Health and mortality inequalities in the US

How unequal are we when it comes to inequalities of health and mortality? Richard Florida (CreativeClass) points to an important new study on this question by public health researchers at Harvard and UCSF. (This is one of many items that Florida references in his Twitter feed -- it's certainly worth following. This bears out the academic value of Twitter!) The study is "Eight Americas: Investigating Mortality Disparities across Races, Counties, and Race-Counties in the United States". And the answer the researchers provide to the question above is -- very. The study is worth reading in detail.

The authors analyze mortality statistics by county, and they break the data down by incorporating racial and demographic characteristics. The data groups fairly well around the eight Americas mentioned in the title:


Here is how they describe their findings:

The gap between the highest and lowest life expectancies for race-county combinations in the United States is over 35 y. We divided the race-county combinations of the US population into eight distinct groups, referred to as the “eight Americas,” to explore the causes of the disparities that can inform specific public health intervention policies and programs.

And here is their conclusion:

Disparities in mortality across the eight Americas, each consisting of millions or tens of millions of Americans, are enormous by all international standards. The observed disparities in life expectancy cannot be explained by race, income, or basic health-care access and utilization alone. Because policies aimed at reducing fundamental socioeconomic inequalities are currently practically absent in the US, health disparities will have to be at least partly addressed through public health strategies that reduce risk factors for chronic diseases and injuries.

For example, their data show that "the life expectancy gap between the 3.4 million high-risk urban black males and the 5.6 million Asian females was 20.7 y in 2001." This is an enormous difference in longevity for the two groups; and it is a difference that tags fundamental social structures that influence health and risk across these two populations.

Here is a time-series graph of the behavior of longevity for the eight Americas:
So what are the factors that appear to create these extreme differences in mortality across socioeconomic and racial groups in America? They consider health care access and utilization; homicide; accidents; and HIV as primary potential causes of variations in mortality for a group. Most important of all of these factors for the large populations appear to be the health disparities that derive from access and utilization. And here they offer an important set of recommendations:

Opportunities and interventions to reduce health inequalities include (1) reducing socioeconomic inequalities, which are the distal causes of health inequalities, (2) increasing financial access to health care by decreasing the number of Americans without health plan coverage, (3) removing physical, behavioral, and cultural barriers to health care, (4) reducing disparities in the quality of care, (5) designing public health strategies and interventions to reduce health risks at the level of communities (e.g., changes in urban/neighborhood design to facilitate physical activity and reduce obesity), and (6) designing public health strategies to reduce health risks that target individuals or population subgroups that are not necessarily in the same community (e.g., tobacco taxation or pharmacological interventions for blood pressure and cholesterol).

These findings are squarely relevant to the healthcare debate currently underway in the United States. The country needs to recognize the severity of the "health/mortality justice" issue, and we need to reform our healthcare system so that these disparities begin to lessen.

Obama and the cities

photo: Cabrini Green housing project, Chicago (now demolished)

Is the Obama administration doing enough to address the problems of urban poverty and lack of opportunity for poor people in cities?

The situation of poverty, inequality, and deprivation in most of America's cities is severe. Wherever regional studies of health status have been carried out, inner cities show up as abnormally unhealthy populations. Unemployment rates in large cities are generally significantly higher than state and national averages. High school completion rates are lower -- often shockingly lower. Housing stock and neighborhoods are in poor condition. Fresh fruits and vegetables are difficult to come by -- because large grocery stores have often moved outside city limits. And all of this implies that the overall quality of life for the poorest half of most urban populations in the U.S. is low. (Here is a 1988 publication on estimates of urban quality of life -- the most recent I can find!)

There is no doubt that President Obama is aware of the gravity of the urban crisis. He knows Chicago intimately, a city that reflects many of these life-limiting circumstances for several million poor people. And his speech of July 18, 2007 reflects an acute understanding of the problem and a commitment to help the country address the crisis. But the question still needs asking: in the first six months of the Obama administration, has there been enough attention given to the problems of cities in America? And so far, the answer seems to be "no."

These are problems that demand federal solutions. States are generally fiscally unable to take the steps that would significantly improve the economic prospects for urban people in Cleveland, Oakland, Miami, Detroit, or Hartford. And all too often state legislatures are dominated by an anti-urban bias that makes significant state investment unlikely in any case. But cities represent a national crisis, not simply a regional crisis. As Richard Florida emphasizes (CreativeClass), cities are potentially the source of the greatest resources of creativity and growth that the country possesses. But too many American cities are hobbled by concentrated poverty, failing schools, corrupt city administrations, and zero-sum politics, with predictable results. The new businesses, technology innovations, and high-end service providers that should be the basis of revitalization of America's cities are simply not showing up downtown. There is very, very little progress in quality of life for the poorest 60% of people living in cities across the country.

