Bobo, Lawrence D.

Du Bois Review Social Science Research on Race

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 Inequality and U.S. Society: Review of Douglas S. Massey'sCategorically Unequal: The American Stratification System  (Article begins on next page)The Harvard community has made this article openly available.Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters.Citation Bobo, Lawrence D. 2010. Inequality and U.S. society: review ofDouglas S. Massey's Categorically Unequal: The AmericanStratification System. Du Bois Review 7(1): 30-34.Accessed February 19, 2015 10:06:25 AM ESTCitable Link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:8919561Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University's DASHrepository, and is made available under the terms and conditionsapplicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth athttp://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#LAAMany readers may find that this biological explanation does not go far in explain-ing current trends in inequality—smaller racial and gender differences on mostindicators but larger gaps between the top and bottom of the income distribution.Massey does not argue that our brains have changed in recent years to generate moreinequality. He observes that governmental policies reduced inequality for threedecades in the last century and then, for the next three decades, governmentalpolicies encouraged economic inequality. There is no explanation of how thosetrends fit with the neurological model presented in this volume. The book would bemore convincing were greater consideration given to social values and how theychange; sometimes quite rapidly. Six decades ago the society’s norms endorsed restrict-ing the careers that women might pursue, called for strict racial segregation in mostareas of American life and tolerated or encouraged discrimination on the basis ofsexual preference and age. Views and attitudes changed because Americans increas-ingly endorsed the ideals of equal opportunity and social justice and courts upheldprinciples of justice for all. Now the nation’s norms abjure blatant gender and racialdiscrimination thanks, in large part, to the Civil Rights Revolution and a growingawareness that intellectual accomplishments are not, primarily, genetically deter-mined. However, there have been few challenges to the widely held belief that oureconomic system equitably determines winners and losers.Inequality is an extremely important issue for this nation. As Massey notes,greater economic polarization appears to generate more political polarization. In1980, the least prosperous ten percent of the country’s household obtained just 1.11percent of total income. By 2008, their share had fallen to 0.95 percent of all income.But the share going to the top ten percent of households grew from 26.7 percent in1980 to 33.6 percent in 2008. Categorically Unequal may encourage scholars andstudents to further explore the many dimensions of inequality.Corresponding author: Reynolds Farley, Population Studies Center, University of Chicago. 426Thompson Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248. E-mail: renf@umich.eduLawrence D. BoboDepartment of Sociology and of African and African American Studies,Harvard UniversityCategorically Unequal: The American Stratification System, is a big, ambitious, tough-minded, and carefully argued book. In a fashion, Princeton sociologist DouglasMassey sets out to answer the daunting questions of what are the fundamentalmechanisms that lend recurrent patterning—social organization and structure, in aphrase—to social inequality in the United States. He unfolds a three-part answer.First, he sets out a basic theoretical framework for understanding the process ofsocial stratification: the factors and mechanisms to which we must attend in order tounderstand how people come to be systematically allocated to positions of differen-tial reward and status. This section of the book is heavily indebted to Charles Tilly~1998!. Part of what Massey does here is quite conventional within sociology, somuch so that he rightly refers to it as invoking “stratification’s Holy trinity”: namely,he points to the dividing lines of race, class, and gender. Yet, part of what he does6 6DBR7~1! 00012 4080 6 016010 9:54 am REVISED PROOF Page: 30 Reynolds Farley30 DU BOIS REVIEW: SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ON RACE 7:1, 2010here—or at least how he does it—strikes me as quite unusual for sociologists: namely,he says that in order to understand social stratification you must attend in some detailto foundational notions from social psychology. To wit, attention to institutionalpractices and macro-level process are insufficient to provide a robust sociology of thedynamics of inequality.Second, Massey develops an overview, mapping the current topography of inequal-ity with regard to core economic measures. This part of the work is probably theleast likely to generate contention and what matters most about it, in any event, isreally played out in fuller detail as part of the third task which Massey sets