Destabilizing the American Racial Order - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Destabilizing the American Racial Order

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Vesla M. Weaver & Traci Burch

Since America’s racial disparities remain as deep-
rooted after Barack Obama’s election as they were
before, it was only a matter of time until the myth of
postracism exploded in our collective national face.

–Peniel Joseph, The Chronicle of Higher Education

(Luglio 27, 2009)

In electing me, the voters picked the candidate of
their choice, not their race, which foreshadowed the
historic election of Barack Obama in 2008. We’ve
come a long way in Memphis, and ours is a story of
postracial politics.

–Congressman Steve Cohen, Letter to the Editor,

The New York Times (settembre 18, 2009)

Race is not going to be quite as big a deal as it is
now; in the America of tomorrow . . . race will not
be synonymous with destiny.
–Ellis Cose, Newsweek (Gennaio 11, 2010)1

Are racial divisions and commitments in the

United States just as deep-rooted as they were
before the 2008 presidential election, largely
eliminated, or persistent but on the decline? As
the epigraphs show, one can easily ½nd each of
these pronouncements, among others, in the
American public media. Believing any one of
them–or any other, beyond the anodyne claim
that this is “a time of transition”–is likely to be
a mistake, since there will be almost as much evi-
dence against as for it. Invece, it is more illumi-
nating to try to sort out what is changing in the

JENNIFER L. HOCHSCHILD, UN
Fellow of the American Academy
since 1996, is the Henry LaBarre
Jayne Professor of Government,
Professor of African and African
American Studies, and Harvard
College Professor at Harvard
Università.
VESLA M. WEAVER is an Assis-
tant Professor of Politics at the
University of Virginia.
TRACI BURCH is an Assistant
Professor of Political Science at
Northwestern University and a
Research Professor at the Amer-
ican Bar Foundation.

(*See endnotes for complete contrib-
utor biographies.)

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151

Destabi-
lizing the
American
Racial
Order

American racial order, what persists
or is becoming even more entrenched,
and what is likely to affect the balance
between change and continuity. Quello,
at any rate, is what we propose to do
(if briefly) in this article.

Given space constraints, we focus on
young adults. Even if we cannot fully
disentangle the effects of age, historical
era, and cohort, understanding this pop-
ulation is essential if we are to grasp what
is and is not changing in the American
racial order. We argue that younger co-
horts of Americans were raised in a dif-
ferent racial context and think about
and practice race differently than their
older counterparts do.2 Older Ameri-
cans are products of “the sixties” and
its sequelae–namely, a rise in immigra-
zione, blacks’ assertion of pride and dig-
nity, whites’ rejection of racial suprem-
acy (at least in public), a slow opening
of schools and jobs and suburbs to peo-
ple previously excluded, and a shift in
government policy from promoting seg-
regation and hierarchy to promoting (at
least of½cially) integration and equality.
Now, Tuttavia, new institutions and
practices are moving into place: of½cial
records permit people to identify with
more than one race, antidiscrimination
policies are well established in schools
and workplaces, and some non-whites
hold influential political positions. IL
very meaning of race for most of the
twentieth century–a few exhaustive
and mutually exclusive groups into
which one is born and in which one
stays–is becoming less and less ten-
able. Immigration and interracial re-
lationships have produced a set of
people who do not ½t conventional
racial categories and who change
their racial identity in different con-
texts. Today’s young adults will move
through adulthood with the knowl-
edge that one need not be white in

order to become the most powerful per-
son in the world.

For these and other reasons, young
Americans’ racial attitudes are usually
more liberal than those of older Ameri-
cans, and their social networks are more
intertwined. Race, while still predictive,
is less able to determine a young adult’s
life chances and eventual socioeconom-
ic status than ever before in American
history. These changes in the views
and behaviors of young people have the
potential to produce a new American
racial order–that is, if Americans take
the political and policy steps needed to
diminish barriers that still block the
chances of too many young Americans.
If residents of the United States make
the right choices over the next few de-
cades, the country could ½nally move
toward becoming the society that James
Madison envisioned in Federalist No. 10,
one in which no majority faction–not
even native-born European Americans
–can dominate the political, economic,
or social arena.

We are hardly the ½rst to notice sig-
ni½cant changes in young Americans;
bookstores are full of volumes on “the
new millennials.” But we analyze desta-
bilization of the racial order more sys-
tematically and theoretically than many
others have done, and we add some dis-
tinctive elements. Following the work
of government and social policy scholar
Brenna Powell, we de½ne a racial order
as a society’s widely understood and
accepted system of beliefs, laws, E
practices that organizes relationships
among groups understood to be races
or ethnicities.3 A racial order can be an-
alyzed through ½ve components: de½-
nition of a race or ethnicity; classi½ca-
tion of individuals into races or ethnic-
ities; groups’ position relative to that
of other groups; acts that are forbidden,
permitted, or required; and social rela-

152

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Scienze

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tions among groups. All these compo-
nents are changing–within individu-
COME, between persons, among groups,
and across society. Variations in the ½ve
components of the racial order may even
be multiplicative in the sense that forms
of instability interact to increase the mo-
mentum of transformation. Young adults
are not only more likely to be immigrants
and to marry across racial lines, they are
also less committed to the cognitions,
emozioni, behaviors, and assumptions
associated with the racial order of the
civil rights era and its aftermath. If these
new views and practices persist as young
adults move through the life cycle, influ-
encing the people growing up behind
them, then the magnitude and pace of
racial destabilization may increase at
ever faster rates.

