In opening his book on the BlackFootnote ¹ political uprising in the United States, Doug McAdam (Reference McAdam1999) posits that there are two routes that could be taken in dealing with competing theoretical perspectives on the causes of a social phenomenon. One route, he claims, is to “… let each theoretical perspective develop more or less autonomously to see just how far the inherent logic and distinctive set of assumptions underlying the perspective can take it” (p. viii). A second route “… just as valid [is] to chart a more synthetic course and to ask how insights [from each theoretical perspective] might be combined to yield a fuller understanding of social movement dynamics” (p. viii).

William Julius Wilson opts for the second route in his recent book More Than Just Race, arguing that to achieve a “fuller understanding” of the causes of persistent racial inequality in the United States, one should integrate both structural and cultural explanations. However, there is at least a third option—to reject decisively one of the competing theoretical perspectives. Specifically, in the context of Wilson's discussion, I contend that the cultural frame has run its course, that there is no compelling evidence to support cultural factors as a viable explanation for racial disparities. Indeed, the evidence is not even light as a feather; it is nonexistent. There is no good reason to sustain a perspective that is simply wrong.

Wilson proposes that there is an interactive relationship between the structural and cultural factors, and that they come into play in varying proportions, depending upon the specific dimension of inequality that is the object of attention. Different investigators can be characterized generally as giving different weights to the proportionate role of the two sets of factors. For example, in a book that displays far less wisdom and temperateness than Wilson's, Amy Wax (Reference Wax2009) gives virtually zero weight to structural factors in explaining Black-White inequality. Sociologists including Elijah Anderson (Reference Anderson1999) and Wilson's colleagues Orlando Patterson (Reference Patterson2010) and Mary Waters (Reference Waters1994) can be interpreted as giving roughly a thirty percent weight to the structural factors and a seventy percent weight to the cultural factors. Wilson himself seems to assign approximately the reverse weighting: seventy percent to structural factors and thirty percent to the cultural factors. At the opposite end of the spectrum, political scientists Michael K. Brown and David Wellman (Reference Brown and Wellman2005), in an article in this journal, give virtually no weight to the cultural factors. I align myself most closely with their position in assigning zero weight to the cultural factors.

Why has Wilson arrived at this endorsement of a synthetic view of the sources of Black-White inequality in the United States? I propose that there are two reasons. The first reason is that synthesis is useful politically as the “scientific” prop to the position taken by Barack Obama in executing an effective campaign for the presidency and thereafter. Obama continuously invests a significant portion of his comments on the status of Black America with words chastising Black fathers for a failure to take personal responsibility, chastising Blacks collectively for falling prey to the psychology of victimization, and chastising Black youths for associating school success with the dreaded practice of “acting White” (Obama Reference Obama2008a, Reference Obamab). Admittedly, Obama's criticisms of these internal failings or dysfunctional practices on the part of the Black community routinely have been accompanied by a perfunctory nod to the adverse effects of residual discrimination or historical deficits. Nevertheless, Obama ultimately hews to the view that there is little unique to the deprivations faced by Black Americans that cannot be resolved by better Black behavior:

A consequence of this perspective, presumably unintended by Wilson, is support for the premise of what Tyrone Forman (Reference Forman, Krysan and Lewis2004) and Brown and Wellman (Reference Brown and Wellman2005) have called “color-blind racism”—a frame that minimizes the importance of race and racism in understanding Black-White inequality today. Indeed, Obama's posture actually is not that far removed from either Amy Wax's or the collective stance of the Manhattan Institute's stable of neoconservatives on the American race question. The connection between the argument presented in the pages of More Than Just Race and Obama's vision of race in America is made explicitly on pages 142–143, and toward the end of the book Wilson (2009) describes Obama's 2008 so-called “race speech,” from which the quotation given above was taken, as “a model” for “the careful political framing of the issues of race and poverty” (p. 154) that will lead to effective solutions. That might be true if an incorrect framing could lead to effective solutions.

In an interview in this journal Wilson went further in his endorsement of the synthetic stance taken by Obama specifically in the same “race speech”:

The second reason is a combination of the cultural and structural factors that provides Wilson with grounds for rapprochement with various colleagues at Harvard ranging from Orlando Patterson and Mary Waters (Wilson 2009, pp. 20–21, 79–81, 85–86, 89, 108–114, 148) to Roland Fryer Jr. (Fryer and Jackson, Reference Fryer and Jackson2008) and Martin Kilson (Reference Kilson2009), all of whom traffic heavily in cultural determinism. For example, Patterson's own observations made in the July 19, Reference Patterson2010 issue of The Nation again expose the connection of the synthesis to Obama veneration. Indeed, Patterson tilts so heavily toward stressing the cultural factors that, even while advocating governmental policies to address racial disparity, he suggests that Black Americans need greater exposure to Whites and their superior mores to get on the road to achievement:

While Wilson (2009) argues in More Than Race “that Patterson tends to downplay the importance of immediate socioeconomic factors,” he “fully concur[s] with Patterson's view that cultural explanations that include historical context should be part of our attempt to fully account for behavior that is so contradictory to mainstream ideas of how work and family should fit into a man's life” (p. 81). On the same page Wilson also expresses uncertainty about the proportional effects of the cultural and structural factors when he writes:

Thus, Wilson leaves the door ajar for the heaviest weight to be placed on the cultural factors, although that is not his own inclination.