Moreover, it needs to be recognized that a central part of this puzzle has to do with race. American cities seem to have become machines for reproducing poverty among African-Americans, Latinos, and other minority populations. Far from being a post-racial society, our cities threaten to become a permanent location of racial disadvantage. Residential segregation, discrimination in employment, and a public education system that is sharply racialized in effect seems to create a set of interlocking institutions that make it all but impossible to narrow the race gap -- in income, quality of life, health status, or education.

So where is the Federal agenda for urban transformation? One of President Obama's priorities is education reform for K-12 schools, and this is certainly relevant and important as a means of addressing poverty and racial inequalities. But it isn't enough. Somehow we need initiatives that will change the game for the tens of millions of disadvantaged children and young people in American cities; that will give them the opportunity to gain the education and skills that will allow them to find their place in a vibrant economy; and to reduce the unacceptable but persistent inequalities of basic life prospects that our cities still create for so many Americans.

Social hate

This is a difficult posting to write. The impetus comes from an exhibit presented by the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Michigan (link). The curators have put together a set of artifacts that capture horrific attitudes towards African-Americans, Asians, gays, women, and other individuals and groups in American society, extending over a century of our history. There are photos of mass rallies of the Ku Klux Klan in the midwest; images of the lynchings of Emmett Till and other African-American victims; t-shirts with racist images of blacks, Jews, Asians, Latinos, and gays; photos from the scene of the Oklahoma City bombing; and recent examples of racist depictions of President Obama. And, of course, it's not just about iconography; it's also about real violence against individuals from these groups. Hate-based murders continue to occur in the United States.

Just viewing these images is a profoundly disturbing experience. But here is the really difficult part: our society continues to embody these strains of hatred somewhere. And it continues to reproduce these hateful beliefs and attitudes for the next generation. We want to imagine that our society is peace-loving, tolerant, respectful of difference, and ultimately "good neighbors" for all members of our society. And this is certainly true for a very high percentage of Americans. But the exhibition makes it all too plain that this is not the case for everyone. There are individuals, and more importantly, there are groups, for whom racial, sexual, and religious hatred is a fundamental social and psychological reality. As investigators for the Anti-Defamation League (link) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (link) have documented, these extremist groups continue to exist, and they continue to recruit new adherents using sophisticated social media (web pages, video games, chat rooms), as well as more old-fashioned means of mobilization.

How are we to come to grips with the idea that some of our fellow citizens -- in our own communities, in our state, and in our country -- have such despicable attitudes and behaviors towards other human beings? And what precautions should our society take to defend itself against the violent manifestations that these attitudes and groups sometimes lead to?

It seems that schools have done a pretty good job of conveying the values of racial equality and social tolerance to our children. This has been an important priority for the past several decades. But at the same time, the hatred documented in the exhibits mentioned here can still be found among young people as well -- not just gun-toting aging militia types. (Here's a resource on youth hate crimes.)

We would all like to imagine that the twenty-first century is going to be a better time than the twentieth century. And a big part of that hope is the idea that hatred and violence between groups will subside, replaced by the values of tolerance and civic equality. Anti-semitism, racism, hatred of gays and lesbians, and the forms of violence that are associated with these attitudes, must disappear. It is tough to be reminded how far we are from that ideal in the first decade of the new century.

Can America overcome racism?

The social and economic inequalities in America that are associated with race are staggering and persistent. Pick almost any category where you'd rather have more than less -- income, health status, property and home ownership, likelihood of having health insurance, life expectancy, or likelihood of having a favorable outcome in the criminal justice system. In all of these categories there is a wide gap between black and white Americans. And this remains true even when we control for income -- the health gap between white and black Americans earning more than $80,000 remains significant. So America has embedded a set of economic and social institutions that reproduce racial disadvantage. America remains a deeply racialized society.

These observations don't necessarily amount to a conclusion about racist attitudes and deliberate discrimination on the part of most Americans. Attitudes and outcomes need to be distinguished. It is likely enough that there has been a lot of progress in conscious attitudes about race since 1950 for the majority of Americans. But persistent discriminatory outcomes can arise without explicit racist attitudes or discrimination on the part of specific individuals. Central examples of these forms of embedded "structural" mechanisms of racial discrimination include residential segregation and unequal educational opportunities for black and white children, based on where they live. Segregation certainly arose in part through deliberate efforts at excluding black people from certain neighborhoods -- real estate "steering", mortgage and insurance redlining, and overt violence and intimidation. But the mechanisms sustaining segregation today may well be more impersonal. The fact remains that patterns of racial residential segregation help to reproduce the kinds of racial inequality mentioned above.

These racial inequalities are also deeply intertwined with the social geography of major American cities. The concentration of poverty, racial isolation, poor schools, poor health facilities, and high crime rates create a multi-stranded social mechanism for reproducing racial inequality. It isn't impossible for an African-American child to thrive and achieve in this environment -- but it is certainly much harder. And the probabilities are stacked against her.

So, back to the main question: can America overcome its racism? Several things are necessary if this can happen.