This image of a snowball gaining girth
and speed as it tumbles down a hill does
non, Tuttavia, quite complete our argu-
ment. The racial terrain has roadblocks
and boulders that can halt, deflect, O
even explode the rolling snowball. Some
of the least attractive features of the cur-
rent American racial order have remained
stable, and some may even be solidifying,
especially among younger Americans.
New groups–for instance, undocument-
ed Latino immigrants or Muslim men–
may be moving into the old roles of
“most disfavored.” Extraordinarily high
levels of police stops and incarceration
among young black urban men deepen
old racial barriers. Some features of
the American racial order could even
be solidifying because other features are
becoming unstable. Per esempio, ad-
vocacy groups may seek even greater
group solidarity for fear that the disso-
lution of a uni½ed group will worsen
persistent race-based prohibitions or
deplete the ability to defend against
growing anti-immigrant discrimina-
zione. They may be right, since percep-

tions and practices of racial distinctive-
ness are dissolving faster than group-
based hierarchy is being undone, poten-
tially leaving the worst-off without sup-
porters or even a language to challenge
injustice.

On balance, the old racial order is be-
ing transformed–but how it is chang-
ing, how much, for whom, and to what
effect is not easily discerned. Disaggre-
gating the changes into ½ve strands is, In
our view, the best way to address these
questions. Having done so, we are con-
½dent in predicting that racial attitudes,
practices, and relative inequalities will
be profoundly different for our children
and grandchildren than they are for us.
We anticipate, but we cannot con½dently
predict, that the gains will outweigh the
costs. That result will depend largely on
how the American political and social
systems deal with the unintended conse-
quences of these pending transformations.

Young adults face an array of answers

to the simple question, what is a race?
Figura 1 shows two forms used by major
American universities on job applica-
tions for an assistant professorship dur-
ing the mid-2000s. The University of
California, Berkeley (left) aimed at pre-
cision through detail, while Pennsylvania
State University (right) aimed at preci-
sion through minimalism. Both mix race
and ethnicity on a single list; Berkeley
adds the complications of ancestry while
Penn State hints that its main interest
lies in legal statuses with budgetary im-
plications. Berkeley acknowledges both
biological and cultural components of
race; Penn State was silent on the cul-
ture/biology dimension.

These examples suggest that de½ni-
tions of race are increasingly in flux–
returning us in some ways to the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries.
As postmodernists have been pointing

Jennifer L.
Hochschild,
Vesla M.
Weaver
& Traci
Burch

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140 (2) Primavera 2011

153

Destabi-
lizing the
American
Racial
Order

Figura 1
What is a Race?

University of California, Berkeley
Race/ethnicity Please choose one category. If more than
one choose the one with which you most closely identify.

White, not of Hispanic origin: persons having
origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, North
Africa, or the Middle East
African American, not of Hispanic origin:
persons having origin in any of the Black racial groups
of Africa
American Indian or Alaskan native: persons
having origins in any of the original American Indian
peoples of North America, including Eskimos and
Aleuts, or who maintain cultural identification through
tribal affiliation or community recognition
Unknown

(cid:2)

Hispanic (including Black individuals whose
origins are Hispanic)

(cid:2)

Mexican / Mexican American / Chicano:
persons of Mexican culture or origin, regardless of race
Latin-American / Latino: persons of Latin
American (per esempio., Central American, South American,
Cuban, Puerto Rican) culture or origin, regardless
of race
Other Spanish / Spanish American: persons
of Spanish culture or origin, not included in any of the
Hispanic categories listed above

Asian or Pacific Islander

(cid:2)

Chinese / Chinese American: persons having
origins in any of the original people of China
Japanese / Japanese American: persons having
origins in any of the original people of Japan
Filipino / Pilipino: persons having origins in any
of the original people of the Philippine islands
Pakistan / East Indian: persons having origins in
any of the original people of the Indian subcontinent
(India and Pakistan)
Other Asian: persons having origins in any of the
original people of the Far East (including Korea),
Southeast Asia, or Pacific islands (including Samoa),
not included in any of the Asian categories listed above.

The Pennsylvania State University
Affirmative Action Data Card

PLEASE CHECK THE APPLICABLE CATEGORIES
(Group definitions can be found on the back of this card.)

