by the Great Migration of black people from the South to the urban North in the first half of the twentieth century, the country's uncertain future in a post-World War II world, intensified postwar civil rights activism and, finally, the urban uprisings of the 1960s. The Myrdal and Kerner Commission studies crystallized ways of framing American race relations and racial inequality that resonated widely in the society, particularly among opinion-leading elites.

Myrdal interpreted racial inequality as a deviation from the basic American Creed committed to ideals of democracy, liberty and fairness. In doing so, he provided a way to acknowledge the injustice of racial stratification while avoiding a more radical judgment of the sources of racial inequality. Defining the problem in that way also allowed Myrdal to propose remedies that mainly concerned changing whites' racial attitudes, even though An American Dilemma extensively documented white racism's foundations in structural economic and political relations.⁷

Similarly, the Kerner Commission report explicitly identified white racism as the linchpin of American racial problems and black inequality, from colonial times forward. Like the Myrdal study, this diagnosis provided, on the one hand, a detailed account of the ways that racial inequality has been maintained and reproduced through social, political and economic structures and, on the other, a frame for discussing the problem that treats it as separable from the fundamental character of the American social order. Defining "white racism" as the source of racial inequality seemed like a bold move at the time, particularly as an explanation of the eruptions of serious civil disorder that had become a pattern in inner cities during the mid- and late 1960s. But doing so once again fingered an attitude as the culprit and preserved a sense that remedying inequality required only finding ways to overcome blacks' exclusion from an otherwise just and well-functioning society.

UNLIKE An American Dilemma and the Kerner Commission report, America Becoming proposes no overarching diagnosis, no potentially crystallizing metaphor, no proposals for national action -- no conclusions whatsoever. Despite the limitations of the earlier studies' diagnoses, they at least linked inequality clearly to injustice. The Kerner Commission document even concluded with seventy pages of recommendations for redress focusing on employment, education, housing and social welfare -- all proceeding from an understanding that the bedrock in each area must be substantially increased public spending.⁸

The Race Initiative study's editors discuss inequality mainly in a morally and politically desiccated language of "unequal outcomes," which begs the question: Outcomes of what? They sedulously steer clear of sharp causal statements or overt judgments. Their introductory essay is dominated by narrow, technicistic discussion of problems associated with research methodology; it is shaped by problems of taxonomy -- how to define groups -- and issues complicating generalization from aggregate data.⁹

This "just the facts, ma'am" approach reflects a sophomoric, or cowardly, notion of social science and its potential for contributing to the struggle against inequality. It was precisely because they were yoked to overarching, morally inflected diagnoses that the Myrdal and Kerner Commission studies had impact. Myrdal's vision reflected a faith in scientific "social engineering" that now seems to expect too much from professional expertise, but he recognized that to be effective in addressing social problems social science must be politically engaged. The evolution of a social policy research industry that accommodates and feeds into the neoliberal political consolidation of the last two decades has been driven by denial of that reality. America Becoming marks an ironic and unappealing comedown from Myrdal's certitude that the "American social scientist, because of the New Deal and the War, is already acquiring familiarity with planning and social action. He will never again be given the opportunity to build up so 'disinterested' a social science."¹⁰

In the absence of mooring to a clear political or policy perspective, the findings of the various studies that comprise America Becoming fall flat. Without some practical impetus no one but other academics will read or discuss them, and for that specialized audience there is little that is strikingly new or surprising in the data assembled. This is not to make light of this research; other social scientists who work in these areas will find much in these chapters helpful. However, most lie in the realm of learning more and more about less and less. From a larger perspective they mainly fill in details of a picture whose outlines are already well known: that nonwhites, including many immigrants, in the United States generally occupy disadvantaged and racially segregated positions in relation to whites in employment, income, occupational distribution, health, education and housing; that they are more likely to be victimized by the criminal justice system and in need of public assistance; and that racial prejudice still exists and has consequences.