First, we have to honestly face the facts -- the outcomes mentioned above. We can't delude ourselves by saying "the problems of race are finished in America" because we've elected an African-American president. The facts of racial difference in life outcomes need to be recognized, and we need to be vigilant in uncovering the mechanisms that lead to these disparities.

Second, we have to recognize why it is so important for our political culture that we address and resolve these continuing racial inequalities. Most fundamentally, we believe in equality -- equality of worth and equality of opportunity. The persistent inequalities between black and white populations are a fundamental affront to these values. And we believe in democracy --but a democracy cannot thrive in circumstances of what amounts to two levels of citizenship.

But third, pragmatically, justice is a necessary component of social peace. Our country has seen violent outbreaks for over a century over the facts of contemporary race relations -- Watts, Chicago, Detroit, Harlem, Miami. It is only enlightened prudence to realize that we must aggressively and consistently attack the institutional realities that reproduce racial disadvantage. Securing racial justice is a good investment in future social harmony.

Finally, we will need to have the resolve it takes to provide the resources necessary to assure genuine equality of opportunity for all Americans. This will be the work of a generation. But it will lay the basis for a more sustainable, harmonious, and productive society.

The multicultural university

It is now pretty universally recognized that universities need to be "multicultural", in several separate senses. They need to be open and welcoming to students coming from many different cultures. They need to create an academic and social environment where students from many cultures can learn together in a harmonious way. And they need to find ways of incorporating the knowledge and perspectives of many cultures into their courses of study and academic programs.

Why are each of these components necessary? One could imagine a university that invited attendance by all students but then worked to extinguish the cultural differences that exist among admitted students. Or we could imagine a university with diverse groups of admitted students that also attempted to create a multicultural social environment -- but that insisted nonetheless on a curriculum based on a narrow, "non-cultural", "neutral" set of topics and pedagogies. So why is it important to incorporate multicultural diversity into all three aspects of the university environment -- recruitment, climate, and curriculum?

There are multiple overlapping reasons for deep multiculturalism in universities that ultimately derive from the changing nature of our society and the fundamental mission of facilitating students' learning.

First, our society. American society may be a relatively extreme case by international comparison, but it is a fact that American culture and society encompasses a remarkable degree of diversity -- in race, age, gender, nationality, and religion, to name several important dimensions of difference. And our commitment to the principles of fundamental human equality and the necessity of equality of treatment establish the moral necessity of making the opportunities of university attendance available to everyone across all of these lines of difference. This is one of the basic justifications that have been offered in support of affirmative action.

The importance of creating a multicultural university environment follows from two things: the necessity of treating cultural differences with respect, and the recognition that all students can learn important things when they are induced to interact with people with very different values and beliefs. Moreover, there is the practical point that virtually everyone in our society will be called upon to work with people from different religious and cultural backgrounds -- and to do this successfully requires the acquiring of a large set of intercultural skills and competencies. (This is one of the reasons that corporations like GM intervened on behalf of the University of Michigan's defense of affirmative action.)

Finally, the need for creating a multicultural curriculum derives from the learning mission of the university. More diverse learning is better learning; it gives students a broader set of perspectives through which to frame the problems we confront, it nurtures the concrete skills needed in order to have productive collaborations with a diverse group of potential partners, and it provides a crucial antidote to the parochialism that goes along with a curriculum designed entirely out of a single cultural tradition. Monoculturalism is as stultifying in problem-solving as monocropping is harmful to agriculture.

In fact, it seems that universities may represent the best opportunity we have as a society to work through the challenge of creating a genuinely multiple-racial, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic society. We can experiment with different approaches to the fundamental values of pluralism and respect that the twenty-first century will demand. From this point of view, the truly successful multicultural university will point the way to a more fully democratic society in the future.

The struggle for racial justice

The struggle for racial justice in America was in its sharpest form in the 1960s, from the Freedom Marches in the South in the early sixties to the militant and determined struggles in the North in the later sixties. Organizers, militants, activists, leaders, and volunteers gave their best energies, brains, and courage to this extended effort to change American society. And when you think about it, this decentralized movement was remarkably successful in terms of its reach, the ability of various civil rights and activist organizations to motivate followers, and some of the concrete structural changes that were achieved. (It goes without saying that we have a very long way to go in pursuit of racial justice today, in 2008.)

One way of getting a better understanding of the Civil Rights movement is to read some of the very good historical and sociological scholarship that has been done on the period -- for example, Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters : America in the King Years 1954-63 or Doug McAdam's Freedom Summer. But another way is to talk with people who lived through the struggle -- people who went "went South", people who worked as organizers and activists in Chicago or Detroit, people who got involved in some of the militant organizations such as the Black Panthers. And often what you gain from conversations like this is somewhat different from what comes across in the organized historical scholarship. It's more intense, for one thing -- just as it must have been in the 1960s to talk with veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade about their experiences in the Spanish Civil War. But it also gives you the participant's perspective on things rather than the historian's view. And it focuses often on the process of mobilization and consciousness-raising, rather than the eventual outcome.