❏ American Indian
or Alaska Native

❏ Asian or Pacific Islander

❏ Black (non-Hispanic) ❏ Hispanic

❏ White (non-Hispanic)

❏ Disabled

❏ Disabled or
Vietnam Era Veteran

❏ United States Citizen or Permanent Resident

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Fonte: Non-random sample of race/ethnicity forms used by various universities for job applications, collect-
ed by the authors in 2007.

out for several decades, if the meaning
of a term is unstable and nonconsensual,
the social structures and practices built
around it are much less solid than they
appear to be.4

Young adults are coming to realize that
nominal racial groups do not have the

solidity that they used to. In 2007, for
esempio, young black adults were more
likely than older ones to agree that “Blacks
today can no longer be thought of as a
single race because the black community
is so diverse.” A year later, young black
adults were slightly more likely to agree

154

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Scienze

Figura 2
Percent of First-Year College Students Choosing Two or More Races, 1971 A 2008

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Data include only full-time students at four-year institutions, and only institutions with at least a 60 per cento
participation rate. Sample sizes range from 142,000 A 286,000, in hundreds of institutions chosen by a complex
strati½cation system. Fonte: Analysis completed for the authors by staff from the Higher Education Research
Institute, Cooperative Institutional Research Program, Freshman Survey (Los Angeles: Graduate School of Edu-
cation and Information Services, ucla, various dates).

that “there is no general Black experi-
ence in America.”5 What counts as a
race is no longer stable, and what char-
acteristics a race has is becoming less
clear, at least to the young.

As race itself is becoming more com-

plicated, individuals’ classi½cations are
becoming less ½xed. An increasing num-
ber of young Americans, Per esempio,
identify as multiracial or as some combi-
nation of conventionally de½ned races.
Since 1971, a University of California,
Los Angeles, survey of full-time, ½rst-
year students at American colleges and
universities has permitted respondents
to choose more than one race. Figura 2
shows the pattern for all students, based
on the weighted sample and including
Hispanic as a “race” analogous to black,
white, Asian, and American Indian. By
2007, more than 8 percent of students
entering American higher education

identi½ed with more than one racial or
ethnic group; the rise since 1990 ha
been uneven but unmistakable, and no
evidence points to reversal.

That more young adults are choosing
to identify as multiracial is no surprise,
given that more are demographically
mixed race. About half of the roughly
seven million people who marked more
than one race in the American Commu-
nity Survey of 2009 were under age eigh-
teen. Interracial mixture will continue
to grow because marriages across group
lines are increasing. Interracial marriages
rose by 65 percent from 1990 A 2000,
e da 20 per cento (from a higher base)
over the next decade. Roughly 8 per cento
of all American marriages are across ra-
cial lines, and about 15 percent of new
marriages in 2008 crossed group bound-
aries. Young adults are much more like-
ly to marry across racial lines than are
even the newly married among their

Jennifer L.
Hochschild,
Vesla M.
Weaver
& Traci
Burch

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140 (2) Primavera 2011

155

Destabi-
lizing the
American
Racial
Order

elders; 13 percent of currently married
people under twenty-½ve have a spouse
of a different race. Intermarriage rates
drop steadily with increasing age, so that
just 5 percent of married adults over age
sixty have wed across group lines.6

In short, young Americans are not only
facing a society in which the de½nition
of a race is less and less clear, they are
also increasingly less able or inclined to
locate themselves within only one con-
ventionally de½ned race. In one survey
of students at highly selective colleges
and universities, descriptions of ethnic-
ity or ancestry included “gay Jewish Cu-
ban American,” “adopted Chinese into
an Indonesia [sic] and Filipino Family,"
“Mixed between American slave descen-
dants and native Liberians, Liberian,"
and “usually Black, sometimes biracial.”
As these survey responses suggest,
immigration complicates individual
classi½cation in a different way. Many
immigrants are reluctant to be catego-
rized within the usual American racial
nomenclature. Somalis, Per esempio,
care much more about religious identity
and clan divisions than about American
racial labels. As one student wrote in a
school essay, “The Somalis that live here
in the U.S. won’t talk to each other until
they know your tribe. . . . [E]very time I
meet someone the ½rst thought that
comes to me is, do they hate you [sic]
tribe?”7 Some immigrant or immigrant
descendants change their racial identi-
ty when they move away from home:
“[R]aised by White parents in a predom-
inantly White town, I considered myself
to be White. . . . In college new worlds
of thought opened to me. Amid a boil-
ing student struggle to create an Asian
American studies program . . . I began
to see myself as an Asian American.”8
Others identify with a different group
from their parents, in a way that is hard
for American-born blacks and whites

to conceive of: “[R]ates of Mexican iden-
ti½cation fall to 81 percent for second-
generation children with only one Mexi-
can-born parent.”9 After all, if the racial
or ethnic labels are essentially arbitrary
from the vantage point of the person
being labeled, why not let them vary?

From the late nineteenth to the mid-

twentieth centuries, people of most
Asian nationalities were excluded from
the United States and denied citizen-
ship even if they managed to immigrate.
Some states prohibited Asians from
owning certain kinds of property, E
thousands of American citizens of Jap-
anese descent were interned during
seconda guerra mondiale. But in recent decades,
the relative socioeconomic status of
Asian Americans and whites has been
reversed, especially among young adults.
Levels of higher education are the only
indicator that we have space to report
here. In 1980, close to 70 percent of
young adult Asians had at least some
college education; by 2009, that ½gure
had risen even higher, to over 80 per cento.
The comparable ½gures for whites are
just under 50 percent in 1980 and just
Sopra 60 percent in 2009–an absolute
gain, but not a relative gain compared
with Asian Americans.

