The Urban Review, Vol. 31, No. 3, 1999

Race, Education, and Joblessness in the Inner City, 1970-1990 Harvey Kantor In When Work Disappears, William Julius Wilson argues that the difficulties blacK innercity residents face in finding work has more to do with their failure to acquire the kinds of education, skills, and work habits required by changes in the urban labor market than with racial discrimination. In this essay, I argue that this notion tends both to obscure the substantial gains African-Americans have made in education and to discount the degree to which race continues to mediate the relationship between educational achievement and labor market outcomes. Although there is no question that the economic position of those with little education has deteriorated badly over the last two decades, absent policies that address the persistent racial disparities in employment, reforming education by itself will not substantially improve African-American employment opportunities or reduce black joblessness in the inner city.

I

The American dream has long included the promise of a steady wage and secure employment for all those who wanted it. For many residents of the nation's inner cities, however, this promise has become a hollow one. Today, more men and women in the United States are at work in the paid labor market than ever before, but in many impoverished neighborhoods in Chicago, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other big cities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, a substantial majority of working-age adults either are unemployed or have stopped looking for work in the mainstream economy altogether. Most of these jobless residents are black (Hacker, 1996). The major aim of William Julius Wilson's book, When Work Disappears (1996), is to account for this disappearance of work in black urban communities and to propose solutions that would begin to ameliorate its ill effects on social and cultural life in inner-city neighborhoods. The first section, "The New Urban Poverty," draws heavily on interviews and surveys with African-Americans Harvey Kantor is professor of education at the University of Utah. Address correspondence to Harvey Kantor, Ph.D., University of Utah, Department of Educational Studies, 1705 E. Campus Center Drive, Salt Lake City, UT 84112.

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who live on Chicago's impoverished South Side. It traces the shift away from an "institutional ghetto—whose structure and activities parallel those of the larger society"— to a jobless one that "features a severe lack of basic opportunities and resources" (p. 23) and examines the connections between the growth of joblessness and the development of what Wilson calls "ghetto-related behaviors and attitudes" (p. 52). The second section engages current debates about the recent history and future direction of urban social policy. It provides an overview of American beliefs about poverty and welfare, examines the connections between recent social policies and the "heightened levels of racial animosity toward blacks" (p. 183), and concludes with a call for new social policies to decrease inner-city joblessness and reduce the growing wage inequality among workers. In focusing on joblessness and its connection to social behavior, When Work Disappears expands Wilson's earlier efforts to reframe the debate about the causes and consequences of black urban poverty. He is especially eager to direct discussion away from conservative arguments about the importance of genetic endowment that have recently resurfaced in books like The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994). As in his previous work, however, Wilson also wants to deflate what he believes are overly sentimental portrayals that romanticize the strengths of the poor. For different reasons, he says, neither of these arguments takes into account the "powerful and complex role of the social environment in shaping the life experiences of inner-city ghetto residents" (p. xv). What he proposes instead is an analysis of urban poverty that does not deny the "existence of unflattering behaviors" (p. xviii) but roots them in the broader structure of constraints and opportunities that have limited social mobility and circumscribed the life chances of so many inner-city residents. Joblessness is central to Wilson's analysis because he believes that the absence of work is the most important of these structural constraints. Partly, of course, this is because work is a source of income, though that is not Wilson's major concern. More than a way to make a living, he argues, work regulates and disciplines individual behavior, provides the foundation for long-lasting, husband-wife families, and helps stabilize social life in neighborhoods and communities. Indeed, Wilson maintains that there is a significant difference between neighborhoods where the majority of residents are poor but working and neighborhoods where they are poor and jobless. When work disappears, he says, neighborhoods and communities are much more likely to lack resources and opportunities (including connections to informal employment networks) as well as the kinds of institutional mechanisms needed to monitor social behavior. This, in his view, is what has happened in inner-city neighborhoods today and is the primary reason for the growth of violence, street crime, drug use, and the other social problems that characterize what he calls the "world of the new urban poor." This argument will be familiar to those acquainted with Wilson's previous

