After Civil Rights: Racial Realism in the New American Workplace - Rilegato

Skrentny, John D.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691159963 ISBN 13: 9780691159966

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 2013

Riassunto

A provocative new approach to race in the workplace

What role should racial difference play in the American workplace? As a nation, we rely on civil rights law to address this question, and the monumental Civil Rights Act of 1964 seemingly answered it: race must not be a factor in workplace decisions. In After Civil Rights, John Skrentny contends that after decades of mass immigration, many employers, Democratic and Republican political leaders, and advocates have adopted a new strategy to manage race and work. Race is now relevant not only in negative cases of discrimination, but in more positive ways as well. In today's workplace, employers routinely practice "racial realism," where they view race as real—as a job qualification. Many believe employee racial differences, and sometimes immigrant status, correspond to unique abilities or evoke desirable reactions from clients or citizens. They also see racial diversity as a way to increase workplace dynamism. The problem is that when employers see race as useful for organizational effectiveness, they are often in violation of civil rights law.

After Civil Rights examines this emerging strategy in a wide range of employment situations, including the low-skilled sector, professional and white-collar jobs, and entertainment and media. In this important book, Skrentny urges us to acknowledge the racial realism already occurring, and lays out a series of reforms that, if enacted, would bring the law and lived experience more in line, yet still remain respectful of the need to protect the civil rights of all workers.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

John D. Skrentny is professor of sociology and director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His books include The Minority Rights Revolution and The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice in America.

Dalla quarta di copertina

"John Skrentny's After Civil Rights will change the way we think and talk about the racial dynamics of the American workplace. It is a singular achievement, revealing in insightful ways the main strategies for managing race in employment over the past several decades. Skrentny maintains that these strategies, what he calls 'racial realism,' make American civil rights laws seem disturbingly outdated. Racial differences can be constructively managed with a focus that goes beyond the protection of rights. He addresses this disconnect head-on with compelling arguments on how the practices of racial realism can be harmonized with the American goals of justice and equal opportunity. This well-written and thoroughly researched book is a must-read."--William Julius Wilson, Harvard University

"John Skrentny's new realism about job discrimination makes a fundamental contribution to conventional understandings of the problem. The book will be a key resource for a new generation as it engages in an ongoing reassessment of the living legacy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."--Bruce Ackerman, Yale University

"This profoundly important book, from one of our most sophisticated and influential scholars of race, paints a rich and variegated picture of contemporary American racial and ethnic relations at work. Skrentny shows that bias remains pervasive at the bottom of the occupational pyramid, even as it has moderated at the top. He makes innovative and provocative suggestions for reform that offer a ray of hope."--Frank Dobbin, author ofInventing Equal Opportunity

"After Civil Rights is a terrific book. Employers are increasingly using race-consciousness to improve their own bottom line, and they are doing so in ways that neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has expressly condoned. There is no one better suited to tell this story than Skrentny."--Deborah Malamud, New York University School of Law

Dal risvolto di copertina interno

"John Skrentny's After Civil Rights will change the way we think and talk about the racial dynamics of the American workplace. It is a singular achievement, revealing in insightful ways the main strategies for managing race in employment over the past several decades. Skrentny maintains that these strategies, what he calls 'racial realism,' make American civil rights laws seem disturbingly outdated. Racial differences can be constructively managed with a focus that goes beyond the protection of rights. He addresses this disconnect head-on with compelling arguments on how the practices of racial realism can be harmonized with the American goals of justice and equal opportunity. This well-written and thoroughly researched book is a must-read."--William Julius Wilson, Harvard University

"John Skrentny's new realism about job discrimination makes a fundamental contribution to conventional understandings of the problem. The book will be a key resource for a new generation as it engages in an ongoing reassessment of the living legacy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."--Bruce Ackerman, Yale University

"This profoundly important book, from one of our most sophisticated and influential scholars of race, paints a rich and variegated picture of contemporary American racial and ethnic relations at work. Skrentny shows that bias remains pervasive at the bottom of the occupational pyramid, even as it has moderated at the top. He makes innovative and provocative suggestions for reform that offer a ray of hope."--Frank Dobbin, author ofInventing Equal Opportunity

"After Civil Rights is a terrific book. Employers are increasingly using race-consciousness to improve their own bottom line, and they are doing so in ways that neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has expressly condoned. There is no one better suited to tell this story than Skrentny."--Deborah Malamud, New York University School of Law