I've done two recent interviews with scholars whose own experiences of the Civil Rights movement are genuinely absorbing. One is Ahmad Rahman, a history professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and the author of The Regime Change of Kwame Nkrumah: Epic Heroism in Africa and the Diaspora. Rahman is an accomplished historian and a rising authority in African and African-American history. He was also an activist and member of the Black Panther Party in Detroit in the 1960s. The second interview is with Dr. Gloria House, a professor of humanities and African and African-American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. House is a well-respected poet and author, and has played an important role in the continuing prominence of Broadside Press. She edited a great volume celebrating the press; A Different Image: The Legacy of Broadside Press: An Anthology. Her own experience of the Civil Rights movement began at UC-Berkeley, followed by time in Alabama and Detroit. Her experiences with SNCC and the struggles in the South are very intense, and she finds the voice to express what she experienced powerfully. She has spent decades as a scholar-activist in Detroit.

Both interviews are absorbing and eye-opening. One point that comes out of both Rahman's and House's recollections is the importance of the struggles for African national liberation in the development of consciousness within the African-American movements -- and the "echo" of American developments in African liberation thinking. There is a very clear demonstration of the political-intellectual work that went into framing an understanding of American society and liberation that was suited to the African-American experience. But there are dozens of other important insights -- the ways in which the struggle for Black Consciousness developed, the importance of youth engagement in the struggle, and the power of poetry during those decades. Rahman brings some of the issues forward to the present day, by comparing the struggles of French immigrant people against police brutality with the struggles of the African-American community in the earlier decades. And House shares some of her thinking about where the quest for racial justice may be going today -- emphasizing community-based activism. She also shares several of her poems about the early days of the struggle at the end of the interview.

It is a constant struggle for all of us to go beyond clichés and cartoons in our understanding of our society and our history. And a very powerful way of doing that is to listen to the voices of people whose experiences are so directly connected to the major fault lines and turning points in our history.

The video interviews with Rahman and House are posted on YouTube, and audio versions are posted as well; Rahman, House part 1, House part 2. The audio interviews are also included in the UnderstandingSociety podcast, available through iTunes.

Visit also this relevant posting on Jim Johnson's blog, with information about the recent publication of Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders.

Higher education and social mobility

There is an appalling level of inequality in American society; and even more troubling, the multiple dimensions of inequality seem to reinforce each other, with the result that disadvantaged groups remain disadvantaged across multiple generations. We can ask two different kinds of sociological questions about these facts: What factors cause the reproduction of disadvantage over multiple generations? And what policy interventions have some effect on enhancing upward social mobility within disadvantaged groups? How can we change this cycle of disadvantage?

Several earlier postings have addressed some aspects of the causal question (post, post). Here I'd like to consider the policy question -- and the question of how we can use empirical evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of large policy initiatives on social outcomes such as mobility.

One social policy in particular seems to have a lot of antecedent plausibility: a policy aimed at increasing the accessibility of higher education to the disadvantaged group. The theory is that individuals within the group will benefit from higher education by enhancing their skills and knowledge; this will give them new economic opportunities and access to higher-wage jobs; the individuals will do better economically, and their children will begin life with more economic support and a set of values that encourage education. So access to higher education ought to prove to be a virtuous circle or a positive feedback loop, leading to substantial social mobility in currently disadvantaged groups.

It is a plausible theory; but are there empirical methods through which we can evaluate whether it actually works this way?

Paul Attewell and David Lavin undertake to do exactly that in Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations?, published in 2007. Their research consists of a survey study of a cohort of poor women who were admitted to the City University of New York between 1970 and 1972 under an open-admissions policy. Thirty years later Attewell and Lavin surveyed a sample of the women in this group (about 2,000 women), gathering data about their eventual educational attainment, their income, and the educational successes of their children. Analysis of their data permitted them to demonstrate that attenders were likely to enjoy higher income than non-attenders and to have children who valued education at levels that were higher than the children of non-attenders.

The benefits of higher education in increasing personal income were significant; they find that in the population surveyed in 2000, the high school graduate earned $30,000, women with some college earned $35,000, women with the associate's degree earned $40,783, women with the bachelor's degree earned $42,063, and women with a postgraduate degree earned $54,545. In other words, there was a fairly regular progression in income associated with each further step in the higher education credential achieved. And they found -- contrary to conservative critics of open-access programs in higher education -- that these women demonstrated eventual completion rates that were substantially higher than 4-6 year graduation rates would indicate -- over 70% earned some kind of degree (table 2.2). "Our long-range perspective shows that disadvantaged women ultimately complete college degrees in far greater numbers than scholars realize" (4).

So access to higher education works, according to the evidence uncovered in this study: increasing access to post-secondary education is the causal factor, and improved economic and educational outcomes are the effect.

