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A sociologist says racial differences in family assets, not culture, explain achievement gaps in school performance.

Over recent years, magazines and newspapers have run a variety of articles that explore why middle-class Black children don't do as well in school as white children from families with similar socio-economic backgrounds. These "achievement gap" articles are based on studies that relate achievement to family incomes. But the findings from these studies, argues one researcher, are highly misleading--because they simply fail to factor in what may be the key determinant to socio-economic status: family wealth.

If Black and white students enjoy the same family income, doesn't that mean they have the same socio-economic status?
No, says Dalton Conley, a sociologist at New York University who formerly taught at Yale. In his 1999 book, Being Black, Living In the Red (University of California), Conley draws a distinction between income--the money parents earn--and wealth.

A family's wealth includes everything the family owns: a home, other property, stocks, savings, and the like. Wealth provides deeper economic security than income. Young adults from families with assets, for instance, can borrow from their parents for a down payment on a house.

Parents with wealth have a cushion against hard times. Consider the hypothetical case of two families whose chief breadwinners are laid off from identical jobs. The family with assets can weather the storm and pay the mortgage, continuing to build equity.

The family without assets, meanwhile, is devastated. Unable to meet the mortgage, the family might end up in an apartment in a much poorer neighborhood, with poorer schools.

So how does wealth affect student achievement?
Parents who own their home or other forms of wealth are imbued with a sense that "their kind" of people can make it in America. They have a stake in society.

An everyday example: Streets populated by homeowners are better taken care of than streets populated by renters, even if incomes are the same.

Families with assets also know they have resources to tap to buy crucial advantages for their children--like a college education.

Children soak up this feeling at the dinner table and in a thousand other little interactions that have more impact than any amount of preaching.

"Wealth is both the pot at the end of the rainbow and the means for getting there," as Conley puts it.

Do current wealth holdings vary significantly by race?
In 1998, the latest year with decent data, the median net worth for minority families was $16,400--less than one-fifth the median net worth for white families.

Black people in America tend to have a lot less wealth than white people, even when their incomes are equal.

Among families with incomes between $35,000 and $50,000 a year, the median wealth for whites is $81,000, Conley notes. For Blacks, the figure is $40,000.

Why the big difference? One big factor is the historic discrimination Black families have faced. The "redlining" of Black neighborhoods by banks, for instance, has made it almost impossible for many Black families to secure credit for starting businesses or buying homes.

Discriminatory policies like redlining help explain why Black families actually save slightly more of their incomes than whites, yet they own less.

The bottom line: When Black and white children come from families with similar incomes, they may seem to be at the same socio-economic level, but they're not--because their family wealth levels are usually so different.

When wealth and other factors are equal, do Black students do as well as white students?
Generally, yes. Conley, mining data from a large, ongoing study of American families, says that when you take wealth into account, white and Black children are more alike than different. The much-vaunted "achievement gap" largely disappears when you take family wealth into account.

Add to wealth the level of parental education and you have the factors that can predict much of school success.

For example, Black students are much more likely to be expelled from school than white students. But that difference evaporates if you look at students from families with similar wealth and parental education.

Black students are also much less likely to graduate from college than white students, but, again, the driving forces seem to be family wealth and parental education, not race.

In fact, when family wealth levels are similar, Black students are more likely to graduate than whites.

What about reports that attribute achievement gaps to Black student peer pressure against 'acting white'?
"What kids tell you about their motivations is the last, window-dressing link in a long causal chain," says Conley. "I worry little about attitudes that kids espouse to reporters.

"All kids are anti-intellectual," Conley adds. "Nobody wants to be the class nerd. But motivation and achievement would be different if the fruits of the American Dream were equally accessible."

For a high school curriculum that explores issues around economic inequality, check Teaching Economics As If People Mattered, by Virginia teacher Tamara Sober Giecek. Contact United for a Fair Economy, 37 Temple Pl., Second Floor, Boston, MA 02111. Fax: 617/423-0191. E-mail: info@ufenet.org.
For more on economic inequality, visit the Web at www.ufenet.org
© 2003 California Newsreel. All rights reserved.

Dalton Conley is director of the Center for Advanced Social Science Research (CASSR) and an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at New York University. He is the author of Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America.

The one statistic that best captures the state of racial inequality in America today is wealth, or net worth. If you want to know your net worth, just add up everything you own, subtract all your debts and that's your net worth.

Today, the average Black family has only one-eighth the net worth or assets of the average white family. That difference has seemingly grown since the 1960s, since the Civil Rights triumphs, and is not explained by other factors like education, earnings rates or savings rates. It is really the legacy of racial inequality from generations past. No other measure captures the legacy - the cumulative disadvantage of race for minorities or cumulative advantage of race for whites - than net worth or wealth.

The wealth gaps between blacks and whites aren't explained by income. In fact, if you compare people at the bottom of the income distribution - say, a family that makes around $15,000 a year, you'll find that the average black family that earns $15,000 year in income has $0 net worth, or is in debt actually. Compare that with the average white family that earns $15,000 a year, and they have a good $10,000 to $15,000 in equity. That means being poor, being at the bottom of the income distribution, really means two different things depending on whether you are black or white.

That white family has a little bit of a cushion. If unemployment strikes, as it does so often to people at the bottom of the economic distribution, they've got some means to ride out the storm. They might have a car that will increase the radius of their job search. They might have this money that they can spend in case of a medical emergency, even if they don't have health insurance. But compare that to the situation for a poor black family with $0 or negative net worth. There is no cushion. There is nothing in between the paycheck and homelessness, so to speak.

The same kind of disparity emerges at the upper end of the income distribution. If you compare, say, a white family that earns $50,000 with an African American family that earns $50,000, you'll find that the white family has about double the net worth - about $80,000 to $100,000 of net worth compared to about $40,000 to $50,000 of net worth for the African American family at that income level. So when you are talking about the difference between financing their kid's college education, starting a new business, moving if they need to move for a better job opportunity - having $100,000 versus $50,000 in net worth might make the difference between upward mobility and stagnation.

Blacks and whites really anchor the ends of the distribution in terms of wealth in America. Latinos fall somewhere in the middle. They fall, on average, closer to the African American average in terms of wealth. But there is enormous disparity within the Latino community. It's hard to talk about Latinos as a unified group because there are enormous differences within that community. And not coincidentally, how Hispanics fare depends on their skin color and it also depends on the particular history of that group.

Cuban Americans, for example, have wealth levels that are much more similar to whites. They don't exactly equal the white levels, but they come close. On the other hand, Puerto Ricans or Dominicans are almost equivalent to the black average. Other groups, like Mexicans and South Americans, fall closer to that group, but again are in the middle somewhere.

Defining whiteness is really difficult because it is a default category. It's something that we don't define. And part of whiteness is the fact that whites don't have to think about race. In the introductory sociology class I teach, I do an experiment with my students. On the first day of class, I ask them to write down five characteristics to describe themselves. And then I don't make any mention of it. Eight weeks later, when we get to race and ethnicity in the course, I ask them, okay, turn back to your first page, and tell me what you wrote down. I can predict almost to a person that racial minorities in the crowd will have put their race at or near the top of the list, while the whites in the group, except for a couple of trouble makers, don't have it on the list. They might put Polish or Italian or Irish - some sort of national origin up there on the list. But they don't put white or Caucasian or Euro-American.