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book, The Truly Disadvantaged (1987). One difference is that Wilson includes many more data in When Work Disappears on unemployment and joblessness among low-income African-American women. As one other reviewer has pointed out, however, Wilson does not take the opportunity to use these data to substantially rethink his ideas about "the importance of female employment, in and of itself, for the well-being of families and children" (Dill, 1997, p. 420). Because he still believes that the increase in female-headed families since the 1960s is a chief source of the social problems now plaguing inner-city neighborhoods and that the decrease in marriage rates among inner-city AfricanAmericans is due mainly to the rise in the number of black men out of work, he continues to pay more attention to the growth of male joblessness, though he does point out that African-American women without jobs are also less likely to marry than those with them. Wilson acknowledges that racial segregation compounds these problems. "If large segments of the African-American population had not been historically segregated in inner-city ghettos," he writes, "we would not be talking about the new urban poverty" (p. 23). But Wilson maintains that the growth of joblessness is more important than residential segregation in accounting for the antisocial behaviors and attitudes that have appeared in inner-city neighborhoods since 1970. Inner-city neighborhoods were just as segregated in 1950 as they are today, he argues, but because levels of employment were much higher then, they did not experience the same degree of social disorganization. In order to understand the new urban poverty, he concludes, we cannot focus primarily on the forces that sustain racial segregation. More important, we must examine how escalating rates of joblessness have interacted with segregation to produce the kinds of socially dysfunctional behaviors that have become commonplace in inner-city neighborhoods. This argument does not seem unreasonable to me. Residential segregation by race has not increased during the last 30 years, but inner-city joblessness surely has. Still, Douglas Massey (1997, pp. 416-418; also see Massey and Denton, 1993) is right when he says that Wilson's approach tends to divert attention from the adverse effects of residential segregation on black well-being. As Massey, Norman Fainstein (1986-1987, p. 438), and many others have pointed out, ghettoization in central cities matters in a variety of ways, many of which are documented in When Work Disappears—in confining low-income black children to underfunded, ill-equipped schools, in cutting young people off from contact with fully employed adults, and, more generally, by isolating impoverished African-Americans from the social networks that facilitate economic mobility. Indeed, though Wilson's emphasis on the causes and consequences of joblessness provides a much needed corrective to views that trace the persistence of black urban poverty exclusively to racial discrimination, to discount the role of segregation is to miss an important part of the story.

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II

Conservatives typically argue that the chief reason for the rising rates of joblessness in the inner city is that poor people don't want to work, either because the government rewards them not to or because they lack initiative (Murray, 1984; Mead, 1986). Wilson does not completely reject the idea that lack of motivation may contribute to joblessness and poverty. But he effectively shows that this has little do with an unwillingness to work per se. None of the people he and his colleagues interviewed said they did not want to work. Nor did they look down on those who did work, even when they labored at lowwage jobs. Rather, most of those they talked with expressed high aspirations and endorsed the idea that hard work was important for getting ahead. But they also acknowledged that seeking work was often an unrewarding process and that it was difficult to sustain motivation because work was not generally available, especially work that paid enough to support a family or stay off welfare. Christopher Jencks (1992, p. 125) has argued that the chief reason for this is our inability to maintain a tight labor market without encouraging inflation. Since African-Americans, especially young black men, are generally at the bottom of the hiring queue, he points out, tight labor markets substantially improve their employment prospects, both absolutely and relative to whites. Over the last three decades, however, successive administrations have tried to control inflation chiefly by letting unemployment rise. Not surprisingly, the result has been devastating for African-American workers, since they are the first fired and last hired when labor markets turn slack. If we could get unemployment rates down to 3% or 4% percent, Jencks argues, joblessness among blacks would drop sharply, though he doubts this will happen because policymakers remain convinced that stimulating the economy to reduce unemployment to such low levels would mean higher rates of inflation. In The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), Wilson also argued that joblessness in inner-city ghettos would decline if the economy could sustain high levels of employment for an extended period of time. But he is less sanguine now than he was a decade ago about the effects of full employment on black joblessness. He points out that labor markets tightened considerably during the economic recovery of the 1990s, lowering black unemployment rates in general, but that this has done little to affect labor force participation rates among inner-city residents. Whereas in the past tight labor markets enlarged employment by drawing back those who had dropped out of the labor market, he argues, today inner-city residents not in the labor market appear to be immune to the effects of fiscal and monetary policy. Although sustained full employment might bring some of these workers back into the mainstream economy, he says, the experience since 1990 suggests that many would have a hard time finding work unless the economy were run at full capacity for several years.