Most of all, this apolitical approach to policy research is bogus. Assumptions about how the social world is fundamentally structured, what features of life are most crucially determinant, what patterns of social relations and institutional arrangements are appropriate or thinkable domains for intervention, shape all policy research. And these assumptions are profoundly ideological and political; they derive from and reflect notions of social arrangements that are "natural" and beyond the scope of social action, what power relations are proper or acceptable, what interests are normative and what constituencies are to be addressed. These assumptions and predispositions determine the formulation of questions that guide inquiry, what counts as evidence and how it is interpreted.

Astonishingly, discussion of politics and political choices is almost entirely missing from the Race Initiative study. Only the three chapters on trends among Asians, Hispanics and American Indians even discuss political participation as an issue.¹¹ Only the three chapters on criminal justice focus on the links between politics, policy and inegalitarian social outcomes.¹² This is a striking departure from nearly all prior such studies, which discussed politics, the impact of public policies and the exercise of citizenship rights at some length.

The editors apologize for this all too revealing omission by noting that the author commissioned to write a paper -- recall that the book has twenty-eight substantive chapters -- on race and politics had to withdraw from the conference.¹³ That simply doesn't wash. Political and ideological assumptions saturate the study; they shape the questions researchers ask and the kinds of evidence they look for. For instance, the chapters on Labor Force, Income, Wealth and Welfare Trends completely avoid examining the significance of federal trade policies, regressive tax reforms, a thirty-year corporate attack on unions and social wage policies and retreat from civil rights enforcement on patterns of inequality.¹⁴ The chapters on health don't inquire as to the role of the corporate takeover of health care provision and of public policies in intensifying the health hazards of life in impoverished areas through lax environmental regulation, atrophy of public services.¹⁵ Neither those nor any other chapters investigate federal and local governments' role in intensifying homelessness and the crisis of affordable housing by supporting redevelopment schemes that displace poor people and reduce the stock of affordable units. The education chapter asks about the effects of hip-hop and a supposed ghetto culture on educational performance -- but not unequal school funding, too large classrooms and inadequate service support.¹⁶ And, of course, concern with tracking out-of-wedlock births and teen childbearing looms far larger than any of those policy- related issues.¹⁷

The problem lies ultimately with the editors, who determined what mix of topics should be covered in the volume and who should contribute to it. It's not really surprising that the Race Initiative's study is biased in this way. One of the three editors, Wilson, has built his academic career on this kind of superficially apolitical research while at the same time acting as a policy advisor for Democratic politicians. In fact, the HOPE VI program, the main vehicle that Clinton's Department of Housing and Urban Development used to displace poor people from inner-city locations attractive to developers, has drawn its perverse legitimation as an antipoverty strategy largely from Wilson's theory that having too many poor people living around one another drags them into social pathology. The Chicago Housing Authority explicitly cited Wilson as justification for its plan to displace residents from the Cabrini-Green low-income housing project and raze the site for construction of upscale housing.¹⁸ Other housing authorities, and even private developers, evoke his formulations in their proposals. Just as "blight" and "slum clearance" sanitized the destruction of poor people's housing as humane social policy under urban renewal a half-century earlier, Wilson's "concentrated poverty" and "isolation effects"¹⁹ now provide similar rhetorical lubricant for a yet more concerted and more surgically extensive effort to remove poor people from desirable central city locations and to replace them with upper-income occupancies. And this effort comes with the Federal government's official repudiation of its responsibility for direct provision of low-income housing, a commitment it had held since the New Deal. Wilson's apologists, all too many of them on the left, might object that it is not fair to hold him responsible for the ways that politicians and others use his ideas. However, despite his prominence and visibility as a Democratic policy advisor, and the ease with which he can gain access to all main public forums, Wilson has never deigned to object publicly to the way his wrong- headed theories are borne out on the backs of poor people.