Ethnicity might matter but race doesn't matter to white people. And that is part of what whiteness is. It's not having to think about being in the norm or dominant group. Beyond that, it is also a sense of privilege, a sense that this society is stacked in your favor and you can do anything, because the American society, the American economy, is sort of like a banquet and you can keep going up for more helpings. That is your system. It belongs to you. So there is a sense of entitlement that comes with whiteness as well.

In trying to understand the power and privilege of whiteness, I like to get whites to ask themselves, how did I get my job? That is a good question to start with. Because very few people get their job in some formal way, where they see an ad in the paper, and then go apply, get an interview and then get the job. Mostly, people get their jobs through social networks and connections. Usually it's someone you know - your uncle in the next city or a friend of a friend who knows somebody in your industry. And that is how we get the foot in the door.

Unfortunately, because most jobs in businesses are controlled or owned by whites, given the structure of ownership in America, that leads to the perpetuation of racial inequality in the labor market. Whites tend to hire whites because they get them through their personal networks, which tend to be white. Minorities who aren't as directly connected to the people who are owning and controlling jobs are left out of this. And of course, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in a vicious circle.

The single largest item in most people's nest egg is the family home. That has enormous consequences for the next generation. It means, for example, that if you own your home and have significant equity, you're in a high-property tax district, and you're going to a good, well-funded public school.

It means that when it's time to go to college, if you don't have money in the bank, you can always take a second mortgage and draw off the equity in your home to finance your kids' college education. It means that you're in a neighborhood, most likely in the suburbs, where jobs are on the increase, and not in the inner city where jobs are on the decrease.

It means that you're in a neighborhood where your neighbors control information and access to jobs. So you're getting the cultural aspects by virtue of living in a high property value area and you can get your kids better job connections. It means that if you want to finance your kids' job search after school, you'll have equity to support them for a while.

These are just a few of the ways that having wealth, or owning a home, has enormous consequences for the next generation, not to mention one's own old age.

There is this tendency for white Americans to see the structure of their aid in the form of tax credits and not as aid, or government assistance, or welfare. But they see other forms of assistance, like reduced rents or welfare benefits, as a direct handout from Big Brother.

Owning your home, first of all, gets you a big mortgage deduction. That means you pay less income tax than you would be paying if you were renting and making similar monthly payments. Second, it probably places you in a community that has higher property values than one where you were just renting. Owner-occupied communities tend to be valued more, and that means that the property tax base is higher. That means that local services, everything from garbage services on up to the public school system, most importantly, are going to be better off in that community. So, without even having to spend your equity in your home, you are getting benefits from it.

Third, there is the ability to borrow off that equity. You can finance starting up a business by taking a second mortgage. You can pay for your kids to go to college through a second mortgage. You can finance your retirement by selling your home. Since homes have increased so much in value over the course of the latter half of the 20th century, people can finance their retirements through the sale of their home and the capital gains they get from it. The home has been a central part of savings for most American families in the latter half of the 20th century. White Americans that is.

The American government provided low-interest loans to returning veterans and other white Americans after World War II. This created a boom in home ownership and helped suburbanize America, but blacks were excluded from participating. At this same time, the government was building high-rise public housing for minorities in inner cities. The segregation in America between a largely dark inner city and a largely white suburban community is not something that just magically happened from market forces. It is part and parcel government policy.

When the government instituted rental housing in inner cities, in the form of public housing projects, for poor minorities, and then developed home ownership in low-cost, suburban communities for low-income whites, where you could put almost nothing down, they created this incredible wealth gap.

Where one's family lives in America is not just a matter of taste and preference. It has important consequences for the perpetuation of advantage or disadvantage across generations for a lot of reasons. First, you have the issue of housing and wealth. The majority of Americans hold most of their wealth in the form of home equity. So, that is their nest egg. It is their savings bank. They are living in their savings bank.

To make matters worse, the way that we finance education in America public schools is based on local property taxes. This means even if you never cash in the value of your home, just living in a high property value district or a rental and low property value district is going to affect what kind of school your kids go to.

Increasingly, there are lawsuits in various states against this way of financing, where school funding is based on local property taxes. But still, it's the dominant form. We pay for our schools locally based on property taxes. So, in high value neighborhoods, which are predominantly white, you are getting well-funded schools. And in low-value neighborhoods, which tend to be predominantly minority, you are getting inadequately funded schools.

The constraints that minorities face in the housing market doesn't just affect quality of life issues, you know, and the selection of homes and styles that people can live in. It really has enormous consequences for economic stability and upward mobility and the life chances of the next generation.

Because minorities have faced limited housing options in the past, now they are usually confined to areas that have worse environment conditions, have poor school funding, have increased risk of violent crime, have worse tax bases. Plus their homes have less equity value, so even if they want to move, they are less able to afford to. Therefore the whole economic structure of the next generation can be really readily viewed in the limited housing selections of the previous generation.

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s really marks both an opportunity and a new danger in terms of racial relations in America. On the one hand, the Civil Rights era officially ended inequality of opportunity. It officially ended de jure legal inequality, so it was no longer legal for employers, for landlords, or for any public institution or accommodations to discriminate based on race. At the same time, those civil rights triumphs did nothing to address the underlying economic and social inequalities that had already been in place because of hundreds of years of inequality.

The danger lies in the fact that many white Americans see the civil rights changes as having solved or addressed the racial problem, because it addresses the rules of the game. And many minorities recognize that because the starting line is so different for whites and blacks, it is almost irrelevant that the rules of the game were altered to be more fair. You really have this danger, where there is a complacency about issues of inequality, because we have addressed the official forms of segregation and discrimination.

There's more than one kind of equality. One is equality of opportunity, which means that as long as the rules are the same for everybody, then there is fairness. The motivation for the civil rights movement was really based on achieving equality of opportunity, and this notion of a colorblind society is based on that.

Unfortunately, the rules are often bent, if not broken, and you can't talk about having a fair shot in the game if the starting line is staggered. Even if the rules of the game are fair, some people have advantages and some people have handicaps depending on the social position of the families they are born into and what kind of wealth they have, based on past opportunities. This brings us to the second type of equality, and that is equality of condition, which is a more progressive or radical form of equality that doesn't just look at the rules but where everyone is starting from.

The notion of a colorblind society is really based on a mythology - the idea that as long as the rules are fair, we'll have equality. This doesn't recognize the fact that the rewards, the house, the Lexus, you know, the big bank account, those are not only the rewards, the pot of gold at the end of the game, they are also the starting position for the next generation. Until we recognize that there is really no way to talk about equality of opportunity without talking about equality of condition, then we are stuck with this paradoxical idea of a colorblind society in a society that is totally unequal by color.

There's a lot of reasons why there are enormous wealth gaps between minorities and whites in America. The most simple answer is, it takes money to make money. Part of the reason that there's this enormous gap is because whites have long had higher wages and wealth to pass on from generation to generation. And it's like a snowball - it gets bigger and bigger as it gets passed on, and the interest gets compounded. That's partly the reason why the wealth gap has actually increased since the 1960s, since the civil rights times.

But that's not the whole story. There's a long history of exclusion of minorities from wealth accumulation in America, going back to right after the Civil War.

First of all, during slavery, slaves were forbidden legally in most cases from owning anything, including their own bodies. After the Civil War, Jim Crow laws instituted policies such as the Black Codes, which required black entrepreneurs to pay, for example, a $100 licensing fee but required whites to pay nothing. Back in 1870, $100 was basically like a million dollars today. It would shut people out of business. So blacks in the 19th century through that mechanism, and through pure terror, threats of lynching, were precluded from becoming business owners, as one example.

