Opting Out

Losing the Potential of America's Young Black Elite

Maya A. Beasley

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780226040127
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Why has the large income gap between blacks and whites persisted for decades after the passage of civil rights legislation? More specifically, why do African Americans remain substantially underrepresented in the highest-paying professions, such as science, engineering, information technology, and finance? A sophisticated study of racial disparity, Opting Out examines why some talented black undergraduates pursue lower-paying, lower-status careers despite being amply qualified for more prosperous ones.   To explore these issues, Maya A. Beasley conducted in-depth interviews with black and white juniors at two of the nation's most elite universities, one public and one private. Beasley identifies a set of complex factors behind these students' career aspirations, including the anticipation of discrimination in particular fields; the racial composition of classes, student groups, and teaching staff; student values; and the availability of opportunities to network. Ironically, Beasley also discovers, campus policies designed to enhance the academic and career potential of black students often reduce the diversity of their choices. Shedding new light on the root causes of racial inequality, Opting Out will be essential reading for parents, educators, students, scholars, and policymakers.

1

INTRODUCTION

The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.

W. E. B. DUBOIS, “The Talented Tenth”

On July 2, President Johnson signed into law the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination in public facilities, education, and employment. This act, coupled with the initiative of a number of colleges and universities across the country, produced a significant rise in black college attendance. By 2000, nearly 18 percent of African Americans aged 25 to 54 had received at least a bachelor’s degree compared with only 7 percent in 1969 (US Census Bureau 1973, 2001). While college education is inarguably a key factor in the upward mobility of African Americans, blacks with college degrees still face considerable hurdles. Indeed, over this same period of time, the difference in average earnings of black and white college graduates dropped by only one percentage point (US Census Bureau 1973, 2001).¹ Thirty-five years after racial discrimination was legally banned, the question remains: what continues to hold African Americans back, if not the law?

The persistence of inequality among well-educated African Americans is at odds with claims that members of this population are the privileged beneficiaries of civil rights legislation. Certainly, relative to their low-income counterparts, the black middle class has been in a better position to profit from the efforts of the civil rights movement. That is, affirmative action and the Civil Rights Act largely served well-educated African Americans who were able to take advantage of the growing corporate and government sectors in the 1960s and 1970s, while lower-class, less-educated African Americans suffered severely from the decline of the manufacturing industry (Wilson 1978). Yet as previous research can attest, legislation has proved incapable of leveling the playing field for well-educated African Americans, and the black middle class is considerably poorer and less advantaged than its white counterpart (Landry 1987; Oliver and Shapiro 1997; Pattillo-McCoy 2000; Collins 1997).

Despite the stark contrasts in the educational and occupational achievements between well-educated whites and African Americans, the majority of contemporary research on black inequality has concerned African Americans living in poverty. This may reflect the compelling findings and rich data sources available to those focused on the urban underclass, or it may indicate a strong ascription to the Rawlsian principle of helping the most disadvantaged in society. Nonetheless, to focus primarily on only one segment of the population is to overlook the severe problems and consequences of other economic sectors within the black population. While poverty, with all its associated handicaps, is inarguably a significant contributor to the continuing economic and status disparities between African Americans and whites, the greatest differences remain at higher levels of income and education.

For example, whites with only a high school degree earn 15 percent more than African Americans, but whites with a bachelor’s, master’s, professional, or doctor’s degree earn 21, 35, 52, and 50 percent more, respectively, than African Americans (fig. 1; US Census Bureau 2001). These figures clearly demonstrate the significance of inequality between the growing population of college-educated African Americans and whites. Yet, because of the political implications of the success of well-educated African Americans, neither liberals nor conservatives have been willing to address candidly the causes of lower black advancement. Those on the left tend to emphasize only the positive attributes of high-achieving African Americans while sweeping aside the serious problems facing this population. The benefits African Americans bring to the educational and occupational experiences of students and colleagues of other races, for example, is seen as proof of the importance of maintaining public policies benefiting this group.

The problem is that the lower rate of upward mobility of African American college graduates and the conspicuous underrepresentation of African Americans in corporate and scientific occupations are often eclipsed by the very studies and testimony intended to improve both mobility and representation and are not accorded the serious scrutiny they deserve from those with sympathetic motivations.

Instead, this same topic has been exploited and used by conservatives as proof of African American inferiority and can be traced to one basic theme that cites the lower achievements of college-educated African Americans as confirmation that racial preferences have placed underqualified blacks at prestigious institutions while displacing their more deserving white counterparts. This argument first appeared in the 1960s and has reemerged whenever the opportunity to test the validity of affirmative action in court presents itself. Conservative analyst Dinesh D’Souza (1991) has repeatedly asserted that “the abolition of race based affirmative action would allow minorities to compete in a free and fair academic environment and would not be subject to the undue pressures of intellectual mismatch” (p. 253). His position, however, discounts the very real possibility that the experiences of black students in universities and the embedded nature of racial inequality in the structure of society have significant and direct effects on the academic and occupational successes of this group far larger than any measure of “ability” can explain.