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Why is this the case? Wilson allows that many factors are at work. But his chief argument is that the rise in joblessness in black urban communities stems from structural changes in the organization of urban economies. Of these changes, the most important has been the redistribution of job opportunities from manufacturing to services and from blue-collar to white-collar work within firms and industries, including manufacturing. As this has occurred, he points out, the economic position of all blue-collar workers, white and black, has deteriorated. But the impact has been greatest on inner-city residents, especially on young black males with little education. This is partly because they live disproportionately in the Northeast and Midwest, where the decline of manufacturing has been most severe, and partly because they have had difficulty finding employment in white-collar services, at least in jobs with wages comparable to those in manufacturing. The data Wilson marshals to support this argument tell a dispiriting story about the deindustrialization of the American economy and its effects on black urban communities. Between 1970 and 1990, Chicago lost 60% of its manufacturing jobs, throwing thousands of inner-city residents out of work. Many found employment in low-wage jobs in the service sector or as unskilled laborers. But many others could not find work and went jobless. Asked how much of a problem unemployment and joblessness was in their community, 73% of the residents in one black inner-city Chicago neighborhood that Wilson studies and 75% in another identified it as a major problem. Not surprisingly, as joblessness increased, so did poverty. The proportion of families in these neighborhoods with income below the poverty line rose from 30% to 50% between 1970 and 1990, compared to a 7% increase in the rest of Chicago during the same time.1 Empirical research confirms that much of this increase in joblessness was due to the impact of industrial and occupational shifts on black male workers, especially those with little education. Findings by John Bound and Harry Holzer, by Barry Bluestone and his colleagues, and by David Howell all suggest that the deindustrialization and postindustrial transformation of the economy account for a substantial portion of the job losses of less educated black men. Using data from fifty-two metropolitan areas, for example, Bound and Holzer found that manufacturing shifts accounted for 10-30% of the employment decline of black and white men and as much as 35-50% of the decline in employment for young black male dropouts between 1970 and 1980. Bluestone et al. used different data but reached a similar conclusion. They found that manufacturing decline explained one-third of the increase in joblessness among less educated black 20-year-olds since the late 1960s. Neither of these studies explains why these shifts hurt the economic prospects of black men so badly, but they lend support to Wilson's argument that if black men lived in cities with relatively large losses in manufacturing, they were more likely to be unem-

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ployed or to have dropped out of the labor market entirely (for a review of these studies, see Moss and Tilly, 1991).2 III

Why have inner-city residents had such a difficult time adjusting to these economic changes? Wilson's analysis suggests that part of the problem is that they live in the wrong place. He points out that 60% of new job growth in the Chicago metropolitan area has been in the suburbs, far from the central city. Combined with the persistence of discriminatory housing policies that exclude African-Americans from most white suburbs, he maintains, this has increased the difficulty inner-city residents have in finding work for two reasons. One is that they have a more difficult time finding out about job openings in the suburbs than they do about openings in the city; the other is that they have a harder time holding onto such jobs when they do find and are hired for them, largely because public transportation rarely provides quick or easy access to suburban jobs and inner-city residents are generally too impoverished to buy cars and drive to work. Intuitively, this argument makes a lot of sense. But the evidence for it is less than clear-cut. Empirical research suggests that inner-city black residents, especially teenagers, do have a difficult time finding employment in the suburbs. It is unclear, however, whether the issue is chiefly one of space or race.3 Wilson cites one study which indicates that after taking into account background factors, such as family circumstances, level of education, and motivation, black suburban residents are more likely to be employed than African-Americans who live in the inner city. But other studies suggest that suburban employers are more reluctant than inner-city employers to hire black workers and that they moved to the suburbs at least partly so that they would not have to do so. Indeed, Jencks, for one, suggests that if inner-city residents have a hard time finding out about jobs in the suburbs it may not be because of distance per se or inadequate transportation but because suburban employers don't want them to and take steps to ensure that they won't (Jencks, 1992, pp. 123-124; on this point, also see Holzer, 1996, ch. 4). But the problem facing inner-city workers is not just that factories shut down and moved to the suburbs or that the majority of new jobs created in metropolitan areas have been located outside the central city. Wilson points out that despite the flight of manufacturing from the city and the suburbanization of employment, cities like Chicago have also added new jobs, especially in retail trade and white-collar service industries. Yet central-city residents have not been much more successful in securing these jobs than they have been in finding and keeping jobs in the suburbs. Many of them have been filled instead by white commuters from the suburbs or by recent immigrants.