By the 20th century, you had the institution of redlining as a policy in which banks rated neighborhoods for loans based on a four-tier system, red being the lowest ranking that a neighborhood could get. And African American neighborhoods were invariably given this red circle around them, and no loans from private banks would go into that system. That was a policy that was initiated by the federal government and adopted by private lenders.

Fast forward to the New Deal, when Roosevelt really cut a devil's deal with white southern senators. He didn't overtly exclude blacks from Social Security, but subtly did it by excluding agricultural workers and domestic workers, who were predominantly minorities, from receiving Social Security benefits. This was done explicitly to appease southern Senators, to exclude African Americans, who were disproportionately employed in those two sectors. It wasn't until the Truman Administration that that got corrected. But there's a whole generation of elderly African Americans that didn't receive Social Security benefits, when in fact, it was the biggest giveaway of all, because no one had paid into the system yet.

So you had whites receiving this sort of windfall, and blacks not getting it. More poor black elderly not receiving Social Security means that working families in the African American community have to support them and pay for it. So it's not only an issue of that generation. It trickles down through issues of inheritance and having to support the aged.

Fast forward again to after World War II when you have two separate American housing policies. You have this really pro home ownership policy where the government guaranteed low-interest loans for whites in suburban America and helped them obtain wealth. And for minorities you get rental, large-scale, inner-city public housing, which of course is a wealth destruction policy.

In the 1960s there were occasional efforts to foster minority asset accumulation, but they really focused on things like financial skills, and community benefit which was, by definition, nonprofit. These efforts really didn't focus on rectifying the enormous wealth inequalities that had grown up to that point.

Until we correct the fundamental wealth inequalities, these little programs of financial education and other sorts of cultural issues aren't going to make much of a difference, because the underlying economic structure is still unequal.

I also would like to mention, by the way, that savings rates are the same for blacks and whites. That's a common stereotype, you know, of why these gaps exist - the idea that white people save more. And the data show that's simply not true.

But aren't there cultural factors that affect performance and have nothing to do with wealth?

Many social observers point to outcome differences between blacks and whites, say in education, where the college graduation rate for whites is double that of blacks. Or in occupational achievement, where whites are twice as likely to have a white collar or managerial job as blacks. Or in income, where white family income is on average about double that of the African-American unit. Or family structure, where whites are much more likely than African Americans to delay childbearing past their teenage years and until marriage. In almost any realm of life you can think of, there are racial disparities.

Often when policymakers or social scientists want to compare the outcomes between black and white kids, they'll look at kids who come from families with the same income level. And when you make that comparison, you'll find that there's still a racial gap. People often point to this as something cultural or innate.

But often when we're talking about these racial disparities, we're comparing apples and oranges, because there's still an enormous wealth gap between those families with the same income level.

And I find that when you make the right comparison - when you compare a black kid from a family with the same income and wealth level as the white kid from the similar economic situation - rates of college graduation are the same; rates of employment and work hours are the same; rates of welfare usage are the same.

So when we're talking about race in terms of a cultural accounting of these differences or a genetic accounting of these differences, we're really missing the picture, because we're making the wrong comparison. We're not comparing blacks and whites on an equal footing if we don't take into consideration these wealth differences in addition to the income differences.

So a lot of times when we're talking about race it's really indirectly race. It's that race is associated with these vast income and wealth differences. And that's what's driving these seemingly cultural or behavioral differences in the next generation. The real issue is inequality.

In the post Civil Rights era it's very difficult to talk about race and class as two separate entities, because they overlap so much in our society. Many things that we associate with race on the surface, like differences in savings rates or differences in education and performance, are really class differences when you get the data and compare individuals coming from similar economic circumstances.

But the complicating factor is that those very economic circumstances are determined by race, through historical inequalities; through contemporary dynamics where whites get jobs disproportionately more than blacks do and other minority groups. So race matters, but it often matters indirectly through the class position, the economic situation of a family.

As individuals, we like to think that our property is a result of our talent, hard work or even luck - that it's our individual fruits of labor. But economists have shown that about 50-80% of our lifetime wealth accumulation is really attributable, in one way or another, to past generations.

Inheritance actually plays a small role in that. What's more common is something like your parents financing your college education, supporting you while you're in school or taking care of you, letting you live with them, while you're looking for a job. It's also little gifts along the way, co-signing the loan for a mortgage, that sort of thing.

All those kind of things lead to lifetime wealth accumulation. And it's this enormous debt we have to our ancestors' wealth that largely explains the perpetuation - in addition to discrimination and government policies - of racial equality in wealth over generations.

So a lot of our wealth comes from our ancestors. Since whites have wealth in their family histories to a disproportionate amount, they're able to confer wealth upon their descendants, and this reproduces racial inequality.

Blacks, on the other hand, tend to have not had wealth accumulation in the past generations for a variety of reasons. But whatever those reasons, even if the current generation makes a lot of money - because there's not also the past wealth to pass on, this racial inequity in wealth gets reproduced generation after generation, and maybe in fact gets worse.

The housing market is a place where culture meets economics - where values about what people want and where they want to live actually influence prices. Whites control the market by virtue of pure numbers, being the largest group. So when whites want to live somewhere, prices go up, and when whites don't want to live somewhere, prices go down.

If you compare housing in black and white neighborhoods that's otherwise exactly equal - the quality of the housing is the same, the income level of the residents is the same, education system is the same, almost everything is the same - you'll find that the white housing will be worth more precisely because it's white. Because whites are the biggest group in the marketplace, their preferences count the most in terms of supply and demand. So wherever whites want to live, housing values will be high.

The flip side is that if whites don't want to live somewhere, the value of houses in that neighborhood will be less. Think about it: if you have a group that makes up 12-14% of the population like African Americans do - or even 25% of the population if you take the entire non-white population of the United States - they can't compare with the demand created by the other 75-80% of the population, so houses in neighborhoods where whites don't want to live will be depressed by virtue of supply and demand.

The evidence shows that even if a house is in exactly the same condition - it's been kept up at the same rate, the neighborhood is almost exactly the same, but it's black racially - it's going to be worth less money than a similar situated white neighborhood.

At one time we had explicit legal racial covenants and/or redlining policies on the part of banks. Today we don't need those anymore, because once we've segregated the market, it becomes in whites' interest to perpetuate the divisions. Whites get a boost in their property values by maintaining a segregation of the marketplace, maintaining their position as the dominant group in the housing market. So once you sort of have the initial push of racial covenants or redlining or any other policy that segregated the housing market, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy after that.

And in fact, there's a vicious cycle here. Because when a neighborhood, a previously white neighborhood starts to integrate, even if individual whites don't have personal or psychological animosity or racial hatred, they still have an economic incentive to leave. Because they recognize that others might make the same calculation and leave first.

And therefore, if there's a rash of selling by whites, which are the biggest group in the marketplace, prices will go down, by virtue of the laws of supply and demand. So you get a vicious circle where whites calculate that other whites are going to sell when the neighborhood integrates. Therefore, they want to sell first to avoid losses, and they actually make it happen - they make white flight happen and drive down property values when the neighborhood becomes more integrated.

It's obviously disadvantageous to African Americans who want to accumulate equity in integrated or in predominantly black neighborhoods. But people don't talk about how it's advantageous to whites.

The strongest argument you can make to white people is that the current system is not in their own interest, in the long run. The fact is that homeowners and people who have a stake in the American dream are better citizens. So when you systematically shut out a group from wealth ownership, from their slice of the American pie, you're creating an unstable and dangerous situation. You're inviting civil unrest. You're inviting crime. You're inviting a situation where there's incredible tension.

