The Limits of Black, Brown Solidarity

At the first meeting of the advisory board to President Bill Clinton’s initiative on race, chairman John Hope Franklin urged the board to focus on the enduring dilemmas facing black Americans. The panel instead favored a multiracial approach to race relations, but Franklin’s point is well worth exploring, especially since it was inadvertently driven home by subsequent testimony from Harvard political scientist Gary Orfield. He warned board members of the growing racial and ethnic segregation of African American and Latino students, then called for a massive new effort to desegregate the nation’s schools.

Orfield’s testimony is only the most visible example of a widespread but largely unexamined practice of likening the problems and obstacles confronting Latinos to those facing black Americans. Among liberals, it is a virtual ideology, the impetus behind calls for a political coalition of browns and blacks. But collapsing these two groups into an overarching racial-minority category not only contravenes historical and contemporary evidence, it also fans the current anti-immigrant backlash.

While measures of black school segregation have fluctuated (depending on the measure used and the period examined) within a relatively narrow range over the past 25 years, Latino segregation has steadily and unequivocally increased. In 1970, a typical black student attended a school whose enrollment was 32% white; in 1994, that enrollment was 33.9% white. For a typical Latino student, white enrollment over this same period went down, from 43.8% to 30.6%.

In some quarters, an increasingly conservative federal judiciary is blamed for these developments. But a preoccupation with the courts completely overlooks the demographic revolution that has swept the country: From 1968 to 1994, immigration policy has resulted in a 178% increase in the Latino public-school population, compared with a 14% increase for blacks and a 9% decrease for whites.

Ignoring the role of immigration in these trends provides an opportunity to skirt some important questions. For example, given the huge and rapid increase in their numbers, why aren’t Latino students even more segregated than they are? One answer is that barrios function as way stations for Latinos, who experience substantial social and residential mobility up and out. Accordingly, Latinos perceive the barrios as the more or less desirable outcome of the confluence of economic necessities and individual preferences. Unlike ghettos, barrios are, if you will, more the product of aggregation than of segregation.

Although at times the objects of shame as well as pride, barrios bear markedly less of a stigma for Latinos than ghettos do for blacks. The two groups also differ in that blacks who advance socially and economically still tend to move into neighborhoods dominated by their own group. As Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, the leading students of residential mobility, sum up their findings: “Despite their immigrant origins, Spanish language and high poverty rates, Latinos are considerably more integrated in U.S. society than are blacks.”

The residential mobility pattern of Latinos diverges so sharply from that of blacks that applying the term “segregated” to both is highly misleading, if not downright dishonest. Massey and Denton acknowledge this by coining the term “hypersegregated” to describe the uniquely isolated situation of black Americans.

Perhaps the most persuasive evidence that “racial isolation” does not similarly characterize blacks and Latinos are intermarriage rates. While black-nonblack marriages have increased dramatically in recent decades, as of 1990, only 3% of all black married persons were married to nonblacks. That same year, the rate for Latinos was 10 times higher, with 30% of all Latino married persons wedded to non-Latinos. For U.S.-born Latinos, intermarriage rates are higher still.

Simultaneously contributing to and reflecting these social trends is how Latinos see themselves racially. When asked by the Census, slightly more than half, about 52%, identify themselves as “white.” Only about 3% say they are black, while about 43% choose “other race.”

Such statistics suggest that the contemporary situation of Latinos more closely resembles that of European immigrants earlier this century than that of black Americans today. Excluding immigration in any analysis of school-segregation trends ignores a defining aspect of the Latino experience. Only with great difficulty or deception can the problems and prospects of those who have recently and voluntarily come here be likened to those whose ancestors were brought here in chains.

All this helps explain why school desegregation has never been on the Latino political agenda. The strong family bonds of which Latinos are so self-consciously proud typically translate into keeping their children close to home and supporting neighborhood schools. One result is that Mexican Americans in Los Angeles have generally accepted double and summer sessions to alleviate overcrowding in barrio schools rather than see their children bused into underutilized facilities in Anglo neighborhoods.

In San Antonio and throughout South Texas, elected boards in myriad small school districts have served as patronage-rich political bases for Mexican Americans. Accordingly, it is not surprising that the landmark court battles for Latinos have focused not on desegregation, but on more money for barrio schools. The two key school-finance reform cases of the 1970s--Serrano v. Priest in California, and San Antonio v. Rodriguez in Texas--were initiated by Mexican American parents.

Then, too, desegregation would undercut the case for bilingual education. As political scientist Rodney Hero succinctly observes: “Latino groups have not pushed hard for desegregation; instead, they have emphasized bilingual education.”

The conviction that blacks and Latinos share the same predicament is embedded in specific institutions. Among them are affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act, which afford Latinos the same extraordinary and controversial benefits as black Americans. As such programs have been challenged and even weakened, their supporters are all the more convinced that their beneficiaries have convergent interests.

This ideology transcends any defense of programmatic prerogatives, however. The pervasiveness of the phrase “people of color” confirms that the facile identification of black with Latino interests has worked its way into the warp and woof of our political culture.

Consider how the term “Latino” has come to be used as a nonwhite racial category corresponding to “black.” The litany “whites, blacks and Latinos” rolls so readily off our tongues that we forget that these are not, in fact, mutually exclusive categories. While “white” and “black” have generally come to be accepted as distinct racial categories, “Latino,” at least until quite recently, has been regarded as an ethnic, or cultural, designation. Yet, today, the Census Bureau is virtually alone in maintaining this distinction, noting in small print at the bottom of its tables that “Latinos can be of any race.” Recently, even the bureau reconsidered changing “Latino” from an ethnic to a racial category.

What’s driving these word games is that American society has only one way of talking about disadvantage: in terms of racial discrimination. Social class has never been a very convincing way of articulating the claims of the excluded, even before the decline of the labor movement. But since the 1960s, when the last remnants of the machine politics that had served earlier immigrants were eliminated, and conscience politics was institutionalized in the universities, the media and the foundations, the vocabulary of the civil rights struggle has monopolized legitimacy.

Latino leaders and their liberal allies (black and white) understand all this, and have sought to shape their agendas accordingly. But this pragmatic and not entirely wrong-headed response has come at great cost. For if Latino immigrants are continually told by their leaders that the obstacles facing them are as deep-seated as those facing black Americans, they may begin to believe it.

So may the rest of America. And as they come to believe that these immigrants pose the same kind of tragic, fundamental challenge to our institutions that black Americans do, many Americans may come to the understandable conclusion that this is a challenge we are not up to.