Author Interviews

Nancy DiTomaso is Professor of Management and Global Business at Rutgers Business School—Newark and New Brunswick. She is also the author of our latest book, The American Non-Dilemma, which provides a comprehensive examination of the persistence of racial inequality in the post-Civil Rights era and how it plays out in today's economic and political context.

Q: Let’s start with the title of your book, a reference to the landmark text by Gunnar Myrdal, The American Dilemma. Myrdal argued that white Americans would eventually face the contradiction or dilemma between their belief in American values such as equality and fair opportunity on the one hand, and the growing attention to racial inequality on the other. You argue, however, that for many whites, no such dilemma currently exists. Why do you believe whites are "uncertain allies in the struggle for civil rights"?

More Research on Racial Inequality
• RSF Book: Documenting Desegregation
• RSF Book: Invisible Men
• RSF Book: Steady Gains, Stalled Progress

A: Myrdal’s argument, contrary to the way it is often portrayed, is that white Americans would experience a moral dilemma because of the contradiction between the foundational beliefs held by all Americans toward equality before the law and fair play and the growing evidence at the time he was writing of racial inequality in the politics of the 1930s, as well as in the racial dimension of World War II (i.e., a fight against an ideology of racial supremacy in Germany and Japan), which he claimed was understood around the world. He believed that this moral dilemma would lead some whites, especially in the North, to use both law and social movements to bring about an end to the racial caste system, especially in the South.

I found in my analysis, however, that in the post-Civil Rights period, the framing of racial inequality in terms of racism and discrimination, that is, of some whites doing bad things to or holding back nonwhites, especially African Americans, contributes to an American Non-Dilemma. Because whites do not have to actively exclude or do bad things to blacks in order to benefit from racial inequality, they do not experience the kind of moral dilemma that Myrdal believed would move them to support social change. Thus, in the post-Civil Rights period, I argue that it is whites helping other whites that may be as much a factor in reproducing racial inequality as whites discriminating against or expressing racist feelings towards blacks and other nonwhites. Indeed, most whites say they believe in civil rights, believe that equal opportunity is the standard of fairness, and believe that everyone should be rewarded for their efforts. They do not readily think about the extent to which they drew on the social resources and help from family, friends, and acquaintances in order to get their own jobs. Yet, I found that this is how the interviewees in my study found most of their jobs throughout their lifetimes.

Q: One of your main arguments is that the national conversation on racial inequality remains too focused on racism, or racial discrimination. Instead, you say we should focus on “in-group favoritism” in terms of whites helping other whites. Explain how this dynamic works, and why you think it’s a better frame for thinking about racial inequality.

A: Because whites disproportionately hold jobs with more authority, higher pay, more opportunities for skill development and training, and more links to other jobs, they can benefit from racial inequality without being racists and without discriminating against blacks and other nonwhites. In fact, I argue that the ultimate white privilege is the privilege not to be racist and still benefit from racial inequality.

In my study, I found that 99 percent of the interviewees found 70 percent of the jobs they had held throughout their lifetimes with the added help from family, friends, or acquaintances, who provided them with inside information not available to others, such as when a job was available, used influence on their behalf, or actually offered them an opportunity or a job. That is, although all of the interviewees said that equal opportunity is the standard of fairness, almost all of them actively sought "unequal opportunity” in their own lives. The last thing that they would want was to have to compete equally in the job market, when finding a job that paid a living wage, provided benefits and some job security was so important to having a decent life. Given this, most wanted to find ways to “get ahead” or to “gain advantage.”

Jane Waldfogel is a professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia University School of Social Work. She has written extensively on early childhood education and the impact of public policies on child and family well-being. In this interview, she discusses President Obama's recent proposal to expand access to preschool.

Q: In response to President Obama's preschool plan, many opinion writers pointed skeptically to Head Start, the major federal early education program. It seems to be settled fact in Washington that Head Start, to quote TIME's Joe Klein, "simply does not work." Others argue that most of the other research on early education comes from targeted, intensive programs, such as the Perry Project, whose quality will probably not be replicated in scaled-up efforts. So let me ask you -- do you think that available research supports higher investments in early education programs? Is there evidence or unanswered questions that gives you pause about expanding preschool access?

