Unfinished Business

By WALTER SHAPIRO

White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice.

-- Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 1944

This is our basic conclusion: Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal.

-- Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968

The status of black Americans today can be characterized as a glass that is half full -- if measured by progress since 1939 -- or as a glass that is half empty -- if measured by the persisting disparities between black and white Americans since the early 1970s.

-- A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society, 1989

How beguilingly easy it has been for most white Americans to forget. How tempting to ignore the evidence that discrimination endures. How alluring is the myth that all those willing to work have shared in the surface prosperity of the 1980s. How glib are the assumptions that civil rights legislation, affirmative action and black political participation inevitably lead to an integrated society. How self-satisfying to conclude that the U.S. has already done enough to tear down the barriers of segregation.

Such delusions are an inevitable consequence -- and a cause -- of a decade of willful denial of the realities of white-black relations. Race remains near the surface of American life, but it is almost always publicly viewed through narrow prisms: a legal wrangle over affirmative action, a political campaign, an isolated incident of racial violence. Sharp disagreements about the origins and implications of the alarming growth of the black underclass and fears of drug-related crime have widened a gulf of mutual incomprehension between the races. Even in private discourse, whites and blacks have lost the capacity to talk to each other honestly about the subject that divides them more than any other.

"I have as many white friends as black, but my white friends and I don't talk about race, because when we do, we get testy," says Franklin Williams, a black New York City foundation executive. Henry Schwarzschild, a white long active in national civil rights causes, remains equally pessimistic: "My sense is that on both sides of the racial divide, society has given up on this problem."

Only in this context is it possible to appreciate fully the importance of the publication last week of A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society, a landmark 588-page study by the National Research Council that strives to update reports by the 1968 Kerner commission and Gunnar Myrdal. Edited by black economist Gerald David Jaynes and white sociologist Robin M. Williams Jr., A Common Destiny represents the nation's most definitive report card on race relations in 20 years. And America has flunked.

Though such a pessimistic assessment is implied throughout A Common Destiny, it is never stated with such sweeping clarity. Instead, the authors prefer to present their findings in the numbing language of social science. "Since the early 1970s," the study states, "the economic status of blacks relative to whites has, on average, stagnated or deteriorated." Consider what that single sentence reveals about white America's smug belief in the healing virtues of progress and prosperity. After nearly two decades, five Presidents, periods of both activism and apathy, largesse and laissez-faire, the result has been at best stagnation.

In theory, it is laudable that A Common Destiny resists the easy summary that leads to TV-style sound bites. But there is also the danger that the report may be unjustly ignored. The enduring value of A Common Destiny can be found in the mountain of evidence it marshals to rebut a series of debilitating myths about the true state of contemporary race relations.

Myth: Affirmative action and a buoyant economy have provided working blacks with a level playing field.

White resentment over affirmative action has become a powerful undercurrent in race relations. "Whites think most discrimination is ancient history," says sociologist Bob Blauner, the author of a recently published oral history, Black Lives, White Lives. "They see things like affirmative action, and some people even think blacks have an advantage."

But aside from a few well-publicized anecdotal examples, virtually all the evidence contradicts this common white stereotype. Take black male college graduates, likely beneficiaries of affirmative action. In 1984 their average yearly earnings were just 74% of their white counterparts'. Popular misperceptions also exaggerate the rate at which the black middle class is growing. Between 1970 and 1986, the proportion of black families with inflation-adjusted incomes over $35,000 merely increased from 18% to 22%.

Sadly, what makes this growth rate seem impressive is the economic difficulties of less affluent black workers. Beginning in the early 1970s, blacks disproportionately bore the brunt of the decline of smokestack America. Since then, not only has there been a widening gap between black and white unemployment rates, but the real incomes of some categories of low-skill black workers have plummeted 20% as well. Small wonder that blacks' per capita income was 57% of whites' in 1984, the same percentage as in 1971. So much for the Reagan-era vision of Morning in America.

Myth: Overt discrimination has virtually vanished in the past 20 years.

Only in terms of the voting booth and the lunch-counter stool is there much truth to support this common white view. As A Common Destiny makes clear, "a considerable amount of remaining black-white inequality is due to continuing discriminatory treatment of blacks. The clearest evidence is in housing."

Since the 1960s, there has been almost no measurable progress in housing integration. In 1980 housing in the 16 metropolitan areas with the largest black populations was rated 80 on a 0-to-100 scale on which 100 meant total segregation. These discriminatory patterns cannot be explained only by black- white economic differences. In New York, Chicago and Detroit, black college graduates are about as likely to live in segregated neighborhoods as black high school dropouts.

What this means in real life is that as soon as the workday ends, the U.S. reverts to a largely segregated nation. Middle-income whites can, if they choose, literally buy their way into a world of racially homogeneous schools, shopping areas and recreational facilities. "These attitudes don't change as we increase the socioeconomic status of the respondent," says Jaynes. "The % higher the white respondents' income, the less they wanted to be in an integrated neighborhood."

Myth: As prejudice recedes, the U.S. will gradually move toward integration without governmental compulsion.

Since Myrdal, social scientists who study race relations have wrestled with the sometimes tenuous connection between expressed attitudes and personal behavior. As A Common Destiny puts it, "blacks and whites share a substantial consensus, in the abstract, on the broad goal of achieving an integrated and egalitarian society."

But surveys also show that whites are much more likely to support integration in theory than specific governmental steps to achieve it. A Common Destiny views discrepancies like these as "important signs of continuing resistance to full equality of black Americans: principles of equality are endorsed less when social contact is close, of long duration, or frequent." Put colloquially, the prevalent white attitude is "Yeah, I'm for integration, but not in my neighborhood."

The result of the past decade's stagnation is that many whites and blacks have given up on integration as a goal that can be achieved or that is even entirely desirable. "To the extent that white folks had a notion of integration, it meant that more and more black folks would become more like us," says white historian David Garrow, a biographer of Martin Luther King Jr. This political climate has left many black leaders disheartened. "We don't have a clue on how to proceed," says Eleanor Holmes Norton, a top civil rights official in the Carter Administration. "I would never have said that in 1978 or 1968."

But as in past decades, the only workable answer remains renewed governmental pressure on behalf of a desegregated America, as politically unpopular as it may be. The implicit message of A Common Destiny is that white America, left to its own devices, will never complete the unfinished task of creating racial equality. That will take leadership, and a dose of compulsion, from the top.

With reporting by Dick Thompson/Washington, with other bureaus