When you have an inclusive society, a republic of property owners where everyone has the opportunity and reality of owning, then you create a stable society where people care about their communities and have a stake in their future. And it's in everybody's interest for everybody in America to have a stake in the future in terms of asset accumulation and economic self-sufficiency.

If we want to seriously address the issue of racial inequality in general and wealth inequality in particular, it's going to take dramatic, progressive action. Simply guaranteeing equal access to financial institutions and to housing markets isn't good enough anymore. There's just too much wealth inequality already built up, that the playing field is not level, no matter what you do to the rules of the game.

Of course the most direct way to fix the black/white wealth gap would be reparations - a simple payment of wealth from whites to blacks. That's the most direct, racially explicit way - but probably also the least likely to happen.

Another way is to take redistribute wealth not based on race but in a way that has enormous race effects. Say taxing the wealth of the rich and redistributing it through direct payments or matching savings plans to the wealth poor. It's going to take something along those lines to correct this racial inequity. Just simple equal opportunity won't do it at this point.

I don't expect wealth redistribution to be popular. But it's already going on all the time. It went on in the 1940s and 1950s when we essentially gave away lots of equity in the form of suburban homes to white Americans. It's going on today through all sorts of mortgage interest deductions and corporate give-aways.

It's happening all around us. It's just we don't want to recognize those, because they're benefiting the majority or dominant group of Americans. If we talk about something explicitly to benefit a minority of Americans, people have a lot more problems with that.

Should whites today be held accountable for things that happened in the past?

Often whites who resist wealth redistribution make the point that, well, my ancestors didn't own slaves; no one in my family was on a plantation, so I'm not responsible for the crimes of history. But the problem with that rationale is it ignores the fact that we're all interconnected and we're all inheritors of the past.

If my family arrived here in the 1920s or the 1960s and is white, I've still benefited from the legacy of slavery. Slavery was the initial push that got the ball rolling and helped generate racial segregation, wealth inequity, inequity in job networks, inequity in housing markets, and so on. The legacy of slavery lives on, because those unequal conditions are still in place, and I benefit as a white person, even if I arrived in 1965.

No matter one's own personal views, you can't escape the larger system in which you're operating. Even if I'm not personally racist or if I can say, Oh, I've got plenty of black friends, I've got plenty of Latino friends. It doesn't matter in the end, unless the overall system has changed, because the question is, How did I get my job? I got my job most likely through social connections, through somebody I know who told me about it and put in a good word for me. And most likely that's somebody white, because whites own more companies and control more jobs.

How did I get to live where I live? I have more freedom because I'm white. I can choose to live in a predominantly white neighborhood, and I can actually choose to live in a predominantly minority neighborhood, without facing the same kind of resistance had the situation been reversed.

So, no matter what your personal views about race are and who your friends are, whites are still advantaged, in an institutional and social way, that often they don't even recognize.

People who criticize affirmative action as antithetical to a colorblind society aren't recognizing that we're not in a colorblind society. Already color matters, and affirmative action is just a way to counteract some of those overall trends. First of all, whites and blacks are coming from very different economic circumstances, due to a long history of economic and political exclusion from blacks. Also, there's the cultural and psychological legacy of generations of racial oppression.

A lot of people say that affirmative action is problematic because it's giving preference to a single group, but we're doing that already all the time in our "colorblind" society. Take the example of college admissions. Sure, there are racial preferences, but those are only meant to countervail some of the more subtle preferences that tend to benefit whites. For example, look at legacies. Kids who have a parent who went to that college have an increased chance of getting into the college. It's an explicit policy among admissions officers. Since whites, in the past, were more likely to have gone to college, especially elite colleges, that's conferring racial advantage, without ever being an explicit racial policy. Affirmative action is one way to counteract that.

Another criticism of affirmative action is that it stigmatizes the group that's receiving the aid. So if a white sees a minority kid in the hallways of Yale or Harvard, they always think, well, did he get in because of affirmative action or does he really "deserve" to be here? No one says the same thing about legacies, who get in at a much higher rate. Now, that's because race is something that we can clearly mark or identify, in a way that you can't see whether someone's parent went to Yale or Harvard on their lapel when they're walking down the hallway, as well.

So, it is true that affirmative action as it's currently designed has some stigmatizing aspects, but it can be mended. I think it shouldn't be eliminated, because the absence of it would mean that we're doing nothing at all to level the playing field, when we recognize there's enormous disparities.

So much of the discourse about race today is about how race disadvantages minorities. People hardly ever talk about the other half of the coin, which is, How does race benefit whites? And I think it benefits whites in many ways, and some are very evident from my own personal experience.

Having grown up as a white minority in a community of color and in a community of housing projects at that, I'm able to see, in a way that many whites take for granted, the advantages that distinguish me from my neighbors. For example, when my local school deteriorated so badly that my parents had to get me out of there and had no money to move or to send me to private school, they had a friend, a social connection on the other side of town, on the rich side of town, that let us lie to the school board and use his address to say that we were in that school district, and go to a well-funded, well-run school.

Now, there's an example of my white privilege because my parents had both the confidence and the sense of entitlement that the system was theirs for the taking. And, at the same time, they had a connection, a white person on the other side of town who lived in a wealthy neighborhood, who let us use is address. So they had both the cultural resources and the social connection that fostered my mobility to a better school district, over and above money. There's a way that race matters.

When I was an adolescent I made a big mistake with a friend of mine after school where I set his apartment on fire. After the fire was put out and the fire marshals and the police came and did their investigation, they decided to let us go. They said, "You seem like good kids who did a really stupid thing. We'll leave it up to your families to discipline you." So this didn't go on my record. I didn't have a mar on my official life history that would have knocked me off the course to college or even worse, have sent me to jail.

I can't be 100% sure, but I'm 99% sure that had I been a different skin tone, or had it been back in my neighborhood of predominantly minority, low-income housing projects, things wouldn't have been handled so informally. I wouldn't have gotten that free pass. And that's one of the major privileges of whiteness that isn't often talked about, but happens to whites in the criminal justice system, for example. We always talk about what happens to minorities, but we don't talk about what happens to whites.
© 2003 California Newsreel. All rights reserved.

In the United States, buying a home is the key to achieving the American Dream. Forty-two percent of the net worth of all households consists of equity in their homes - that means for most Americans, their homes are their single largest asset. Homeownership provides families with the means to invest in education, business opportunities, retirement and resources for the next generation.

When the federal government stepped in to make it possible for most Americans to finance the purchase of their own home, they essentially paved the way for millions of average white Americans to begin their own wealth-building. But the policies they endorsed made it very difficult for minorities to attain the same resources and opportunities, resulting in deeply segregated communities and an enormous wealth gap between whites and nonwhites that persists to this day. In 1995, the median white family had over 8 times the net worth of the median Black family. The gap is even greater for Latinos - the median white household has over 12 times the wealth of the median Latino family.

Race, wealth and life opportunities are intertwined in the United States. Today, white and nonwhite communities are still "separate and unequal" and the gap continues to grow, long after the Civil Rights era. Wealth, and the opportunities it affords, is passed down through successive generations. Along with it, Americans have also inherited a legacy of inequality that continues to shape the future. Segregation and the wealth gap between whites and nonwhites did not arise on their own. And because they are so deeply entrenched in the institutions that structure our society, they will not fade away by simply outlawing discriminatory policies.