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To discover why, Wilson and his colleagues interviewed 179 employers both in the city of Chicago and in surrounding Cook County. These interviews revealed that many Chicago-area employers engaged in recruitment practices and utilized screening mechanisms that systematically eliminated or reduced the number of inner-city applicants who could apply and be hired for entry-level jobs. Among other things, they limited their recruitment efforts to certain neighborhoods, placed ads in local newspapers unlikely to circulate in ghetto communities, and avoided recruiting from welfare programs and state employment services that historically have served large numbers of African-American workers. Many also indicated that they preferred not to hire students from the Chicago public schools and passed over them in favor of applicants from Catholic or suburban schools. Although a few employers openly admitted that racial discrimination played a role in this, most contended that charges of racism were not justified. They argued that employer practices had more to do with perceptions about the poor quality of inner-city workers than with racial prejudice per se. Across a range of occupational categories, most of them pointed to a lack of basic skills, especially language skills, and poor attitudes toward work as the two main reasons why employers did not want to hire inner-city residents, though there were significant differences in employers' views of African-American men and women. Although employers had negative perceptions of all African-American workers, most of them preferred black women to black men. This was partly because they believed that black women were more responsible and had a better attitude toward work and partly because they believed that black men did not possess the kinds of personal traits required for white-collar work and for service occupations that deal with the public. Wilson interprets this to mean that race remains a significant factor in the labor market. But he does not view this chiefly as a matter of racial prejudice or overt discrimination. He points out, for example, that the black employers he and his colleagues interviewed had the same negative perceptions of inner-city African-American workers as did white employers. Instead, Wilson argues that race remains a factor because central-city black workers are the product of segregated, impoverished communities that have constrained and limited their opportunities to acquire the types of skills and personal qualities required by the recent shifts in the economy from blue-collar to white-collar work and away from manufacturing toward retail trade and service industries. If African-Americans had not been segregated in the inner city, he concludes, they would be just as likely as other groups to have the kinds of technical skills as well as the styles of speech and deportment that employers are now looking for. Given the inadequacies of inner-city schools and the other disadvantages of growing up in impoverished city neighborhoods, this is hardly an unreasonable argument to make. But Wilson does not spend much time investigating why

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employers value the skills and attitudes they talk about or whether inner-city residents in fact lack them. Instead, he takes for granted employers' statements that the difficulties inner-city residents face in finding work are due to their inadequate educations, skills, and work habits.4 As a result, even though Wilson goes to great lengths to stress that black joblessness is not the result of a culture of poverty but the by-product of deindustrialization and the historical legacy of racial segregation, his analysis ultimately reinforces the idea that the employment problems of inner-city residents are due mainly to their personal shortcomings, not the organization of the economy or the marginalization of innercity African-Americans in it.

IV This argument—that because of the restructuring of the economy the employment problems of poor urban African-Americans now have more to do with their inadequate skills and poor attitudes toward work than with racial discrimination—is not unique to Wilson. It has been voiced often and widely by other social scientists as well as by politicians from both parties, political pundits, and the media. But despite its popularity, Wilson's argument is difficult to credit fully. Although he is surely right that discrimination is not worse now than 50 years ago, the notion that black joblessness has increased mainly because inner-city residents lack the skills and attitudes to qualify for employment in the growing sectors of the urban economy tends both to obscure the substantial gains African-Americans have made in education and to discount the degree to which race continues to mediate the relationship between educational achievement and the labor market outcomes of black inner-city residents. African-Americans do indeed drop out of high school more often and complete high school less frequently than whites, especially if they live in the inner city. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, however, the historical record suggests that over the last 50 years, African-Americans have made considerable gains in education and taken substantial, though still partial, steps toward closing the educational gap with whites (Waldinger, 1996, p. 13). Nationwide, the percentage of African-Americans ages 25-29 who did not finish high school began to decline after World War II and fell even further between 1970 and 1986, from 43% to 17%, while the proportion graduating from college nearly doubled. As a result, median educational attainment for African-Americans 2529 years old rose from 8 to 11 years between 1960 and 1970 and to slightly over 12 years by the mid-1980s. This was still less than white attainment but only by about 1 year compared to more than 3 years in 1940 (Kantor and Brenzel, 1993, p. 381; Smith and Welch, 1986, p. 27). Drawing on John Kasarda's research, Wilson argues that as impressive as these gains appear to be, they have been insufficient to keep up with the rising

