Book Review: After Civil Rights: Racial Realism in the New American Workplace

‘Morals cannot be legislated, but behaviour can be regulated. The law cannot make an employer love me, but it can keep him from refusing to hire me because of the colour of my skin.’ – Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the key achievements of the American Civil Rights Movement (The Second Reconstruction) was the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the landmark legislation outlawing discrimination on grounds of race in employment and public facilities, and heralding the dismantling of Jim Crow ¹ segregation in the South. Chiefly associated with and symbolic of the entry into full citizenship of African-Americans with eradication of the barriers to equal opportunity and access, the 1964 Civil Rights Act as anti-discrimination legislation also enabled the possibility of wider federal protection of the rights of Women and other minority groups. However, as the ‘racial fault lines’ (Almaguer, 1994) exposed in the city of Ferguson, Missouri, demonstrate in this the 50th anniversary year of the Civil Rights Act, race and racism remain central features of US society.

Some scholars debating how ‘Race Matters’ (West, 1994) in the post-civil rights era contrast the brutal and overt Jim Crow racism of the pre-civil rights era with what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls subtle ‘colour blind racism … the ideological armour for a covert and institutionalised system in the post-civil rights era’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2014: 3). His research project investigates how commonsense viewpoints espoused by the new racism articulate an ideology of colour, blind racism that enables ‘the persistence of racial inequality in America’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2014).

Here in a sense is the starting point of John D Skrentny’s ‘After Civil Rights’, a policy framing macro-sociological study which assesses how effective Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ‘the classical liberal strategy’ designed to encourage a ‘colour blind workplace’ (p. 4) is in the 21st century of upholding the ‘consensus value’ of equal opportunity in employment. Against this legal backdrop the author states the book’s purpose is to illustrate how ‘race matters’ in the perceptions and current practices of employers in ways which often do not accord with the original intent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This contemporary period of American history dubbed ‘after civil rights’ by the author presents an opportunity to not only accommodate protection of rights but to strike a balance between managing workplace opportunities and barriers for America’s diverse population, including immigrants (p. 3).

The book’s structure comprises chapter case studies on US employment sectors with a concluding chapter offering principles for reform. In Chapter 1, Skrentny argues that America’s changing racial demography (alongside globalization and technological change) has fundamentally recast American workplaces and society with a seismic shift from the Black/White divide focus of 1964 to concerns about immigration and the rising Latino population (population projections predict minority groups to become the US majority by 2042, Betancur and Herring, 2013: 2). Within this context Skrentny presents a model of how race is managed in the new American workplace. He argues that racial diversity and the ‘utility of racial differences’ (p. 2) underpin the diversity discourses prevalent in business, the professions, government, media and entertainment. Similarly, employers of racially and ethnically diverse labour (particularly) immigrant labour in lower skilled work sectors articulate preferences based on commonsense perceptions and stereotypes of immigrant Latinos and Asians being harder workers than white and black Americans.

Here the author presents his main contention that the two key strategies (‘cultural models’) for managing race in employment – ‘Classical Liberalism’ and ‘Affirmative Action Liberalism’ associated with the 1964 Civil Rights Act have in terms of every day practice been joined by a third: ‘the strategy of using membership in a racial group as a qualification, what I call racial realism has prominent support in society, but surprisingly little in law’ (p. 3).

In contrast to the social/racial justice approach of affirmative action – Skrentny describes racial realism as a practice which manifests itself from employers’ perceptions that in the workplace race has both ‘significance’ and ‘usefulness’ – the oft stated business case for diversity is a key component of racial realism which itself has evolved as the author attests into a suitable strategy for managing race in accord with neoliberalism (p. 10). However, this third strategy is increasingly problematic in relation to the 1964 Civil Rights Act because employers in a manner unregulated by law are using racial realism for the purpose of business performance rather than rectifying injustice or promoting equality.

For Skrentny the main causal factors for racial realism are America’s increasing racial diversity and geographical patterns of immigration. In 2010 Latinos made up 16 per cent of the US population, Black Americans 13 per cent and Asians 5 per cent. This demographic change has in turn contributed to high numbers of immigrant labour in the low-skilled work sector. The impact of deindustrialization, technological change and restructuring of the global economy described by sociologist William Julius Wilson, in When Work Disappears (1996), led to the disappearance of living wage work for some Americans and the proliferation of low-wage service sector work with employers exploiting the supply of both legal and undocumented immigrant labour. The racially diverse population has also spurred professional, political and business elites to endorse diversity management discourses.