More Research on Early Childhood Education
• RSF Book: From Parents to Children: The Intergenerational Transmission of Advantage
• RSF Book: Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting: The Comparative Study of Intergenerational Mobility
• RSF Book: Britain's War on Poverty

A: While policymakers in Washington have been debating the merits of Head Start, and the generalizability of the early model programs such as Perry, state lawmakers have been quietly moving forward with universal pre-kindergarten (pre-K). These pre-K programs, which now serve more than 20% of 4-year olds, differ from Head Start, and the early model programs, in some very important ways. First, they are universal – they are open to all children in the community (although when resources are limited, states do try to serve disadvantaged children and communities first). And second, they are administered and supervised by the schools (even if not always located at schools – in some states, community-based providers can be approved as pre-K providers as long as they meet the pre-K requirements, which include highly qualified teaching staff and approved curricula). This quiet pre-K expansion has been going on for some time, and we now have quite a bit of evidence about its effects (see review in Ruhm & Waldfogel, 2012). That evidence is clear – children who have the opportunity to attend pre-K enter school with better reading and math skills, and these effects tend to be largest for the children who would otherwise be the furthest behind. These results come from studies in several states, using rigorous methods such as regression discontinuity analyses. Governors and state legislators are familiar with this research evidence, and they have been eager to expand pre-K programs. But it’s tough to do this with limited state funds. So that’s why the Obama initiative to make federal funds available is so welcome.

Kevin Stainback and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey are the co-authors of the RSF book Documenting Desegregation: Racial and Gender Segregation in Private-Sector Employment Since the Civil Rights Act. The volume offers the most comprehensive account to date of what has happened to equal opportunity in America and is an indispensable guide for those seeking to understand where America stands in fulfilling its promise of a workplace free from discrimination.

Q: Your book draws on data collected by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that report on more than 5 million workplaces between 1966 and 2005. Talk a little about the data – what are in these reports and why were they collected? Secondly, have social scientists been able to use them before to analyze desegregation trends?

More Research on Segregation in the Workplace
• Fact Sheet: Equal Employment Opportunity in America
• RSF Book: The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism
• RSF Program: Cultural Contact

A: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided numerous legal gains for previously disadvantaged groups. With regards to employment, the act outlawed racial and gender discrimination and segregation; it also created the EEOC, which was mandated to monitor progress toward an equal opportunity society. This federal regulatory agency was charged with processing discrimination complaints and collecting annual data from private sector organizations. These annual reports, known as EEO-1 reports, contain the race and gender composition of occupations for each workplace in private sector firms with more than 100 employees. The EEO-1 surveys of private sector workplaces we analyze in this book were the primary tool mandated by the Civil Rights Act to monitor progress in private sector firms toward equal employment opportunity.

The EEOC, unfortunately, has never had the resources to use these data for the Act’s intended purpose. Additionally, these data have only been used occasionally in the past by social scientists. More recently, social scientists have had increased access to these EEOC-generated data, but access remains difficult and the EEOC is extremely limited in its ability to use these data to identify systemic employment discrimination.

In the 1960s corporations were terrified of being held publicly accountable for employment discrimination. The political pressures of those times severely limited the EEOC's ability to analyze these data or to share them with either the academic community or society at large. It is our hope that these data will become more available to both the academic community and the public at large.

In short, these extraordinary data are remarkable in scope and have very rarely been analyzed until recently. Documenting Desegregation provides the most systematic analysis of change in racial and gender employment opportunities since the Civil Rights Act.

Vivian Louie is an associate professor of education at Harvard University. A former Visiting Scholar, she is the author of Keeping the Immigrant Bargain: The Costs and Rewards of Success in America, which examines the journey of Dominican and Colombian newcomers whose children have achieved academic success one generation after the arrival of their parents.

Q: Let’s start with the title of your book – what exactly is the "immigrant bargain"?

A: The immigrant bargain is one made between immigrant parents and their American-born and/or raised children. The children try to make up for their parents’ sacrifices with migration by successfully going on to college, a transition that would hopefully help them be upwardly mobile.

Q: Your book seeks to explain the sources of academic success among the children of Latino immigrants in America. One popular narrative, which you challenge, argues that culture largely determines why some immigrant groups do better than others. According to this theory, Asian-Americans generally do well in school chiefly because their culture values education more. Why do you think we should be cautious about accepting this explanation?

More Research on Immigration
• RSF Program: Immigration
• RSF Book: Achieving Anew: How New Immigrants Do in American Schools, Jobs, and Neighborhoods
• RSF Book: Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age

A: Motivation and optimism, which lie at the heart of the cultural narrative about success, are definitely both important to becoming successful. What we need to think more about, however, is where this motivation and optimism actually come from, and how they are maintained or depressed by the opportunities and constraints immigrants and their children find in the United States. By emphasizing family cultures, the cultural argument shifts the emphasis away from powerful institutional and other factors outside the family, which are crucial to understanding success.

