In the fall of 1974, I entered the fifth grade in the public schools of the Boston suburb where I grew up. At the same time, the Boston Public Schools embarked on a court-ordered school desegregation plan that involved sending both black and white children on buses to schools in neighborhoods dominated by the other race. Busing in Boston provoked intense political conflict and sometimes violent resistance, and it was impossible, even for a ten-year-old whose main preoccupations were music lessons and the ever-tragic fortunes of his beloved Red Sox, to avoid confronting the meaning of this crisis. I am told, although I do not remember the incident, that one day that fall I burst into tears at school because I was having trouble writing an assigned essay on the question, "What Does Busing in Boston Mean For Me?" I surely knew, although at ten I would not have expressed it in this way, that segregation was wrong and that it symbolized an American legacy of slavery and racism that was at odds with the liberal and egalitarian principles on which our politics and society profess themselves to be based. But even though all of New England, if not the whole country, was watching with rapt attention as events in Boston unfolded, I evidently found it hard to fathom how they would affect my life. It was all too easy for my family and our friends and neighbors, living in an almost exclusively white suburb, to express our approval or disapproval of this or that action, secure in the belief (thanks to the Supreme Court's rejection earlier that year of metropolitan desegregation) that our quiet neighborhoods, good schools, and sheltered lives were quite safe from the consequences of the struggle that went on not ten miles away. What could busing in Boston possibly have meant to me? Little surprise that this question presented me with a profound puzzle, and something of an existential crisis.
This book is an attempt to answer that question, even though it is about neither the Boston busing crisis nor school desegregation. Nor is the question as narrow as it seems, for it really asks us to contemplate what it means for all Americans that we live in a society that is divided along overlapping lines of race, class, and residence. It is tempting to observe that the civil rights revolution of this century has been a resounding success and to conclude that the significance of the color line in American political life has declined. African-Americans, who were once denied the most basic rights of citizenship, are now in most respects welcomed as full members of society. They have achieved not only the right to vote, finally, but also access to the ladder of success and achievement in American society--schools, jobs, professions, political offices, and (to some extent) neighborhoods that were once absolutely closed to them are now more or less open. Public expressions of out-and-out racism that were once commonplace are now, for the most part, frowned upon. The great moral dilemma of American politics how to account for the presence of a racial caste in a society that espouses a creed of liberty and equality--has been largely resolved. If life circumstances and opportunities remain unequal, as they surely do, the problem is of an altogether different character and the barriers to the fulfillment of the American dream are no longer primarily racial in character. In this view, my answer to the question "What Does Busing in Boston Mean For Me?" would have to be, "Not much." The racial problems of the neighborhoods and schools of an aging, industrial city are, perhaps, the residue of an older order of racial imbalance, but they do not reflect the current state of American politics.
But there is an alternative view of our history, a bleaker one, to be sure, but one that is in many ways truer to the real contours of race, class, and politics in American life. While racism is in retreat, white fear and rage live, from the snub in the street to the sinister rumblings of white supremacist militias. While African-Americans can vote, the worth of their votes and their access to real political power remain in serious question. While African-Americans now compete for access to schools and jobs, the terms of that competition are the subject of intense controversy. And while formal, legal racial barriers to opportunity are gone, that opportunity still passes by a substantial segment of the African-American population, the increasingly isolated ghetto poor, or "underclass." Approached from this point of view, the question "What Does Busing in Boston Mean For Me?" suggests a different answer: "Quite a lot." Many of the central issues in American politics still revolve around racial difference. Fundamental questions of voting rights and representation remain to be settled, exemplified in controversies over the drawing of congressional districts. Affirmative action, a set of policies designed to create equal opportunity, is under attack for allegedly stifling opportunity. And the welfare state, the very programs enacted to attack poverty and spread economic opportunity, is being scaled back, the victim of a politics that pits middle-class white suburbs against poor black cities (an exaggeration, perhaps, but only a slight one). Suddenly, the question about busing in Boston--and, more generally, the question about the consequences of racial politics for the larger society--takes on great urgency. These issues, among others, organize the partisan and ideological debates of our time, suggesting that race continues to be of momentous consequence in American politics.
Through the lens of the last of these issues--the welfare state--this book attempts to answer this question that has nagged at me for more than twenty years: How does race change politics? The question is, of necessity, a historical one, because it involves a process that unfolds over time, often in surprising ways. Political institutions and public policies take distinctive shapes at particular moments that reflect racial imbalances (among others, of course) in political power. As I did research, however, I discovered that this question makes little sense without its converse: How does politics change race? The very racial categories that enter into political decisions are themselves the product of politics, for it is the same political institutions and public policies that allocate power. These two questions come together in the story of the American welfare state and the construction of the urban "underclass." Racial politics shaped the welfare state in important ways. The welfare state, in turn, helped to redraw lines of division within and between races by sorting both black and white Americans into categories defined by their relationship to programs of social provision. Thus to tell the story of race and the American welfare state is to reconsider the political origins of the predominantly African-American ghetto poor, the "underclass," a subject of intense dispute. This book, then, also tries to sort out some of the competing arguments about the existence and growth of an "underclass," especially claims that implicate welfare in expanding urban poverty. Finally, in the aftermath of legislation ending federal government's guarantee of assistance to poor children, signed by President Clinton just before this book went to press, it is essential that we seek to understand precisely what government can and cannot do address the interlocking political crises of race and welfare in the United States now that one of the pillars of the New Deal welfare state has crumbled. Such understanding is essential if we are to reconstruct, on the ruins of the past, an edifice of social provision and inclusive citizenship worthy of such a prosperous nation. This book is my own small gesture toward this task and my own answer not only to the question that pierced my youth but to its even more compelling corollary: What can we do about the racial inequality that remains in our midst?