Another of Wilson's colleagues in Harvard Sociology, Mary Waters (Reference Waters1994) actually has argued that second-generation immigrant Blacks whose parents migrated to the United States from the West Indies suffer motivational deficiencies if they come to identify more strongly with Black Americans. Waters contends that young Black immigrants who see themselves primarily as ethnic West Indians tend to perceive fewer obstacles in setting and pursuing high goals in life; in particular they have a weaker perception of discriminatory limits to their range of opportunities. On the other hand, according to Waters, those who see themselves primarily as Black Americans perceive significant racial barriers to accomplishing big things in life. Thus, for Waters, gravitation toward Black American culture pollutes the aspirations of second-generation Black immigrants.

Whether or not Waters is correct that a Black American cultural frame produces a point of view that overemphasizes race-based limitations, there is at least one fundamental problem with her study. She only sees causation running uni-directionally from identity to perceptions of racialized barriers. Instead, one could argue that those second-generation immigrants who had the least first hand exposure to discrimination and racism are the most likely to prioritize an ethnic West Indian identity, while those second-generation immigrants who had greater first hand exposure to discrimination and racism are the most likely to prioritize a Black American identity. The data on educational attainment to be discussed below suggests that Waters' entire narrative is misguided. But nowhere in More Than Just Race does Wilson simply quash this frame of thought.

Wilson's willingness to accommodate the cultural determinists at Harvard brings a new level of tranquility to the Yard. But the price is intellectual peace exchanged for intellectual error. Indeed, Wilson's rapprochement is fully in step with a striking resuscitation of cultural explanations for both general inequality and racial inequality that now pervades the social sciences, especially sociology. A recent wave of papers published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Binder et al., Reference Binder, Blair-Loy, Evans, Ng and Schudson2008; Skrentny Reference Skrentny2008; Small et al., Reference Small, Harding and Lamont2010) epitomizes this tendency. Here is the recrudescence of an older outlook in a repackaged form that can be described as “the Harvard/Washington consensus” on race: (1) race still matters somewhat in shaping life outcomes but far less than in the past, and (2) Black Americans' own negative behaviors are of major (and probably increasing) importance in explaining their comparatively deprived status.

But this consensus is invalid. The cultural factors have no purchase in explaining racial differences in three areas highlighted by Wilson: employment and earnings, educational attainment, and family structure. With respect to employment and earnings, discriminatory treatment continues to yield pronounced penalties for Blacks in America's labor markets. Neither differences in attitudes toward work nor differences in attitudes toward acquisition of “skills” provide insight into the sources of employment and earnings differences between Blacks and Whites. Moreover, disadvantaged status in the labor market is far from limited to “poor, young Black males” as Wilson tends to imply.

Indeed, Wilson (2009) acknowledges that “[a] number of … studies have documented employer bias against black males” (p. 75) highlighting Devah Pager's (Reference Pager2003) field experiment in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she found “that a white applicant with a felony conviction was more likely to receive a callback or job offer than … a black applicant with a clean record” (Wilson 2009, p. 75). Bureau of Labor Statistics data routinely indicate that the unemployment rate for Blacks with some college education exceeds that of Whites in the same age range who have dropped out of high school (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2011, Congressional Budget Office 1978).

Nevertheless, Wilson (2009) proceeds with his integration of structural and cultural factors on the next two pages, contending that a (structural) shift from manufacturing to service industries has had an adverse effect on the employability of Black males due to their (cultural) lack of “soft skills” (pp. 76–77).

How ironic, then, that a systematic national study on the phenomenon of occupational crowding reveals that Black men are grossly underrepresented in the construction and manufacturing sectors but grossly overrepresented in the vast majority of the service sectors. In the former sectors one would expect a low demand and in the latter sectors one would expect a high demand for the “soft skills” required for effective personal interaction with clients, but the presence of Black male workers operates in precisely the opposite direction from Wilson's claim. Black men consistently are underrepresented in sectors requiring comparable levels of education but offering markedly higher wages, regardless of “soft skills” requirements (Hamilton et al., Reference Hamilton, Austin and Darity2011).

