Slicing the Political Pie.

T he publication in 1981 of Stanley Lieberson's A Piece of the Pie." Black and White Immigrants Since 1880 constituted an important contribution to our understanding of American race relations. Lieberson describes the differences between blacks and the new immigrant groups from Southern and Eastern Europe who, like blacks, faced extraordinary impediments to success when they entered northern industrial America. The book is divided into two parts. The first, "Structural Background," is concerned principally with questions of government, politics, and public policy. The second, "Socioeconomic Conditions," focuses on education, residential segregation, and occupational trends. Because of a lack of integration between these two parts, and a perplexing omission of political factors from the author's suggestive analytical conclusion, I decided to write this essay. Lieberson's disappointingly uneven treatment of politics impedes an elaboration of his understanding that "linkages between political achievement and various forms of an ethnic group's social and economic mobility are very complicated, involving causal effects in several directions simultaneously." The relationship between black economic and political deprivation was thought to be very clear before the 1960s; that is, before the Voting Rights Act, the social legislation of the Great Society, and the dramatic growth in black officeholding and access to public employment. Poverty and weak political capacity went hand in hand. From this perspective, the solution appeared much the same to the social policy community in Washington and to an emerging civil rights leadership, whether moderate or militant. Rather than alter black economic conditions directly, political empowerment--through the vote, community organization, and group mobilization--would help close the earnings and wealth gaps between white and black Americans. This view proved naive. In the period since the middle 1960s, black political gains have been striking. The Voting Rights Act opened the doors to black political participation in the South and enhanced the potential of the black electorate overall by nationalizing the politics of race. From a low base to be sure, black representation (measured by the number of elected officials) has increased nearly tenfold in just two decades. Black mayors and senior city officials have been elected with significant white as well as black support. Public-sector employment has opened new possibilities for enterprising blacks and their political sponsors. This radical departure has not produced the expected effect of fundamental economic change. Rather, as William J. Wilson has shown, these new political opportunities have contributed to a growing gap between the black middle class and the rest of the black population. Lieberson's comparative and historical project raises the possibility of developing an analysis that finds an appropriate place for political factors in accounting for economic mobility and deprivation. But that possibility is not realized. In this commentary on A Piece of the Pie, therefore, I suggest ways of developing the book's political themes and propose how they might be incorporated into, and thereby strengthen, its central arguments.