The research I have done with the children of Chinese, Colombian, and Dominican working-class immigrants reveals that a key factor in their paths to college was having access to resources that provided critical help at important times, like referrals to a gifted class, a better middle school, after school programs, and quality college-counseling.

My comparative research also highlights the role of residential segregation and of ethnic community wealth in shaping different opportunities. First, the working-class Chinese were less residentially segregated, and thus had access to better public schools. Second, even when they lived in ethnic communities with substantial rates of poverty, e.g., a Chinatown, these communities also had a lot of transnational (from Asia) and ethnic wealth, which allowed for educational investments; as a result, the working-class Chinese had access to institutions that helped with schooling and ties to middle- and upper-middle class Chinese that provided key schooling information. Both are key advantages that were not as available to the Dominicans and Colombians, despite the fact that they were also highly motivated to help their children with schooling in America.

Becky Pettit is a professor of sociology at the University of Washington. She is a sociologist, trained in demographic methods, with interests in social inequality (broadly defined). A former Visiting Scholar, she is the author of Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, an eye-opening examination of how mass incarceration has concealed decades of racial inequality.

Q: There have been a number of books published recently that discuss the explosion of incarceration in America. I’m thinking in particular of Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow, which received a lot of attention last year. What does Invisible Men add to the conversation about race and imprisonment?

More Research on Incarceration
• RSF Chartbook: Incarceration in America
• RSF Book: Invisible Men
• RSF Book: Punishment and Inequality in America
• RSF Book: Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration
• RSF Book: Do Prisons Make Us Safer?

A: Invisible Men is a critique of our national data systems and the social facts they produce. When you hear the unemployment rate is 8.1 percent, those data come from the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of 50,000-60,000 individuals living in households. The Current Population Survey and many other data sources used to frame our understanding of the American population exclude people who don’t live in households – like inmates, people living in military barracks, or people living in long-term care facilities for the mentally ill. The inmate population is now so large and so disproportionately concentrated among young, low-skill black men that it distorts portraits of the population based on samples of people living in households. So, unlike Alexander, I don’t try and explain the buildup of the criminal justice system itself. Instead, I consider the implications of mass incarceration on patterns of racial inequality.

Q: Let’s talk about the subtitle of your book – "the myth of black progress." What exactly do you mean by that? Do you feel contemporary accounts in the media and by scholars routinely overstate progress?

A: Yes, the media and scholars routinely overstate the well-being of black Americans. Many Americans want desperately to believe in the American dream and believe we live in a colorblind society. We have an African American president. There is a healthy black middle-class. And, if you focus your attention only on data from the household population -- which most assessments of the population are based – it is easy enough to believe that blacks have made progress on a number of social indicators. When data exclude the most disadvantaged segments of the population, they do show a decline in the race gap in high school dropout rates, modest employment gains for blacks, wage increases among blacks with the lowest levels of education, and increases in voter turnout.

What I show in my work is that if you include inmates, things aren’t quite as they seem. Over the past 35 years the penal population has increased five-fold. 2.3 million Americans are now behind bars and 1 in 31 American adults is now under some form of correctional supervision. Nowhere is incarceration more prevalent than in the African American community. My research shows that one in nine black men was incarcerated on any given day in 2008 and that 37 percent of young, black, male dropouts were behind bars.

It seems obvious to say, but prison and jail inmates live in correctional institutions, not households. As a result, they aren’t included in conventional data sources. And that means that conventional data sources generate overly optimistic accounts of black progress on a range of fronts.

Timothy Smeeding is the Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty. He co-edited two RSF volumes on intergenerational mobility: Persistence, Privilege and Parenting and From Parents to Children.

Q: Let me start with a broad question that is currently animating much debate: How rigorous is the evidence on the relationship between inequality and mobility? Would it be fair to say that if a society has higher inequality, it will also generally find that it is harder for its citizens to climb the income ladder?

More Research on Intergenerational Mobility
• RSF Working Group: Cross-National Research on the Intergenerational Transmission of Advantage (CRITA)
• RSF Review: A Reading List on Economic Mobility
• RSF Report: Does America Promote Mobility As Well As Other Nations?
  