Although still educationally disadvan-
taged, even young adult African Ameri-
cans and Hispanics are attaining more
schooling than in 1980. The proportion
of young adult blacks with at least some
college has risen from just over 30 per cento
to almost 50 per cento; for Latinos, the move
was from less than 30 percent to about
45 per cento. Così, if post–high school
education is a rough indicator of other
measures of socioeconomic status, young
Asian Americans are now better situated
than all other groups and, if anything,
gaining in advantages. At least compared
with their situation a few decades ago,

156

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Scienze

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young adult blacks and Hispanics are
better able to move into jobs requiring
cognitive skills, but they remain consid-
erably behind whites and Asians. A cru-
cial question for the coming decades is
how to avoid “black exceptionalism,"
in which all other non-white groups,
possibly excepting unauthorized immi-
grants, improve their absolute and rela-
tive statuses, leaving blacks at the bot-
tom. There are good reasons to believe
that this outcome can be avoided–some
articulated in this essay–but doing so
will require concentrated efforts to ad-
dress disparities of class as well as of race.
Instability in relative group positions

takes a different form in the political
arena; here, African Americans have a
distinct advantage over Asians and His-
panics. The data are not systematic, Ma
multiple observations point to the idea
that the role, or perhaps tone, of race
in electoral politics is changing. Writer
Darryl Pinckney observed a panel includ-
ing Jesse Jackson, Jr., Al Sharpton, E
Cornel West, all of whom emphasized
“an alternate understanding of Ameri-
can history” that distinguishes blacks
from other Americans. “And yet,” Pinck-
ney wrote, “I got a sense from the students
around me that although they were say-
ing thank you to the older style of black
politica, it was for them very much a new
day.”10 San Francisco District Attorney
Kamala Harris makes roughly the same
point: “[O]ur civil rights heroes fought
so that we could be free to be anything
we wanted. But today’s plan of attack
would not be to march; it would be to
change legislation. We try to change the
system from the inside.”11 A young black
candidate for the Boston City Council
describes her generation as “coalition
builders,” able to “talk to and relate to
other people. . . . I think the successes of
our parents’ generation have better po-
sitioned us–by being exposed to differ-

ent opportunities, you’re exposed to dif-
ferent people, different cultures, differ-
ent perspectives.”12

These quotations could be multiplied.
More systematically, a survey conducted
by the Joint Center for Political and Eco-
nomic Studies found young black elected
of½cials to have different, less conven-
tionally Democratic political views from
their elders, and to be more willing and
able to appeal to voters outside their
race.13 That ½nding suggests an increas-
ing chance to develop new, broader con-
stituencies–as well as to disrupt old as-
sumptions and allegiances within mi-
nority populations.

IL 2008 presidential election re-
inforces the sense that non-whites’ politi-
cal power is rising. Minorities were cru-
cial to Obama’s success both in the pri-
maries and the general election, and their
impact has made it clear that at least in
some states, candidates no longer can
focus only on white voters. Inoltre,
Obama “scored an unprecedented victo-
ry among young Americans, taking 66
percent of the under-30 vote nationally.”14
Even controlling for education, race,
party identi½cation, and views about
the economy and equity, age was signi½-
cantly related to support for Obama’s
candidacy.15 If, as political scientists
have consistently found, a person’s ear-
liest political experiences tend to shape
their later commitments and attitudes,16
then young white voters may be more
willing over the next few decades to sup-
port non-white candidates than their
counterparts used to be, and young non-
white voters may feel more ef½cacious
in electoral politics than their older
counterparts did.

It would be naive to imagine that race
no longer matters in electoral politics–
one need only to look at the Senate or
the set of governors to be disabused of
that idea. Inoltre, black legislators

Jennifer L.
Hochschild,
Vesla M.
Weaver
& Traci
Burch

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140 (2) Primavera 2011

157

Destabi-
lizing the
American
Racial
Order

remain less successful in getting their
bills passed.17 But mounting evidence
shows that opportunities for young black
political candidates are improving, Quello
black candidates have more flexibility in
possible policy positions and strategies
for appealing to voters, and that young
voters of all races are increasingly will-
ing to support some black candidates.
While Asians have overtaken whites in
educational attainment (and achieve-
ment), blacks are at least weakening
whites’ hold on political power.

Until the 1960s, whites had the widest

array of permissions and the narrowest
list of prohibitions; in legal terms, IL
civil rights movement and Great Society
policies swept all that away. Social scien-
tists should never make absolute state-
ments and risk overlooking exceptions,
but we can say that we have not been
able to identify any current laws that
permit or prohibit action based on race
or ethnicity alone. (The Voting Rights
Act and af½rmative action policies come
close to being exceptions, but they make
distinctions by race or ethnicity with
the purpose of bene½ting rather than
harming disadvantaged minorities.)
This 1960s transformation of the legal
structure underlying the American
racial order made possible further
destabilizations in the 2000s.