This is an important empirical study that sets out some of the facts that pertain to poverty and higher education. The study provides empirical confirmation for the idea that affordable and accessible mass education works: when programs are available that permit poor people to gain access to higher education, their future earnings and the future educational success of their children are both enhanced. It's a logical conclusion -- but one that has been challenged by conservative critics such as Bill Bennett. And given the increasing financial stress that public universities are currently experiencing due to declining state support for higher education, it is very important for policy makers to have a clear understanding of the return that is likely on the investment in affordable access to higher education.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today is a sad day of remembrance in America and the world. Forty years ago today Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis. And, followed by the murder of Robert Kennedy only a few months later, America's heart and history were jolted.

Dr. King's life devotion to the cause of racial justice in America is one of the most important legacies we have in this country. His moral clarity and his personal courage provided our generations with signposts we still haven't fully absorbed. And the work to which he devoted his life is unfinished. It is crucial for our future as a country that we make intelligent and compassionate progress based on this legacy.

It is so remarkably striking to me to see the different life experiences that white and black Americans have lived, especially the generation who are in their fifties and sixties today. These men and women were in their teens and twenties in 1968. They have clear, personal memories of that day in April forty years ago, and of the months that followed. For most African-American people in this group there are very specific, vivid, and personal memories of segregation and racism in their years of childhood and adolescence. Whether their experiences were of growing up in Arkansas or Chicago in the 1950s, most African-American people of this age cohort have deep and personal experiences of racism. And their memories of the murder of Dr. King have an urgency and personal sorrow that feels very different from the experience of white Americans of the same age.

My discipline is philosophy and I have taught social and political philosophy intermittently throughout my teaching career. At this stage of my career it is very striking to recall how mute this field of philosophy has been to the experience and structure of American racism. The ideas of equality, liberty, and justice are defining values in the field of social philosophy. And yet the topic of racial justice has not been a central focus; only rarely has it been even talked about as we consider the theories of Kant, Rousseau, Mill, or Rawls. And yet my whole education and career are framed by the murder of Martin and the candidacy of Barak. How could race not have been the central problem of social philosophy in America during these decades? It is a failure of collective social cognition, an instance of willful social blindness.

I think there is a connection between these two points. A part of teaching about principles of social justice should be a serious learning of the lived experience of injustice.

The majority in America is inching its way towards a commitment to racial justice. We can make further progress along this road if we will only listen in humility and silence to the experiences of racism that shaped the lives of so many millions of our fellow citizens.

Persistent urban inequality

Race, segregation, and inequality -- these are the major issues that metropolitan America needs to address, and hasn't so far. But there is some good analytical work being done to allow us to better understand these processes -- and therefore, possibly to alter the course we are on.

I heard an excellent talk a week or so ago by Myron Orfield of the University of Minnesota and the Metropolitan Area Research Corporation (MARC). Orfield is a national expert on the governmental and social processes affecting poverty, segregation, and schooling in the major metropolitan areas of the United States. At his talk at the University of Michigan he provided a series of map overlays for Minneapolis-St. Paul that demonstrated the coincidence of neighborhoods with high incidence of poverty, failing schools, high crime rates, and poor health performance. And, importantly, he highlighted some of the political processes through which school and district boundaries have been drawn in Minneapolis-St. Paul communities that have the fairly direct effect of sharpening the segregation of individual schools.

The same set of issues is addressed in this month's issue of the Boston Review in a forum on "ending urban poverty." Each of the contributions is very good, and especially interesting is an article by Patrick Sharkey with the title "The Inherited Ghetto." Sharkey begins with a crucial and familiar point: that racial inequality has changed only very slightly since the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968. The concentration of black poverty in central cities has not substantially improved over that period of time, and the inequalities associated with this segregation have continued. And the association between neighborhood, degree of segregation, and income and quality of life is very strong: children born into a poor and segregated neighborhood are likely to live as adults -- in a poor and segregated neighborhood. Sharkey documents this statement on the basis of his analysis of the data provided the University of Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the first major statistical study of several generations of families in terms of residence, income, occupation, health, and other important variables. Using a computer simulation based on the two-generation data provided by the Panel Study, Sharkey indicates that it would take five generations for the descendants of a family from a poor, black neighborhood to have a normal expectation of living in a typical American neighborhood. (That's one hundred years in round numbers.) In other words: the progress towards racial equality in urban America is so slow as to be virtually undetectable.

