The Long Reach of Slavery

Slavery, abolished 150 years ago, measurably influences who is rich and poor today (see abstract below), and even who we vote for. It is one thing to say in a general sense that we are living with the echoes of slavery. It is quite another to control for all other variables and find that current inequality correlates with slave concentrations eight generations ago. We're not as independent as we like to believe. We can't escape the past. We must either face it as best we can, or let our ignorance compound its ravages.

Racial Inequality, Public Opinion, Christianity

As I recuperate from my surgery I'm doing a little blogging. It's a guilt-free break from grad school! The Center for American Progress recently gathered some pretty extensive survey data about Americans' attitudes toward diversity and their support for steps to combat inequality. There is some really fascinating stuff here. For now, I'll just note this chart:


First, I like this question. It's simple, but it gets to the heart of the matter: few people quibble over the ideal of reducing inequality. The sticking point is whether you favor any substantive action to do something about it. Decades of public policy and historical and sociological research have shown that tackling inequality--especially racial inequality--will require robust action. Just as a combined government/civic/church/society/business effort built White supremacy, a similarly multi-pronged and comprehensive approach would be required to tear it down. The good news is that, in the abstract, Americans support that. It is, perhaps, a vague platitude, and as soon as we start talking tax rates we'd be into entirely different territory, but it's better than nothing.

But there are two things that stand out in this chart. First, Whites are dramatically less likely to support efforts to reduce inequality. Second, this is entirely driven by the attitudes of White conservatives. White liberals as a group are actually right in line with African Americans in their support for efforts to reduce inequality. Now, I don't actually think this support runs deep for many White liberals, especially once you get into the nitty-gritty and they see the prospect of losing some of their unfair privileges. But it does suggest that at least on a rhetorical level, White liberals as a group have embraced an ethic that says others' gain is not necessarily their loss, that indeed all are strengthened by policies benefiting the poor. There is certainly a subset of the White population that finds White supremacy so repugnant that they are genuinely willing to endure added personal hardship to see it torn down. It's hard to quantify how large that population is, but anecdotally I've certainly been privileged to see it in action. Contrary to popular perceptions, some of the most committed folks I've known on this front are White evangelical Christians.

But that is somewhat of a segue into the second thing that is so noticeable about this chart, because most White evangelicals fall into the conservative category, and less than half of them said they would support new efforts to reduce inequality. I think it is important to be precise about what this might mean. It doesn't mean conservative Whites are uniquely bad. But nor does it mean it's a mysterious statistical quirk. It's actually excellent evidence of the value conservatives Whites continue to place on their supremacy in American society. Why should a privileged group support efforts to reduce inequality when it is the beneficiary of the current inequality?

The other thing that might be mixed up in this is attitudes toward government. Many conservative Whites are much more concerned about activist public policy than they are about our society's deep-seated inequality born of racist practices. This is an explanation, not an excuse. I have no quibble with conservative perspectives on government's proper role. It should be stated with clarity, however, that Christian conservatives must not elevate their perspective on size of government (a matter of preference rather than morality) above the need to combat racism (a moral imperative rather than a preference). I feel quite certain about this. It doesn't necessarily imply any particular stance on public policy (I've known White families deliberately raising their kids amid poverty and shooting and I'm pretty sure voting Republican while they did it). But what I see much more often is Christians who actively reject the ethics of their faith, pretending that particular views about government's role are Christian principles, while fighting racial inequality is a liberal concern rather than a Christian mandate.

It's hard to thread the needle, but I do think we need to be able to insist on certain sets of priorities that are Christian or not, without distilling those priorities into a particular political agenda that becomes a litmus test of faith. It is sometimes difficult to withhold judgment, though, when we feel that people's political agendas reveal their priorities so loud and clear.