Wilson seems to be singularly unaware of the most recent research on race and labor-market dynamics conducted by economists. While evidence of a rise in the “skill premium” for more advanced educational credentials may help explain changes in general earnings inequality in the later years of the twentieth century, it does not explain changes in racial earnings inequality (Mason Reference Mason1997; Murnane et al., Reference Murnane, Willett and Levy1995).

Bertrand and Mullainathan's (Reference Bertrand and Mullainathan2003) field experiments conducted in response to positions advertised in classified want ads in Boston and Chicago go unmentioned in the pages of More Than Just Race. Their study provides a smoking gun for evidence of persistent discrimination in employment. They conducted a correspondence test that demonstrates that letters from applicants with White-sounding names are far more likely to prompt call backs for interviews than applicants with Black-sounding names.

Goldsmith et al. (Reference Goldsmith, Hamilton and Darity2006) use data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality to demonstrate that medium- and dark-complexioned Black men suffer substantially larger wage penalties than light-complexioned Black men after controlling for the individual's human capital and other demographic attributes, their workplace features, their family and neighborhood characteristics during adolescence, and the characteristics of their current neighborhood. In fact, Black men with lighter skin shades have labor-market experiences largely indistinguishable from White males. But as Hughes and Hertel (Reference Hughes and Hertel1990) observe “… there is little sociocultural differentiation in the black community based on skin shade” (p. 1115). Hence, the relationship between skin shade and discrimination provides strong counter-evidence against the cultural determinists' case.

Furthermore, increased educational attainment does not insulate Blacks from discrimination. Sociologists Tomaskovic-Devey, Thomas, and Johnson (Reference Tomaskovic-Devey, Thomas and Johnson2005) have found that discriminatory penalties for wages actually increase with higher levels of educational attainment on the part of Blacks. This is wholly consistent with the functionality of discrimination hypothesis (Darity Reference Darity2001) that posits that exclusionary practices intensify as Blacks become more credentialed vis-à-vis Whites in labor markets. In turn, this suggests that discrimination itself is endogenous, varying upward in degree with the “human capital” accumulated by members of a group subjected to bias.

On average, Blacks do have lower levels of educational attainment than Whites, but when employment outcomes are compared between Blacks and Whites at similar levels of educational attainment, Blacks consistently do worse. And Blacks do relatively worse than comparably educated Whites as they become better educated.

Given the uneven payoff for additional education, one might anticipate that Blacks would display less motivation to pursue schooling. The comparative payoff could even be viewed as a “rational” basis for Blacks to have a cultural orientation that devalues educational attainment, consonant with the “rational dysfunctionality” hypothesis advanced by Fang and Loury (Reference Fang and Loury2005) and by Fryer and Jackson (Reference Fryer and Jackson2008).

The problem is, rational dysfunctionality is a theory used to explain a phenomenon that does not exist. In general, Blacks display a higher level of commitment to educational achievement than Whites. Group-specific adversity can lead individuals to surrender or to redouble their efforts. Mason (Reference Mason1997) has pointed out that an age-old aphorism transmitted from Black parents to their children is “to be successful you have to work twice as hard as the White man.” He suggests that this aphorism is taken to heart by most Blacks by providing evidence from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics which shows that with comparable resources Blacks achieve more years of schooling than Whites. Across multiple surveys, once parental resources are taken into account, Black students reveal a greater commitment to educational achievement than Whites. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to focus on a younger cohort than those examined in Mason's study, William Mangino (Reference Mangino2010) observes:

But no one proposes that, in comparison with Black cultural dispositions, White culture is dysfunctional with respect to education. Instead, we frequently hear about a culturally driven Black oppositionality toward school success, although the evidence on transformation of given resources into degree attainment points in the exact opposite direction. In addition, two new major studies, one ethnographic (Tyson Reference Tyson2011) and one quantitative (Harris Reference Harris2011), devastatingly debunk the proposition that Black students uniquely or disproportionately carry anti-school attitudes with them from their homes and neighborhoods. Harris and Marsh (Reference Harris and Marsh2010) also show that African American students who are more “Black” identified tend to have superior academic outcomes than those who locate themselves as “raceless” or transcending racial classification.

It is with respect to the determinants of racial differences in family structure that Wilson appears to give the greatest leverage to the cultural factors. But even here the story can be told completely by focusing on the economic conditions that envelop parents and children. In a remarkable essay published in the National Review, even the iconic doyen of the neoconservative movement, Charles Murray (Reference Murray1986)—before his full-bore descent into genetic determinism—argued that all the pathologies allegedly caused by the familial cultural practices of Black Americans are evident in White families enmeshed in poverty. Using data from Ohio, Murray (Reference Murray1986) found:

Murray (Reference Murray1986) even warned his readers at the time, “… don't confuse a class phenomenon with a race phenomenon” (p. 32). For once, Murray was right.