forhimself. Third, he then fleshes out in great detail the dynamics of inequalities of race,of class, and of gender with an emphasis on the post-World War II period.For sociologists, as Massey explains, “stratification refers to the unequal distri-bution of people across social categories that are characterized by differential accessto social resources” ~p. 1!. The resources might be economic in the form of incomeor wealth. They might be status related involving prestige or other symbolic claims.And they might even be socioemotional. ~I assume that power and access to powerresources, legitimate and otherwise, is included here, though he does not say soexplicitly.! Drawing on Tilly’s durable inequality formulation, Massey suggests thatstratification processes entail two basic mechanisms: ~1! “the allocation of people tosocial categories”; and ~2! “the institutionalization of practices that allocate resourcesunequally across these categories” ~pp. 5–6!. These institutionalized practices involveexploitation and opportunity hoarding.Critically, the process rests on the human cognitive capacity, and indeed procliv-ity, to categorize. “In a very real sense,” Massey writes “stratification begins psycho-logically with the creation of cognitive boundaries that allocate people to categories.Before categorical inequality can be implemented socially, categories must be createdcognitively to classify people conceptually based on some set of achieved and ascribedcharacteristics” ~p. 8!. At this point, some students of social stratification may won-der exactly how much social psychology does a good sociologist really need to know,for Massey does not stop here. Moreover, he does not even turn in the direction of amore familiar social psychological model of social stratification, namely the Wiscon-sin status attainment model, wherein interaction with and the influence of significantothers in one’s life helps to shape aspirations and related patterns of behavior thatintervene in between parental socioeconomic status and a child’s own educationaland early occupational attainments ~Sewell and Hauser, 1980!.No, Massey turns at this point to eminent social psychologist Susan Fiske’s workon stereotyping and prejudice and even delves a bit into the emerging field ofcognitive neuroscience ~Fiske 1998; Fiske et al., 2002!. The upshot of this manuver isthat all of us, “whether @we# think of @ourselves# as prejudiced or not, hold in @our#heads schemas that classify people into categories based on age, gender, race, andethnicity. @We# cannot help it. It is part of the human condition, and these schemasgenerally include implicit memories that yield subconscious dispositions towardpeople and objects, leading to stereotypes” ~pp. 10–11!. Critical here is the claim thatthese stereotypes are not merely associations of category memberships with variouspositively or negatively valued traits or attributes. There are two evaluative dimen-sions at work that lead us to array members of groups in a two-dimensional space.Those dimensions are warmth, on the one hand, and competence on the other. Theresult is a core set of four-ideal types linking groups to a central socio-emotionalpredisposition toward them: such as pity for those viewed as warm but not particu-larly competent ~classic chauvinist, paternalistic male orientation to women!; envytoward those viewed as highly competent but not very warm ~as perhaps best epito-6 6DBR7~1! 00012 5080 6 016010 9:54 am REVISED PROOF Page: 31 Inequality and U.S. SocietyDU BOIS REVIEW: SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ON RACE 7:1, 2010 31mized by the conspicuous Asian success at certain elite institutions of higher learn-ing!;w et e n dt odespise those understood as neither warm nor competent ~we needonly think of radio personality Don Imus’s hateful remarks about the Black women ofthe Rutger’s basketball team in 2007 as “nappy headed hos’”!; and lastly those whowe hold in high esteem as both warm and competent, the privileged classes.I find myself very much in agreement with this set of framing moves by Massey.I think it important for students of social stratification, and especially for thoseinterested in understanding racial inequality. Let me say several things about Mas-sey’s treatment of race and a changing but remarkably durable racial divide. First,BRAVO! I’m in near complete agreement with the argument he sketches out, bothwith respect to the contemporary presence of discrimination in many key domains oflife and the extent to which such bias rests upon negative stereotyping and racialprejudice. Yet, second, there are important ways that his argument is incomplete orinsufficiently complex and nuanced. Part of this traces, no doubt, to the enormity ofthe terrain he had to cover in a relatively compact treatment. However, to elaboratea bit, more could have been folded in to capture just how much more complex theterrain is today. In the process of documenting continuing discrimination in thehousing market, in insurance markets, in car sales, and in the erection of a vastracialized, mass-incarceration society, Massey’s treatment