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AFTER CIVIL RIGHTS

Racial Realism in the New American Workplace

By JOHN D. SKRENTNY

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-15996-6

Contents

List of Figures and Tables.................................................
ix
Preface....................................................................
xi
CHAPTER 1 Managing Race in the American Workplace.........................
1
CHAPTER 2 Leverage Racial Realism in the Professions and Business........
38
CHAPTER 3 We the People Racial Realism in Politics and Government........
89
CHAPTER 4 Displaying Race for Dollars Racial Realism in Media and 
Entertainment..............................................................
153
CHAPTER 5 The Jungle Revisited? Racial Realism in the Low-Skilled 
Sector.....................................................................
216
CHAPTER 6 Bringing Practice, Law, and Values Together.....................
265
Notes......................................................................
291
Index......................................................................
383

CHAPTER 1

Managing Race inthe American Workplace

What role should racial differences play in American life? Americanshave debated this question for decades. In fact, if the question is understoodbroadly, they have been debating it for centuries. Yet the America ofthe 2000s is very different from the nation at its founding. It is quite differentalso from the America that existed, now a half-century in the past,when our civil rights laws first took shape. Civil rights law is, of course,the primary tool we use to authorize and enact our visions and plans forhow race should or should not matter. Can civil rights laws made a half-centuryago still adequately govern race relations in today's America? Dothey reflect our current practices and goals?

There are several civil rights laws, but my focus is on the venerable,celebrated Civil Rights Act of 1964. Could it be that this law—whichlegal scholars have called a "superstatute" or "landmark statute" becauseof its constitution-like importance in American law—is in someways out of sync or anachronistic in today's America? The point here isnot that the Civil Rights Act may out of sync because it has failed to stopdiscrimination, which studies show is still common. That only suggeststhat (as with almost all laws) the job of the Civil Rights Act is not yetdone. The point is, rather, that the assumptions and the world that createdthe Civil Rights Act may no longer be true or exist, and that it maywell be time to rethink the law and what we as Americans want it to do.Put another way, we may have entered a period after civil rights—a stagein American history when we can constructively and productively manageracial differences with a focus that goes beyond the protection of rights.

Consider that American racial demography has changed greatly fromthe period when our current civil rights laws were born. In place of thefocus on the black/white divide that dominated congressional debates in1964, controversies about immigration and the growing Latino populationhave taken center stage in American racial politics. Meanwhile, as I describebelow, the economy has been transformed by globalization andtechnological changes, remaking the workplaces that the Civil Rights Actwas intended to regulate.

The way Americans talk about race and what pragmatic and progressivevoices say that they want has changed as well. Never before hassuch a wide variety of employers, advocates, activists, and governmentleaders in American society discussed the benefits of racial diversity andthe utility of racial difference in such a broad range of contexts. Havingemployees of different races, we are told by these elites, is good for businesses,the government, schools, police departments, marketers, medicalpractitioners, and many other institutions. When managed properly, racialdifferences make organizations work better, or make Americans feelbetter, or both. In short, race can be a qualification for employment.It is less discussed, but we see an analogous dynamic at the low endof the job market as well, where employers of low-skilled workers alsoconsider the race, as well as immigrant status, of potential employees.

These employers, the most willing to talk, tell both journalists and socialscientists that they prefer Latinos and Asians as workers, and especiallyimmigrant Latinos and Asians, because they work harder, better, and longerthan others, including white and black Americans. These perceptionshave helped to fuel the great waves of migration that have transformedAmerica since the 1980s.

What we have not come to terms with, however, is that the lauding ofracial differences as beneficial for organizations suggests a new strategyfor thinking about and managing race in America. It does not fit (certainlynot in any obvious way), with traditional conceptions of equal rights andcitizenship. It is an issue quite apart from, and perhaps beyond, civilrights. And yet the country is mostly flying blind. We put into practice ournew conceptions of race in ever wider realms and contexts, while holdingon to more traditional ways of thinking about race and civil rights, andwe do this with little awareness of what is going on. Our laws and conversationsenact multiple strategies and multiple goals in an incoherentjumble. Significant opportunities and values are lost in the shuffle.

The purpose of this book is to provide a picture of the racial dynamicsof the American workplace. I aim to show how race matters, the perceptionsemployers and others openly express when they talk about race, andespecially how current practices fit with the Civil Rights Act. I argue thatsince 1964, there have been three main strategies for managing race inemployment. These vary greatly both in how they conceive of race, andalso in how much support they have in law. The most important point isthis: the strategy of using membership in a racial group as a qualification,what I will call racial realism, has prominent support in society butsurprisingly little in law.

