Is There a Looming Period of Liminality for Race and Ethnicity in the United States?

Abstract

Social scientists take for granted that racial and ethnic origins play a critical, though hardly the exclusive, role in determining the life chances of Americans, including where they live, how much education they get, what kinds of jobs they do, and whom they marry. An enormous literature establishes that this assumption is generally warranted. For some of the most salient racial divides in the United States, such as that between blacks and whites, that literature also demonstrates that numerous differences in life chances have remained stable for decades. One particularly significant instance concerns residential life chances, which not only involve who the neighbors will be, but what the “quality” of the neighborhood is—reflected in the risk of criminal victimization, the adequacy of the schools, or other ways. The research on residential segregation reveals the stability of black-white differences in these respects for at least half a century (Massey and Denton 1993, Logan, Stults and Farley 2004). In this sense, a crystallized racial/ethnic order could be said to exist in the United States, with whites occupying the top position and African Americans at the bottom, with others somewhere in between.