Codes and Coalitions

Glenn Loury was a leading black neoconservative during the 1980s and early 1990s, adding his voice to those calling for the dismantling of federal antipoverty programs and an end to most race-based preferences. But the conservative movement's success during the Reagan-Bush years drove a wedge between Loury and his allies, for he learned that many of them were content to destroy the legacy of the Great Society without proposing alternatives aimed at helping minorities or the poor. This dispute was dramatized a few years ago, when Loury spoke at a gathering of conservatives in Washington. In his talk, he moderated his opposition to affirmative action and called for increased government attention to inner-city job training and education. According to the New Republic's Jacob Heilbrunn, the audience responded angrily, with Norman Podhoretz grimly announcing, "I much prefer the old Glenn Loury to the new one." "Those are my people going down the sewer hole with your no-programs," Loury shot back.

While Loury has previously written about his policy prescriptions, in The Anatomy of Racial Inequality he takes on an antecedent question: "Why is there so little public debate in the United States" about "dramatic social facts" such as the high rate of black imprisonment, urban poverty and other indices of black suffering? Loury's answer is racial stigma.

Stigma, he writes, "is about who, at the deepest cognitive level, [people] are understood to be." Who blacks are "understood to be" is rooted in slavery and its accompanying dishonor. And though racial attitudes have certainly evolved, blacks remain stigmatized, forever branded as "the other." Thus, Loury argues, high rates of black imprisonment or other indicators of social disadvantage do not provoke much "public angst," for they do not "strike the typical American observer at the cognitive level as being counterintuitive."

To demonstrate the persistent power of stigma, Loury offers the following example. When people see a sign on a store that says "Smith and Sons," few fear that they will be served by an unqualified beneficiary of nepotism. Upon seeing a black as their surgeon, however, many will suspect that because of affirmative action they are about to be treated by an unqualified doctor. Careful not to assign blame or call names, Loury says that this difference in perception "has little to do with political principles, and everything to do with racial stigma."

In Loury's analysis, racial stigma is closely linked to racial stereotyping, and he is at his most insightful when discussing the self-confirming nature of stereotypes. He provides the example of taxi drivers afraid of being robbed. Because most drivers perceive young black men as the principal threat, most will not stop for them at night. Over time, law-abiding young black men who just want a ride home get tired of being ignored by cabs and develop alternative forms of transportation. But those who want to rob are not so easily deterred. Robbers wait until a cab does stop for them. The result of this process, which economists such as Loury refer to as "adverse selection," is that "the set of young black men actually seen to be hailing taxis after dark may well come to contain a noticeably larger than average fraction of robbers, precisely the circumstance presumed by the drivers in the first place."

While Loury focuses on how blacks are perceived, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres consider how blacks' own perceptions of their plight might lead to a new political movement. In The Miner's Canary, Guinier and Torres argue that rather than internalize their social dysfunction as being their "own fault," many blacks have developed a critical perspective on "the system." Refusing to accept the mythology of the American Dream -- "that those who succeed or fail invariably do so according to their individual merit" -- blacks "appreciate the necessity and efficacy of collective political struggle."

Guinier and Torres announce a bold agenda: "to use the experiences of people of color as the basis for fundamental social change that will benefit not only blacks and Hispanics but other disadvantaged social groups." While they believe that blacks and other minorities will always be at the forefront of progressive reform in this country, Guinier and Torres want to unite the disadvantaged of all races. Their emphasis on the role of poor and working-class whites is perhaps their most important contribution. Drawing explicitly on the legacy of those who, like Martin Luther King, Jr., sought to make the civil rights movement about more than rights for blacks, Guinier and Torres challenge progressives "to move from a politics based primarily on a narrow definition of group or individual self-interest to action in service of a transformative vision of social justice."

Though they know the odds are long ("we . . . identify what appears utopian and utterly implausible"), the authors cite a number of concrete examples where their vision of coalition politics has succeeded. Their best example comes from Texas, where, after the University of Texas's affirmative action plan was voided by a federal judge, the state university system responded by deciding to admit any student who places in the top 10 percent of his or her high school class -- regardless of SAT score. Though the plan has been in effect only since 1997, early indicators suggest that it achieves racial diversity with the added benefit of socioeconomic class diversity.

Guinier and Torres emphasize class, arguing that "the debate over the Texas 10 Percent Plan revealed that what had been thought of as a racial divide also masked a historic class divide in the provision of elite higher education." Before the lawsuit, admission to the Texas state universities was based principally on SAT scores. While blacks and Latinos achieved disproportionately poor results, they were not alone. According to Guinier and Torres, "one of the important breakthroughs occurred when the advocates of reform revealed that some counties in West Texas had never sent a high school graduate to the University of Texas. Reformers could point to this fact and state forthrightly that the plan would help poor rural white as well as nonwhite students." Once representatives of this non-minority, rural constituency joined the coalition, say Guinier and Torres, victory was achievable.

Unfortunately, some of what Guinier and Torres have to say is obscured by unnecessary jargon. When discussing different forms of power, for example, they offer the following: "If power-over, in the modernist view, can be symbolized by a pyramid, then power-with might be symbolized by an egg. Because of its oval shape, an egg has two centers of gravity, suggesting the possibility of shared and circulating power. . . . An egg's oval shape makes it strong and highly resistant to force when evenly applied. . . . Finally, an egg is also the seed of life, reinforcing the idea that power-with is generative." One suspects that the progressive movements Guinier and Torres wish to support want to hear more about racially inclusive coalition-building and less about the egg.