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educational requirements of jobs in the new urban growth industries. Kasarda documents that major northern cities experienced a consistent decline in industries that employ workers with less than a college education and that black urban labor remains "underrepresented in the educational-attainment categories" where city employment has expanded most rapidly, "especially in the category of college graduate" (Kasarda, 1989, p. 33). Based on this evidence, he concludes that despite increases in their overall educational attainment, black inner-city workers suffer from a significant structural disadvantage in cities that are losing manufacturing jobs because they still do not have enough education to qualify for employment in the industries and occupations that are providing most of the new jobs in the restructured urban economy (Kasarda, 1989; also see Kasarda, 1992). On the face of it, this argument sounds reasonable. Not only have the educational levels of inner-city jobholders increased significantly since 1970, but African-American college attendance still lags considerably behind white attendance.5 Yet despite its apparent plausibility, Kasarda's argument runs into two problems. One is that black employment problems are not limited to the least educated. Although better-educated African-Americans are much less likely to be jobless, they continue to be underrepresented in the most desirable sectors of the labor market, particularly in executive, administrative, and managerial jobs and in sales positions as well (Farley, 1993, pp. 207-209; Fainstein, 19861987). The other is that even though the proportion of central-city jobs held by college-educated workers has risen rapidly over the last two decades, centralcity industries still have lots of jobs for workers with more modest levels of education. According to Kasarda's own evidence, for example, about 40-50% of the jobs in cities like New York and Chicago continue to be held by workers with 12 years of education or less. Yet African-Americans have been excluded from these jobs or channeled into the lowest-paying ones available, even though they have enough education to qualify for them (Fainstein, 1986-1987, pp. 439-446). That African-Americans continue to suffer from occupational segregation and exclusion does not mean that the increase in African-Americans' educational attainment has had no impact on their economic fortunes. Since 1940, many African-Americans have improved their economic position in part because of increases in the quantity and improvements in the quality of the education they have received (Card and Krueger, 1992a, 1992b; Smith and Welch, 1986). But these gains clearly have not eliminated racially segmented patterns of employment. On the contrary, although more years of schooling tend to be compensated by lower levels of joblessness and unemployment and by higher wages, the persistence of occupational segregation and exclusion despite significant increases in the number of years African-Americans stay in school suggests that race continues to shape access to the labor market in ways that cannot

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be understood simply by reference to differences in educational attainment (on this point, also see Boston, 1988, chp. 4). More direct evidence of this comes when we compare the recent employment record of black and white men with similar amounts of schooling. Although all men have experienced a rise in long-term joblessness since the mid-1960s, the increase has been greater for African-American men of all ages and at all levels of education, not just absolutely but (with the exception of high school graduates) relative to whites as well. For example, the percentage of white male high school graduates ages 25-54 who did not work at any time during the year increased from 1.6% to 4.9% between 1963-1965 and 19851987, while for black high school graduates it increased from 4.8% to 12.7%. At the same time, the jobless rate for white men with some college rose from 1.8% to 3.9%. For comparably educated black men, however, it jumped from 2.4% to 9.2%. In fact, since the mid-1960s, it has not been uncommon for African-American males with some college to have had higher rates of annual unemployment than white high school dropouts or for black college graduates to have been out of work more often than whites who graduated from high school (Jencks, 1992, p. 156). Because of deteriorating conditions in urban schools, some observers have argued that a good part of this racial disparity in employment is due to the fact that African-Americans learn less in school than whites and that the black-white achievement gap has been getting bigger. If so, they point out, African-Americans' educational credentials would not be as valuable in the labor market, and they would receive fewer offers of employment. But there is not much evidence linking either the rise in black joblessness or the racial divergence in employment rates to growing differences in school performance. On the contrary, results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) indicate not only that black performance has improved but that between 1971 and 1988 the achievement gap between African-Americans and whites in reading and math actually diminished (Carnoy, 1994, pp. 65-71; OERI, 1988, pp. 58-63; O'Day and Smith, 1993, pp. 254-256). Since the NAEP does not test dropouts, its results overstate the percentage of all students who can perform at any given level. But since the percentage of African-Africans who have completed high school has increased, they may also understate the overall extent of black progress. None of this necessarily disproves Wilson's contention that lack of schooling and skills contributes more to the employment difficulties of inner-city black residents than racial discrimination. The data on African-American educational progress that I have cited here are for the nation as a whole, while Wilson is concerned about the most economically distressed areas of the inner city. But contrary to what Wilson's argument implies regarding differences among African-Americans and the connection between education and the increase in job-