Wilson (2009) appears to give pride of place to Orlando Patterson as the representative voice of those giving precedence to the cultural factors over the structural factors. Patterson long has been notorious for arguing that family fragmentation among African Americans is primarily a product of intergenerational transmission of attitudes and values that lead to single parent headship. One wonders what Patterson's views are about his native Jamaica, where the incidence of female headship approaches fifty percent of all families and it is commonplace for students of Jamaican society to describe its families as “matrifocal” (Dreher and Hudgins, Reference Dreher and Hudgins2010). Would this also be due to a pathological cultural legacy carried from generation to generation? Or would it be due, as the mid-1980s Murray suggested, to the deprived economic conditions confronting so many Jamaicans?

Indeed, are Black American family values significantly different from those of Whites in the first place? If anything, Blacks are more “family oriented” in conventional terms. For example, Patrick Mason's (Reference Mason2007) investigation of attitudinal answers in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics reveals that Black respondents actually express a greater sense of obligation to assist relatives than White respondents (see also Chiteji and Hamilton, Reference Chiteji and Hamilton2002). Mason also shows that while the family values measures do have some effect on educational attainment, earnings, wages, and annual hours worked for both Blacks and Whites, parental socioeconomic status—intergenerational resources measures—has a much greater effect.

At a number of stages of More Than Just Race, Wilson's wiser impulses push him fully toward the structuralist end of the spectrum. At various points he charges ahead with arguments that undermine the cultural frame (pp. 58–60, 88–89, 126–129, 153) but does not conclude that there is little or nothing remaining of the cultural frame. Wilson contends that those who refuse his synthetic strategy for analyzing racial inequality just are not being “frank and honest” (p. 3).

For Wilson, the time has come to overcome the “fear” that to “dare to take culture seriously as one of the explanatory variables in the study of race and urban poverty [will be] construed as ‘blaming the victim’” (2009, p. 3). In my estimation, that “fear” has been overcome quite rapidly. Furthermore, it long has been a fear of the label rather than the rich, substantive analysis presented by William Ryan (Reference Ryan1971) in his book that introduced the phrase “blaming the victim” to the world. Few scholars read the book any more, just as they no longer read the Moynihan Report that inspired Ryan's critique.

If scholars today took Ryan's urgings seriously, they would forge a research agenda vastly different from the synthesis between structural and cultural factors proposed in More Than Just Race. They might turn instead to the program of research suggested in the excellent analysis by Linda Burton et al. (Reference Burton, Bonilla-Silva, Ray, Buckelew and Freeman2010) on the integration of critical race theory with social science inquiry on color and inequality or to the research program associated with stratification economics (Darity Reference Darity2005).

They would give a central place to the importance of racial differences in net worth. Wealth is a topic never mentioned in More Than Just Race, despite the fact that wealth is the paramount pecuniary indicator of well-being. Indeed, in the preceding discussion all of the studies mentioned did not control for wealth in attempting to situate Blacks and Whites on the same tier in socioeconomic status. When wealth is taken into account virtually every group-based disparity in behavior customarily attributed to racial differences in cultural orientation disappears (Conley Reference Conley1999; Oliver and Shapiro, Reference Oliver and Shapiro1995).

Even in the lowest quartile of income distribution, Blacks and Whites have vastly different wealth positions. In that quartile, Black estimated net worth is less than $500 and White estimated net worth is closer to $15,000 (Gittleman and Wolff, Reference Gittleman and Wolff2004). Thus, to be Black and poor is not the equivalent of being White and poor. Overall, Blacks have less than ten cents in net worth for every dollar of wealth held by Whites.

Moreover, the disparity is not due to poor financial practices by Blacks; after controlling for household income Blacks have similar savings rates and rates of return on their portfolios as Whites. The major source of the racial gap in net worth is the shift of resources across generations via inheritances and in vivo transfers—transfers that occur independently of individual merit (Hamilton and Darity Reference Hamilton and Darity2009). The silence of More Than Just Race on wealth inequality renders its analysis of race and poverty sorely incomplete and misleading.

And scholars would be more likely to move toward cross-national comparisons of the structural conditions that produce intergroup disparity. So, for example, there would be more studies in more countries of the type conducted in India by Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell (Reference Thorat, Attewell, Thorat and Newman2010) replicating the correspondence-test technique and establishing the high incidence of employment discrimination against Muslims and Dalits (untouchables) in India. Or more studies in more countries of the type conducted by Arif Maan et al. (Reference Arif Maan, Arif, Akhtar, Haque, Iqbal and Raja2009) examining the psychological and economic consequences of darker skin shade for women in Pakistan.

Scholars need to dispense with the cultural factors altogether to proceed with the serious study of racial inequality. Cultural factors may go a long way toward explaining other social phenomena, but they yield nothing in explaining racial disparities.