Fig. 1. Difference in earnings by level of education, ages 25 to 44

Shifting the Focus to Occupations

To provide an honest account of the disparate fates of individuals from different racial groups, it is essential to find suitable measures. This book takes the stance that a considerable portion of the inequality in income between well-educated African Americans and whites is due to the different occupational fields where these two groups predominate. While part of the occupational schism results from enduring institutional racism, it cannot explain the virtual absence of African Americans from certain career fields, among them science, academia, technology, financial management, and engineering. It also fails to account for the concentration of African Americans in other fields, for example, education, social work, and government administration, as well as racialized specialties—jobs directed at, disproportionately used by, or concerned with African Americans (Collins 1997)—within mainstream occupations and organizations.²

Across the board, the disparities in the mean earnings of African Americans and whites within professional occupations are actually relatively small. African Americans who are engineers earn approximately 6 percent less than their white counterparts, similar to the 11 percent difference in black and white primary and secondary school teachers. Even in fields where there is considerable variance in pay, such as law and medicine (in which African Americans are paid 20 and 30 percent less than whites, respectively), much of the difference is accounted for by variations in pay among specialties (US Census Bureau 2002). That is, the disparity in earnings of black and white lawyers reflects closely the differences in the average earnings of government and public interest law and private practice (Chambliss 2000).

The greatest differences in annual earnings are actually found between the jobs in which African Americans are most numerous and those in which they are least represented. Thus, the 1 percent of African Americans in professional and managerial occupations who are lawyers and judges earn an average of $63,000 more than the 17 percent of African Americans who work as teachers and over $48,000 more than the 9 percent in health professions (US Census Bureau 2000). In contrast, whites are spread evenly among pay grades, making the $14,000 difference in pay between natural scientists or mathematicians and health professionals, who compose 6 and 7 percent of white professionals, respectively, far less of an impact on the white population.

Limited diversity is a significant shortcoming of the occupations chosen by African Americans. According to data from the 2000 census (US Census Bureau 2008), the most prevalent white-collar occupations among African Americans and whites are appreciably different. While the top twenty careers for both groups include elementary, middle-school, and secondary-school teachers as well as registered nurses, the range of occupations among these two groups is quite different. The top twenty white-collar occupations of whites include financial managers, general and operations managers, lawyers, designers, physicians and surgeons as well as chief executives. In contrast, the top twenty white-collar occupations of blacks shows a very clear trend of service-oriented, racialized jobs including counselors, education administrators, preschool and kindergarten teachers, community and social service specialists, other teachers and instructors, and human resources managers. Hence, chief executives are the fifth most common white-collar occupation among whites, but only the thirty-fifth among blacks. Lawyers rank tenth among whites, but twenty-seventh among blacks; physicians nineteenth among whites, but thirty-first among blacks. And, while there are six different engineering specialties listed among the top fifty white occupations, there are only three listed for blacks and they are considerably lower on the list. Effectively, education and social service work dominate among African Americans, while whites hold a far greater diversity of positions.

The occupational trends among those who graduated from the top institutions in the country—persons who should be the leaders within their generations—are much the same. The types of careers aspired to and eventually occupied by African Americans and whites from highly selective institutions are assuredly dissimilar. Bowen and Bok’s seminal work on the experiences and life outcomes of college students at elite universities (1998) shows that African American and white students occupy career sectors in very different proportions. For example, while 76 percent of the white male graduates they tracked were working in the private sector, only 67 percent of black men and 48 percent of black women did so. Instead, African American graduates were disproportionately working in government or nonprofit sectors—34 percent of black men and 52 percent of black women relative to 24 percent of white men and 39 percent of white women.

The problem does not lie with the individuals in these positions or with the positions themselves. Service-oriented occupations and those closely related to minority communities are extremely valuable. The point is that a lack of diversity among careers carries with it two inherent flaws similar to those of undiversified financial portfolios: it does not minimize risk, nor does it maximize the potential for returns. Among economists, one of the dominant investment paradigms is portfolio theory, first introduced in an article published in 1952 and developed in subsequent decades into what is known as modern portfolio theory (MPT) by Harry Markowitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1991. MPT provides an insightful framework which advocates that financial investors diversify their holdings across a wide variety of unrelated assets so as to maximize their potential returns and hedge their losses. That is, we can reduce the risk inherent in any one investment and maximize the likelihood that one of our investments will pay off if our portfolio is diversified (Markowitz 1952).

