Stephen Steinberg’s Race Relations: A Critique (Stanford University Press) is a short, contentious new book that condemns American social science on two grounds.
“The people I win with the first half of the book I might lose with the second half,” says Mr. Steinberg, a sociology professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
In his first salvo, Mr. Steinberg excoriates the so-called “race relations” model in sociology. That tradition, born at the University of Chicago in the 1910s, has analyzed American racial conflicts in a timid and evasive way, in his view. Instead of looking squarely at what Mr. Steinberg calls “occupational apartheid,” scholars in the race-relations tradition have focused on bigotry as a personal failing of individual white people or an inevitable byproduct of cultural differences. Even today, 40 years after the civil-rights revolution, sociologists of race devote too much attention to “culture” and too little to meat-and-potatoes questions of economic oppression, he says.
In his second indictment, Mr. Steinberg attacks sociology’s treatment of ethnicity and the immigrant experience. For several decades, he says, social scientists have exaggerated immigrant groups’ ability to maintain their cultural identities in the United States. In fact, the melting pot has always been a powerful force, he insists: Today’s immigrants, like their predecessors, quickly adopt English and intermarry with other Americans.
Social scientists who deny the melting pot are guilty of an “epistemology of wishful thinking,” Mr. Steinberg suggests. It has come in flavors both right-wing (like Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1963 book, Beyond the Melting Pot) and left-wing (like contemporary celebrations of “transnationalism”). But whatever its political bent, Mr. Steinberg says, that wishful thinking exaggerates the similarities between black Americans’ struggles and immigrants’ experiences, and obscures the fact that the descendants of slaves are still largely excluded from mainstream American institutions.
Mr. Steinberg recently spoke with The Chronicle about his polemic.
Q. One scholar you’re unhappy with is Orlando Patterson, who teaches sociology at Harvard. In an essay in “The New York Times” last year, Mr. Patterson made an argument that is essentially the opposite of yours: He wrote that social scientists have paid too much attention to structural factors and not enough attention to cultural norms — and therefore they fail to explain black males’ poor performance at school.
A. You know, it’s easy to see where people like Patterson are coming from. It’s always tempting to get up on a pulpit and just shout, as Nancy Reagan did: Don’t take drugs, don’t drop out of school. … But in making this sort of moral condemnation, they fail as social scientists to really get into the experience and the mind-set of the people they’re talking about, and to ask why people engage in self-destructive behavior. … We’re failing to see that there is a whole generation of black youth consigned once again to the periphery — jobless, without hope. And then we use their reactions, whether it’s cultural or behavioral, to impugn them.
Q. Part of your argument is that — whatever one’s take on the public-policy questions here — the proponents of the “race relations” model often failed on a basic empirical level. They failed to predict the deep social conflicts of the 20th century.
A. The Chicago school takes pride in having spurned social Darwinism and biological racism. But they essentially replaced “genes” with “culture.” … They had this sort of evolutionary optimism — “Well, we had to go through some of this stuff, and some of it was unpleasant and chaotic, and there were wrongs.” They saw race relations as a kind of unavoidable long-term process of assimilation that would have a happy ending. But here you have the Chicago race riots [of 1919] happening just blocks away from their exclusive oasis in Hyde Park, which was maintained with all sorts of racist neighborhood groups to keep blacks at bay.
Q. You also celebrate a few scholars whom you believe understood American racism correctly — W.E.B. Du Bois, Oliver Cromwell Cox, and E. Franklin Frazier.
A. One of the most remarkable documents in the whole historiography of race is a report Frazier wrote on the 1935 race riots in Harlem. He was commissioned by Mayor LaGuardia, the good liberal, to head up a study commission. And instead of doing what was expected, which was to repudiate all of this wanton violence and to locate the problem in the antisocial tendencies in the black community, Frazier’s focus was on the seething resentments over being shut out of all of the major employment structures in New York City. He collected figures on all of this, and he essentially came up with a concept of affirmative action. Something had to be done to incorporate black labor into these employment structures. This was too radical for LaGuardia. He essentially canned the report.
Q. You’ve written elsewhere that, while you certainly don’t support a crackdown against immigrant workers, the government should much more aggressively enforce antidiscrimination laws — and that the targets of that enforcement should include small, family-owned immigrant businesses that often hire only from their own ethnic groups.
A. Many immigrants do begin at or near the bottom of the social ladder. But we can’t close our eyes to the difference between immigrants and a group whose ancestors go back 10 or 12 generations and who are still languishing at the bottom. Again, there’s a danger of deflecting attention away from the urgent problems of this indigenous minority. Immigrants do have rights, including rights of residence, especially since they’ve been essentially invited here under unenforced immigration laws. I’m not playing one group off against the other. But it is hard to see them all as being in the same boat, when one group arrived so much earlier.
Q. Why are so many sociologists eager to believe that immigrant groups resist assimilation?
A. Many scholars today are committed to a kind of ethnic nostalgia, to the preservation of these rich and valuable identities. They see assimilation as an ethnic apocalypse, as the erasure of things that they deem valuable. And I have no judgment to make about their personal allegiances and commitments. But the facts seem to belie their hopes. Immigrants today are assimilating very rapidly, even more rapidly than did the earlier waves of immigration from Europe, despite their so-called racial difference. … Rates of intermarriage are soaring, except for what has to be called the African-American exception. We seem to be devolving into a kind of dual melting pot — one that includes everyone except blacks.
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 54, Issue 12, Page A13
