The Great Demographic Illusion (2020)
Things Are Getting Better, Not Worse: Education and the Economic Mobility of Minorities: The “Mainstreaming” of American Minorities, Part 4
One of the main purposes of these posts, sourced mostly from the three books whose covers are shown on the posts, is to help build a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities of race in America today. I also hope that many readers will find the posts to be less polarizing than so much of what we see on the subject from the media and politicians, which often is intended to rile us up and drive us further into our respective political corners. The goal of these posts, like most Lone Liberal Republican posts, is to work towards more sensible, pragmatic and consensus-oriented discussions about difficult issues that America faces today, like race.
More interesting and thought-provoking material from The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority and the Expanding American Mainstream:
● “The children of immigrants, like their parents, tend to see prejudice and discrimination as obstacles that can be overcome through effort and intelligence. Their immigrant parents frequently tell them that they will have to work much harder than native whites to obtain the same status and rewards, but these lessons need not be discouraging because they also teach that high goals are attainable. Studies find that the children of immigrants are unusually optimistic. By contrast, the lessons taught in African American families often have more to do with protecting oneself from the injuries of white racism. Such lessons are likely to produce a guardedness that contrasts with the optimism of the immigrant second generation.”
● “And yet there are hints that this may be changing for African Americans. One hint lies in the new pattern of residential integration for many middle-class African Americans, who for the first time are able to leave neighborhoods that expose them and their children to severe place-linked disadvantages, such as nearby poverty and crime. Another hint lies in the prominence of African Americans in the burgeoning diversity of the mainstream popular culture. Linked to these hints is the idea that ethno-racial diversity in general could provide openings for African Americans to enter the mainstream alongside Asians and Hispanics. Studies of residential integration offer qualified support for this so-called buffering hypothesis. Moreover, the role of African immigrants has grown rapidly since 2000. A growing part of the African-descent population now has immigrant origins; the figure was about 10 percent in 2017. Many of the African immigrants, such as the Nigerians, who have been the object of the most social-science attention, bring high levels of educational and professional attainment, and their children therefore begin life in unusually favorable circumstances compared to other black Americans. If these groups are able to enter the mainstream to the degree that other nonwhite immigrant groups have done so—something I must underscore remains to be demonstrated—then they will contribute to an expansion of the black presence there and possibly ease the way for more African Americans with non-immigrant backgrounds.” [Emphasis mine]
● “A claim made throughout the book is that assimilation is more extensive under conditions of large-scale non-zero-sum mobility, when upward mobility by minority-group members does not require downward mobility by some in the majority. In the early twenty-first century, when economic inequality is much greater than it was in the middle of the twentieth century, the basis for significant non-zero-sum mobility that favors minorities is demographic rather than economic [growth].”
● “The next question is obvious: is there evidence of economic mobility by minorities? There is—a look at the top of the occupational hierarchy, at positions that were once monopolized by whites, reveals growing ethno-racial diversity. In 2015, among top-quartile workers under fifty years of age, more than 30 percent were minorities. The groups that are benefiting from this diversification in the top quartile of the workforce are principally those of the immigrant-origin population; African Americans are gaining only modestly.”
● “As top-tier positions become occupied increasingly by individuals from mixed or unmixed nonwhite family backgrounds, we can expect hiring and promotion decisions to favor minorities more than they do now. Quantitative shift eventually brings qualitative change.”
● “The improvements in Hispanic educational achievements are less well known. In the recent past, Hispanics were characterized by relatively high rates of dropout from high school, but this is less and less the case. The disparity in high school graduation rates has narrowed since 2000 as the rates have climbed for all major ethno-racial groups, but especially for Hispanics. Moreover, among high school graduates, Hispanics now have a rate of continuing into the postsecondary system no different from that of whites as a consequence of a sharp rise in their college-going since the mid-1990s… The number of young Hispanics who are graduating with baccalaureate degrees is soaring. In just the ten-year period between 2004 and 2014, that number more than doubled. No other group saw an increase anywhere near as large; in the same period, the number of BAs earned by non-Hispanic whites rose by just 15 percent.”
● “The idea of an expanding and more diverse mainstream can form the basis for a new narrative that emphasizes the openness of the majority to Americans from different ethno-racial backgrounds. Such a narrative idea would promote a sense of cohesion that convinces Americans of different origins that “we are all in it together,” to borrow a phrase from the historian David Hollinger. This way of thinking about mainstream inclusion need not diminish the sense of urgency about social policies to enhance it.
● “This new narrative can allow members of the native majority to imagine that “somebody else’s babies” are just like their own, or like their grandchildren, and to understand that the contemporary alterations to the mainstream are not a revolution but an evolution.”
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If you find the subject matter in these The Mainstreaming of Minorities posts interesting, check out this link to the late Arthur Schlesinger’s book The Disuniting of America, foreshadowing the difficult place identity politics would lead us. (I used to get scolded for suggesting people read it.) All twelve of the posts can be found in the “For Those With More Academic Interests” section on the Lone Liberal Republican website.
As always, thanks for reading and sharing, and be well.