Douglas Massey’s book, Categorically Unequal, draws up an instructive inventory of inequality in the United States. A classic study of social stratification, it is complemented by a discussion of the production of the categories by means of which individuals and groups are hierarchically organized

Safi, Mirna

SPIRE - Sciences Po Institutional REpository

 
 
 
 
Is America Sick with Inequality? 
 
Mirna SAFI 
 
 
Douglas Massey’s book, Categorically Unequal, draws up an instructive 
inventory of inequality in the United States. A classic study of social stratification, it 
is complemented by a discussion of the production of the categories by means of 
which individuals and groups are hierarchically organized. 
 
Under Review: Douglas S. Massey, Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification 
System, New York, NY, Russell Sage Foundation, 2007, 319 p. 
 
Categorically Unequal is above all a work of scholarship: it is distinguished by 
the quality of the synthesis that it offers of a multi-disciplinary literature on the 
measurement, analysis and explanation of social inequality in the United States. To read 
Categorically Unequal at the end of 2008 – that is, at a moment when the entire world 
seems to be looking toward America and its future President – nevertheless amplifies the 
work’s eminently political character, which under other circumstances might have 
seemed secondary. Indeed, with the world’s aspirations and expectations focused on the 
impact of the incoming Administration on world peace and international diplomacy, 
Categorically Unequal allows the reader to evaluate what’s at stake in this change for 
American society itself. 
 
The richness of this work resides in the fact that it lends itself to two distinct 
readings. First of all, it can be read as a socio-historical analysis of inequalities related to 
skin color, ethnic origin, social class and gender in the United States. This analysis is 
developed by means of a particularly impressive survey of the mainly empirical studies 
that have recorded the level and evolution of inequality over the course of the 20th-
century. Though this might seem overly ambitious, Douglas Massey is probably better 
equipped than most sociologists to meet the challenge. A professor at Princeton 
University, he has long worked on racial inequality in the United States: American 
Apartheid (co-authored with Nancy Denton) is thus one of his best known works1. He is 
also a leading specialist of American migration issues and has given particular attention 
to Hispanic populations (particularly as relates to Mexican immigration2). More recently, 
his work has addressed questions of social class and educational inequality. 
 
A Portrait of Social Stratification in the United States 
Massey shows himself to be up to the task of providing a synthetic overview of 
research in all of these areas. His book, which supplies a very thorough portrait of the 
system of social stratification in the United States, is written in a perfectly accessible 
style and treats scholarly sources with admirable precision. Levels of inequality in the 
United States are unparalleled among developed countries. In contrast to the orthodox 
Marxist analysis, which presents capitalism as the driving force behind inequality, 
Massey shows how social inequality is in fact generated by the lasting and sometimes 
institutionalized exclusion of certain groups from the market (by mechanisms of 
discrimination) along with the simultaneous protection of other groups from its failures. 
While America underwent an experiment in “egalitarian capitalism” during the New 
Deal/Fair Deal period, inequality has continually grown since the 1970s. The most 
convincing example of this concerns the long-standing subordination of African-
American populations, which did not even benefit from the progress made during the 
period of egalitarian capitalism (the G.I. Bill, for example, which spurred the advent a 
                                                
1 Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the 
Underclass, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1993. 
2 Cf. Massey, Douglas S., Jorge Durand and Nolane J. Malone, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican 
Immigration in an era of Economic Integration, New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 2002. 
society of mass consumption, was exclusively reserved to whites). The book’s third 
chapter, without a doubt its richest, offers a history of racial inequality in the United 
States from the segregationist era through the Bush years. It subtly shows how the 
mechanisms of racial categorization resisted the revolution that the Civil Rights Act 
represented: despite the rational rejection of racism that was reflected in opinion polls, a 
sort of “cognitive inertia” allowed whites’ negative feelings towards black people to 
persist. 
 
Massey carries out an extremely valuable survey of empirical studies of the 
spatial segregation of African-Americans, the discriminatory mechanisms that victimize 
them as soon as they try to rent or buy a home, ask for a job or a raise, apply for credit 
from the bank or take out insurance. One can only be impressed by the extensive research 
that has been conducted in the United States to locate and quantify such discriminatory 
practices, whether by means of statistical analysis or audit studies (of, for example, the 
taxi industry! p.93). The most striking research concerns the judicial and prison systems: 
drawing upon the work of Loic Wacquant and Bruce Western, in particular, Massey 
shows how the massive incarceration of blacks – young African-American high school 
dropouts have a 0.59 probability of being incarcerated before turning 35! (p.11) – 
compounds exclusion from the market with physical exclusion from society. And these 
trends show no sign of changing: current measurements of inequality show striking 
differences independently of whether or not the incarcerated population is taken into 
account. 
 
Chapters 4, 5 and 6 describe how this inegalitarian dynamic more generally 
affects all disadvantaged groups in American society: immigrants, women and poor 
people. Coupled with an explosion of illegal immigration, restrictive legislation, 
particularly since the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, has stimulated the 
emergence of an underground economy that exploits undocumented workers (with the 
growth of subcontracting). Legal immigrants have also experienced deterioration in their 
situation and a curtailment of their rights (particularly since September 11th). The 
example of Mexicans is typical: while they occupied an intermediate position between 
whites and blacks over the first half of the 20th-century, Mexicans have in recent years 
seen their living and working conditions converge with those of African-Americans. 
 
