Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective

by Robert C. Lieberman

"Shaping Race Policy" investigates one of the most serious policy challenges facing the United States today: the stubborn persistence of racial inequality in the post-civil rights era. Unlike other books on the topic, it is comparative, examining American developments alongside parallel histories of race policy in Great Britain and France.

Focusing on on two key policy areas, welfare and employment, the book asks why America has had such uneven success at incorporating African Americans and other minorities into the full benefits of citizenship. Robert Lieberman explores the historical roots of racial incorporation in these policy areas over the course of the twentieth century and explains both the relative success of antidiscrimination policy and the failure of the American welfare state to address racial inequality. He chronicles the rise and resilience of affirmative action, including commentary on the recent University of Michigan affirmative action cases decided by the Supreme Court. He also shows how nominally color-blind policies can have racially biased effects, and challenges the common wisdom that color-blind policies are morally and politically superior and that race-conscious policies are merely second best.

"Shaping Race Policy" has two innovative features that distinguish it from other works in the area. First, it is comparative, examining American developments alongside parallel histories of race policy in Great Britain and France. Second, its argument merges ideas and institutions, which are usually considered separate and competing factors, into a comprehensive and integrated explanatory approach. The book highlights the importance of two factors--America's distinctive political institutions and the characteristic American tension between race consciousness and color blindness--in accounting for the curious pattern of success and failure in American race policy.

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Robert C. Lieberman is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of the award-winning books Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State and Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective, and has written about American politics for Foreign Affairs. He has received fellowships from the Russell Sage Foundation and the American Philosophical Society. He previously served as provost of the Johns Hopkins University and as dean of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Reviews

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ethics and International Affairs

Although minority incorporation is difficult to gauge in any one country, let alone three.... but the result is a selective use of statistics that fails to convey a clear sense of how the author compares incorporation patterns across space and time.

Moreover, at points his analysis also takes for granted that different rates of minority poverty or unemployment or participation in retirement programs, for example, are primarily due to race policies, as opposed to reflecting (at least in part) other structural or environmental patterns such as educational background, citizenship status, or life expectancy.

.......

The book is convincing when it argues that state policies affect racial incorporation, but it is less clear just how important they are, and just how much racial incorporation exists at any given time or place.

The book’s explanatory framework is even more difficult to pin down.

The ambiguities in the analysis make it easier to apply the theory flexibly to address the complexities of 100 years of American, British, and French policy history.

Yet, because the author aspires to advance a particular model of policy-making, there are a few significant points at which he selects evidence and historical examples that appear to fit the theory, but that are at best a stretch and at worst misleading.

For example, it is a stretch to view the development of the British welfare state as an attempt to distinguish white Britons from colonial subjects.

It is also a stretch to compare French policies toward noncitizen immigrants to American policies toward citizen minorities because the presumption of full equality and ability to participate in political decision-making is not the same in the two cases.

It is misleading to contrast the 1976 British Race Relations Act as an example of race-consciousness with the color-blind 1964 American Civil Rights Act, because the British law was deeply influenced by late 1960s and early 1970s race-conscious policies in the United States.

Moreover, it is incorrect to suggest that minority political participation is the key to understanding racial incorporation in all three societies because minimal minority participation cannot account for strong welfare incorporation in Britain, and because stronger minority participation in France would not have led to vigorous employment incorporation in the American sense as French minorities imbued with color-blind ideals have not traditionally advocated for affirmative action.

Finally, it is untenable to argue that the United States is the quintessential case of institutional decentralization—viewed as a feature that has offered significant opportunities for racial incorporation—when the Supreme Court was one vote shy of ending affirmative action in higher education both in the 1978 Bakke case and in the 2003 Grutter decision, thus illustrating that one person sitting in Washington has had the power to sweep away affirmative action with the stroke of a pen.

These are significant objections, but they have to be weighed against the substantial benefits that come from the book’s broad overview of how race policy is crafted and the effects it has on minority incorporation.

Regardless of whether one takes issue with the theoretical model or with aspects of the historical analysis, this book sets its sights on a big, interesting question and tackles it over a long period of time in three separate countries.