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作者

Mary C. Waters

来源

CITY & COMMUNITY,Vol.18,Issue2,P.457-461

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

Harvard University

摘要

Nathan Glazer was an intellectual and loved debating ideas and thinking about social issues. While he had retired before I joined the Harvard faculty in 1986, I got to know him over the years because he stayed very active well into his nineties. I often disagreed with him, but I very much liked him as a person. He was kind and had a good sense of humor. He would often meet with undergraduate and graduate students and would agree to be part of debates about issues like affirmative action and civil rights. Once after a particularly contentious panel discussion where Glazer put forth a critique of some aspects of multiculturalism and the undergraduate students vigorously attacked him for what they termed his “racist” views, I asked him why he agreed to show up at events where he would be treated that way. He answered that he knew he was invited because the students wanted to attack his ideas, but that he thought it was important to engage in dialogue and to model intellectual disagreement that was not personal. And it was not personal for Glazer. Perhaps due to his own radical youth, he was remarkably sympathetic to the students who accused him of racism; and kept his cool and his equanimity. And unlike many people I see now on both the right and the left, Glazer was himself open‐minded and nuanced in his thinking and not at all an ideologue. He changed his mind about important issues over the course of his career and really listened and took seriously the critiques of his own thinking and the changing world around him. I have a newfound appreciation of his writing on race and ethnicity after the events of the last 15 years. The hope and pride that many Americans felt at the election of the first Black President, Barak Obama in 2008, was very real and drew my own scholarly attention to the great progress we had made as a country since the Civil Rights movement. The rise in visible racism and white supremacy since the election of Trump in 2016 and the cruel anti‐immigrant policies of the Trump administration was a shocking corrective to the earlier optimism and hope. Of course, the United States has always been a place of great contradictions, most especially when it comes to racism, which was at the heart of the society at its founding and which remains our national dilemma. Having lived through these changes, I have an appreciation for the changes Glazer lived through, and that are reflected in his writing on race and ethnicity that went on from the 1940s until the early 2000s. Over such a long career, his intellectual honesty and modesty means that he changed his mind often. He was always aware of both the promise and the shame of American race and ethnic relations—but his lens for understanding what was happening shifted over time. I think these shifts are one of his greatest legacies. Younger scholars should learn from Glazer that great academic careers are about a search for truth, and not about taking a position and defending it for the rest of your life. Glazer's thinking on race and ethnicity evolved and changed course over time as circumstances in society changed and as he realized the limits of his earlier approaches. In short, he was an empirical social scientist and he had both the confidence and the humility to change his perspectives. I wish more intellectuals took this approach. In his collection of essays from 1964 to 1982, entitled Ethnic Dilemmas (Glazer 1983), Glazer discusses the evolution of his thoughts on what he terms “color blind” and “color conscious” approaches to racial and ethnic inequality. He points out that when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, he had already been writing about race in the U.S. for 20 years. A strong advocate of Civil Rights, Glazer celebrated the promise of the Civil Rights Movement that he interpreted as the movement to create a society in which the color of your skin would no longer matter, and everyone would be treated equally as an individual. Glazer clearly thought that the idea of color blindness and the recognition of individual rights as opposed to group rights was the best route, and the one most likely to lead blacks in the U.S. to experience the social mobility and acceptance that white ethnic groups had experienced. His approach to these issues was no doubt strongly influenced by his own social mobility. He grew up in East Harlem and the Bronx, the youngest of seven children. His father was a garment worker and his mother was a homemaker. He attended City College in New York and went on to a PhD in Sociology from Columbia, positions at Berkeley and Harvard, and a strong position as a public intellectual, with a platform in the journal he edited, The Public Interest. He wrote best‐selling books and had opportunities to discuss issues with politicians and others in power. I would compare his influence and perspective to Ta‐Nahesi Coates, whose opinions on race shape the national conversation and reflect his own life experience