Another purpose of this book is to call for debate. Legal scholar BruceAckerman has emphasized that the civil rights era, the "Second Reconstruction,"was a great constitutional moment and an elaborately deliberatedcreation of "We the People." But the current era is evolving withlittle awareness let alone debate in Congress, the courts, or the publicsphere. My point is not to criticize any particular strategy, but to arguethat we should be mindful of the gap between everyday practice and thelaw, and that we should consider reforming the law to bring the two intosync, so as to ensure that we act in accordance with our most fundamentalvalues. The task is complex: we must balance or manage employmentopportunities and restrictions to Americans of all racial affiliations, aswell as to immigrants. Given this country's violent history, we shouldkeep our eyes wide open when institutionalizing practices on mattersof race.

If we do not know what we are doing, we are likely to do it badly. If wetacitly allow racial meanings to figure in the workplace, without thinkingthrough how this should be done, we will—and already have, as I willshow—sacrifice the consensus goal of equal opportunity. Moreover, toogreat of a disjuncture between law and everyday practice diminishes respectfor the law and invites arbitrariness in its enforcement.

Strategies for Managing Racein Employment, Law, and Politics

Since 1964, there have been three dominant strategies, or cultural models,6 for managing how race matters in the workplace, all variously supportedby employers, politicians, civil rights groups, workers and judges.Current employment practices and employment civil rights laws are amixed bag of these three competing strategies: classical liberalism,affirmative-action liberalism, and racial realism. The key point here arethat these strategies vary in both the significance as well as utility orusefulness that they attribute to racial distinctions, and in their organizationalgoals (these are summarized in table 1). They also vary in theirpolitical support and in their degree of legal authorization.

Before discussing their differences, it is important to acknowledge thatthese strategies do have one thing in common: they are not based on rigorousthinking about what "race" is, but rather on cultural or folk understandingsthat are usually quite intuitive to Americans but can be utterlyinscrutable to outsiders. We can see this in the attitudes of employers,who may discriminate against or prefer certain people based on perceptionsof physical differences in skin color, hair or facial features, and ontheir beliefs about traits associated with regional or national origin. Notably,none of the statutes governing employment discrimination definerace, an issue I discuss below.

The Classical Liberal Strategy: A Color-Blind Workplace

The classical liberal strategy of how race should factor in employment canbe stated simply: in order to achieve justice, race should have no significanceand thus no utility, or usefulness, in the workplace. This strategy isrooted in the Enlightenment view of individuals as rights-bearing entitiesof equal dignity. Opportunities should be allocated based on ability andactions. In the classical liberal view, which has intellectual roots perhapsmost prominently in John Locke's political philosophy, immutable differencessuch as race or ancestry should not determine opportunities oroutcomes.

The classical liberal strategy for managing race is solidly institutionalizedin American civil rights law. It is the guiding vision behind the primarystatute regulating the meaning of race in the workplace: Title VII ofthe Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII states:

It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer -

(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, orotherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect tohis compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment,because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or nationalorigin; or

(2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicantsfor employment in any way which would deprive or tend to depriveany individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adverselyaffect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race,color, religion, sex, or national origin.

The message here on the relevance of race to employment seems clear:there isn't any. When employers do any of the things that employers normallydo—when they make everyday decisions regarding whom to hire,fire, or promote; what their workers should be doing; with whom theyshould be working; and how much they should be earning—they mustnot have race (or any of the various other qualities mentioned in Title VII,or identified in other laws, including immigration status and disability) intheir minds at all.

Congress founded the law on this vision in part as a response to thereality of race in America, and in particular in the Deep South, wherethe brutal caste system known as "Jim Crow" held sway. Through bothlaw and norms, life in the Southern states was thoroughly and openlybased on a hierarchy in which whites were the dominant race. At work,this meant that employers typically excluded African-Americans fromthe better jobs, that they did so openly, and that, typically, workplaceswere segregated. Though discrimination was rampant in the North aswell, civil rights leaders fought against these Southern practices inparticular. Congress therefore designed Title VII with a classical liberalvision: Jim Crow–style intentional discrimination was finally madeillegal.

Title VII was not the first classical liberal intervention in federal lawthat governed employment. In a similar response to racial discriminationin the South, Congress passed Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of1866. It states "all persons ... shall have the same right ... to make andenforce contracts ... as is enjoyed by white citizens...." Though it remaineddormant for decades after the failure of Reconstruction, Section1981 today is often a part of court decisions on employment discriminationbecause it allows plaintiffs to sue for compensatory and punitivedamages. The Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of "equal protectionof the laws" can also justify classically liberal nondiscrimination in thespecific context of government employment.