In what concerns class inequality, the author shows the devastating effects that the 
Reagan Administration’s decision to break the airport controllers’ strike in 1981 has had 
on the balance of power between employers and employees. Since then, America has 
served the rich, with plunging minimum wages, a rise in levels of poverty, the 
dismantling of the Welfare State and a gradually shrinking federal government (a process 
that dramatically accelerated under Bush). A survey of recent work in political sociology 
shows how the multiplication of municipalities in a single metropolitan zone has allowed 
a significant portion of the tax money raised in poor neighborhoods to be used for 
financing the luxurious facilities of rich neighborhoods, where inhabitants 
disproportionately benefit from tax breaks. Even at schools and in universities, the 
mechanisms of social reproduction remain very strong: far from being a trifling matter, 
“legacy” discrimination in favor of the children of former students, particularly as 
practiced by the country’s most prestigious universities, contributes to the concentration 
of cultural and human capital within the ruling class. 
 
Finally, despite global improvement in the situation of women in the labor 
market, Massey claims that in reality they have not escaped the inegalitarian dynamic that 
characterizes contemporary America. While studies reveal some reduction in the gender 
wage gap, the horizontal separation of masculine and feminine professions has continued 
to grow (manual and non-manual professions) and vertical separation (job prestige and 
remuneration) remains very salient even within professional categories. By drawing on 
the work of Maria Charles and David Grusky, in particular, the author presents the 
growing schism between two categories of American women: on the one hand, well-
educated women who have made it into prestigious and well-paying professions and have 
married educated, non-chauvinist men and, on the other hand, poorly educated working 
class women who find themselves confined to ill-paying and particularly difficult work. 
These are often single mothers who clean the homes or look after the children of their 
wealthier counterparts. 
 Categorically Unequal thus presents a very negative portrait of America, 
particularly the America of the last thirty years, depicting it as a racist, xenophobic, 
imperious, macho and far from democratic country. Indeed, the author occasionally 
allows himself to get carried away: one might in this connection cite the passage 
describing the American prison system as a Gulag that “surpasses that created by the 
Soviets” (p.112) or that concerning the democratic functioning of a country where 
“money talks” while the voice of the poor counts for nothing (the “bullshit” of the poor, 
p.186). These passages reveal what is no doubt the soul of a militant behind the 
sociologist’s objective stance. Indeed, Massey says as much on this web page: what gives 
him the greatest satisfaction is the real world impact of his research. “I am proudest when 
I make a difference in the life of people,” he writes there. 
 
The Cognitive Foundations of Social Stratification 
In addition to presenting this portrait of America, Categorically Unequal can be 
read as a theoretical essay that uses the historical example of American society to 
examine the production and persistence of social stratification. It’s this reading that has 
inspired most criticisms of Massey’s book. Indeed, Massey transgresses certain taboos of 
classical social theory, which insists on the constructivist nature of all forms of social 
categorization related to differences of biology (gender), origin (ethnicity) or skin color. 
Under the influence of several works in social psychology, cognitive science and 
neuroscience, Massey returns to the roots of social categorization as it takes place in 
individual brains. The first chapter, which departs from the general narrative sweep of the 
book, attempts to explain how stratification works by presenting the cognitive 
foundations of social relations of exploitation. According to Massey, the construction of 
frontiers between social groups first takes place at the level of the individual. In applying 
a principle of dual classification along an axis of skill, on the one hand, and an axis of 
warmth or sympathy, on the other, the human brain lays the groundwork for social 
stratification. These cognitive schemata are of course socially reinterpreted and “framed” 
by attributing stereotyped characteristics to certain social groups. It is no less the case 
that they exist first and foremost in the heads of humans. It is not the market, capitalism 
or even the power and interests of the ruling class that create inequalities: it’s above all 
else the synapses! 
 
This analysis of the construction of social frontiers draws upon a variety of 
sources: Massey cites work in cognitive science and social psychology (particularly that 
of Suzanne Fiske) as well as the work of sociologists (that of Michèle Lamont, for 
example) and more anthropological work such as that of Fredrik Barth. This 
rapprochement between sociology and the biomedical sciences will no doubt raise 
eyebrows – some reproach Massey with reviving a substantialist vision of ethnic, racial 
and even gender differences. Yet the author denies that this is his intention on several 
occasions. Opening up sociological inquiry to the findings of neuroscience does not 
imply that inequalities are natural: they are of course always subject to historical and 
social contingency. Nevertheless, to say that whites discriminate against blacks in order 
to preserve their interests as a dominant group is not satisfying in itself: for a group to 
become exploitable in the sense that it becomes possible to extract the fruit of its labor 
from it, its members must first be despised and seen as incompetent in the “head” of the 
dominant group. In this way, they lose all characteristics specific to human beings to such 
an extent that the cognitive system no longer even identifies them as such (pp. 12-14). 
 
In this way, it becomes possible to inflict all possible forms of inequality on them 
(spatial segregation, housing, work and credit discrimination and even incarceration) 
without compassion and at no psychological cost to members of the dominant group. 
While some will find Massey’s biomedical turn dangerous, it has the undeniable 
advantage of linking up with an exciting and rapidly growing literature in neuroscience 
and social psychology concerning these questions. While its tools are those of scientific 
research, this work has produced results that are far from being without interest to 
sociologists. The latter have long looked down on this type of work, sometimes perhaps 
for good reason, but also sometimes mistakenly, reducing these fields to a crude 
caricature. 
 
For all that, in reading Categorically Unequal, the first chapter can be dispensed 
with. It seems to have been grafted onto the others, probably out of a desire to strengthen 
the work’s theoretical character by creating a bridge between, on the one hand, precise 
and well-documented analysis of the evolution of inequality in American society and, on 
the other, a general theory of social stratification. It is the former that doubtless 
constitutes Categorically Unequal’s greatest contribution. In this respect, Massey’s book 
should be seen as an indispensable resource for all scholars who work on contemporary 
American society. 
 
Translated from french by Ethan Rundell. 
 
Published in www.laviedesidees.fr, February 19th, 2009 
© laviedesidees.fr 
 


Is America Sick with Inequality?

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Is America Sick with Inequality?

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