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less poverty, the gains African-Americans have made in education have not been restricted to those who are better off. More fine-grained research on the geographic distribution of dropouts and school achievement indicates that high school completion rates and test scores have risen for many African-American students in impoverished inner-city schools, too (Jencks, 1992, pp. 170-180; on this point, also see Fainstein, 1986-1987, p. 420). As Martin Carnoy (1994) has observed, this does not mean that black test scores are that high or that "the prevailing, negative image of inner-city schools" is mistaken. Economically disadvantaged African-American students in urban schools continue to drop out of school much more often and do worse on tests than their peers in less-impoverished urban neighborhoods and in the suburbs (Kantor and Brenzel, 1993, pp. 378-385; Kasarda, 1993, pp. 270278). What the results from the NAEP and these other studies suggest, however, is that when we talk about the problems black inner-city residents have had finding work over the last three decades, we cannot reasonably trace them to the fact that their school performance has declined or that they have fallen still further behind their white classmates in what they learn in school, although there is some evidence that the test scores of African-American children have fallen off slightly since the late 1980s.6

Why haven't these educational gains done more to reduce joblessness among inner-city black workers? One possible explanation is that many employers continue to believe that inner-city residents lack schooling and educational skills. As a result, they may use race and residence as proxies to screen out inner-city workers, at least for those jobs that require basic levels of literacy and numeracy. This is not entirely irrational, since African-Americans historically have not done as well in school as whites. By most definitions, however, this is a form of racial discrimination, since it arbitrarily eliminates inner-city black applicants from the job pool before they have had a chance to demonstrate their qualifications. Clearly, it erects barriers to employment for centralcity black residents that white workers from similar backgrounds do not have to face. I suspect that this goes on quite often. Surveys indicate that, despite increases in black educational attainment, employers continue to avoid hiring African-Americans for entry-level jobs that require reading/writing and math skills or the use of computers (Holzer, 1996, Ch. 4; Braddock and McPartland, 1987, p. 14). But I doubt that this is the only reason inner-city residents have had such a hard time finding work. If it were, the difficulties they have experienced could be overcome through better assessment processes and more objective ways of evaluating workers' competencies. In the past, however, employers

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have not demonstrated much interest in developing more accurate or less subjective means of assessing workers' skills. On the contrary, Harry Holzer's study of the hiring procedures employers use to select workers for entry-level jobs indicates that employers prefer to rely on less formal means of screening workers, largely because they want the "opportunity to judge their applicants personally in a format in which they can go beyond the information obtained from more objective measures" (Holzer, 1996, p. 57; on this point, also see Lafer, 1994, pp. 361-62). The reason for this is that employers are just as interested in their employees' attitudes and interpersonal traits as they are in their schooling and educational skills. Beyond basic skills in literacy and numeracy, most employers report, they do not need workers with high levels of math and reading competencies for low-level entry positions. Instead, they seek workers who are trustworthy and dependable, come to work regularly and on time, can get along with their supervisors and fellow workers, are capable of dealing with the public, and have the ability to learn quickly on the job. Good work attitudes and personal traits are also a priority for higher-level jobs, though for more advanced positions employers are looking for workers who demonstrate good judgment, leadership potential, and the ability to adapt to complex situations as well (Braddock and McPartland, 1987, pp. 13-15; Bowles and Gintis, 1976, Chs. 3-5). Wilson's interviews suggest that employers perceive distinct differences beween racial and ethnic groups on these and other job traits, especially at the entry level. Most of the employers Wilson and his colleagues talked with, for example, were more dissatisfied with their black employees' poor work habits than with their lack of schooling or cognitive skills. In fact, nearly all of them stated that they preferred to hire whites or Mexican and other recent Latino immigrants for entry-level jobs because they were more cooperative and diligent workers than African-Americans, who, they said, were much more likely to express dissatisfaction with their work, to view the way they were treated as insulting and degrading, and to feel they were victims of discrimination.7 From a strictly economic point of view it would hardly be unreasonable even for an unprejudiced employer to exclude black workers if they had poor work habits. But the ethnographic data Wilson gathered point in a different direction. They indicate that, in contrast to Mexican and other recent immigrants from Latin America, native-born African-Americans were less willing to tolerate harsh work conditions or to work for low wages at menial jobs and were more likely to protest about the way they were treated on the job. Seen from this perspective, what employers' aversion to hiring inner-city black workers suggests is not that they necessarily have worse work habits than immigrant Latinos or other groups but that they are more likely to speak out about their