The U.S. population is more racially and ethnically diverse than ever before. Yet for the most part, America's neighborhoods remain highly segregated. The only areas that have become more integrated since 1970 are cities with small minority populations.

* On the whole, segregation is highest in the major metropolitan areas of the Midwest and Northeast and lower in the West and South.

* The 2000 census shows that overall the nation's largest cities have lost large numbers of white residents to suburban and outlying areas. The urban populace is becoming increasingly Latino and Asian, with a slight increase in Black residents.

* According to the Lewis Mumford Center at the University of Albany, segregation has increased in almost every large suburban area from 1990 to 2000.

* Across the nation, four out of five whites live outside of the cities and 86 percent of whites live in neighborhoods where minorities make up less than 1 percent of the population. In contrast, 70 percent of Blacks and Latinos live in the cities or inner-ring suburbs.

* According to the Census Bureau's 1999 American Housing Survey, 74 percent of suburban residents owned their own homes, while only about half of urban residents are homeowners. The proportion is similar when you compare homeowners by race - in 1999, 74 percent of whites were homeowners, while only 45 percent of Latinos, 46 percent of Blacks and 51 percent of Asians owned their homes.

Whites are still the most segregated of all racial groups, have the largest suburban presence and are most likely to own their homes. African Americans continue to be highly segregated and as Latinos and Asians gain a larger share of the population, they are becoming increasingly segregated from whites as well.

When whites relocated to the suburbs, their strong tax base and businesses followed. The result: a huge discrepancy in the quality and quantity of resources, jobs and public services in central cities and inner-ring suburbs inhabited by mostly minority populations. As white communities continue the trend of isolating themselves and their resources, the pattern of flight and divestment repeats, and the wealth gap grows larger.

Communities cannot be expected to accomplish integrated, stable neighborhoods on their own. In a 2002 study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project, analysts found evidence of an overwhelming trend toward school district resegregation. Court-ordered busing once made Southern schools the most integrated in the country. However, when many of these programs expired in the 1990s, the proportion of Black students in majority-white schools decreased by 13 percent. Until the problem of residential seclusion is addressed, schools will continue to resegregate by default.

But aren't some communities segregated by choice? What about the Chinatowns, Little Ethiopias and other ethnic enclaves?

People sometimes assume that certain ethnic or racial groups segregate themselves "voluntarily," but there are many factors involved. These groups often face discrimination when they try to enter established, primarily white communities. Limited job and economic opportunities, language barriers, and shared culture can also influence many groups to cluster. Ethnic enclaves, however, are very different from impoverished urban ghettos. Apart from "first-settlement" immigrant neighborhoods, rarely do ethnic groups ever become as highly concentrated as many Black communities. Ethnic groups can tap into various types of resources unavailable to areas of concentrated poverty: networks of friends and relatives, "niche" occupations and businesses, etc. Furthermore, ethnic enclaves are more transitory in nature - as stepping stones to entering more privileged, resource-rich communities. Still, many groups (such as Latinos and Asians) will face more barriers based on racial discrimination as they look to move out.

Confronted with racially discriminatory policies, minorities could not take advantage of the programs that made it possible for millions of people to buy homes in the suburbs. People of color remained in the cities while they witnessed their white counterparts leave in droves. Today, mostly minority inner cities are characterized by the unique phenomenon of concentrated poverty. Inner-city residents face intense spatial isolation and inadequate public resources, education and economic opportunities. As more and more people leave, costs for basic services rise and the poor become even poorer. The average inner city consists of abandoned buildings, total business disinvestment, and resource-depleted schools leaving it vulnerable to violent crime, prostitution, and drugs. By the time anti-discriminatory laws were passed, suburban whites were enjoying soaring property values and minorities now faced the economic barriers that replaced those initially created by race.

Moreover, after decades of segregation, a culture of poverty has become associated with people of color - particularly African Americans. Inner-city residents are not only surrounded by crime, drugs, homelessness and poverty, they are blamed for it. As john powell says, "Not only have we racialized our space, but it is through space that we do our 'racing' in the 20th century."

How does discrimination, both past and present, continue to affect the life opportunities of nonwhites?

* In 1992, The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston released a study showing that Black and Latino mortgage applicants are 60 percent more likely to be turned down for loans than whites, even when they share similar employment and financial backgrounds.

* According to a 1998 report by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), African-American mortgage applicants were rejected 217 percent as often as whites - up from 206 percent in 1995. Latino applicants were denied 183 percent as often as whites - up from 169 percent in 1995.

* According to a Department of Housing and Urban Development study, high-cost loans are offered five times more often in Black neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods. Furthermore, homeowners in upper-income Black neighborhoods were twice as likely to receive these sort of loans than homeowners in low-income white neighborhoods. In 1998, 9 percent of home loans in white neighborhoods were high cost compared to 51 percent of loans in Black neighborhoods.

In 2003, we celebrate the 35th anniversary of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Nonetheless, housing discrimination persists in subtler forms. Minorities still experience discrimination on an individual level as well as through a variety of systematic practices. Realtors who practice racial steering will direct nonwhites to segregated areas or direct whites away from integrated areas. Minority mortgage applicants who are regularly denied loans more often than their white socioeconomic equals will by necessity turn to predatory lenders who charge them higher-cost loans than their credit histories warrant.

As long as minorities are still barred from desirable communities and lose out on opportunities to accumulate wealth through rising property values, socioeconomic inequalities between racial groups will continue to be reinforced. Even if individual incidences of discrimination are no longer, the current housing market makes it almost impossible for a family with little or no assets to enter it. As home prices in resource-rich communities continue to rise, low to middle-income families must choose between renting or buying in at-risk, often segregated suburban communities.

Ironically, defenders of the racial bias in the home lending system will point to the low net worth of minority applicants, even those with high incomes. As George Lipsitz points out, "net worth is almost totally determined by past opportunities for asset accumulation, and therefore is the one figure most likely to reflect the history of discrimination."

Many middle-class white people, especially those of us who grew up in the suburbs, like to think that we got to where we are today by virtue of our merit - hard work, intelligence, pluck, and maybe a little luck. And while we may be sympathetic to the plight of others, we close down when we hear the words "affirmative action" or "racial preferences." We worked hard, we made it on our own, the thinking goes, why don't 'they'? After all, it's been almost 40 years now since the Civil Rights Act was passed.

What we don't readily acknowledge is that racial preferences have a long, institutional history in this country - a white history. Here are a few ways in which government programs and practices have channeled wealth and opportunities to white people at the expense of others.

We all know the old history, but it's still worth reminding ourselves of its scale and scope. Affirmative action in the American "workplace" first began in the late 17th century when European indentured servants - the original source of unfree labor on the new tobacco plantations of Virginia and Maryland - were replaced by African slaves. In exchange for their support and their policing of the growing slave population, lower-class Europeans won new rights, entitlements, and opportunities from the planter elite.

White Americans were also given a head start with the help of the U.S. Army. The 1830 Indian Removal Act, for example, forcibly relocated Cherokee, Creeks and other eastern Indians to west of the Mississippi River to make room for white settlers. The 1862 Homestead Act followed suit, giving away millions of acres - for free - of what had been Indian Territory west of the Mississippi. Ultimately, 270 million acres, or 10% of the total land area of the United States, was converted to private hands, overwhelmingly white, under Homestead Act provisions.

