Are the urban blacks of today like the European immigrants of
yesterday? When Nathan Glazer first suggested the comparison in the
early 1970s, there was little clear evidence for or against, but
since then leading historians such as Stephan Thernstrom, Herbert
Gutman, and, more recently, Theodore Hershberg have demonstrated
the essential invalidity of the comparison. Professor Lieberson
(Sociology, Univ. of Arizona) here performs sophisticated
statistical analysis of census and other material but fails to
truly revive a rather dead question. Still, if it's data you're
looking for, you'll find it. Lieberson shows first how blacks
differed from the European immigrants in terms of access to
governmental power and access to education. Regarding residential
segregation, he finds that segregation per se has not increased so
much as racial composition has changed, such that "One can
interpret the changing patterns of black-white segregation not as
an effort by whites to increase their segregation from blacks but
merely to maintain it." And in employment he again finds like
others before him that the unions for the most part closed their
doors to the blacks - while opening new doors for the white
immigrants. For such differences, Lieberson looks to social
structural conditions (occupational opportunities, timing and flow
of migration, level of segregation) and to race and discrimination,
although he hesitates to emphasize any one factor. Regarding the
question of race, for example, he states that while "the
disposition to apply the same levels of legal protection and
rights" to the various racial groups "was weaker than that directed
toward white populations," the greatly-improved position of the
Japanese and Chinese may just be related to the idea that "it is
not impossible that whites have a hierarchy with respect to
nonwhites such that blacks and Africans generally rank lower than
Asian groups." The book's main conclusion is equally bland. While
he judges it "a serious mistake" to underestimate the conditions
European immigrants faced upon arrival, it is "equally erroneous to
assume that the obstacles were as great as those faced by blacks or
that the starting point was the same." No news isn't good news:
it's no news, period. (Kirkus Reviews)
There is little question that the descendants of the new European
immigrant groups from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe have
done very well in the United States, reaching levels of achievement
far above blacks. Yet the new Europeans began to migrate to the
United States in 1880, a time when blacks were no longer slaves.
Why have the new immigrants fared better than the blacks? This
volume focuses on the historical origins of the current differences
between the groups. Professor Lieberson scoured early U.S. censuses
and used a variety of offbeat information sources to develop data
that would throw light on this question, as well as provide new
information on occupations at the turn of the century, finding
remarkable parallels between the black position in the urban South
and the urban North.He examines and compares progress in education
and in politics between the new Europeans and the blacks. What were
the effects of segregation? Why did labor unions discriminate more
severely against blacks than against the new immigrant groups? This
book will generate a fresh interpretation of the origins of
black-new European differences, one which explains why other
nonwhite groups, such as the Chinese and Japanese, have done
relatively well.
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