• RSF Review: An Interview with Miles Corak
• RSF Review: Why Is Economic Mobility Higher in Canada than the U.S.?
• RSF Review: An Interview with Jane Waldfogel

A: The evidence that inequality and mobility are negatively correlated is strong and growing. We no longer need to wait until a child reaches adulthood to learn that the children of higher status parents, be it according to parental education, income, wealth or all of these, will have a much better chance of future life success than those children who are not so lucky.

Q: From Parents to Children looks at the transmission of advantage in ten advanced countries. How strong is the link between parental education and children’s outcomes in the United States compared to the rest? Is equal opportunity – often hailed as a quintessentially American concept – most available in the U.S.?

A: Ironically, the evidence shows that children in the USA—where inequality is the highest—have the least equal opportunities of all the countries studied in multiple dimensions. The mobility gradients across parental education for cognitive, behavioral and job-related outcomes are the steepest of the countries studied.

Q: One argument often made during debates over inequality is that differences in outcomes may merely reflect differences in ability or effort. But From Parents to Children finds disturbing disparities among children from richer and poorer families even before they reach school. How important are these early differences in the course of a child’s life?

A: Early differences are increasingly important. With many child outcomes we observe—be it early childhood health, pre-kindergarten ability, behavior—there is already a steep gradient benefiting the children of the most able adults, and that gradient persists or grows, but never lessens as the child moves to adulthood. Early action on quality preschool and parenting behaviors cam make a big difference to move toward a more level playing field.

Jane Waldfogel is a professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia University School of Social Work. She has written extensively on the impact of public policies on child and family well-being. She also contributed research to the RSF volumes Persistence, Privilege and Parenting and From Parents to Children.

Q: As part of our volume Privilege, Parenting and Persistence, you and Elizabeth Washbrook examined income-related gaps in school readiness among children in the U.S. and the U.K. You found that parenting behavior played a big part in the significant disparities between the children. What parental practices are we talking about here?

More Research on Intergenerational Mobility
• RSF Working Group: Cross-National Research on the Intergenerational Transmission of Advantage (CRITA)
• RSF Review: A Reading List on Economic Mobility
• RSF Report: Does America Promote Mobility As Well As Other Nations?
  
• RSF Review: An Interview with Miles Corak
• RSF Review: Why Is Economic Mobility Higher in Canada than the U.S.?
• RSF Book: Britain's War on Poverty

A: The most important aspect of parenting, in particular for young children, is whether it is responsive and sensitive to the child. This is of course difficult to measure, so often in large datasets we have to rely on measures of other aspects of parenting, such as whether the parent provides cognitively stimulating materials (such as books and toys), whether the parent is warm and supportive of the child, or whether the parent uses harsh discipline. Reading with children is also important, particularly for early literacy and language development.

Q: Several policymakers have suggested that improving children's outcomes needs to involve encouraging better parenting. Barack Obama, for example, often exhorts parents to read more to their children. But what does the research tell us about the success of initiatives in changing family practices? Are there any promising efforts on the horizon?

A: We have known for some time that parenting is really important for children’s outcomes, but until recently, the consensus among social scientists was that we did not have much rigorous evidence that parenting programs are effective at improving parenting and children’s outcomes. But this has been changing. We now have good evidence, from randomized controlled trials, that well-designed programs can be effective at improving parenting and child outcomes. One of the best examples in this regard is the Nurse-Family Partnership Program, which is now being expanded nationwide (and in other countries such as the United Kingdom).

Miles Corak is a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa. He has published numerous articles on topics dealing with child poverty, access to university education, intergenerational earnings and education mobility, and unemployment. He has also contributed to two RSF volumes on economic mobility—From Parents to Children (2012) and Persistence, Privilege and Parenting (2011).

More Research on Intergenerational Mobility
• RSF Working Group: Cross-National Research on the Intergenerational Transmission of Advantage (CRITA)
• RSF Review: A Reading List on Economic Mobility
• RSF Report: Does America Promote Mobility As Well As Other Nations?
  
• RSF Review: Why Is Economic Mobility Higher in Canada than the U.S.?

Q: In your chapter in Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting, you compare the effects of family background on mobility outcomes in Canada and the United States. First, why should people interested in inequality and mobility look in particular at the different results in these two countries? And second: is the ‘American Dream’ more achievable in Canada?

A: Perhaps the best way to answer this question is to consider what we mean by this phrase.

The "American Dream" is a very important metaphor in the United States, indeed some would say a defining metaphor. But it has a host of meanings, and our analysis speaks to the idea that economic outcomes should be the result of the energies, talents and motivations of individuals than of their family background. The American Dream is about becoming all that you can be regardless of your starting point in life.