What are the reasons for this? That is Sharkey's main question. One point that he makes is an important one for explaining the continuation of segregation in the forty years since the passage of the Fair Housing Act. This is the fact that the policy choices that have been made by federal and local authorities concerning housing patterns have more or less deliberately favored segregation by race. Beginning with the initial Fair Housing legislation -- which was enacted without giving the Federal agencies the power of enforcement -- both federal and state policies have reinforced segregation. As Sharkey notes, federal housing programs have subsidized the growth of largely white suburbs, while redlining and other credit-related restrictions have impeded the ability of black families to follow into these new suburban communities. The continuation of informal discrimination in the housing market (as evidenced by "testers" from fair housing agencies) further reinforces continuing segregation between inner-city black population and the suburban, mostly white population. Sharkey makes another very important point: the forms of disadvantage -- economic, health, income, educational -- that currently exist between black and white, poor and rich -- are the result of at least fifty years of social accumulation. So we should be resolute in designing policies that will move the dial in the right direction -- and then stick with those policies for a couple of generations. We should not expect that this accumulation of disadvantage will be reversed in a short time.

One other important part of Sharkey's piece is his review of the results of several experiments in relocation: what happens when individual families are relocated into less segregated, less poor neighborhoods (the "Moving to Opportunity" program and the Gautreaux program in Chicago)? Stefanie DeLuca picks this topic up in her equally interesting article in the same issue, "Neighborhood Matters."This topic is one of the most important issues of social justice that we face, and this forum is a great contribution to better thinking about the subject.

Privilege and race

I've heard a couple of speakers recently who offered an unusual degree of honesty in addressing issues of race in our society.

The most recent was a talk by Tim Wise at my university on "white privilege." Tim is the author of several books, including White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. Tim lectures quite a bit on race in America, and he doesn't hold back.

The talk was outstanding, and Tim did a great job of connecting with the audience of students and faculty -- over a hundred students and a handful of faculty. Tim's message is that we need to refocus the way that we talk about racism and racial inequality and we need to recognize racial inequality as the structural fact that it is in America. If a set of social institutions -- education, banking, employment, healthcare -- have the effect of conferring disadvantages on some groups of people, then it is unavoidable that these institutions are conferring advantages or privilege on other groups of people. If African-Americans have substantially lower levels of health, at every level of income, this seems to imply that white Americans are "privileged" with respect to access to health care. This is what he means by "white privilege." And his basic point is that privilege is pervasive in our society -- along with its opposite, cultural, economic, and social disadvantage.

Tim also makes the point that it is crucial that we listen, really listen, to the voices of people who are the recipients of these entrenched disadvantages. Their perspectives are fundamentally different from those of racially privileged, economically advantaged upper-middle class Americans.

I also heard a pair of talks in Detroit recently by Tom Sugrue, a historian from the University of Pennsylvania, and Kurt Metzger, director of research at the United Way of Southeast Michigan. The panel was on the causes and effects of racial segregation in metro Detroit. Tom is the author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit and is a leading expert on the history of race in America. Kurt is recognized throughout metro Detroit as the most knowledgeable person around when it comes to the demography of southeast Michigan. The two talks made a powerful case for demonstrating how crucial the social mechanisms of racial separation are in the history of Detroit and the suburbs. And the consequences for all of southeast Michigan are severe -- especially for the population of young African-American men and women whose opportunities are so limited by the existing social institutions supporting employment, education, and health. (Tom addresses some of these issues in a conversation he and I had that is posted on YouTube.)

The third great talk that I have heard in the past six months was by Ted Shaw, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. (Visit the LDF site for a bio.) Ted is absolutely eloquent and direct in talking about racial inequalities in our country. He is an unapologetic defender of affirmative action, on the ground that it is an entirely appropriate social mechanism for addressing the structural inequalities that the history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination have created in our country. (There is a good piece of video on YouTube featuring some of Ted's ideas and views -- Ted's speech begins at 3:40 in the video.) Ted is an inspiring visionary and our country needs to hear his voice.

All three of these thinkers make the point that we need to find more space for honest, direct talk about the legacy of racism in our country. And that is certainly true.

Martin Luther King's journey

Today we celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is easy enough to be discouraged about the current state of racial inequality in this country. We have not made nearly the progress on economic inequalities and inequalities of opportunity that seemed possible in 1966. But Dr. King was an optimistic man and a man who always looked for ways of moving forward. So I want to honor him today by reflecting on some of the difficult but real efforts that are underway today to prepare our society for a more racially just future. And examples can be found in my own city of Detroit.

I think first of a youth opportunity program that is having significant impact in Detroit. The program is called YouthVille. Located in a repurposed warehouse, YouthVille is filled with young people finding some of the resources and support they need to take charge of their lives -- succeed in school, develop the confidence that they can achieve their dreams, and successfully negotiate the challenges of being a kid in a tough city. Young people from over 270 schools in the Detroit area have participated in programs at YouthVille, and the numbers are growing.