of social mobility along with continuing discrimination and prejudice. While Glazer “made it” like Coates did, he also was very conscious of his Jewish identity, the anti‐Semitism that he knew surrounded him in the elite circles he frequented, and the limits of “assimilation,” even though he seemed to personify its promise. Richard Alba, in his symposium essay, has reviewed the contortions Glazer had to go through to consider Blacks and Puerto Ricans as similar groups to the Irish, Italians, and Jews of New York in the analysis in Beyond the Melting Pot. Glazer's initial approach of considering all the groups similarly entailed a denial of the unique circumstances of slavery and de jure discrimination, as well as the necessary assumption that the Negroes of New York were “recently arrived”; that the North did not have its own virulent discrimination, and that the real discrimination was present only in the South. As Alba argues, this interpretation was simply not true. The amount of discrimination in the Northern cities directed against African Americans was very different and more severe than what European immigrants experienced. The resistance to Blacks by all White Americans—southern and northern—was deep seated and not reversed by the passage of the Civil Rights Movement (also see Aldon Morris's symposium essay). The essays collected in the book Ethnic Dilemmas collect Glazer's writing from 1964 to 1982 and they unfold as he slowly gives up much of his earlier optimism. These changes in his thinking culminate in his 1997 book We Are All Multiculturalists Now. His belief that destroying legal discrimination would free black individuals to join the mainstream and catch up with white ethnic groups through some of the same methods—education, political action, suburbanization, and so on—was severely tested and ultimately gave way to a recognition that Blacks were not just another ethnic group and faced unique formidable challenges. In 1974, Glazer had written about Black–White segregation and concluded that no special government action would be needed to desegregate neighborhoods. From the vantage point of 1997, he recalled that he had firmly believed “Blacks would become residentially more integrated with whites as their economic circumstances improved, as their political power increased, as they drew closer in all other respects to whites. And we would expect this to happen as a result of the powerful anti‐discrimination legislation of 1964 and 1965” (Glazer 1997:123). Glazer looks back at his earlier writing and concludes: “There is nothing that concentrates the mind on an issue more sharply than discovering one has been wrong about it” (p. 122). Relying on the sociological literature of the 1970s through the '90s, in particular the work of Massey and Denton (1988), Glazer notes that the progress he expected stalled in the mid‐1970s, and the large gaps between Blacks and Whites on most social and economic indicators were not closing. He describes his earlier attempt to think about Blacks as a new group just arriving in Northern cities like immigrants after World War II as naïve and ignorant of American history and social relations. He began to focus not on explaining American society by assuming all of the different ethnic and racial groups would eventually assimilate and become similar, but instead on why blacks are so exceptional and what could be done about it. His optimism about the transformational role of the Civil Rights Movement needed to be corrected. It was his optimistic belief that assimilation would happen for non‐White groups on its own that prompted Glazer to oppose affirmative action. While he supported “soft” affirmative action in terms of searches for qualified minority and women candidates and polices to promote hiring of non‐Whites, he opposed “hard” affirmative action that he identified as “quotas” or set goals that required hiring to match applicant or population demographics. This violated his belief that individuals should be judged on their own merits and that equality of opportunity and not equality of result should be the goal of the government. Affirmative Discrimination (Glazer 1987) is a book that makes a conservative argument and that could be interpreted as anti‐Black. Yet it owes its roots I believe to Glazer's optimistic (and wrong) expectation that Blacks were likely to see sharp increases in social mobility on their own without any government assistance because of the removal of legal restrictions through the Civil Rights laws. He opposed affirmative action not because he was anti‐Black or because he was worried about “reverse discrimination” but rather because he thought it was unnecessary and that the needed changes to the social and economic status of African Americans would happen on their own. The evolution of his thought caught many people's attention when he published We Are All Multiculturalists Now in 1997. In this book, he did not exactly embrace multiculturalism. He still believed in assimilation, and in a sort of soft Americanization program. He did not condone earlier harsh forced assimilation such as prohibiting school children from speaking