The 1790 Naturalization Act permitted only "free white persons" to become naturalized citizens, thus opening the doors to European immigrants but not others. Only citizens could vote, serve on juries, hold office, and in some cases, even hold property. In this century, Alien Land Laws passed in California and other states, reserved farm land for white growers by preventing Asian immigrants, ineligible to become citizens, from owning or leasing land. Immigration restrictions further limited opportunities for nonwhite groups. Racial barriers to naturalized U.S. citizenship weren't removed until the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952, and white racial preferences in immigration remained until 1965.

In the South, the federal government never followed through on General Sherman's Civil War plan to divide up plantations and give each freed slave "40 acres and a mule" as reparations. Only once was monetary compensation made for slavery, in Washington, D.C. There, government officials paid up to $300 per slave upon emancipation - not to the slaves, but to local slaveholders as compensation for loss of property.

When slavery ended, its legacy lived on not only in the impoverished condition of Black people but in the wealth and prosperity that accrued to white slaveowners and their descendents. Economists who try to place a dollar value on how much white Americans have profited from 200 years of unpaid slave labor, including interest, begin their estimates at $1 trillion.

Jim Crow laws, instituted in the late 19th and early 20th century and not overturned in many states until the 1960s, reserved the best jobs, neighborhoods, schools and hospitals for white people.

Less known are more recent government racial preferences, first enacted during the New Deal, that directed wealth to white families and continue to shape life opportunities and chances today.

The landmark Social Security Act of 1935 provided a safety net for millions of workers, guaranteeing them an income after retirement. But the act specifically excluded two occupations: agricultural workers and domestic servants, who were predominately African American, Mexican, and Asian. As low-income workers, they also had the least opportunity to save for their retirement. They couldn't pass wealth on to their children. Just the opposite. Their children had to support them.

Like Social Security, the 1935 Wagner Act helped establish an important new right for white people. By granting unions the power of collective bargaining, it helped millions of white workers gain entry into the middle class over the next 30 years. But the Wagner Act permitted unions to exclude non-whites and deny them access to better paid jobs and union protections and benefits such as health care, job security, and pensions. Many craft unions remained nearly all-white well into the 1970s. In 1972, for example, every single one of the 3,000 members of Los Angeles Steam Fitters Local #250 was still white.

But it was another racialized New Deal program, the Federal Housing Administration, that helped generate much of the wealth that so many white families enjoy today. These revolutionary programs made it possible for millions of average white Americans - but not others - to own a home for the first time. The government set up a national neighborhood appraisal system, explicitly tying mortgage eligibility to race. Integrated communities were ipso facto deemed a financial risk and made ineligible for home loans, a policy known today as "redlining." Between 1934 and 1962, the federal government backed $120 billion of home loans. More than 98% went to whites. Of the 350,000 new homes built with federal support in northern California between 1946 and 1960, fewer than 100 went to African Americans.

These government programs made possible the new segregated white suburbs that sprang up around the country after World War II. Government subsidies for municipal services helped develop and enhance these suburbs further, in turn fueling commercial investments. Freeways tied the new suburbs to central business districts, but they often cut through and destroyed the vitality of non-white neighborhoods in the central city.

Today, Black and Latino mortgage applicants are still 60% more likely than whites to be turned down for a loan, even after controlling for employment, financial, and neighborhood factors. According to the Census, whites are more likely to be segregated than any other group. As recently as 1993, 86% of suburban whites still lived in neighborhoods with a black population of less than 1%.

One result of the generations of preferential treatment for whites is that a typical white family today has on average eight times the assets, or net worth, of a typical African American family, according to New York University economist Edward Wolff. Even when families of the same income are compared, white families have more than twice the wealth of Black families. Much of that wealth difference can be attributed to the value of one's home, and how much one inherited from parents.

But a family's net worth is not simply the finish line, it's also the starting point for the next generation. Those with wealth pass their assets on to their children - by financing a college education, lending a hand during hard times, or assisting with the down payment for a home. Some economists estimate that up to 80 percent of lifetime wealth accumulation depends on these intergenerational transfers. White advantage is passed down, from parent to child to grand-child. As a result, the racial wealth gap - and the head start enjoyed by whites - appears to have grown since the civil rights days.

In 1865, just after Emancipation, it is not surprising that African Americans owned only 0.5 percent of the total worth of the United States. But by 1990, a full 135 years after the abolition of slavery, Black Americans still possessed only a meager 1 percent of national wealth. As legal scholar john powell (sic) says in the documentary series Race - The Power of an Illusion, "The slick thing about whiteness is that whites are getting the spoils of a racist system even if they are not personally racist."

But rather than recognize how "racial preferences" have tilted the playing field and given us a head start in life, many whites continue to believe that race does not affect our lives. Instead, we chastise others for not achieving what we have; we even invert the situation and accuse non-whites of using "the race card" to advance themselves.

Or we suggest that differential outcomes may simply result from differences in "natural" ability or motivation. However, sociologist Dalton Conley's research shows that when we compare the performance of families across racial lines who make not just the same income, but also hold similar net worth, a very interesting thing happens: many of the racial disparities in education, graduation rates, welfare usage and other outcomes disappear. The "performance gap" between whites and nonwhites is a product not of nature, but unequal circumstances.

"Colorblind" policies that treat everyone the same, no exceptions for minorities, are often counter-posed against affirmative action. But colorblindness today merely bolsters the unfair advantages that color-coded practices have enabled white Americans to long accumulate.

Isn't it a little late in the game to suddenly decide that race shouldn't matter?

Larry Adelman is executive producer of RACE - The Power of an Illusion and co-director of California Newsreel.

Race intellectual john powell believes attacking suburban sprawl is crucial anti-racist work. ColorLines' Executive Editor Bob Wing asks him why.

john powell is one of the most innovative thinkers regarding race, civil rights, public policy, and the law in the country. He is the executive director of the Institute on Race and Poverty and Julius E. Davis professor of law at the University of Minnesota. He was formerly national legal director of the ACLU and has published widely on race, civil rights, and the law.

In recent years, john has become convinced that "bringing racial justice awareness to regionalism is the single most important civil rights task facing us today." Recently, ColorLines invited him to do a forum on suburban sprawl, poverty, and race at our offices in Oakland.

A: Regionalism is the notion that you should think about, fight for, and administer resources at a regional and not just at a city or federal level. The economy, the infrastructure (transportation, utilities, etc.), and the labor market all function on a regional level. In general a region can be thought of as a city and its suburbs, what the census calls a metropolitan statistical area. That is why regionalism is sometimes called "metropolitics" by people like Myron Orfield.

A: Today, metropolitan regions are divided racially and spatially into largely white and affluent suburbs and largely non-white and poor urban centers. These dynamics are at the heart of racial inequality today. If this inequality is to be effectively fought, suburban sprawl and political fragmentation must be combatted by movements for regional and metropolitan equity.

Regional inequity has seriously undermined the efforts of the civil rights movement. By the time the movement came to the north, this structure of suburban sprawl and urban poverty had been put in place and the movement could not effectively address it. A series of policy and Supreme Court decisions like Milliken in the mid-1970s outlawed desegregation and anti-discrimination efforts across school district and city lines. These decisions protected racial inequality between what were increasingly white suburbs and minority cities.

In fact, while the Supreme Court basically dismantled the ability of whites to garner resources and protect themselves on a neighborhood basis, it actually enhanced the ability to do the same on a regional basis. Just as the doctrine of states' rights at the beginning of the century was a code for allowing the states to frustrate the rights and economic hopes of blacks, the doctrine of local autonomy and municipal rights have been used to frustrate these hopes at the end of the century.