actually short changes thevast differences in accumulated wealth linked with race ~Oliver and Shapiro, 1995!.The profoundly sedimentary character of this dimension of economic status andresources is critical to an individual or family’s capacity to maintain a particularstandard of living. Incorporating a more substantial discussion of wealth inequalitywould not reverse any aspect of Massey’s argument, but it would serve to reinforceand deepen an appreciation for how race still structures overall quality-of-lifeexperience.Now, let me say something a little more contradictory. Because of the emphasison major patterns of racial inequality and the contemporary relevance of discrimi-nation, the changing nature of the racial divide itself and the class complexity ofBlack America are given short shrift in Categorically Unequal. That is, to say thatBlacks have lower odds of a call back from an employer or realtor, or that a White carsalesman is likely to hold out for a higher price from a Black buyer, especially a Blackmale buyer versus a White male, is not to say that the sort of absolute categoricaldistinctions evident in the slavery and Jim Crow eras operates today. Massey cer-tainly acknowledges the more subtle, complicated, and indirect ways in which dis-crimination now operates. But one feels the need to see more detail on how this playsout at different points in the class structure than Massey ever provides. Thus, forexample, Bruce Western’s ~2006! analysis of the rise in incarceration is careful tostress the extent to which this has involved class and race, falling with special severityon high school-dropout Black men. We could use some consideration of the dynamicof racial discrimination at the higher end of the class distribution as well, but we findrelatively little of it. This is important to do because it is too easy for some analyststo dismiss the evidence of on-going discrimination by pointing to the attainments ofthe Black middle class ~Thernstrom and Thernstrom, 1997!. The very powerful andconvincing auditing studies can be read as establishing that the hurdles Blacks face infinding employment are somewhat harder—neither completely categorical nor impass-able, just harder. Could such problems be solved perhaps, some might ask, with alittle more effort or more diligence in school?This concern about nuance and complexity in the argument can be raised inregard to Massey’s discussion of Latinos being fashioned into a new, increasinglyracialized underclass. He shows that changes in immigration policy have worked to6 6DBR7~1! 00012 6080 6 016010 9:54 am REVISED PROOF Page: 32 Lawrence D. Bobo32 DU BOIS REVIEW: SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ON RACE 7:1, 2010reduce the status of Latinos—a group that once occupied a sort of liminal status inbetween Black and White—to a point where they increasingly come to resembleBlacks on key economic indicators. The problem here is that crucial distinctionsregarding citizenship status, generational status, and other factors such as Englishlanguage mastery are not uniformly taken into account in making these comparisons.My point is not that Massey’s claims are wrong—but one immediately wants to knowhow robust some claims are in the presence of controls for these sorts of otherfactors. We know from other careful research that these patterns are quite robust~Telles and Ortiz, 2008!.Likewise, the nuance and complexity concern arises in the final chapter as wellwhere Massey does attempt some analysis of race, class, and gender simultaneously.Such integrated analyses of race-, class-, and gender-dynamics are never easy and wehave few powerful exemplars in the sociological literature ~ Jackman 1994!. ForMassey, this part of the analysis proceeds mostly with respect to explaining individualand family earnings, specifying main effects for the ‘holy trinity’ or interactive ones.Again, he provides a useful but very gross cut on how these factors intertwine. Thus,one suspects a more specific face could be put on some of the extreme points in thecontinuum, comparing an undocumented recent Latina immigrant at one extreme,to an Ivy-league educated legacy-admit White male at the other. To his credit,Massey does specify the extent to which inequality has grown and identifies formaleducation as an increasingly central mechanism allocating people to relative privilegeor disadvantage. Access to education and its quality, of course, are also, Massey notes,very much class- and race-stratified.Third, the whole project has more the feel of a powerful typology and descriptiveaccount, than it does an explanatory or predictive model. Theclear specification of anengineordrivertochangeislargelyabsent,havingbeenleftasimplicit.Namely,Mas-sey seems to suggest that people act in ways that are consistent with their underlyingstereotypes and schemas and, furthermore, that there is a certain inertia attached toestablished institutional practices. In fairness, much great sociology does not reachbeyondexcellenttypologizingandthickdescription.ButIthinkmoreispossiblehere.Let me give just a quick teaser: I am very much attracted