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wages and working conditions and that employers prefer not to hire them because of it.8 Partly for this reason, Latino and other recent immigrants have been more successful than African-Americans in developing effective social networks and carving out employment niches in particular industries. In his study of the New York labor market, for example, Roger Waldinger points out that Latino (and Asian) immigrants "piled up" in manufacturing and retailing even though the the number of jobs in these industries constituted a shrinking share of the city's occupational base. African-Americans, by contrast, turned increasingly to the public sector, largely because the exclusionary mechanisms that operate in the private sector were less effective there. Initially, this strategy promised more jobs and better opportunities for promotion. But in the long run, Waldinger observes, African-Americans lost out because public employment stagnated, while the rest of the city's economy recovered. One result, he concludes, is that employment rates are much lower for native-born African-Americans than for Latino (and Asian) immigrants, who have retained strong attachments to the labor market through the economic niches thay have formed (Waldinger, 19861987, 1996). That Wilson does not pursue any of this says as much about his view of the labor market as it does about his view of race. For the most part, he assumes that the labor market is shaped chiefly by shifting demands for different kinds of technical skills. But this is an overly simple view of the forces that influence the way labor markets operate. Because they are the product of history and politics, labor markets also bear the imprint of racial discrimination, ethnic exclusiveness, and class power. To understand current patterns of occupational exclusion and segregation, therefore, we cannot look only at the kinds of skills that workers possess. We must also examine the way past and present struggles for access to jobs and resources continue to shape the ability of different groups and classes to protect their economic interests and constrain the opportunities for African-Americans and other people of color to translate their human capital into economic rewards.

VI What can be done about this? Wilson's proposals include a variety of opportunity-enhancing policies to address the problem of joblessness in both the short and long term. In the short term, Wilson argues for expansion of the earnedincome tax credit and universal health insurance in order to "make work pay," for better information and carpooling to link people with jobs, and for a Works Project Administration-style employment program to provide work for those unable to find it in the private sector. At the heart of Wilson's long-term agenda

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are a number of proposals to build human capital by investing in children and improving public education. These include family policies, such as child care, family leave, and child support assurance, and a number of other proposals to reform urban public schools. Among other things, he argues for school finance reform to equalize the distribution of resources, public school vouchers so that parents can "vote with their feet," and most notably the creation of a system of national performance standards to provide incentives to students and equip policymakers with the means to evaluate schools. In advancing these proposals, Wilson argues that he has not tried to tailor them to fit the current political climate. He has chosen to talk, he says, not about what is realistic but about "what ought to be done to address the problems of social inequality" (p. 209). And given the current consensus among leaders in both parties about the need for a balanced budget, much of what he proposes does seem unlikely to win Congressional approval anytime soon. From another perspective, however, what Wilson has proposed is utterly conventional. Not only will his proposals to create jobs and "make work pay" sound familiar to anyone who has kept abreast of the recent debates over welfare policy, but the idea that poverty can be eliminated by building human capital has been commonplace among policymakers in both political parties since at least the 1960s. Indeed, Wilson's program for building human capital differs little from the current administration's, except that Wilson wants to spend more money on school reform than Clinton proposes. That these proposals are more conventional than Wilson presumes does not of course mean that they are undesirable. I would be more than pleased to see most of them passed. Even so, I doubt that they will accomplish everything Wilson claims they will. Expanding the earned-income tax credit and making health insurance available to everyone will increase the rewards of low-wage work, and creating public jobs will take up the slack in private labor markets. But neither set of policies will do much to alter either the societal position of ghetto residents or the "economic and political forces that generate occupational redundancy and unemployment" (Katz, 1989, p. 215) in the first place. In fact, because they take the underlying structure of the economy and the subordinate position of African-Americans in it for granted, these kinds of policies are just as likely to reproduce the racial division of labor as to change it, however desirable they might otherwise be (Fraser, 1995, pp. 85-86).9 Wilson abjures race-based social policies to address these issues because he believes they generate resentment among whites and are unpopular with conservative politicians. More universal approaches that benefit all low-wage workers, he argues, will generate greater political support. As a general rule, this is true. But political support for social programs is not simply a function of whether or not they are universal. As Robert Greenstein (1991) has pointed out, the political viability of social programs has as much to do with the nature of the ser-