Nevertheless, some argue that, at times,

state actions still uphold the old, pre–
civil rights racial order. Evidence for this
claim is most apparent in the criminal
justice system, and most apparent for
the young. Controlling for delinquency,
black teens are twice as likely as whites
to have experienced a police interven-
tion by the tenth grade. A study of Chi-
cago found that 20 percent of all sam-
pled residents, but fully 70 percent of
young black men, recalled being stopped
by police in the past year.18 As one stu-

dent puts it, “[T]hey’ll pull me aside
sometimes because they say I ½t the
description. Yeah. Young Black male.
I always ‘½t the description.’”19

Immigration is another arena in which
of½cial or quasi-of½cial state policies tilt
toward the old system of race-based pro-
hibitions; Ancora, young non-white men
are disproportionately affected. Sezione
287 (G) del 1996 immigration law “per-
mit[S] designated . . . local law enforce-
ment . . . of½cers to perform immigration
law enforcement functions.”20 Even the
institutionally cautious Government
Accountability Of½ce concludes, “Bet-
ter Controls Needed over Program.” It
found that some local agencies have fo-
cused not on terrorism or serious crime
as the program intended, but instead
“used 287 (G) authority to process indi-
viduals for minor crimes, such as speed-
ing.” All local agencies lacked suf½cient
oversight, and most reported community
concern that “use of program authority
would lead to racial pro½ling and intim-
idation by law enforcement of½cers.”21
Sezione 287 (G) has an impact well be-
yond the small number of communities
using it. By 2010, slightly over half of
Latinos–a third of the native-born and
seven-tenths of the foreign-born–wor-
ried that they or a close associate might
be deported. A third claimed to know
someone who had in fact been detained
or deported within the past year.22

Perhaps most important, In 2010,
Arizona passed a law that would permit
the police to request proof of legal sta-
tus after stopping someone for a traf½c
or other offense. The law is currently
blocked by the courts on the grounds
that it interferes with federal authority,
but legislators in roughly twenty other
states have suggested that they will in-
troduce similar legislation.

Protecting citizens against crime, po-
licing the borders, and guarding against

158

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terrorism are essential functions of gov-
ernment. But racial pro½ling, harassment
of immigrants (and Muslim men), E
the extremely high levels of incarceration
of young black men reinforce old patterns
of racial hostility and alienation, espe-
cially among teens and young adults. If
group-based prohibitions persist, Essi
could prevent the current destabilization
of the old racial order from becoming a
genuine transformation, at least for the
people immersed in racially inflected
modalities of control.

Overt expressions of stereotypes are

declining in several ways. While many
Americans, especially whites, still hold
pejorative views of people of other races,
the population overall identi½es fewer
sharp-edged group differences than in
previous decades. Almost two-thirds of
Americans, including seven-tenths of
bianchi, agreed in 2007 that whites’ and
blacks’ values have become “more sim-
ilar” in the past decade. Asked if they
“don’t have much in common with peo-
ple of other races," 24 percent of young
adults “completely” disagreed in 1987–
1988; that ½gure rose to 57 percent in
2009. (Among adults over age sixty,
the proportions rose from 11 per cento
A 43 percent–a steeper climb, but to
a lower summit.)23

Inoltre, Americans now hold–
or at least admit to–fewer negative as-
sumptions about groups other than their
own than they did in the past. Young
adults are the most likely to hold “very
favorable” opinions of various groups,
as Table 1 shows. Certamente, Americans
have learned over the past few decades
that it is politically and socially inappro-
priate to express negative stereotypes;
così, some of these “very favorable”
opinions are probably insincere.24 Never-
theless, we have found no reliable evi-
dence showing that young people are

more likely than older adults to give a
socially desirable response instead of a
sincere one. So it seems reasonable to
conclude that, in general, young adults
hold more positive images of other
groups than do older adults.

Daily life can bring the results of rath-
er sterile survey data to life. At a high
school senior prom in Walnut, Califor-
nia, a Thai dances with an African Amer-
ican, while a white, black, and Latino all
dance with one another. “Isn’t it like
this everywhere now?” asks one of the
dancers.25 Second-generation immi-
grant young adults in New York, more
jaded than high school seniors, perceive
plenty of discrimination; but for them,
pure, “cultural traditions collide, merge,
and coexist. . . . These young people . . .
are often proud of their bicultural
abilities.”26

Whether or not they get along with
one another, children and young adults
are growing up in a world that their
grandparents could not have fathomed.
About 40 percent of public school stu-
dents in New York City live in a home
in which a language other than English
is spoken. The school system translates
documents for parents into Spanish,
French, German, Chinese, Japanese,
Urdu, Persian, Hindi, Russian, Bengali,
Haitian Creole, Korean, and Arabic. It
teaches students who speak 167 lan-
guages–no surprise given that they
come from 192 countries.27 According
to Montgomery (Md.) College Presi-
dent Charlene Nunley, community col-
leges are making similar adjustments:

When you change in this diverse way, you
have to fundamentally change your insti-
tution. You have to change the language
skills of your frontline people in admis-
sions, registration and records. You have
to create international student of½ces. You
have to change the art so people feel their

Jennifer L.
Hochschild,
Vesla M.
Weaver
& Traci
Burch

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140 (2) Primavera 2011

159

Destabi-
lizing the
American
Racial
Order

Tavolo 1
Percent of Adults with “Very Favorable” Opinions of Various Racial or Ethnic Groups, 2007