Conservatives Hail Progress, Ignore Context

It is important to be precise about what the Supreme Court did to the Voting Rights Act yesterday. There has been some overwrought commentary from the left, to the effect that we're going back to Jim Crow, or that the Voting Rights Act is gone. None of those things are true, and crying wolf hurts the cause of racial equality. Witness National Review's gleeful singling out of the most excessive statements from liberals.

That said, yes, of course it was a bad decision. It's not going to take us back to Jim Crow, but what it does mean is that the new racists and vote suppressors, represented by groups such as True the Vote, will be empowered. Officials in Texas, North Carolina, and Mississippi have already expressed their satisfaction with the fact that they can now move forward with voting laws that section 5 was standing in the way of until yesterday. Voter ID laws with racially disparate effects can now move ahead. Less visible but perhaps more important are the developments likely to take place in small jurisdictions such as counties and cities. Instead of needing to clear the requirements of section 5 in advance, they can now implement a law and are only constrained by the ability of local people to bring a suit after the fact.

The net effect of these changes will be to make it harder for people to vote. It won't bring back "literacy" tests and poll taxes. But it is likely to only exacerbate the subtle discrimination in voting procedures that caused blacks to wait in line to vote, on average, about twice as long as whites in the last election. So, we're not in danger of going back to Jim Crow. If, somehow, the court were to eventually strike down section 2, then yes, we can appropriately talk about Jim Crow. But that's not going to happen. We're simply forging ahead into the latest iteration of American racism. It's not Jim Crow, but that doesn't make it acceptable.

I'm actually more disturbed by the conservative reaction to the ruling than by the decision itself. I have not yet seen a single conservative criticize the decision. They are making it abundantly clear that they oppose proactive federal efforts to protect Americans' rights. Indeed, the predominant line of argument conservatives are taking implies that they envision the eventual repeal of all civil rights laws. They are treating yesterday's decision as almost self-evident progress. The idea seems to be that since we've made so much progress against racism, civil rights laws are now ugly distortions in our otherwise colorblind corpus of law. Removing protections is thus not a step back, but a ratification of the progress we've made.

As always, context is the terrifying enemy of racial conservatives. So let's introduce them to some context. In the United States of 2013, minorities are racially profiled with impunity, arrested for drug crimes out of all proportion to their use of drugs, receive harsher average sentences for identical crimes, attend unequally funded schools, frequently attend segregated schools that are, according to the Brown decision, inherently unequal, live in neighborhoods of much higher average poverty than almost any whites are exposed to, bear the brunt of environmental pollution, face pervasive discrimination in hiring even when their qualifications are identical, are discriminated against by realtors and banks, and, you get the idea. We're not going to have a debate about these things; if you do not accept them you are not ready to have an honest discussion. The point is, given this state of affairs, the urgent priority is to identify what more we can do to tear down this racist edifice. Worrying about repealing old civil rights laws, even if they were no longer needed, would be pretty low on our list of priorities.

So what are conservatives thinking? One of the most common fallacies is to set the 1950s and 60s as a baseline. Conservatives are astonishingly indifferent to the question of what a society with no racial privilege might look like. They are content to merely ask if we have advanced from the baseline of murderous police state. And we have! With that proved, they rest their case. Don't believe me? Look at the National Review piece I referenced above. The title, and I'm not kidding, is: "Yes, Race Relations Have Improved Since 1965." You can see how that title is born of the kind of thinking I just described. Because otherwise you quickly realize that whether race relations have improved since 1965 is neither here nor there. Imagine a conservative saying we don't need the NRA anymore because crime is down and second amendment rights have been expanded. That's basically what they're saying here. And really, "race relations"? This is not about people getting along; this is about severing a 400 year old link between race, money, and power. The editors at National Review conclude like this:

Instead of gnashing our teeth and reliving old battles, we Americans should consider it a source of great pride that legal provisions contrived to ensure that the Jim Crow era was brought to a welcome close have finally outlived their necessity.

