After spending several years researching and writing about the historical development of minority rights legislation in the United States, I learned something new. I learned that not everyone was as passionate about the history of American policy as I was. It turned out that many people were more interested in what was happening now, in the contemporary United States, than what had happened in the past. They wanted to know more about where we were going than about how we arrived at where we were.
Eventually I came to share their interest. I had studied the history of affirmative action in employment for African-Americans in my first book, which focused on the years between 1965 and 1975. In my second, I sought to show how other groups won new rights during the same period, including nonblack racial minorities, women, immigrants, the disabled, and others. It makes sense now to write a third book to bring the story of minority rights development up to date, at least as it regards the important topic of employment, and as it regards people whom employers tend to categorize on the basis of their race, national origin, or immigrant status.
More specifically, the purpose of this book is, first, to reveal changes that are going on in employment practices across a broad spectrum of job sectors as regards race. I call this management strategy racial realism. It refers to employer perceptions that workers vary by race in their ability to do certain jobs and contribute to organizational effectiveness, and/or in the kinds of signals their racial backgrounds send to customers and citizens. Though racial realism benefits whites, hardly anyone openly advocates for employers to manage their workplaces in ways that leverage whiteness. The racial realism that employers, advocates, activists, and political leaders regularly talk about is the kind that benefits nonwhites.
A second goal of this book is to show how these employment practices are or (mostly) are not authorized by law, and to point some ways toward reform. I wish to show that despite the partisan nature of so many policy debates in America, these changes are not partisan, and that in words and actions, both political parties have shown support for them. In some small way, I hope also that by calling attention to these new realities, the book will encourage advocates to take true ownership of them—to acknowledge that they might claim to support color-blind classical liberalism in some contexts, but they also support racial realism, and to acknowledge that racial realism has downsides as well as upsides. Only then can we ensure that employment practices are in line with the consensus value of equal opportunity.
Writing a book about what is happening “now” in American employment and law presents several challenges to someone used to writing about the past. First, “now” is obviously a moving target, requiring constant updates. Second, an early strategy—interviewing employers about their beliefs and practices—had to be abandoned because too many employers were either unwilling to talk openly and directly about these topics or unwilling to talk at all. Their reluctance is almost certainly related to a major point of the book—that racial realism is still far away from civil rights law as currently interpreted. Third, the effort to be comprehensive in mapping what was going on “now” and also policy-oriented means that a rigorous causal argument is not possible. While the introductory chapter presents a causal story to account for the rise of racial realism in the last few decades, and while I believe that story to be accurate, the book does not attempt to rigorously test that argument.
This book took a very long time to write. Describing it as “a book about race, law, and employment in America,” as I often did, perhaps makes it sound narrow in its focus. In fact, it required learning vast new literatures, because in each section I sought to show how employers and advocates think of and use racial realism, to give some sense of how widespread the phenomenon is, to present material on whether social science research supports employers’ racial realism, and then to assess what the law has to say about it. It is not easy to be expert in all of these literatures, but I did my best to present the state of knowledge in each of them.
During this long process, I benefited from the wise counsel of many, many scholars and research assistants. I apologize to those whom I neglect to mention below. The basic idea for the book was developed in conversations with Paul Frymer, perhaps the only person in America who is as fascinated with Section 703(e) of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as I am. We presented some early material at conferences at Harvard Law School and the University of Connecticut Law School, and published a piece together in the Connecticut Law Review. I also benefited from audience comments when I presented various pieces of this research before scholars at meetings of the American Sociological Association, the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities, and the Association of American Law Schools, and also at seminars, conferences, and workshops at many great institutions, including the Indiana University Law School; the American Political Development Seminar at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia; the Center for the Study of Law and Society Seminar at the University of California-Berkeley; the Legal Studies Seminar at Brown University; the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University; the Department of Political Science at Yale University; the Russell Sage Foundation; the Economic Sociology Workshop at Harvard University; the Stanford Workshop on Migration, Ethnicity, Race and Nation; the Conference on “Racing the Republic: Ethnicity and Inequality in France, in American and World Perspective” at the University of California-Berkeley; the Conference on “Fractures: Defining and Redefining the Twentieth-Century United States” at the University of Pennsylvania; and the “Borders and Boundaries Conference” at the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for Social Sciences, École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.
I also benefited from conversations with such a great number of people that I am afraid I cannot list all of them. Several commented on the entire manuscript. They include Erik Bleich, Frank Dobbin, Tristin Green, and Deborah Malamud. I am grateful for countless long conversations about the issues discussed in this book with Paul Frymer, Tomás R. Jiménez, and Tom Sugrue. I also had helpful conversations with colleagues at UCSD, including Amy Binder, Kevin Lewis, Isaac Martin, Tom Medvetz, and Kwai Ng, and with the members of what we then called the Race Reading Group—Marisa Abrajano, Amy Bridges, and Zoltan Hajnal. Other colleagues at other institutions patiently answered questions, shared their work, or offered their constructive reactions. Among them, I wish particularly to thank Bruce Ackerman, Frank Bean, Chris Bonastia, Emilio Castilla, Ming Hsu Chen, Roger Clegg, Robert Cole, N. Jeremi Duru, Amin Ghaziani, Michael Jones-Correa, Rodney Hero, Jacques Ho, Milo Ho, Thanh Ho, Mohan Kanungo, Rick Karr, Lee Ann Kim, Desmond King, David Kirp, Jennifer Lee, Glenn Loury, Philip Martin, Cristina Mora, Orlando Patterson, Efrén O. Pérez, Brian Powell, Russell K. Robinson, Wendy Roth, Susan Silbey, Audrey Singer, David Sklansky, Marie Skrentny, Stanley Skrentny, Robin Stryker, Steve Teles, Dorian Warren, Mary Waters, David Wilkins, William Julius Wilson, and Ezra Zuckerman. I apologize for any omissions in this list. Despite this great volume of wise counsel, I of course could not follow all of it, and the faults in the manuscript are fully my responsibility.
This book also benefited from the efforts of many research assistants. Several graduate students were instrumental in the writing of the book, including Melody Chiong, Emma Greeson, David Keyes, Jack Jin Gary Lee, Jane Lilly Lopez, Shehzad Nadeem, and Sabrina Strings. UCSD undergraduates Hilda Chan, Kellie Egan, Stella Kim, Samira Motaghedi, Diane Truong, John Whittemore, and Joe Woodring also helped.
This research was made possible by generous grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and University of California Institute for Labor and Employment. Eric Schwartz at Princeton University Press was incredibly helpful and patient in offering guidance on editorial questions both big and small. Sara Lerner and Eva Jaunzems offered expert and detailed editing.
In the early stages of my research, Minh Phan-Ho offered many insights regarding employment practices in the hiring of teachers in school districts. Later, after doing years of research, I found myself totally and utterly stuck, still lacking not only an argument, but also any reasonable plan for how the book should be written. Over dinner at a restaurant, she helped me to shape the vision, structure, and goals that guided the writing until the very end. I could not have finished this book without her contributions. To Minh, my wife and intellectual partner, this book is dedicated.