Next I think of an African-centered after-school program for middle and high school students, the Alkebu-lan Village. Founded by committed community activists and sustained by the daily efforts of these same dedicated men and women, the Village gives inner city kids a supportive and safe environment where they can develop their own dreams about the futures they want to achieve. The mission statement of the organization describes it as "an African-centered community-based organization committed to developing and nurturing an environment where families work together to build healthy minds, bodies and communities." It is inspiring to spend time at Alkebu-lan Village and to witness the caring concern and commitment that these Detroiters give to their mission. The village provides tutoring and homework help, and it measurably improves the kids' experience in school. It offers sports, dance, and music activities for the kids who attend, and it organizes summer camp experiences for inner-city kids. Throughout it gives all its kids a better chance at success. This is a community-based organization that has successfully harnessed the energies of a community of people in service to the futures of Detroit's youth.

Finally, I think of CityYear Detroit and the wonderful team members and staff who are devoted to providing meaningful service to their community. CityYear exists in over a dozen cities throughout the country and, recently, South Africa. Its team members can be spotted in their red jackets, providing tutoring, establishing urban gardens, and helping to improve the lives of children and adults in the cities they serve. I have met quite a few team members and leaders in Detroit and elsewhere over the years, and their commitment and energy are inspiring. These young people, often inner city kids, are learning about team work, leadership, and service in ways that will affect them throughout their lives. And because CityYear is successful in recruiting a highly diverse group, each kid learns very deeply and personally about other people's experiences in life. This is the kind of learning that universities haven't yet succeeded in creating. But a year of service in CityYear (and other AmeriCorps programs) is transforming for almost every young person who does it. And the CityYear alums have a vison for their futures that we all can learn from.

So there are some compelling examples of people and organizations that are addressing the issues of poverty, race, and inequalities of opportunity that have proven so intractable. One thing that ties all three examples together is the ethic of community service that they reflect, and the determination by so many leaders and activists to live this comitment out. And there is inspiration here at every level -- in the men and women who have dedicated their energies to create these organizations, and the young people who have gained such good values and skills within them. Let's all find ways of joining in this important work. And in doing so, let's notice that we're helping with the work that Martin began.

Gradient of justice

Given that there is significant injustice in our society, and granted that we are a long ways from a society that establishes what Rawls called the circumstances of justice -- can we at least have the confidence that we are moving in the right direction?

Some people would argue that our society is doing just that. They sometimes point to the fact of rising nutritional and health status in the poorest 40 percent of our population during a 50-year period, and they might say that the situation of institutionalized racism -- and with it the circumstances of middle-class African-Americans -- has also improved measurably in 50 years.

Unfortunately, these impressions are misleading. In fact, it is more likely the case that inequalities of income, wealth, and well-being have worsened in the past twenty years. Lower-middle income and poor people have the smallest share of the nation's affluence that they have ever had. And many of the programs designed to provide a social safety net have been gutted or have disappeared altogether.

And on the racial justice side -- if general social racism has diminished, the depth of racial inequality and lack of opportunity in large cities has almost certainly increased in thirty years. The lack of opportunity and hope that exists in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, or Oakland is truly staggering -- and it is worsening. This wall of deprivation is drawn largely along racial lines. And all too often this impacted lack of opportunity leads to crime and violence.

So we don't seem to be on a trajectory of general improvement when it comes to social justice. The myth of the "trickle-down society has turned out to be more trick than truth. The benefits of economic growth have not lifted the lower middle class. This growth has not dissolved the knot of urban poverty. The public is turning its back on public schools -- surely one of the surest mechanisms of greater social justice over time. And we don't seem to have a public commitment to the basic value of allowing all members of society to fully develop their talents. Even more disturbingly, we seem to be entering a period of time that will involve even greater economic anxiety. And anxious times seem to bring out the worst in people when it comes to competition for scarce resources and opportunities.

What we seem to need is a greater sense of community, a greater recognition of our inter-connectedness and inter-dependence, and a greater common commitment to making sure that our society and its policies work to improve the lot of all its citizens. But most regrettably -- this sense of the strands of community is exactly what is most imperiled by the facts of current inequalities. It is difficult to maintain the strands of civic commitment to each other when fundamental inequalities separate us further and further.

So perhaps we ought to consider the unhappy possibility that our society may be inching towards the deepening chasm of inequality that characterizes South Africa, Mexico, or Brazil today. And if this is true, then the future is ominous.

Why affirmative action?

Since the Supreme Court's Bakke decision in 1978, universities that practice affirmative action in admissions have premised their case on the educational benefits that accrue to all students from a diverse student body. This is the heart of the successful University of Michigan defense of affirmative action in the Supreme Court in 2003. What has been largely lost in this debate is any explicit effort to assert that there are fundamental reasons of social justice that should require American social institutions to practice some form of affirmative action. And yet those reasons are if anything more immediate, more fact-driven, and more compelling than the "indirect educational benefits" justification.

