Exploring Myths of Affirmative Action : USC sociology professor’s study of black women in the labor force may serve to enlighten combatants on both sides of a divisive issue.

Angela James, 30, is an assistant professor of sociology at USC. Last year, she and UCLA graduate student David Grant initiated a study on black women in Los Angeles County and how they had fared in the labor force between 1970 and 1990. They plan to publish a research article on their findings, a work that should be of particular interest in light of the recent developments concerning affirmative action. James and her husband, Darnell Hunt, live in Baldwin Hills. She was interviewed by Karen E. Klein.

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I feel that affirmative action has been made a scapegoat for economic stagnation and the peculiar nature of growth in the economy over the past two decades.

I hear people who say that 30 years of affirmative action have taken jobs away from white people and from white men in particular. But they are wrong.

Our study showed that the problems of white men have to do with the changes in the economy, not with competition from black men or black women.

As a member of an intersectional group myself--both a woman and a black person--I felt that the debate over affirmative action was going on without real data. People’s perception of the world is colored by their own frustrations over their progress or lack thereof. I wanted to find out whether things were getting better or worse for black women.

My partner and I took census data from 1970 to 1990 in Los Angeles County and looked at income and occupations of black women, then compared them to black men, white men and white women.

We found, as expected, that between 1970 and 1990, black women’s participation in the labor force did increase. But we also found that the change for other groups of women was more dramatic than for black women. And we found that black men’s participation in the labor force dropped rather dramatically over the same period.

That was interesting because progress for black women is often articulated in terms of whose expense it has come at. In fact, men in general tend to view women’s successes at their own expense.

But the success of black women has engendered debate in the black community, with some charging that black women are taking jobs from black men or that the rest of society is more comfortable with black women in the work force than with black men.

I feel that that is a very myopic view. What we found is that while black women have experienced change that is positive relative to their own history, they are still relatively disadvantaged.

Our study showed that in 1970, 55% of black women were in the work force. Most of them worked in private households (as domestic workers), in hospitals, in the apparel industry and in government offices.

By 1990, 63% of black women in Los Angeles County were employed. But still, their employment was primarily in hospitals, general government offices, the telephone company and elementary and secondary schools.

So you see, things have improved, but not a lot has changed.

We looked at people in elite occupations, such as lawyers and doctors. In 1970, the census data reported no black women employed in those two categories. The census sampled 5% of the population.

By 1990, 1.9% of the lawyers and doctors surveyed identified themselves as black women. That is a dramatic increase, but we still see that black women have not made huge inroads into the elite professions.

We found that in 1990, 61.2% of the lawyers and 51% of the physicians surveyed were white males.

Of course, there are always a lot more mid-level jobs with little power than there are high-powered jobs with authority. Those with authority require relatively high levels of education.

The good news we found was an increase in educational levels among black women. In 1970, 29% of black women had not graduated from high school. By 1990, only 16% did not have a high school diploma.

In 1970, 7% of black women held bachelor’s degrees. By 1990, that number had risen to 15%. It’s a big increase, but again overall that’s not a large percentage.

Our study showed that black women benefited over the 20-year period from an increase in earnings, and that was encouraging to me.

At the same time, however, black men’s role in the work force declined, from 80% participation in 1970 to 67% in 1990. Much of that decline paralleled the decrease in the manufacture of durable goods. Those jobs in manufacturing and in the defense industry that used to require low levels of education but offered stable, working-class salaries, that allowed a man to do something like buy a home, are gone.

When you see declines in those kinds of jobs, the options for people with those levels of skills and education become increasingly marginal. There have been huge numbers of jobs created since 1970, but the bulk of them are in extremely low-paying sectors, like fast food.

I think this is what prompts many people to say, “Aha! Black women are making gains at the expense of black men!” But I think the more simple, reasonable explanation are the gains in the service sector of our economy. Those traditional “women’s jobs” with little power or authority have exploded, while the availability of low-skill-level jobs for men has collapsed.

We have begun to see some progress for black women, but it certainly has not been tremendous. Affirmative action is just beginning to start to work and we’re already saying, “It’s a bad thing!”

We have to remember we can’t get around the fact that we all get a bigger piece of the pie when the pie gets bigger. We can’t get a bigger piece when the pie is shrinking.