to the notion of boundarywork as Massey uses it. Accordingly, “Boundary work involves actions and behaviorsundertakentodifferentiatepeoplesocially;theyarepubliclylabeledasmembersofanin- or out-group who thus embody the social traits associated with that category ofpeople. Labeling may occur through informal mechanisms such as gossip, ridicule,shaming, ostracism, praise, or harassment that serves to ‘put people in their place,’ oritmaybeeffectedformallythroughregulationsandlawssuchastheone-dropruleandthe anti-miscegenation laws enacted throughout the South before the civil rights era.Boundary work distinguishes people from one another socially by highlighting inter-personal differences across categorical lines” ~p. 244!.I have also been a long-time advocate for the notion of prejudice as a sense ofgroup position, a view of prejudice with unambiguous sociological pedigree ~Blumer1958; Bobo and Tuan, 2006!. To wit, many of the great struggles of the past, overschool desegregation and affirmative action, let’s say, can be read as boundary strug-gles where the fight really was very much over changing, or resisting change tocustomary group positions in access to key social resources of educational and jobopportunities. The politics of these struggles, a great body of literature shows, isdirectly and deeply linked to things we would rightly classify as racial prejudice andits social dynamics.The importance of Massey’s work springs from what we all know: inequality haswidened enormously in this country over the past several decades. The growing gap6 6DBR7~1! 00012 7080 6 016010 9:54 am REVISED PROOF Page: 33 Inequality and U.S. SocietyDU BOIS REVIEW: SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ON RACE 7:1, 2010 33between the haves and have-nots here in the United States, while certainly linked tolarge-scale processes of globalization and technological innovation, is not a simplemechanical function of such externalities. Nor is the rise in Black incarceration theinevitable product of a society’s age-old struggle to deal with “unruly men;” just asthe declining fortunes of undocumented immigrants in particular, and segments ofthe Mexican American community more generally, reflect policy choices and actions,not some inevitable macro-social dynamic. Sociologists need theoretical models thatinvolve the full specification of these critical micro- and meso-level processes thatundergird social inequality. With Categorically Unequal, Massey has provided a strongprovocation and analytical push in the direction of a more comprehensive sociologyof stratification processes.Corresponding author: Professor Lawrence D. Bobo, Department of Sociology, William JamesHall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. E-mail: bobo@wjh.harvard.eduREFERENCESBlumer, Herbert ~1958!. Prejudice as Group Position. Pacific Sociological Review, 1: 3–7.Bobo, Lawrence D. and Mia Tuan ~2006!. Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion,and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Fiske, Susan T. ~1998!. Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination. In Daniel T. Gilbert,Susan T. Fiske, and Gardner Lindzey ~Eds.!, The Handbook of Social Psychology, 4th ed.,pp. 357–415. New York: McGraw Hill.Fiske, Susan T., Amy J. C. Cuddy, Peter Glick, and Jun Xu ~2002!. A Model of ~Often Mixed!Stereotype Content: Competence and Warmth Respectively Follow from Perceived Statusand Competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,8 2 ~6!: 878–902.Jackman, Mary R. ~1994!. The Velvet Glove: Paternalism and Conflict in Gender, Class, and RaceRelations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Oliver, Melvin L. and Thomas M. Shapiro ~1995!. Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspec-tive on Racial Inequality. New York: Routledge.Sewell, William H. and Robert M. Hauser ~1980!. The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study ofSocial and Psychological Factors in Aspirations and Achievements. In Alan C. Kerckhoff~Ed.!, Research in Sociology of Education and Socialization, Vol. 1, pp. 59–99. Greenwood, CT:JAI Press.Telles, Edward E. and Vilma Ortiz ~2008!. Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assim-ilation, and Race. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Thernstrom, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom ~1997!. American in Black and White: OneNation, Indivisible. New York: Simon & Schuster.Tilly, Charles ~1998!. Durable Inequality. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Western,Bruce~2006!.PunishmentandInequalityinAmerica.NewYork:RussellSageFoundation.6 6DBR7~1! 00012 8080 6 016010 9:54 am REVISED PROOF Page: 34 Lawrence D. Bobo34 DU BOIS REVIEW: SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ON RACE 7:1, 2010

Inequality and U.S. Society: Review of Douglas S. Massey's Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System

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Inequality and U.S. Society: Review of Douglas S. Massey's Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System

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