their parents’ languages. But he was not a proponent of bilingualism and he believed in civics education. Yet he understood that this education had to change. He wrote that “Multiculturalism is the price America is paying for its inability or unwillingness to incorporate into its society African Americans in the same way and to the same degree it has incorporated so many groups” (p. 147). He argued that post 1965 immigrants were becoming more like Whites over time and that assimilation is working in terms of educational progress, economic mobility, and intermarriage for these groups in a way that it is not for African Americans. He did not see the need to have a multicultural curriculum in the public schools for these other non‐White groups; it is only needed for African Americans. By 1997, Glazer was very much aware of the failures of American society to incorporate Blacks after the Civil Rights Movement. He laments the “old history” that he had once been taught and that fit the trajectory of his own life—that the United States had become more inclusionary over time, more liberal in its definition of who could be an American. He had believed that the United States was open to the world and that over time our constitution had been used to rectify past exclusion, becoming more equal and more diverse in a way that was truly exceptional compared to other countries. Yet he now recognized that this story left out two groups who had been here as long or longer than the White colonists—American Indians and African Americans. He believed that we need to tell the truth about our history, not the myths that make us feel good. He rejected separatism, but he embraced a multiculturalism that he thought most Americans could agree on. He wrote: “The new America that multiculturalism, in its principal variants, envisages and is trying to establish as the America we learn about in schools will not, like the old, take it for granted that this is the best of all countries, as well as the strongest and the richest. We will become more self‐conscious about making any claim to a distinctive virtue and superiority, and that is all for the best” (p. 19). Glazer's later writing on ethnicity and race spoke to another issue that social scientists are currently debating—what will be the future of the color line in the 21st Century? Glazer's early work downplayed differences between race and ethnicity, insisting that the term ethnicity could encompass all the groups in the United States. The growth of non‐White immigration after 1965 transformed the demography of the US, leading to rapid growth in the Hispanic and Asian populations. Glazer studied the data and believed that Hispanics and Asians could assimilate in the same way as earlier European immigrant groups did. He was especially sure that high intermarriage rates with Whites would lead to acceptance and a change in racial and ethnic boundaries separating these groups from Whites. As a result of this thinking, he made a radical proposal for the redesign of the census race question (Glazer 2002). He argued that the census should recognize the diversity in the United States, but the government should not be in the business of encouraging the maintenance of distinct racial and ethnic identities. His evolution in thinking about the particular problem of African American integration led him to propose a redesign of how we measure race and ethnicity in the census. He proposed that the race, Hispanic origin, and ancestry questions all be replaced with two questions. The race question should only ask if someone is African American. These data would be used to count and monitor the progress (or lack thereof) of African Americans as they joined the mainstream. The other question would ask about birthplace and birthplace of parents so that we could track the assimilation of immigrants and their children over time. By the third generation, Glazer believed that the level of intermixing and integration would be so great that there would be little distinctive about the descendants of immigrants compared to all other Americans. In this census proposal, he is clearly proposing that the color line in the 21st Century will be between Blacks and non‐Blacks and that going forward that is the line we should be most worried about. Before 2016, I would have agreed with him. The relentless attacks and exclusion of Latino immigrants by the Trump administration have changed my mind and I now worry that the forces of racism and exclusion that Glazer reluctantly came to recognize vis a vis African Americans are now also targeting Latinos and, to a lesser extent, Asians. Surveying Nathan Glazer's work on the important topic of American race and ethnicity has a great deal to teach us about this topic, but I also take two additional lessons from his contributions. One is that optimism and a belief in progress and inclusion can be justified but it needs to be tempered with empirical proof that it is warranted. The other lesson is that sometimes our beliefs, even noble ones, cloud our vision, and a good social scientist is always willing to change his or her mind when the evidence tells us we are wrong.