By what and who's standard? As I've found in my thesis research, conservatives assured us that the VRA had outlived its usefulness when it came up for renewal in 1970! There really wasn't a gap between fighting against the law's passage and then turning around saying, "look, all better now!" Today, no one, not even Justice Roberts, has claimed that there is no discrimination in the covered jurisdictions. The idea is that it is much better than it used to be. And so it is! But that is an absurd basis for repealing a law. Imagine if we went around striking down everything that governs abuses that are no longer as egregious as they once were. Clean water act, gone. Child labor laws, gone.

The difference is that this section of the VRA only applied to part of the country. And the court simply decided that the disparate treatment of states was more grievous than the racial discrimination those states continue to practice. (Again, because Jim Crow is the baseline. We've made so much progress that current discrimination doesn't really count). The idea was that we're perpetually punishing these states for past sins. This misses a crucial fact. Before yesterday's ruling, areas that were subject to preclearance were allowed to get out from under that requirement and join the rest of the nation. All they had to do was demonstrate 10 years of compliance with the law. Thus the whole conservative narrative about how we're treating these states unfairly for eternity completely collapses. They were free to get out from under preclearance but they couldn't do it, precisely because of their ongoing discrimination. They couldn't demonstrate 10 years of compliance!

The Wall Street Journal editorial page provided another example of leading conservative opinion, and framed the ruling much as National Review did:

The U.S. has a long and difficult history with racial discrimination, but on Tuesday the Supreme Court marked a milestone worth celebrating when it ruled that a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act has outlived its usefulness. The political left is reacting as if this means a return to Jim Crow, but the ruling is best understood as a sign of the racial progress that progressives claim to believe in...

Far from a civil-rights defeat, Tuesday's ruling is a triumph of racial progress and corrective politics. The Voting Rights Act was designed to eliminate barriers to minority voting, and it succeeded as well as any modern law. You'd think that liberals who claim to believe in human progress would recognize progress when it occurs, rather than assume that whatever is is right.

It's the same framing. Because we've made so much progress (and we have) current context is irrelevant. For the record, I've always thought section 5 should apply nationwide. The north and west are and always have been extremely racist, and have added hypocrisy on top of it. But that's a story for another time. If there is a push to replace the coverage formula with a simple nationwide application you can bet many liberals will oppose it. Northern liberals have nearly always turned into defenders of white privilege when the issues hit home.

Why Affirmative Action is Morally Right

[While writing this post the Supreme Court released its ruling on the case. It looks as though they did a narrow ruling that dodged most of the issues involved. A much better outcome than what I feared.]

For some background on the Supreme Court's likely ruling on affirmative action this week, I encourage you to read Propublica's insightful reporting. The plaintiff at the center of the case, Abigail Fisher, has alleged that she was denied admission to the University of Texas because she is white:

"There were people in my class with lower grades who weren't in all the activities I was in, who were being accepted into UT, and the only other difference between us was the color of our skin," she says. "I was taught from the time I was a little girl that any kind of discrimination was wrong. And for an institution of higher learning to act this way makes no sense to me. What kind of example does it set for others?"
It's a deeply emotional argument delivered by an earnest young woman, one that's been quoted over and over again.
Except there's a problem. The claim that race cost Fisher her spot at the University of Texas isn't really true.
In the hundreds of pages of legal filings, Fisher's lawyers spend almost no time arguing that Fisher would have gotten into the university but for her race.
If you're confused, it is no doubt in part because of how Blum, Fisher and others have shaped the dialogue as the case worked its way to the country's top court.
Journalists and bloggers have written dozens of articles on the case, including profiles of Fisher and Blum. News networks have aired panel after panel about the future of affirmative action. Yet for all the front-page attention, angry debate and exchanges before the justices, some of the more fundamental elements of the case have been little reported.
Race probably had nothing to do with the University of Texas's decision to deny admission to Abigail Fisher. 