And that brings us to the Race Initiative's initiator himself. How could Bill Clinton -- who has been so deeply implicated in the spread of corporate health care, pursuit of trade and investment policies that accelerate the global race to the bottom, who intensified the racist war on drugs and criminalization of inner-city minority populations, exponentially expanded the federal death penalty, eliminated the federal commitment to public assistance to the poor, led a retreat from the federal commitment to provide low- income housing, temporized about affirmative action, pandered to racist sensibilities ever since he capitalized on the execution of a poor, brain-damaged black Arkansan during his campaign for the 1992 presidential nomination -- accept a study that would raise any of those issues?

Political scientist Claire Jean Kim also discusses the significant shift the Clinton Race Initiative marked from the sensibilities undergirding the Myrdal and Kerner Commission studies. She argues forcefully that the real significance of Clinton's Initiative lay in its rejection of the postwar liberal orthodoxy on racial inequality, articulated in the Myrdal study and amplified by the Kerner Commission report, that "first, denied the existence of racial/cultural differences between Blacks and Whites and, second, identified White racism or prejudice as the most important barrier to Black advancement in American society." The Clinton Initiative, she argues, "repudiated this orthodoxy, essentializing racial/cultural differences and arguing that the race problem consisted not of White racism but of the threat these differences posed to national unity." ²⁰ Moreover, the 1998 final report of his Initiative's Advisory Board, One America in the 21st Century: Forging a New Future, eschewed discussion of contemporary patterns of structured inequality and called instead for "overcoming 'racial and cultural barriers,' finding common ground 'despite racial differences,' and using dialogue to 'develo[p] new understanding among people of different races.'"²¹ Not only do these formulations recall essentialist expressions of racial liberalism that predated An American Dilemma; they also mark, as Kim notes, a retreat from the conviction that public policy is the appropriate domain for redress of racial inequality. The multiculturalist notion of "difference," in fact, replaced inequality or racial injustice in the Initiative's report.²² It is instructive in this context that the editors' introduction to America Becoming similarly presumes fundamental racial/cultural difference.²³ It also shares with the Initiative's report a teleological view of racial progress, proclaiming their commitment "to tracking the progress of racial and ethnic groups toward conditions of equity and justice."²⁴

Kim asks the pertinent question: "Why did the Clinton White House launch the Race Initiative in the first place?" Her answer, that it stemmed most immediately from the Clinton administration's poll-drivenness,²⁵ makes sense. I suspect that the fact that it came less than a year after he signed the odious 1996 welfare reform legislation, and at the same moment that his administration was pressing its attack on public housing, may also help to explain Clinton's motives and timing in calling for the vapid national discussion. The Race Initiative both deflected public attention from the real injuries his administration was inflicting on the largely nonwhite poor, while expressing empty concern through the therapeutic language of racial healing -- a standard political ploy for his administration.

But what about the scholars and the integrity of their pursuit of inquiry? Well, here's where the development of a social policy research industry is pertinent. The firmest, most consistent and emphatic conclusion of these studies is that further research is needed. Now remember that: 1) the Race Initiative staff (including its commissars) and its editors set the parameters for the study; 2) academics as a race are vulnerable to fantasies of advising the Prince and like to be close to power; and 3) ideology is the mechanism that harmonizes the possible dissonance between principle and advancing personal interest.

1. See Adolph Reed, Jr., "Yackety-Yack About Race" The Progressive (December 1997). return

2. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1944). return

3. For discussion of these features of the Myrdal study's background, see, for instance, David W. Southern, Gunnar Myrdal and Black-White Relations: The Use and Abuse of an American Dilemma, 1944-1969 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), pp. 1-27 and Walter A. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938- 1987 (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 10-35. return

4. B. F. O. Schrieke, Alien Americans: A Study of Race Relations (New York: Viking, 1936). The book's front dust cover described it as "A notable study of conflicting races in the United States, made by an expert foreign observer without sectional or racial bias". return

5. Charles S. Johnson, The Negro in American Civilization: A Study of Negro Life and Race Relations in the Light of Social Research (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1930). return

6. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report (New York: Bantam, 1968). return