Three arguments based on social justice are particularly important. First is the history of slavery and racial discrimination in this country, a history that has persistent consequences up to the present day. Consider the premise that current educational and economic disadvantages for African Americans as a population derive chiefly from these historical facts about slavery and past discrimination -- facts that are manifestly unjust. Is it not then apparent that justice requires concrete social actions and policies today that have the effect of reducing and eliminating current-day disadvantages that derive fairly obviously from past injustice? And given that those historical disadvantages create exactly the current educational deficits that make further educational progress more difficult, is it not clear that there need to be processes in universities to assist in increasing the percentage of African American students who have benefited from high-quality university education? This line of thought creates a positive obligation for current institutions to "affirmatively" work to overcome current inequalities created by past injustice. The tool of affirmative action is one such tool, and justice requires that it be used.

Second, the broad conception of equality of opportunity discussed in a prior posting has special relevance to the case for affirmative action. If various sub-populations in a society have less than full access to current opportunities because of substantial structural inequalities of access to critical resources in the past, then it is very convincing that society needs to find tools for leveling out these opportunities. Access to excellent higher education is fundamental to achieving decent life prospects. Again, affirmative action is such a tool and should be available.

Finally, these two arguments converge when we consider that the current educational disadvantages suffered by young African American students themselves derive from current social arrangements that are deeply discriminatory. The fact that current racial structures impose very different life prospects on different groups gives rise to a pressing non-historical reason for "affirmatively" addressing these inequalities. Unjust racial inequality of outcome is not simply a fact about the past; it is a fact about the present. The racism associated with the fact that inner-city (largely minority) schools are underfunded and substantially inferior to suburban (majority white) schools in providing educational opportunities to the children they serve, indicates a powerful basis for concluding that affirmative action programs need to be available as a tool. Affirmative action can help redress current injustice along racial lines.

So there are powerful reasons based in facts about historical injustice, equality of opportunity, and the injustice of the current distribution of educational resources, that all lead to the conclusion that affirmative action policies should be lawful and available to large social institutions, especially in education and employment. The fact that the terms of debate have been limited in such a way as to simply exclude these considerations of past and present racial injustice is itself an obstacle to our society's successfully addressing these injustices.

Real equality of opportunity

Let's say that our basic moral commitment is the idea that every human being ought to have real equality of opportunity as he/she pursues a life plan. What does this mean, in detail, and what implications does it have for social justice?

Equality of opportunity can be construed in broader or more narrow ways. Narrowly, we might say that persons have equality of opportunity if they are considered for positions, benefits, and burdens without respect to "personal" characteristics -- their family origin, race, age, ethnicity, health status, etc. Only the objective and person-independent features that are relevant to performance ought to be considered in selecting people for opportunities. (This is how equality of opportunity is construed in employment.) Does this narrow construction really capture the moral value of equality of opportunity, however? Evidently it does not, because it ignores the history of how various individuals came to have the objective characteristics and talents they possess today. If two candidates for firefighter are compared on the basis of their current physical fitness, but one had a childhood of normal nutrition and the second was chronically malnourished, then we would be reluctant to say that they are currently enjoying equality of opportunity. The choice between them today depends on objective differences of fitness for the job; but the differences that currently exist were not themselves created through a fair process.

So we should broaden the definition of equality of opportunity and require that each individual should have had access to the resources normally necessary for the full development of his/her capacities as a human being. These would include decent nutrition, access to health care, and access to education of comparable quality. And we might even add in an empirical assumption, that there is a range of levels of provisioning of these social goods within which any individual has the possibility of achieving high levels of performance. That is, it might be maintained that there is a (reasonably high) level of provisioning of health care, nutrition, and education that is "good enough" to permit the individual to have a fair chance to compete for opportunities in a " narrow equality of opportunity" environment.

If we take this somewhat broader view of equality of opportunity, then we are immediately forced to consider the workings of basic social institutions and the distributive consequences they have for rich and poor. Do the resources available to the poor exceed the minimum level of provisioning specified above? Or are significant numbers of the poor sufficiently disadvantaged in their current performance by the history of unequal access to resources, that today's competition fails the broader "equality of opportunity" criterion?

In many of the instances we can observe today the answer to the final question is "yes". Children who have attended under-resourced elementary schools and high schools have substantial deficits in terms of high-end cognitive achievement -- so a "neutral" competition between them and better-educated children fails the test. Children whose nutritional status and health status is sufficiently compromised that their cognitive development has been impaired, are equally unfairly treated when subjected to "narrow equality of opportunity" processes. And this has immediate implications for the social inequalities that exist in American society between rich and poor, urban and suburban, white and black, and rural and urban.

When we shift the focus to international inequalities across levels of human development, we come to a similar conclusion: because of gross inequalities in the availability of resources during the process of human development for children and young people, we cannot conclude that contemporary distributions of positions, opportunities, and burdens are the fair result of institutions embodying equality of opportunity. Nutrition, health, and education are factors that are very unequally distributed in the country and the world today; and the bottom end of the distribution falls well below any reasonable standard of "good enough" for full human functioning.

The implication, then, is a strong one: if we think that fair equality of opportunity is a compelling moral principle, then we also must conclude that a very significant reform of some basic social institutions must occur if we are to be able to assert that contemporary society is just.