But let's go deeper. What if it it had? Would that be a problem? Doesn't the entire premise of affirmative action imply that, even if Abigail Fisher in this specific incident is incorrect in her allegation, there will inevitably be many Abigail Fisher's? Are we okay with that? Many Americans, especially whites, are not. Perhaps you oppose affirmative action too.

I would like to convince you that you're wrong.

Your view of affirmative action is heavily influenced by your understanding of what American society is like. As soon as you acknowledge the exhaustively documented extent of inequality and discrimination that favors whites and disadvantages minorities, affirmative action looks fairly reasonable even if you disagree with it. If you're in denial about the way our society systemically privileges white skins, there's little left to argue about. You need something like a spiritual conversion.

Twenty years ago Cheryl Harris wrote a classic article in the Harvard Law Review called "Whiteness as Property." She argued that whiteness itself has taken on the characteristics of property and many whites and social and governmental systems unconsciously expect privileges to accrue to them because of their whiteness.

In questions of affirmative action, the baseline is thereby distorted beyond any reasonable standard of justice. When considering whether affirmative action cost them a specific job, whites claim to ask, "Would I have got the job if race was not a factor?" In asking this question, they elide the fact that the society of which they are a part is discriminatory and unequal in ways that favor them. Had they been born with a different skin color they would have been statistically less likely to have the opportunity to apply for the job in the first place. Having arrived at the specific circumstance of the job or college application on the strength of an uneven playing field, they now insist that the playing field be equal. In this way they enshrine their white privilege as normative.

It is a bit mind-numbing if you've never thought about it this way before, and probably more so due to the inadequacies of my explanation. But this gets at the deeper changes the lawyers working on Fisher's behalf are trying to bring about:

So while the Fisher case has been billed as a referendum on affirmative action, its backers have significantly grander ambitions: They seek to make the case a referendum on the 14th Amendment itself. At issue is whether the Constitution's equal protection clause, drafted by Congress during Reconstruction to ensure the rights of black Americans, also prohibits the use of race to help them overcome the nation's legacy of racism.

The Supreme Court has never ruled that the Constitution bars any and all laws and government programs that consider race. But Blum and his supporters, seeing an opening with the current Court, seek to overturn more than a century of precedent.

The true crux of the suit is not Fisher's failed application, but that government officials violate the constitutional rights of white Americans when they consider race in a way that might help African-Americans and Latinos.

"An argument can be made that it is simply impossible to tease out down to the last student who would have been admitted, and who would have not been admitted, had they been a different skin color," Blum said. "What we know is skin color is weighed and ethnicity is weighed by the University of Texas in their admissions process, and that alone is enough to strike down the plan."

Blum and his supporters say the reasoning is simple. The Constitution is colorblind and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment prohibits the government from treating people differently because of race. 

It is difficult to immerse myself in the strategies and rhetoric of segregationists defending Jim Crow, and then when I come up for a breather I find their spiritual descendants are respectable figures arguing cases before the Supreme Court. I have a rather unlimited degree of contempt for Mr. Blum and his ilk. They're using the same old playbook. As soon as the Supreme Court essentially told whites they weren't allowed to officially write white supremacy in law, whites turned around and said, "oh okay, well you know, the constitution is colorblind. We can't acknowledge race in government policy." The motivation is clear. In a society that is systemically discriminatory against blacks, a strictly neutral government validates such racial inequality as a baseline status quo. The culture acts affirmatively against blacks, while conservatives seek to prevent the government and other socially responsible institutions from stepping in to act affirmatively in blacks' favor.

Take a step back and realize that there are respectable people in the United States today who are fighting for the rights and privileges of white people, as such, even if they do not admit it in precisely those words. As a Christian who believes in the words of Jesus and the reality of a final judgment, that is a truly scary place for a person to be in. At the end of our lives when we tell Jesus what we were all about, I don't think fighting on behalf of the most privileged group in our society will have done us any favors.