White
Respondents

Black
Respondents

Latino
Respondents

Total
Respondents

Opinion about Whites

18 A 29 years
30 A 44 years
45 A 59 years
60+ years

Opinion about Blacks

18 A 29 years
30 A 44 years
45 A 59 years
60+ years

Opinion about Latinos

18 A 29 years
30 A 44 years
45 A 59 years
60+ years

Opinion about Asians

18 A 29 years
30 A 44 years
45 A 59 years
60+ years

(30%)
(34)
(31)
(29)

19
29
21
18

28%

(38)
(41)
(41)
(38)

46%

(60)

(57)

(51)

(49)

34%

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Figures in boldface indicate decrease in “very favorable” opinions with increasing age. Figures in parentheses
indicate respondents’ views of their own group. “Other” respondents not included. Fonte: Authors’ analyses
of data from the Pew Research Center, “Racial Attitudes in America,” September 5–October 6, 2007
(Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2007), http://pewsocialtrends.org/assets/pdf/Race.pdf.

culture is represented. You have to change
the food–fundamentally change the way
you do business.

Even this list is incomplete. Nunley
continues by observing, “[Y]ou’ve got
to have people on your campus that your
diverse students can identify with. You’ve
got to have people who understand their
issues and their cultures. . . . It’s not good

enough to say, ‘There’s nobody out there;
I can’t ½nd anyone.’ You’ve got to ½nd
them.”28

Finalmente, long-standing and deeply em-
bedded explanations for the old Ameri-
can racial order, in which whites held
most of the best positions and blacks
held most of the worst positions, are
being transformed even as the relative

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160

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Scienze

Tavolo 2
Percent of Respondents Agreeing to Certain Explanations for Racial Socioeconomic Inequality,
by Age and Across Cohorts, 1985 A 2008

Jennifer L.
Hochschild,
Vesla M.
Weaver
& Traci
Burch

Inequality is Due To:

Less Inborn Ability

Lack of Willpower

Year

Age

Whites

Blacks

Whites

Blacks

1985 A 1988

2004 A 2008

18 A 29
30 A 44
45 A 59
60+

13
13
24
36

4
6
6
15

9
6
25
30

14
11
7
19

53
57
64
74

46
48
47
58

32
30
41
48

49
47
39
40

Data from the General Social Survey (gss). Each time period combines three rounds of the gss in order to
have a large enough sample size of blacks. Fonte: Authors’ analysis of gss, various dates.

positions themselves are (more slowly)
shifting. Since 1977, the General Social
Survey has asked respondents for expla-
nations of racial inequality in socioeco-
nomic position. Two of the standard
four response options–“less inborn
ability” and “lack of motivation or will-
power”–clearly make negative attribu-
tions to blacks. Comparing responses
across decades enables us to see both
differences by age at a single point in
time and cohort change over time.

Younger respondents are almost always

less likely than older ones to attribute
blacks’ lower status to lack of ability or
lack of motivation.29 However, disaggre-
gating the data by years reveals a fasci-
nating pattern of cohort change, partic-
ularly among blacks. Tavolo 2 shows the
risultati. In the early period, pejorative
attributions to blacks rose with age in
both races. And with only one exception,
within each age group whites expressed

more negative views of blacks. In the cur-
rent period, older whites remain more
willing than younger whites to express
negative stereotypes, although the ab-
solute levels have declined. Now, how-
ever, younger blacks are almost as will-
ing as older ones (in one case), or more
willing (in the other case), to attribute
socioeconomic differences to blacks’ own
failings. Most important, in one case,
the views of the two youngest groups of
adults are converging and, in the other
case, the views of all but the oldest group
of adults are converging, in explanations
of racial inequality. With one exception,
the differences between the oldest and
youngest adults within a race are now
greater than the differences between the
two races in a given age group.30
Not everything is changing. Old-fash-
ioned racism has not disappeared, as fbi
reports of hate crimes, incidents of daily

140 (2) Primavera 2011

161

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cent. (In contrasto, whites older than
sixty-½ve will make up about 60 per cento
of their age cohort through 2050.)33

Partly through these encounters, E
partly because of institutional and atti-
tudinal change, members of this genera-
tion will have more leeway to choose their
own racial identities, and to change those
identities if they want to. Race will be
less of a determinant in a young adult’s
life chances than it was for his or her par-
ents. The old racial memory of marches,
½re hoses, and boycotts on behalf of farm
workers are being replaced with the burn-
ing towers of 9/11, the New Orleans Su-
perdome of 2005, and the 2008 election
night euphoria in Grant Park, Chicago.
Those images are equally powerful, Ma
their collective impact is more confus-
ing. The American racial order is becom-
ing less and less stable in a variety of
ways. That reality clearly leads to dan-
gers, but on balance, we concur with
Toni Morrison’s report of “guarded
optimism”: “Guarded. Perché il
young people I talk to are just different.
They’re not hanging on to the power-
ful stories. They’re just marching along,
marrying who they want to marry. They
are not like my generation or even the
generation right after me.”34

Destabi-
lizing the
American
Racial
Order

discrimination, and hostility to even le-
gal immigrants make clear. Newer, more
subtle–but also pernicious–forms of
racial domination (often described as
laissez-faire, implicit, or symbolic rac-
ism) have partly replaced overt Jim Crow
forms of control.31 And not all forms of
destabilization will bring racial justice
and equality closer. Without a clear and
demonstrable villain, it is very dif½cult
for young people of color and their white
allies to understand how racial domina-
tion–legacies of the past as well as con-
tinuing practices in the present–still con-
strains their lives. Without group solidar-
ità, if not identity,32 many young black
or Latino men in poor inner-city neigh-
borhoods will lack the allies and group-
based resources that they desperately
need in order to have any chance of con-
ventionally de½ned success.