As a result, whites have been able to re-isolate minorities in the declining urban core and older suburbs, away from jobs, growth centers, a strong tax base, and other opportunities. This is aggravated by the fact that, today, suburban voters outnumber urban voters: the political center of regions throughout the country has shifted to the suburbs, again isolating the urban core.

Q: But regionalism seems to be dominated by white environmentalists and suburban interests that are not interested in racial justice.

A: True. So far, regionalism, "smart growth," and anti-sprawl movements have been mainly framed around the interests of white suburbanites and environmentalists. Our challenge is to reframe these issues from the standpoint and interests of people of color, who mainly live in the cities and older declining suburbs, but whose conditions are inextricably connected to the newer, growing suburbs.

In most cases, the cities actually subsidize the suburbs, which in turn suck resources out of the cities. Cities need to fight for equal resources--housing, transportation, jobs, and education--with the suburbs. Cities cannot raise the money they need to deal with issues of concentrated poverty simply within the cities.

A: Although most politicians frame the issue of regionalism mainly through an environmental lens, as a historical matter the central issue driving sprawl is race.

Where there is sprawl--the expanding low-density use of land--and political fragmentation in an area with a substantial minority population, there will be racialized concentrated poverty at the core. Concentrated poverty is where people with incomes below the poverty line represent over 40 percent of a census tract: most of these are people of color.

This pattern is caused by white middle class and upper middle class people fleeing to the edge of the region, taking important resources and opportunity with them and erecting barriers to low-income people of color. Concentrated poverty should be understood as racial and economic segregation combined. It is the segregation of poor people of color from opportunity and resources.

Q: Can you give an example of how this dynamic of sprawl and concentrated poverty actually works out?

A: Over the last twenty years, the population of Detroit has fallen from just under two million to probably less than a million today. Most of those remaining are low-income black people. At the same time, the population of the Detroit metro area as a whole has increased by 3 percent--but the land it occupies has multiplied times 12. Hundreds of separate municipalities have been created, and they vie to capture resources and keep needy, low-income people out. This is classic sprawl and fragmentation.

The first population that moved to the metropolitan edge was white and upper middle class--the corporate executives of General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, and their friends. When they moved, they brought their auto plants and resources with them. I grew up in Detroit from 19601995, and during that time there wasn't one auto plant built inside the city of Detroit. In 1960, 56 percent of the jobs in the Detroit metropolitan area were in Detroit proper; today only 18 percent of the jobs are in Detroit.

When rich people move, they also suck resources out of the urban core: businesses, jobs, property taxes, malls, money for highways, transit, police, water, etc. Then other middle class strata in the population follow them, reproducing the same phenomena. This flight was not just looking for the right place to live but looking for a white place to live.

This in turn left Detroit and dozen of other cities across the country with masses of poor people of color who have much greater social needs than middle class or rich people, but with a decimated tax base with which to pay for those needs. Fewer resources, concentrated poverty. More needs, higher taxes.

A: You know, half the people in the country living in concentrated poverty are black. Another third are Latinos. Even though more than half the people in the country are poor white, most poor white people don't live in concentrated poverty. Moreover, during the long economic boom we've had in the U.S., the number of people living in areas of concentrated poverty has doubled. So it's not just economics; concentrated poverty is sorted by race. And this racial sorting takes place not just on a neighborhood level now, but on a regional level: cities versus suburbs, inner-ring suburbs versus outer-ring suburbs, this side of the freeway versus that side of the freeway, etc.

A: The government had a central role in the history of sprawl, especially through its housing policy. When the government set up the home owners loan corporation and then the Federal Housing Authority in the 1930s, it wrote a truly racist underwriting manual to guide them. To qualify for a loan, you had to live in a "racially homogenous community," meaning an all-white community. It was the first to draw a red line around communities of color, prohibiting loans. Newly constructed homes were preferred over existing homes, thus encouraging the development of suburbs. And then the federal government built highways so people could get from their new suburban homes to their jobs in the cities.

Since the private lending industry wanted to do big business with the federal government, they adopted the same racist policies for making home loans.

These programs racially structured housing patterns just as large numbers of blacks were leaving the south and moving to cities in the 1940s and 1950s. Some economists have estimated that the federal government has spent over two trillion dollars subsidizing the flight of white people out of the central cities. In addition, this set the lending practices for private banks and the creation of the secondary mortgage market made trillions of dollars available primarily for white suburbs.

But there is even more when one looks at our transportation policy, our infrastructure policy, or our taxing policy. They reflect nothing short of a national suburban policy and an anti-city policy. And race is central to understanding any of these policies.

A: I think in many ways urban strategies, so--called "in place strategies," have been the wrong strategy. These strategies focus on specific neighborhoods.

For example, there are hundreds of community development corporations (CDCs) that fight for more low-income housing in their neighborhoods. I say we really don't need it. If you look at Minneapolis for example, 85 percent of low-income houses are in a few neighborhoods, often at the behest of community advocates. The problem is that concentrating low-income public housing also concentrates poor people away from opportunity and resources. It adds to concentrated poverty.

By contrast, Montgomery County, outside Washington D.C., adopted a mixed-income housing plan. Their plan requires that 15 percent of new housing has to be below market rate and half of those need to be public housing. They thus distribute public housing throughout the community rather than concentrating it in a few neighborhoods. And the public housing is not some cheaply built high rise, but normal commercial units that have been taken off the market. It's a very popular plan that
deserves consideration elsewhere.

By regionalism I'm not suggesting a dispersal strategy, but I am suggesting a comprehensive strategy. We need a strategy that looks at what's going on in the region and that links people of color with opportunities. This can be done through new transportation lines. It can be done by bringing some jobs and businesses to the community itself. But we also have to have the option of having people move to where those opportunities currently exist outside of the inner cities.

I know there is real concern about maintaining strong communities of color, but can we do this if they are communities of concentrated poverty?

A: Many urban social activists are legitimately concerned that regionalism will weaken the political and cultural ties of the minority community that are centered in the cities.

Certainly this is a real issue. But the answer is not to avoid participation in regional discussions, but to participate in such a way that we protect those concerns. With or without us, regional development is occurring and undermining our communities. The corporations, developers, and suburban whites who drive this regional development are not likely to put racial issues on the table. If we don't come to the table, wealthy and middle class whites will simply continue to set the regional agenda according to their own interests, and we will simply suffer the consequences.

A: The core issues are really jobs, housing, and education. But they are also the hardest issues to get political unity on, given the class and racial differentiation of the metropolitan populations. So, unless you already have significant political clout, I suggest you start with easier issues like tax base revenue sharing, transportation, and infrastructure sharing.

These issues appear to be relatively race neutral, but can nonetheless be quite beneficial to people of color. For example, some years ago in Portland, concerns about slowing growth, saving the spotted owl and maintaining farmland led to an agreement to create an urban growth boundary. The resources that would have sprawled out started going back in. Land and housing values in Portland started soaring, including those of the black and Latino community and Latino communities. In fact, Portland's black community is accumulating wealth at a faster rate than any other black community in the country. A nonracial regional decision to create an urban boundary line has positive impact on racial minorities. There are still issues but the environmental community in Portland is started to focus on racial justice issues.

In Detroit, there is a growing coalition between those who want to save farms and those that want to save the cities. And throughout the country, faith-based organizations are successfully taking up this issue. Unfortunately, the civil rights community is not present.

Q: Where do you think regionalism fits in a racial justice agenda? How important is it?