Equality, Rights, Privileges

Ta-Nehisi Coates continues his critique of President Obama's way of speaking to black audiences:

I would argue that the current black predicament did not arise because black people lacked sufficient moral will. I would argue that we recognize this in other communities and their own predicaments. It would not be productive for the president to go before a white working-class Appalachian audience and say, "We know that economic unfairness exists, and has long existed, but government programs won't keep your kids off meth and painkillers." The fact that meth and painkiller addiction is higher in those communities, that one in ten kids born in Appalachia was born addicted to drugs, would not be seen as relevant to, say, a jobs program.

Nor would it be productive or wise for the president to go before a primarily Hispanic audience and say "We know that the DREAM Act is the right thing to do, but what you really need to do is keep your babies from having more babies." The fact that the Hispanic community has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country would not be seen as relevant to, say, immigration reform.

And it would not be productive or wise for the president to go before an audience of Native Americans and say, "Yes, this country stole your land and prosecuted a ruthless war against you, but what would really help now is if you stopped your kids from drinking so much." The high rate of alcoholism among Native Americans would not be seen as relevant. And as I've said, it would not be wise for the president to go to Newtown and point to the absence of active fatherhood in the life of Adam Lanza.

But for some reason all of these kinds of statements are appropriate in the black community. Not because of higher rates of anything, and it not even because the president is black. They're seen as appropriate because there a deep belief -- even among black people -- that morality lies at the seat of our troubles...

I can (and have) marshaled numerous statistics to show that morality is not the real issue here, but the trouble is that statistics are subject to varying interpretations. Whether you believe the problems of black Americans are rooted primarily within or without, in black culture or in external discrimination, is less a question of evidence than of a priori assumptions.

Part of examining those basic assumptions involves stepping back, as Coates does here, and asking why this discussion so often seems particular to black people. All groups have unique problems, but in the case of African Americans there is a tendency to say that external conditions reveal the essential nature of a supposed black "morality" or "culture."

One of the reasons I'm so skeptical of these moralizing and cultural arguments is that the pattern we see across civilizations and throughout time is of dominant social groups attributing the behavior of disadvantaged groups to their essential nature. Thus Aristotle looked at slaves and instead of concluding that their degradation resulted from being enslaved, he got it backwards and said that some people are natural slaves. Thus the English poor of the 17th century were not desperate landless peasants amid rising demographic pressures and unjust economic systems, they were natural thieves.

The American context ought to make this all the more clear. For most of our history, to put it in blunt and simple terms, the white elite has been carrying on this conversation around the question, "What is wrong with black people?" The basic contours of the answer to that query have remained remarkably stable, because the question mostly answers itself. To ask it is to implicitly absolve the dominant society of any wrongdoing or responsibility.

During the height of slavery, the question was answered with the assumption that blacks were biologically inferior. By the middle of the twentieth century, even among many segregationists this scientific racism shaded into arguments that were more cultural and civilizational. Someone like John Stennis might be agnostic on the question of biological inferiority, while claiming that black culture was degraded.

This is part of the reason why the civil rights laws were so offensive to many whites. Civil rights inscribed equality in law that, in the view of segregationists, had not been earned. Black civilization was not equal, they said, and to treat it as such invited harm to white civilization. By relentlessly focusing on the state of black behavior, whites obscured their complicity in the creation of an oppressed class.

Much of segregationist rhetoric took on an Orwellian double-speak character because it started from these presuppositions of black cultural inferiority. Many whites could say with a straight face that blacks were not being discriminated against when their schools were funded at a fourth of white funding levels, because they were being provided with education adequate to their level of cultural development. Equal treatment is wasted on groups that are not equal. This was the segregationist mind, but it also bleeds into the broader white American mindset both then and now.

By merely asking what is wrong with black people, we play into a narrative that elides what is wrong with America. This is a country in which black people have had to earn what whites possess as a right. And when they do set out to claim those rights, they're seen as seeking after special privileges. As TNC sums it up:

The neighborhoods where black people shoot at each other are the work of racist social engineering. We know this. But we do not say it, because there is almost no political upside. Instead we hand-wave at racism and pretend that individual black morality might overcome many centuries of wrong.

