Abstract
Befitting its title, Black in America: The Paradox of the Color Line by Enobong Hannah Branch and Christina Jackson provides a sweeping overview of the social science literature on the policies and practices that perpetuate the unequal status of Black people in the United States. The book starts by defining the meaning of race and ethnicity and examining how Black Americans fit within those designations. It then examines how institutions such as housing, employment, politics, and the law contribute to Black racial inequality. Admirably, the authors attend to the diversity within the experiences of Black Americans, whether by national origin, class, gender, or sexuality. Still, the main argument of the book is that racial inequality remains the hallmark of American society, no matter the differences among Black Americans and despite post-racial wishes to the contrary.
The book includes an introduction, seven substantive chapters, and an epilogue. The introduction examines the progress and setbacks Black people in the United States have faced in the pursuit of racial equality. It argues that Americans’ belief that they have achieved a post-racial reality, where race no longer matters, belies the ongoing salience of race in shaping the life chances of Black people. The seven other chapters meticulously build this case, reviewing major works of both contemporary and classic social science research on the status of Blacks in the United States. The sheer amount of research that the book compiles is itself a contribution to the study of race and ethnicity. Other features, such as the “Critical Thinking Questions” at the end of each chapter and a glossary of key terms at the end of the book, make the book accessible to undergraduate students and to other people who may be new to thinking about issues of racial inequality. Additionally, the inclusion of case studies gives a more in-depth view of the topic under exploration in each chapter.
Chapter One, “How Blacks Became the Problem,” explains how whites frame Black people as the problem rather than as victims of systemic racism. The authors adopt Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (1994) approach of viewing race as an ideology of inequality secured by unequal practices. They then contrast the works of conventional race scholars to those of critical race scholars. Conventional race scholars: (1) study race at the individual level, (2) think racial inequality has passed (e.g., racial studies by Schuman et al. 1998), and (3) believe that class differences between Blacks are more important than the racial division between Blacks and whites (e.g., Wilson 1978). In contrast, critical race scholars argue that: (1) racism persists, (2) racism is structural, and (3) racism is not subordinate to class relations, but constitutive of them (racial capitalism) (e.g., Bonilla-Silva 2003). Modeling a technique they use throughout the book, the authors then examine a particular topic in depth to support their argument, in this case the accuracy of the critical race approach to studying Blackness. They trace the history of educational inequality to show that racism is institutional by recounting how institutional racism created educational inequality during slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and in the post-Civil Rights movement era.
The book falters some in Chapter Two, “Crafting the Racial Frame,” which argues that white Americans construct racial frames to justify Black oppression by naturalizing it or making it seem inevitable (Feagin 2009). The chapter uses the experiences of Black immigrants to show the racial frame. Black immigrants are a racialized ethnic group in that their experiences are distinct from native-born African Americans yet are nonetheless constrained by the white racial frame. The racialization of Black immigrants depends on skin tone, such that darker-skinned Black immigrants are more likely to be seen as Black, and this exemplifies how the white racial frame shapes the experiences of Black immigrants. Still, the authors over-rely on the racial frame to the exclusion of other models, such as Treitler’s (2013) concept of ethnic projects—this despite having provided a thorough overview of contemporary models for thinking about race in the previous chapter. Treitler (2013) argues that racialized ethnic groups, including Black immigrants, pursue ethnic projects to distance themselves from the negative consequences of racialization by distancing themselves from native-born Blacks. The ethnic project model shows how racial inequality is perpetuated within groups, not just imposed by the dominant group.
The rest of the book is more assured in its discussion of institutions that perpetuate Black racial oppression in the United States. Highlights include Chapter Five, which examines the experiences of Black Americans in the labor market, and Chapter Six, on the criminal justice system. Like earlier chapters, Chapter Five puts research on the Black labor market in historical perspective. It starts with the coerced labor of enslaved Africans in the supposed free market system of the United States, then moves into Black labor struggles during the World Wars, when northern whites treated Black migrants from the South as a threat to their monopoly on well-paying industrial jobs. The chapter’s review of how support for welfare in the United States changed once it became associated with Black women is especially enlightening. It shows that Moynihan’s infamous report blaming single Black mothers for Black poverty culminated in years of governmental policy that cast Black women as undeserving recipients of government assistance, a far cry from the deserving (white) widows who were the intended beneficiaries of welfare when it was established. The discussion shows the book’s sustained engagement with intersectionality.
Likewise, Chapter Six links the over-policing of Black Americans to racial capitalism. It talks about how, in the post-slavery era, white people introduced the Black Codes in the South to imprison formerly enslaved Africans and force them to work. These codes criminalized Black people as vagrants for the crime of gathering in public, thereby reinstating a regime of forced labor despite the official end of slavery. The Black Codes mutated in the later part of the twentieth century into mass incarceration of Black Americans largely for nonviolent drug offenses. Unlike the Black Codes, the drug policies that led to mass incarceration have been harder to combat since the policies seem race-neutral. The chapter also explores how mass incarceration destabilizes Black communities, making it harder for Black people with a criminal record to get a job, find housing, and participate in family life. Again, the chapter uses intersectionality, noting that despite the typical focus on Black men’s incarceration, formerly incarcerated Black women have the hardest time maintaining employment once they get out of prison (p. 141).
Overall, Black in America more than proves its point that America’s post-racial dream is still a dream, not a reality. Though packed with information, the authors never lose sight of their main argument. The book would be a great starting point for anyone trying to understand the plight of Black Americans in contemporary society.