7. This aspect of the Myrdal study was noted by some, mainly black, reviewers at the time of its publication. See Ralph Ellison, "An American Dilemma: A Review" in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964) and Oliver C. Cox, Caste, Class and Race (Garden City: Doubleday, 1948; reprinted Monthly Review Press, 1959), pp. 509-38. Stephen Steinberg discusses and amplifies these criticisms of Myrdal in Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston: Beacon, 2001), pp. 21-49. return

8. National Advisory Commission, Report, pp. 410-84. return

9. America Becoming, vol I, pp. 1-19. return

10. American Dilemma, p. 1023. return

11. Albert Camarillo and Frank Bonilla, "Hispanics in a Multicultural Society: A New American Dilemma?"; Russell Thornton, "Trends Among American Indians in the United States"; and Don T. Nakanishi, "Political Trends and Electoral Issues of the Asian Pacific American Population," all in volume I. return

12. Randall Kennedy, "Racial Trends in the Administration of Criminal Justice"; Alfred Blumstein, "Race and Criminal Justice"; and Darnell F. Hawkins, "Commentary on Randall Kennedy's Overview of the Justice System"; all in volume II. return

13. Neil J. Smelser, William Julius Wilson and Faith Mitchell, "Introduction," vol. I, p. 2. return

14. James P. Smith, "Race and Ethnicity in the Labor Market: Trends Over the Short and Long Term"; Harry J. Holzer, "Racial Differences in Labor Market Outcomes Among Men"; Cecelia A. Conrad, "Racial Trends and Labor Market Access and Wages: Women"; Robert A. Moffitt and Peter A. Gottschalk, "Ethnic and Racial Differences in Welfare Receipt in the United States"; John Sibley Butler and Charles C. Moskos, "Labor Force Trends: The Military as Data"; Thomas D. Boston, "Trends in Minority-Owned Businesses"; and Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, "Wealth and Racial Stratification"; all in volume II. return

15. Raynard S. Kington and Herbert W. Nickens, "Racial and Ethnic Differences in Health: Recent Trends, Current Patterns, Future Directions"; Vonnie C. McLoyd and Betsy Lozoff, "Racial and Ethnic Trends in Children's and Adolescents' Behavior and Development"; Renée R. Jenkins, "The Health of Minority Children in the Year 2000: The Role of Government Programs in Improving the Health Status of America's Children"; David R. Williams, "Racial Variations in Adult Health Status: Patterns, Paradoxes, and Prospects"; and Eugene Z. Oddone, Laura A. Peterson, and Morris Weinberger, "Health-Care Use in the Veterans Health Administration: Racial Trends and the Spirit of Inquiry"; all in volume II. return

16. Ronald F. Ferguson, "Test-Score Trends Along Racial Lines, 1971 to 1996: Popular Culture and Community Academic Standards," volume I. return

17. Gary D. Sandefur, Molly Martin, Jennifer Eggerling-Boeck, Susan E. Mannon and Ann M. Meier, "An Overview of Racial and Ethnic Demographic Trends," volume I. The book's index lists fourteen references to teen childbearing (seven in each volume), one reference to homelessness, one to trade unions, one reference to managed care, none to gentrification, capital flight or corporate welfare. return

18. Larry Bennett and Adolph Reed, Jr., "The New Face of Urban Renewal: The Near North Redevelopment Initiative and the Cabrini-Green Neighborhood" in Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and our Retreat From Racial Equality (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999), Adolph Reed, Jr. ed.. Also see Blair Kamin, "Public Housing in 1999: A Hard Assessment" Architectural Record (November, 1999), pp. 77f. return

19. I have criticized these notions extensively elsewhere on substantive grounds as characterizations of the lived experience of poor people. See Adolph Reed, Jr., Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), chapter 6. return

20. Claire Jean Kim, "Clinton's Race Initiative: Recasting the American Dilemma", Polity 33 (Winter 2000): 175. return

21. Ibid.: 193. return

22. Ibid.: 190-91. return

23. America Becoming, pp. 7-12. return

24. Ibid., p. 7. return

25. Kim, 191. return

Contents of No. 32

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