Black communities would also be well advised to diversify their most important assets, their young people’s careers, across a wide variety of occupational opportunities. Whereas a diverse portfolio minimizes financial losses and maximizes financial gains for individual investors, so too can encouraging their youth to pursue diverse careers provide black communities with a diverse occupational portfolio that will minimize social, political, and economic losses and maximize social, political, and economic gains.³ And just as individual investors are advised to shift their investments from less promising to more promising asset categories from time to time, so too should black communities shift their children’s career aspirations. Racialized occupations are still important today, but other career tracks are likely to yield comparable, if not substantially greater, returns both to the individual students as well as to black communities as a whole.

Revisiting Racial Inequality

This book seeks to understand what the statistics already show. There has not been a substantial increase in occupational diversity among well-educated African Americans despite the civil rights movement. African Americans have undoubtedly made progress, but a high degree of occupational segregation among black and white professionals remains. Unfortunately, there is a misperception of the advancements derived from civil rights legislation, which, when examined closely, was never directed at the black middle class in so far as it relates to jobs. I thoroughly document the limited impact of this legislation and its consequent failure to enhance African American upward mobility. This misperception has survived because the legislation that passed in the 1960s and 1970s was groundbreaking and ostensibly solid. As the 1970s began, there was genuine progress for African Americans, both in educational achievements and in blue-collar occupations. However, the way the legislation was written, in conjunction with judicial activism (which devalued it) and inadequate enforcement, meant that any progress that might initially have accrued was lost.

While there is certainly more occupational diversity among black professionals than there was in the 1960s, there is a tendency to see any progress as great progress. This is not only a distortion of facts, but it skirts the root of the problem. The persistent lack of black Americans within certain fields can be considered the source of significant economic and status disparities between African Americans and whites. Collins (1997) regards the opening of black consumer markets within white corporate America and the expansion of social services following the civil rights movement as two of the primary culprits for the systematic movement of African Americans into racialized career paths. Likewise, David Thomas’s research on minority executives (Thomas and Gabarro 1999) places responsibility on early career experiences and movement into specialized niches. Whereas Collins and Thomas trace the experiences of African Americans who began their careers shortly after the civil rights movement, implicating the lack of mentors available to African Americans and the pull of blacks to racialized tracks once within an organization or during the hiring process, I contend that for the generations now entering the workforce, the tendency toward homogenous, racialized fields starts well before that first job or career search.

This analysis offers a new perspective on racial inequality by exploring the occupational aspirations of African American and white college students rather than their ultimate career achievements or earnings. Focusing on the preference of career fields rather than differences in average income paints a considerably different picture of the mechanisms underlying racial inequality in America than is commonly perceived. One of the central arguments of this book is that some African Americans choose racialized careers or avoid higher-status, higher-paying fields for which they are educationally eligible. In effect, some black students are opting out of the very careers in which they are least represented and most needed.

I differ, however, with those who contend that the aspirations of African Americans are the result of deficiencies in culture and ability or merely the byproduct of poor educational backgrounds. Whereas white student aspirations are based primarily on parental expectations and social class backgrounds and motivated in ranked order of the highest paying jobs, the occupational aspirations of African Americans are the result of a complex series of structural, institutional, and psychological forces operating both within and on the black population. In particular, concerns about racism and a desire to help other African Americans weigh heavily in decisions and interests which, because of a deficit of social capital relevant to upward mobility among African Americans, are often not fully informed. Therefore, I view well-educated African Americans as a distinct population—one that differs from less-educated African Americans and well-educated populations of other races—and one deserving of careful consideration.

A Generation of Difference

Although the dynamics I have identified may resonate with some people, they do not account for why some African Americans today appear inclined to recoil in the face of conspicuous increases in opportunity when previous generations persevered in spite of a considerably more overt racism and a more limited opportunity structure. In chapter 2 I begin to explore this issue by examining the historical relationships between black higher education, structural opportunities, and occupational attainment. In so doing, I present a case that historical trends have several significant implications for the decisions made by contemporary young adults.

First, as Collins (1997) has documented in her research on black corporate executives, the opportunity structure that moved college-educated African Americans into racialized career paths thirty to forty years ago has resulted in considerably different profiles of black and white professionals today. So, as African American youth move through life—despite verbal reinforcements about advances in opportunity—the opportunity structure they see, the one they learn of, and, often, the one they expect as they are making their career decisions, reflects the career paths of older generations. Moreover, as young African Americans see the limitations placed on their elders, they may look for what may appear to be more opportune ways to achieve, rather than risk languishing in the white opportunity structure.

Second, the movement of African Americans into racialized careers and specialties from the 1960s onward has fortified the significance of careers with direct or visible s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Significance of History
• 3. Family Effects: Is It Really Just a Matter of Money?
• 4. The Role of the University
• 5. Majority Rules: Apprehension, Racism, and Racial Representation in Occupations
• 6. Stereotype Threat: Where Have All Our Scientists Gone?
• 7. The Value of Work: Careers That Matter
• 8. It’s All about Connections
• 9. Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index