Ancora, American young adults live in a
different world from that of the 1960s, UN
decade that witnessed civil rights strug-
gle, initiation of a new wave of immigra-
zione, and ½rst steps toward af½rmative
action, school desegregation, electoral
equality, and immigrants’ rights. Questo
generation is more likely to come into
interracial contact both voluntarily
(choosing more diverse friends, net-
works, partners, neighborhoods) and in-
voluntarily, given demographic changes.
They can hardly help but do so: “four
out of 20 children and young adults are
minorities, compared with three out of
10 baby boomers and only two out of 10
seniors. New-immigrant minorities . . .
are both younger and more likely to have
children than the native White popula-
tion.” Non-Hispanic whites younger
than six years old will be in the minority
by 2021; eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-
old non-Hispanic whites will be in the
minority by 2028. Hispanics will then
comprise more than a quarter of young
adults, and blacks will comprise 13 per-

162

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endnotes

* Contributor Biographies: JENNIFER L. HOCHSCHILD, membro dell'American Acade-
il mio da allora 1996, is the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government, Professor of African
and African American Studies, and Harvard College Professor at Harvard University. She
is author of The American Dream and the Public Schools (with Nathan Scovronick, 2003) E
Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (1995). Her current
book project, coauthored with Vesla Weaver and Traci Burch, is tentatively titled “Trans-
forming the American Racial Order: Immigration, Multiracialism, dna, and Cohort
Change.” At present, she is the John R. Kluge Chair of American Law and Governance at
the Library of Congress.
VESLA M. WEAVER is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. She has
published articles in American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, Political Behavior,
Studies in American Political Development, and Social Forces. Her ½rst book, Frontlash: Civil
Rights, the Carceral State, and the Transformation of American Politics, is forthcoming from
Cambridge University Press. Her current book project is “Political Consequences of the
Carceral State” (with Amy Lerman).
TRACI BURCH is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and
a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. Her publications have appeared
in Political Behavior, Law and Society Review, and the Du Bois Review. Currently, she is com-
pleting a book manuscript, “Punishment and Participation: How Criminal Convictions
Threaten American Democracy.”
1 Peniel Joseph, “Our National Postracial Hangover,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Luglio
27, 2009; Steve Cohen, Letter to the Editor, The New York Times, settembre 18, 2009; Ellis
Cose, “Red, Brown, and Blue,” Newsweek, Gennaio 11, 2010.
2 There is no sharp distinction between younger and older individuals; on average, the evi-
dence suggests a division around age thirty, but the changes we describe are better under-
stood as a continuum than as a dichotomy.
3 Jennifer Hochschild and Brenna Marea Powell, “Racial Reorganization and the United
States Census 1850–1930: Mulattoes, Half-Breeds, Mixed Parentage, Hindoos, and the
Mexican Race,” Studies in American Political Development 22 (1) (2008): 59–96; Brenna
Powell, A New Comparative Agenda for Ethno-Racial Politics (Cambridge, Massa.: Harvard
University Government and Social Policy Program, 2010).
4 A good recent example of this argument is in Christina Beltran, The Trouble with Unity:
Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
5 The ½rst item is from Pew Research Center, “Racial Attitudes in America” (Washington,
D.C.: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2007), http://pewsocialtrends
.org/assets/pdf/Race.pdf. The second item is from Fredrick C. Harris and Gary Langer,
“Survey on Race, Politics, and Society” (Center on African-American Politics and Society,
Università della Columbia, and the abc Polling Unit, settembre 2008).
6 All data in this paragraph are from Pew Research Center, Marrying Out: One-in-Seven New
NOI. Marriages Is Interracial or Interethnic (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center for
People and the Press, 2010).
7 Lauren Gilbert, “Citizenship, Civic Virtue, and Immigrant Integration: The Enduring
Power of Community-Based Norms,” Yale Law and Policy Review 27 (Primavera 2009): 374,
380–381.
8 Jiannbin Shiao and Mia Tuan, “Korean Adoptees and the Social Context of Ethnic
Exploration,” American Journal of Sociology 113 (2008): 1023.
9 Brian Duncan and Stephen Trejo, Intermarriage and the Intergenerational Transmission of
Ethnic Identity and Human Capital for Mexican Americans (Bonn, Germany: Institute for
the Study of Labor, 2008), 26.