A: I believe that fighting for regional resources and participating in regional planning are crucial to a successful racial justice agenda. Currently, regionalism is aggravating racial inequality and injustice. People from Al Gore to big corporations to your county boards of supervisor to your regional transit boards make regional decisions every day, and people of color are basically absent from these decisions.

I think that bringing issues of race into regionalism is crucial to a progressive agenda that can cut away at racialized concentrated poverty and inequities in education. In fact, I believe bringing racial justice awareness to regionalism is the single most important civil rights task facing us today.

University of Minnesota Law School • 415 Law Center 229 19th Avenue South • Minneapolis, MN 55455
Telephone: (612) 625-8071 • Fax: (612) 624-8890

Ask a fish what water is and you'll get no answer. Even if fish were capable of speech, they would likely have no explanation for the element they swim in every minute of every day of their lives. Water simply is. Fish take it for granted.

So too with this thing we hear so much about, "racial preference." While many whites seem to think the notion originated with affirmative action programs, intended to expand opportunities for historically marginalized people of color, racial preference has actually had a long and very white history.

Affirmative action for whites was embodied in the abolition of European indentured servitude, which left black (and occasionally indigenous) slaves as the only unfree labor in the colonies that would become the U.S.

Affirmative action for whites was the essence of the 1790 Naturalization Act, which allowed virtually any European immigrant to become a full citizen, even while blacks, Asians and American Indians could not.

Affirmative action for whites was the guiding principle of segregation, Asian exclusion laws, and the theft of half of Mexico for the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny.

In recent history, affirmative action for whites motivated racially restrictive housing policies that helped 15 million white families procure homes with FHA loans from the 1930s to the '60s, while people of color were mostly excluded from the same programs.

In other words, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that white America is the biggest collective recipient of racial preference in the history of the cosmos. It has skewed our laws, shaped our public policy and helped create the glaring inequalities with which we still live.

White families, on average, have a net worth that is 11 times the net worth of black families, according to a recent study; and this gap remains substantial even when only comparing families of like size, composition, education and income status.

A full-time black male worker in 2003 makes less in real dollar terms than similar white men were earning in 1967. Such realities are not merely indicative of the disadvantages faced by blacks, but indeed are evidence of the preferences afforded whites -- a demarcation of privilege that is the necessary flipside of discrimination.

Indeed, the value of preferences to whites over the years is so enormous that the current baby-boomer generation of whites is currently in the process of inheriting between $7-10 trillion in assets from their parents and grandparents -- property handed down by those who were able to accumulate assets at a time when people of color by and large could not. To place this in the proper perspective, we should note that this amount of money is more than all the outstanding mortgage debt, all the credit card debt, all the savings account assets, all the money in IRAs and 401k retirement plans, all the annual profits for U.S. manufacturers, and our entire merchandise trade deficit combined.

Yet few whites have ever thought of our position as resulting from racial preferences. Indeed, we pride ourselves on our hard work and ambition, as if somehow we invented the concepts.

As if we have worked harder than the folks who were forced to pick cotton and build levies for free; harder than the Latino immigrants who spend 10 hours a day in fields picking strawberries or tomatoes; harder than the (mostly) women of color who clean hotel rooms or change bedpans in hospitals, or the (mostly) men of color who collect our garbage.

We strike the pose of self-sufficiency while ignoring the advantages we have been afforded in every realm of activity: housing, education, employment, criminal justice, politics, banking and business. We ignore the fact that at almost every turn, our hard work has been met with access to an opportunity structure denied to millions of others. Privilege, to us, is like water to the fish: invisible precisely because we cannot imagine life without it.

It is that context that best explains the duplicity of the President's recent criticisms of affirmative action at the University of Michigan. President Bush, himself a lifelong recipient of affirmative action -- the kind set aside for the mediocre rich -- recently proclaimed that the school's policies were examples of unfair racial preference. Yet in doing so he not only showed a profound ignorance of the Michigan policy, but made clear the inability of yet another white person to grasp the magnitude of white privilege still in operation.

The President attacked Michigan's policy of awarding 20 points (on a 150-point evaluation scale) to undergraduate applicants who are members of underrepresented minorities (which at U of M means blacks, Latinos and American Indians). To many whites such a "preference" is blatantly discriminatory.

Bush failed to mention that greater numbers of points are awarded for other things that amount to preferences for whites to the exclusion of people of color.

For example, Michigan awards 20 points to any student from a low-income background, regardless of race. Since these points cannot be combined with those for minority status (in other words poor blacks don't get 40 points), in effect this is a preference for poor whites.

Then Michigan awards 16 points to students who hail from the Upper Peninsula of the state: a rural, largely isolated, and almost completely white area.

Of course both preferences are fair, based as they are on the recognition that economic status and even geography (as with race) can have a profound effect on the quality of K-12 schooling that one receives, and that no one should be punished for things that are beyond their control. But note that such preferences -- though disproportionately awarded to whites -- remain uncriticized, while preferences for people of color become the target for reactionary anger. Once again, white preference remains hidden because it is more subtle, more ingrained, and isn't called white preference, even if that's the effect.

But that's not all. Ten points are awarded to students who attended top-notch high schools, and another eight points are given to students who took an especially demanding AP and honors curriculum.

As with points for those from the Upper Peninsula, these preferences may be race-neutral in theory, but in practice they are anything but. Because of intense racial isolation (and Michigan's schools are the most segregated in America for blacks, according to research by the Harvard Civil Rights Project), students of color will rarely attend the "best" schools, and on average, schools serving mostly black and Latino students offer only a third as many AP and honors courses as schools serving mostly whites.

So even truly talented students of color will be unable to access those extra points simply because of where they live, their economic status and ultimately their race, which is intertwined with both.

Four more points are awarded to students who have a parent who attended the U of M: a kind of affirmative action with which the President is intimately familiar, and which almost exclusively goes to whites. Ironically, while alumni preference could work toward the interest of diversity if combined with aggressive race-based affirmative action (by creating a larger number of black and brown alums), the rollback of the latter, combined with the almost guaranteed retention of the former, will only further perpetuate white preference.

So the U of M offers 20 "extra" points to the typical black, Latino or indigenous applicant, while offering various combinations worth up to 58 extra points for students who will almost all be white. But while the first of these are seen as examples of racial preferences, the second are not, hidden as they are behind the structure of social inequities that limit where people live, where they go to school, and the kinds of opportunities they have been afforded. White preferences, the result of the normal workings of a racist society, can remain out of sight and out of mind, while the power of the state is turned against the paltry preferences meant to offset them.

Very telling is the oft-heard comment by whites, "If I had only been black I would have gotten into my first-choice college."

Such a statement not only ignores the fact that whites are more likely than members of any other group -- even with affirmative action in place -- to get into their first-choice school, but it also presumes, as anti-racist activist Paul Marcus explains, "that if these whites were black, everything else about their life would have remained the same." In other words, that it would have made no negative difference as to where they went to school, what their family income was, or anything else.

The ability to believe that being black would have made no difference (other than a beneficial one when it came time for college), and that being white has made no positive difference, is rooted in privilege itself: the privilege that allows one to not have to think about race on a daily basis; to not have one's intelligence questioned by best-selling books; to not have to worry about being viewed as a "out of place" when driving, shopping, buying a home, or for that matter, attending the University of Michigan.

So long as those privileges remain firmly in place and the preferential treatment that flows from those privileges continues to work to the benefit of whites, all talk of ending affirmative action is not only premature but a slap in the face to those who have fought, and died, for equal opportunity.

Tim Wise is an antiracist activist, essayist and lecturer. Send email to timjwise@msn.com.