The Shortfalls of Colorblind Policy

Sometimes I just need to shamelessly share another person's work without adding any value at all. This is one of the those times. Commenting on the shortfalls of "colorblind" public policy in the Affordable Care Act, Ta-Nehisi Coates is marvelously succinct:

This is one reason why color-blind -- "lift all boats" -- policy so often falls short. When you have a country grappling with the deep vestiges of bigoted policy, you do not need "colored only" signs to get "colored mostly" effects.

Yes. A thousand times yes. I heard a conservative on the Diane Rehm show this morning literally refuse to answer a question about how Republican policies help women because he wanted to focus on what helps all Americans rather than dividing us into groups. The problem is that we are, as a factual matter, divided into groups! We do not all have the same interests, and the fact is that group identities such as race and gender provide rough approximation for very real differences in needs and life circumstances.

Refusing to acknowledge that when crafting public policy is not the noble gesture conservatives think it is.  Colorblind policy purports to be for all, but it is actually a front for policies that disproportionally help the white, rich, and male. The main reason people are uncomfortable with being "divided into groups" is because of all that it implies in terms of privilege and redistributive economic policies.

As we saw in the last election campaign, when Mitt Romney ran on a platform obviously tilted to most benefit the wealthy, retirees, whites, and business owners, he and his supporters denied he was doing any such thing. Yet when the Obama campaign did its own outreach to certain groups of voters, it was accused of dividing Americans. Colorblindness is not about trying to unite Americans. It is about denying the divisions that exist so that those on the privileged side of those divisions can go on profiting from them.

How Networks Perpetuate Inequality

Nancy DiTomaso had a great piece in the Times a couple days ago distilling some of the information from her recent book, The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism. One of the reasons unemployment is so high for African Americans is because access to jobs continues to be conditioned by social networks that are racially distinct.

Favoritism is almost universal in today’s job market. In interviews with hundreds of people on this topic, I found that all but a handful used the help of family and friends to find 70 percent of the jobs they held over their lifetimes; they all used personal networks and insider information if it was available to them.

In this context of widespread networking, the idea that there is a job “market” based solely on skills, qualifications and merit is false. Whenever possible, Americans seeking jobs try to avoid market competition: they look for unequal rather than equal opportunity. In fact, the last thing job seekers want to face is equal opportunity; they want an advantage. They want to find ways to cut in line and get ahead.

Despite the crucial role social networks play in employment, DiTomaso found that most whites are reluctant to acknowledge their good fortune.

When I asked my interviewees what most contributed to their level of career success, they usually discussed how hard they had worked and how uncertain were the outcomes — not the help they had received throughout their lives to gain most of their jobs. In fact, only 14 percent mentioned that they had received help of any kind from others.

The gulf between the 70% figure above and the 14% figure here represents the extent of our delusions. Part of what DiTomaso is trying to get across is that this failure to acknowledge reality has serious consequences. By pretending that there is some sort of level playing field in which everyone gets where their hard work will take them, whites position themselves to be offended by affirmative action. This taking of offense is opportunistic rather than principled, as Di Tomaso finds that "the real complaint is that affirmative action undermines long-established patterns of favoritism."

This ought to drive home the banality of racial injustice. We're not even talking about discrimination (though that occurs frequently too). In this case we're simply talking about people using their existing networks and showing favoritism in completely natural ways. But because of our unique circumstances, this produces horrible outcomes for minorities.  Many whites assume that drastically bad outcomes must have equally dramatic causes. Not at all. When networks are segregated and the bulk of wealth and power is concentrated in one of them, simply going about our business will perpetuate exclusion and inequality. It is made all the worse when those in the powerful network pretend that they are not privileged.