In fact, we used similarly designed public opinion polls in the two countries to ask representative samples of Americans and Canadians what they understood the American Dream to mean, and surprisingly they answered in very much the same way, indeed in some scenarios we put to them, exactly in the same way. Both Americans and Canadians value freedom, being able to accomplish anything that you want, and to have the basic opportunities like health and education to do so.

Canadians differ from Americans in that they have a stronger tendency to see government policy as just another tool to help them achieve their individual goals. I don't want to overstate this tendency, but it is clear that Americans have a stronger tendency to see government as hindering rather than helping them, and that this could reflect a belief about the effectiveness of public policy as much as a principled stand against it.

There is value in comparing these two countries precisely because Americans and Canadians share some important values and goals, and because labour markets function in broadly similar ways on both sides of the border. But also because attitudes to public policy and the actual design of policy differ. These are differences that we potentially can all learn from, and that might be transferable across the countries.

To the extent that we measure the American Dream by the degree of relative earnings mobility across the generations --- by how closely tied a child's adult position in the earnings distribution is to the position occupied by his or her parents --- then on average it is pretty clear that there is more mobility, up to three times more mobility, in Canada than in the United States.

But the major point of our chapter was that this difference reflects differences in mobility at the two extremes of the earnings distribution. In fact, the broad majority of Canadians and Americans born to parents in the broad middle of the earnings distribution experience considerable mobility both upward and downward. But Americans born to parents at the top and the bottom are more likely than Canadians to become, respectively, the top and bottom earners of the next generation. It is in this sense that some might suggest that the American Dream is more of a reality north of the 49th parallel.

Chris Rhomberg is the author of The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor, a riveting analysis of the 1995 Detroit newspaper strike. An associate professor of sociology at Fordham University, Rhomberg studies issues of race, labor, and urban politics in American political development.

Q: By 1995, when the Detroit strike began, the erosion of collective bargaining rights was already firmly established. What drew you to this newspaper strike as opposed to the many other wrenching labor disputes of the 1980s and early 1990s? What did you hope to learn from Detroit?

More Research on Labor Policy
• RSF Program: Future of Work
• RSF Book: They Say Cut Back, We Say Fight Back! Welfare Activism in an Era of Retrenchment
• RSF Book: Low-Wage America
• RSF Book: America Works: Critical Thoughts on the Exceptional U.S. Labor Market

A: The rise of the current anti-union regime began in the 1980s, but my argument is that such macro-institutional changes do not occur neatly in all places all at once. In the 1990s it was not necessarily clear where things would go next. By that time unions had adopted counter-tactics of community mobilization and striking against unfair labor practices in order to gain some protec-tion against permanent replacement. The National Labor Relations Board became more favorable to unions, under the administration of President Bill Clinton. The labor movement as a whole had begun a progressive revival, symbolized in the October 1995 election of Service Employees International Union president John Sweeney as president of the AFL-CIO.

William Marsiglio (University of Florida) and Kevin Roy (University of Maryland) are the co-authors of Nurturing Dads: Social Initiatives for Contemporary Fatherhood (Russell Sage Foundation, 2012). The book explores the ways new initiatives can address the social, cultural, and economic challenges men face in contemporary families.

Q: Let’s start with your book’s title. You argue that contemporary models often equate “good” fathering with the ability to bring home a weekly paycheck. You say this framework is too narrow and is being redefined. What is the new model you propose?

More Resources on Fatherhood
• RSF Book: Chapter One, Nurturing Dads (PDF)
• RSF Book: Fathers Under Fire: The Revolution in Child Support Enforcement
• RSF Book: Black Fathers in Contemporary American Society

A: To be clear, for a few decades now, part of the cultural narrative about fatherhood has included references to the “new age father” or the “new father.” Scholars and other commentators of family life have highlighted how fathers are increasingly more active with and nurturing toward their children. Thus we are not the first to call for the public to support men’s nurturance of their children.

But we do, in a fairly comprehensive way, draw attention to the limitations of formal federal and state policies that hinge on fathers’ lack of residence, marriage status, or financial contribution. At the same time, we advocate for a new cultural discourse about fathering that will guide an eclectic yet coordinated set of initiatives to help fathers in all sorts of circumstances become more nurturing and responsive to their children’s everyday needs. The social transformation we seek will ensure that good fathering is widely defined to accentuate nurturance to the same extent, perhaps more so, than financial support. We stress diverse initiatives to forge unconditional, positive bonds between fathers and their children.