The author offers a typology of racial realism including perceptions of racial abilities to engage people of the same race, the widespread racial realist assumptions being that diversity enhances creativity and innovation in white-collar professions, business, government, media and entertainment alongside racial signalling where an employee’s race is used to elicit a positive response from particular groups or to demonstrate a modern diverse organization. In low-skilled manufacturing and service sector employment racial abilities are expressed in terms of right attitude and work ethic with employers nationwide adhering to racialized thinking and racial hierarchies where Latino and Asian immigrant workers in particular are considered more valuable than white and black workers.

In Chapters 2, 3, and 4 the author analyses empirical research on employment law in the sectors of the professions and business, politics and government, and media and entertainment to highlight the ‘leveraging’ of racial realism in the professions and business. These chapters are particularly useful for the author’s description of the origins and current practice of diversity management discourses that were originally adopted from the US and are now firmly embedded within the EU. For instance, Skrentny discussing racial realism advocacy for diversity in the US medical profession outlines the very diversity management template now being proposed by policy-makers in the NHS who argue that diversity in health care leadership makes a real difference to health care (see Kline, 2014; Health Service Journal, 2014). Contradicting the claims of diversity discourse Skrentny contends that current empirical evidence provides at best a variable picture of the effectiveness of diversity management for organizational performance. (For critical debates on diversity management in Europe see: Working Lives Research Institute, 2013; Lentin and Titley, 2011; the Second European Network against Racism Ad Hoc Expert Group on Promoting Equality in Employment, Monitoring Diversity Report, Brussels, 8 December 2010; Greene et al., 2005; Wrench, 2005.)

Chapter 5 is probably the most interesting and most contentious chapter from the viewpoint of migrant rights’ networks, trade unionists, human rights NGOs and social movement activists who might contest the authors’ theoretical concept of ‘racial realism’ (and ‘immigrant realism’/‘undocumented realism’) which could be construed as providing a rationale for and legitimizing employer (and state-institutional) exploitation of racialized immigrant and undocumented migrant workers. Presenting research data on sectors of low-skilled employment such as the meatpacking industry, the subject of Upton Sinclair’s classic ‘The Jungle’ (1906), Skrentny, in his description of ‘The Jungle Revisited’ comments on how employers’ preferences linked to racial stereotypes, racial hierarchies, and word of mouth recruitment have led to Latino and Asian immigrant and undocumented labour being considered the best in terms of ‘the ability to work long and hard without complaint’ (p. 222).

This book skilfully presents comprehensive empirical research and is written in a conversational style accessible to a wide audience. The author concludes this excellent book with a set of key principles for legal reform which might accommodate racial realism based on America’s consensus value of equal opportunity. State and corporate social responsibility should be mobilized in a variety of forms and contexts, e.g. encouraging in certain communities plant locations and living wages, employment impact statements, improving workplace health and safety, incentivizing employers (through tax regimes) to recruit displaced domestic workers and break their dependence on exploitable migrant labour.

This reader wonders to what extent the author by basing his suggestions for reform on the level playing field ‘consensus value of equal opportunity’, underplays the deeply entrenched historical patterns of privilege, structural discrimination and racialization which continue to shape racial (class and gender) inequality within US society. In the context of American cultural conservatism, however, this is a significant and timely study that exudes the approach advocated by Cornel West in his 1993 essay ‘The Role of Law in Progressive Politics’.

To compare the concept of racial realism against other theoretical approaches investigating the realities of race, immigration and intense racialization of minorities (Betancur and Herring, 2013: 2), After Civil Rights can be read alongside the following critical studies that use intersectional approaches to challenge discrimination and analyse ‘whiteness’, privilege, and labour, stratified and segmented by race, gender and class.

Exploring Occupational Stereotyping in the New Economy, Gary K Perry in The Intersectional Approach: Transforming The Academy Through Race, Class, & Gender, edited by Michele Tracy Berger and Kathleen Guidroz, 2009;