What this means is that if we are ever in a position of influence in hiring but have a segregated social network we need to consciously reach beyond our network in an attempt to break down privilege. To just go through the normal channels and whisper about job openings to friends and neighbors is not some sort neutral playing field. It is a proactive choice to advantage an already privileged group.

The most remarkable thing is how unwilling DiTomaso's respondents were to acknowledge the ways in which they succeeded due to factors beyond themselves. As I think about the nine jobs I've had in my lifetime, I can see that two were very clearly due to network effects. The other seven do not appear to have been, but I may be missing something. More importantly, I probably got some of my subsequent jobs because my resume and skills were dramatically bolstered by my network effect jobs. And I'll keep pounding away at this in a way that makes proud people uncomfortable: one of the big reasons I have achieved the success I have is because I'm white and middle class. I started out on third base. It is to be expected that many Americans would be reluctant to acknowledge their dependence; they often find their identity in their own individual effort. But it is a scandal that many Christians are unwilling to bring the spiritual truths of the gospel down to earth.

Book Review: Sweet Land of Liberty

Thomas Sugrue. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008.

For many Americans the civil rights movement remains a southern-rooted morality play providing reassuring testament to how far the nation has come. Thomas Sugrue argues that including the North in the story of the black freedom struggle upends this soothing narrative and fundamentally reshapes our understanding of both the movement and America’s present progress toward racial equality. Traditional histories that focus on the South in the 1950s and 1960s are, Sugrue says, “as much the product of forgetting as remembering." This is forgetfulness with a purpose, as simplistic tales of past victories produce complacency in the present. By broadening the geographic and temporal scope of civil rights history, Sugrue challenges this forgetfulness.

Sugrue employs a blend of topical and chronological approaches to show the importance of the North in the black freedom struggle. He begins his narrative in the 1920s and 1930s with chapters on topics ranging from the fight to desegregate public accommodations in the North to school integration, open housing, and fair employment efforts. Sugrue reveals a northern landscape of broad-based activism, much of it led by grassroots groups operating under the radar of the white press. It becomes clear that the North was anything but a sideshow. Indeed, while the South still appeared relatively tranquil the movement was already well underway in the North. Like other recent civil rights scholars such as Glenda Gilmore, Sugrue explores the radical roots of much of this protest. Activists achieved significant – if frequently symbolic – gains, as many northern states passed laws banning de jure segregation in the 1930s and 1940s.

Sugrue sees 1963 as a turning point. In that year alone, the justice department tallied 1,412 civil rights protests, the result of an unprecedented surge of activism driven by an increasingly militant and impatient grassroots. Yet Sugrue’s book differs in important respects from classic texts such as Taylor Branch’s epic trilogy. In Sugrue’s hands, the splintering of the civil rights movement and the rise of black power in the latter part of the 1960s is not a false turn or unprecedented change. Rather, it appears as an organic development that is markedly familiar, rising out of the wide-ranging radicalism of the interwar years. Here Sugrue’s difficult blending of topical and chronological approaches works well as he comes around to the same topics covered earlier – housing, schools, work – but explores the struggle over them in the different context of the 1960s and 1970s as everyone from radical nationalists to moderate integrationists drew on decades-old currents of protest.

Sweet Land of Liberty is as comprehensive an account of the civil rights struggle in the North as we are likely to have for quite some time. Sugrue deftly covers subjects as diverse as the violent uprisings of the urban North to issues of gender and the politics of welfare. Crucially, Sugrue carries his narrative through the 1990s. Though this final section of the book is less developed, it bolsters Sugrue’s thesis that examining the northern civil rights struggle forces a reappraisal of the movement and America’s present condition. He points out that in education, housing, employment, and wealth inequality, the conditions that produced the black freedom struggle remain astonishingly similar. Seen from the North and in the broad sweep of the twentieth century, it becomes clear that the civil rights movement ended not merely because it achieved its goals, but because it was defeated.