The Political Economy of Hope and Fear: Capitalism and the Black Condition in America

Abstract

The Political Economy of Hope and Fear: Capitalism and the Black Condition in America By Marcellus Andrews. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Pp. vii, 224. $29.95. Marcellus Andrews, an associate professor of economics at Wellesley College, argues in this provocative and passionate series of essays that racism is not the cause of Black economic backwardness in the modern era. Instead, he contends that the persistence of racial economic inequality stems from the nature of competitive capitalism and the destructive forces of globalism. The book has four chapters. A brief introduction provides the context of the discussion of conservative and anticonservative views on racial inequality and Andrews' statement of the hypothesis that racism is not the cause of racial economic inequality. The first chapter lays the foundation for the paradox explored in the remaining chapters. On one hand, the author demonstrates that there has been much economic progress among African Americans in the past decades. Relative Black poverty has fallen, educational completion has increased, and at least one segment of the Black community, the Black middle class, has made significant gains toward economic parity. On the other hand, the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores of Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 are lower than the SAT scores of Whites with incomes of only $30,000. The racial gap in test scores at the upper end of the income distribution is larger than it is at the lower end. Andrews contends that this persistent disparity in one measure of merit-even accounting for racial differences in income-opens the door for two competing conservative explanations for racial inequality. One explanation, effectively detailed in Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein's The Bell Curve, points to genes, as Andrews puts it. The other, restated recently by Dinesh D'Souza in his The End of Racism, is termed by Andrews as cultural deficiency. The first chapter passionately rejects both of these apparent explanations for the persistent racial gap in economic performance. The explanation for the rejection of the culture and genes arguments rests in the second chapter, where Beckerian models of labor market discrimination are detailed and elaborated. The central point of the second chapter is that in a dynamic world in which previous discrimination vests itself in underdeveloped skills among the discriminated-against group, racial inequality will persist under competitive capitalism. Alternative explanations for the failure of the elimination of racial discrimination in conventional market economies are also explored. The third chapter initiates a more macroeconomic approach to the persistence of BlackWhite economic inequality. Here, Andrews details the destructive forces of worldwide competition and the implications for Black and White workers alike. It is here that the argument advanced in the introduction is developed: [T]he movement towards racial justice in America was assassinated by free markets and the technological whirlwind driving capitalism worldwide rather than by organized racism per se. Racism is still an important and destructive influence on the economic fortunes of Black people in America, but it is no longer the primary reason why Black people are poorer than White people. .. . Black people were completely unprepared for, and unable to take advantage of, the shift in the structure of the American economy toward a knowledge- and technology-driven system that offers huge rewards to brains over brawn, because they remain an industrial labor force in a postindustrial country. (p. 3) According to Andrews, capital mobility, budget deficits, and a strong dollar limit the ability to subsidize the declining relative positions of the poorest of the poor, whose very position is a consequence of the new international competition. …