Jennifer L.
Hochschild,
Vesla M.
Weaver
& Traci
Burch

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140 (2) Primavera 2011

163

Destabi-
lizing the
American
Racial
Order

10 Darryl Pinckney, “What He Really Said,” The New York Review of Books, Febbraio 26, 2009, 10.
11 “Leaders of the New School,” Essence, Febbraio 2009, 106–107.
12 Kenneth Cooper, “Young, Black, and in the Running,” The Boston Globe Magazine, Luglio 19,
2009, 19. See also Gwen I½ll, “Nothing Unique About It,” TIME, settembre 1, 2008, 54.
13 David Bositis, Changing of the Guard: Generational Differences among Black Elected Of½cials

(Washington, D.C.: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 2001).

14 Peter Levine, Constance Flanagan, and Les Gallay, The Millennial Pendulum: A New Genera-
tion of Voters and the Prospects for a Political Realignment (Washington, D.C.: New America
Foundation, 2009), 5.

15 Michael Lewis-Beck, “The Economy, Obama, and the 2008 Election,” PS: Political Science

& Politics (Luglio 2009): 481.

16 Alan Abramowitz, “Barack Obama and the Transformation of the American Electorate,"

agosto 25, 2009, http://papers.ssrn.com.

17 John Grif½n and Brian Newman, Minority Report: Evaluating Political Equality in America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman, “Legis-
lative Effectiveness in Congress” (Department of Political Science, Ohio State University,
2009). Alarmingly, some evidence suggests that many younger blacks and Hispanics exhibit
very high levels of political alienation and nihilism; see Cathy J. Cohen, Democracy Remixed:
Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
18 Robert Crutch½eld, Martie L. Skinner, Kevin P. Haggerty, Anne McGlynn, and Richard F.
Catalano, “Racial Disparities in Early Criminal Justice Involvement,” Race and Social Prob-
lems 1 (2009): 218–230; Wesley Skogan, “Asymmetry in the Impact of Encounters with
Police,” Policing and Society 16 (2) (2006): 99–126.

19 Michael Powell, “Pro½les of Men Who ‘Fit the Description,’” The Washington Post,

Dicembre 14, 2006.

20 Immigration and Nationality Act, section 287 (G) 1996.
21 Government Accountability Of½ce, Immigration Enforcement: Better Controls Needed over
Program Authorizing State and Local Enforcement of Federal Immigration Laws, Gennaio 2009,
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09109.pdf.

22 Pew Hispanic Center, Illegal Immigration Backlash Worries, Divides Latinos (Washington,
D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2010), http://pewhispanic.org/½les/reports/128.pdf.
23 Authors’ analyses of Pew Research Center, Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes:
1987–2009: Independents Take Center Stage in Obama Era (Washington, D.C.: Pew Re-
search Center for the People and the Press, 2009), http://people-press.org/report/517/
political-values-and-core-attitudes.

24 Nevertheless, one might argue that a racial order has changed in important ways if more
and more people who once used derogatory group stereotypes no longer feel free to express
them publicly.

25 Marie O’Connor, “Learning to Look Past Race,” Los Angeles Times, agosto 25, 1999.
26 Philip Kasinitz, John Mollenkopf, Mary Waters, and Jennifer Holdaway, Inheriting the
Città: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age (New York and Cambridge, Massa.: Russell
Sage and Harvard University Press, 2008), 273, 342.

27 Leanna Stiefel, Amy Schwartz, and Dylan Conger, “Language Pro½ciency and Home Lan-
guages of Students in New York City Elementary and Secondary Schools,” February 2003,
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1064581.

28 Charlene Nunley, quoted in David Pluviose, “Study: Most Community Colleges Not Fully

Prepared for Demographic Shift,” Diverse, May 18, 2006, 10–11.

164

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Scienze

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29 Not surprisingly, there is a strong correlation between these two attributions. We found
no signi½cant age difference in the likelihood of explaining status differences by discrimi-
nation or lack of education.

30 These results are not unique. We also found this general pattern of attitudinal or explana-
tory convergence in the 2000s among young adults in other items on other surveys. IL
same sort of convergence across races does not appear among older adults.

Jennifer L.
Hochschild,
Vesla M.
Weaver
& Traci
Burch

31 Lawrence Bobo, James Kluegel, and Ryan Smith, “Laissez-Faire Racism: The Crystalliza-
tion of a Kinder, Gentler Antiblack Ideology,” in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity
and Change, ed. Steven Tuch and Jack Martin (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997), 15–43;
Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders, Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Nilanjana Dasgupta, Debbie McGhee, An-
thony Greenwald, and Mahzarin Banaji, “Automatic Preference for White Americans:
Eliminating the Familiarity Explanation,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 36 (3)
(2000): 316–328; Brian Nosek, Frederick Smyth, Jeffrey Hansen, Thierry Devos, Nicole
Lindner, Kate Ranganath, Colin Tucker Smith, Kristina Olson, Dolly Chugh, Anthony
Greenwald, and Mahzarin Banaji, “Pervasiveness and Correlates of Implicit Attitudes
and Stereotypes,” European Review of Social Psychology 18 (1) (2007): 36–88.

32 Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity

(Cambridge, Massa.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).

33 William Frey, “The Racial Generation Gap,” Milken Institute Review (2007): 16–17;

William Frey, “The Census Projects Minority Surge,” Brookings Institution, Gennaio 7, 2010.

34 “Toni Morrison,” AARP, January–February 2009, 26, 28.

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