Considerable evidence indicates that Title VII and these other lawshave contributed much to the goal of equal opportunity. Most obviously,the kind of open exclusion of African-Americans and preference forwhites that was common in 1964 is no more. Many scholars focus nowon more subtle but nevertheless powerful kinds of discrimination that aredeeply, almost invisibly institutionalized in employment practices or theresult of unconscious bias.

Given its successes, and its fit with foundational documents in Americanhistory such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution,and specifically the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,the classical liberal strategy for managing race remains dominantin American politics. Its basic premise—that race should have no meaningor significance in employment—is the official view of the mainstreamof the Republican Party. Republicans tend to emphasize that discriminationis wrong and should be prohibited by law no matter whom it benefits.For example, the Republican platform in 2012 stated, "We considerdiscrimination based on sex, race, age, religion, creed, disability, or nationalorigin unacceptable and immoral," and added, "We will stronglyenforce anti-discrimination statutes." At the same time, social policiesthat target racial minorities in order to boost their opportunities, in theRepublican view, violated the principle of merit: "We reject preferences,quotas, and set-asides as the best or sole methods through which fairnesscan be achieved, whether in government, education, or corporate boardrooms.... Merit, ability, aptitude, and results should be the factors thatdetermine advancement in our society." In the GOP view, race shouldhave no bearing on law or life chances, and the elimination of racial discriminationrequires a commitment to colorblindness. Legal scholarsoften call the Republicans' strict interpretation of classical liberalism the"anticlassification" view of race and law.

Affirmative-Action Liberalism: Seeing Race to Get Beyond Race

An alternative strategy for managing race in employment, what I will callhere "affirmative-action liberalism," grants significance to race, but assertsthat it should not have usefulness for an organization. That is, racehas meaning for employers, but only to ensure the goal of justice (andspecifically, equal opportunity). It should not carry any messages about agiven worker's usefulness to the day-to-day functioning or effectivenessof a business or government employer.

This strategy has coexisted with the classical liberal vision, though itis always subordinate in political discourse and in the way employers talkabout their hiring. It is also less prominent in law, as it is not enshrined ina statute, let alone a landmark or superstatute. Yet affirmative-action liberalismis certainly institutionalized in the federal regulations and guidelinesthat implement Title VII, as well as in a presidential order, LaborDepartment regulations, and several Supreme Court rulings.

What is affirmative-action liberalism? While activists at the grass rootsfought for jobs across America in the 1960s, Washington policy elites—civilrights administrators, judges, and White House officials—gave legalshape to this new vision of race in employment. Shortly after Title VIIwent into effect, administrators at the new Equal Employment OpportunityCommission (EEOC), the agency created by Title VII to enforce thelaw, concluded that race should have some significance. In their view, itwas important to monitor the hiring of different racial groups to learnwhether or not employers were using race in their decision-making. Theybegan to require large employers (those with at least one hundred workers)to count the number of workers on their payroll, categorize them bythe nature of work they performed and their race and sex, and report thatthose data annually to the agency. This meant that every year, employerslooked over their entire workforce and categorized all workers accordingto their race. It marked the rise of affirmative-action liberalism: The administratorsmade counting race a tool for measuring equal opportunity.

There followed other developments in civil rights law that infused racialdifferences with significance. In 1971, the Supreme Court created anew understanding of discrimination in Griggs v. Duke Power. The courtdeclared, "If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroescannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited"and "good intent or absence of discriminatory intent does notredeem employment procedures or testing mechanisms that operate as'built-in headwinds' for minority groups and are unrelated to measuringjob capability." This meant that employers had to pay attention to theracial impact of whatever means they used to select and place employees.Those that had a "disparate impact" on minorities and women would beillegal unless they could be justified by business necessity.

Another important factor was the Labor Department's development ofaffirmative-action regulations to implement Lyndon Johnson's ExecutiveOrder 11246. This 1965 order had stated only that government contractorsneeded to promise not to discriminate in employment, and also totake some undefined "affirmative action" to ensure equal opportunity. Ittook several years, but by 1970, Labor Department regulations explainedthat "affirmative action" meant that the contractors must promise to hirecertain percentage ranges of racial minority workers at various job levelsby specified time periods.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0691159963
• ISBN 13: 9780691159966
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 397
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Germania