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vices provided, the effectivesness of the program, and whether it is "linked to work and perceived as earned" as with the the nature of "the delivery mechanism employed." Race-neutral or universal programs that disproportionately benefit African-Americans may be just as vulnerable to political attack as more race-specific ones, as the recent attacks on AFDC make clear (Massey, 1997, pp. 417-418). For these reasons, Wilson is on much stronger political ground when he stresses the opportunity-enhancing aspects of programs like education and job training. Opinion polls show, for example, that in contrast to welfare there is strong public support for spending more on education, even when it is targeted on impoverished black communities. This is because education corresponds with the beliefs that many white Americans hold about the values of self-sufficiency, individualism, and equal opportunity, or the ability to take advantage of opportunities, whereas welfare appears to contradict them (Bobo and Smith, 1994, pp. 392-393). But if enhancing human capital is politically popular, I doubt that in the long run this strategy will turn out to be much more effective than Wilson's other proposals in reducing inner-city joblessness. Wilson seems to assume that increasing the supply of well-educated black labor will naturally increase the demand for it. As the recent trends in African-American employment and education suggest, however, building human capital will not by itself increase the availability of good jobs. Nor will it necessarily prevent whites from trying to monopolize them by restricting African-Americans to the lower levels of the job hierarchy or by excluding them from jobs altogether. This requires more aggressive policies of the kind that Wilson either ignores or dislikes—income and employment policies that encourage firms to restructure work and expand the number of high-skill jobs in the economy, affirmative hiring policies that change the position of African-Americans in the labor queue, and more vigorous enforcement of antidiscrimination laws to ensure equity in employers' decisions about how to allocate workers to jobs. There is no question that the economic position of those with little education has deteriorated badly over the last two decades, both absolutely and relative to those with more education (Katz and Murphy, 1992; Levy and Mumame, 1992). Though the reasons remain debatable, the economic changes Wilson describes have put a premium on more highly educated workers. But if more education is necessary for economic success for both blacks and whites, by itself it is hardly sufficient to eliminate joblessness among inner-city AfricanAmericans or reduce the persistent racial disparities in employment. Employers may value schooling and educational skills, but as Wilson's interviews with employers make plain, they also prefer to hire white and immigrant workers even when they have less education. Absent policies that address this reality, reforming education by itself will not substantially improve African-American

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employment opportunities or reduce black joblessness in the inner city. That Wilson's ideal program has little to say about these things only indicates how limited the liberal vision has become. Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Robert Lowe, Frank Margonis, and Audrey Thompson for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

NOTES 1. The increase in ghetto poverty beyond the general poverty rate is not due entirely to the growth of joblessness, however. It is also due to the concentration of the poor in ghetto neighborhoods because of the out-migration of those who are better off. Wilson points out, for example, that in the ghetto neighborhoods he studied almost half the population moved out between 1970 and 1990. On the growth of concentrated poverty neighborhoods more generally, see Jargowsky (1996). 2. In his study of postwar Detroit, Thomas Sugrue (1996) also traces the displacement of AfricanAmerican workers to the decline in manufacturing, but he argues that the decline began in the 1950s, two decades sooner than Wilson and these other scholars believe. 3. For reviews of this research, see Jencks and Mayer (1991), Holzer (1991), and Kain (1992). 4. Stephen Steinberg (1995, p. 154) makes a similar point in his discussion of Wilson's earlier work. 5. In 1986, 11.8% of African-Americans 25-29 years old had 4 or more years of college compared to 23.5% of whites of the same age. The gap has widened somewhat since then because white rates have increased while black rates have stagnated. For college graduation rates from 1940 to 1986, see Office of Educational Research and Improvement (1988, p. 52). For college attendance since the mid-1980s, see Carnoy (1994, pp. 61-65). 6. Jencks (1992, p. 38) makes a similar point about racial differences in wages. 7. Holzer (1996, p. 93) also reports that employers prefer to hire recent Latino immigrants rather than African-Americans for entry-level jobs. 8. As John Ogbu (1987) has observed, this is not because immigrants are somehow inherently more docile than native-born African-Americans but because they tend to evaluate jobs in terms of the even lower quality of employment where they came from.

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