WASHINGTON -- It's beyond debate that the landmark civil rights victories of the '50s and '60s created dramatically better economic opportunities for African-Americans. In 1960, six years after Brown vs. Board of Education ushered in an era of relative desegregation, slightly more than three-quarters of a million blacks worked at middle-class jobs. That number had swelled to almost 7 million by 1995 and continues to grow.
The apparent prosperity of many blacks and the tremendous advances American society has made in terms of race relations have led some optimistic observers to declare that color no longer matters.
That's wishful thinking, according to Thomas M. Shapiro. The substantial progress of blacks does not "suggest by any stretch of the imagination that we have seen the dawning of the age of racial parity in the United States," he writes in his persuasive new book, "The Hidden Cost of Being African-American."
After he and his team of researchers interviewed nearly 200 families in Boston, Los Angeles and St. Louis, Shapiro arrived at a conclusion that won't surprise many African-Americans: "Black and white professionals in the same occupation earning the same salary typically move through life with significantly unequal housing, residential and educational prospects, which means that their children are not really on the same playing field."
Shapiro, a sociology professor at Brandeis University, argues that efforts to measure economic well-being and inequality tend to focus on income, education and jobs -- a narrow focus that inevitably yields an incomplete picture.
The emphasis, he suggests, should be on wealth, not income. During a phone interview last week, I asked him to explain the difference. "Income is the money people receive from our jobs or substitutes for jobs such as Social Security or unemployment," he said. "For most people it's a paycheck, which the majority of us use to reproduce our existence," i.e., buy basic necessities and keep a roof over our heads. "We use wealth as much more of a storehouse of assets rather than a stream," Shapiro said. Wealth typically takes the form of home equity plus savings accounts, stocks and bonds.
"In most families when they have assets, especially when they're above $5,000, they think of them as moving-ahead money," he said, "not only as a safety net but also for moving ahead, launching and stabilizing social mobility, such as taking advantage of a business opportunity or paying for private school for their kid."
The official poverty rate for blacks is 24.1 percent, but when Shapiro factors in wealth considerations, he comes up with 55 percent. He acknowledges that far too many white families -- 26 percent -- fare poorly by his formula as well. "Four in 10 American families live a pretty fragile existence in terms of asset stability," he said. "They really can't survive a crisis very well." In such households there is no moving-ahead money; just staying-alive money.
And blacks continue to have less of it than whites. Conservatives tend to attribute lingering disparities to blacks themselves, blaming lousy saving habits, irresponsible sexual behavior and criminal activity. There's no doubt that such things help keep some poor people impoverished, but what if we're not talking about poor people?
"Even black and white families with equal accomplishments are separated by a dramatic wealth gap," Shapiro says. In his view, there are still too many ways in which "being black disadvantages even successful, hard-working, playing-by-the-rules, middle-class blacks."
That kind of talk will certainly rile folks who think black people should quietly appreciate their good fortune and stop complaining about what they don't have. I get letters from readers who argue as much, emphatically telling me that my people need to "get over slavery."
But you don't have to go as far back as slavery to trace the source of economic inequality, Shapiro said. He cited as an example some neighborhoods that sprang up following World War II, communities that for years barred blacks and other minorities. "Those kinds of communities have increased tremendously in value. That's the wealth that's being passed down in families."
For obvious reasons, previous generations of blacks had little of economic value to pass down. Consequently, their descendants are forced to go without the generational transfers of wealth that many whites rely on for things such as down payments for houses. Shapiro derides these forms of seldom-measured assistance as "wealthfare."
He demurred when I asked him if he thought whites would willingly give up such advantages -- if he could convince them that they existed at all. His book is "part of a larger, more honest conversation to have in the U.S.," he said, "about how families become successful and the linkages in some instances between advantage and disadvantage."
