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Gerald Jaynes and Robin Williams, eds.,A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989); Gunnar Myrdal,An American Dilemma, The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). Originally published in 1944 by Harper and Row. See also the critique of ACommon Destiny presented in James B. Stewart, “Did They Come to Bury Gunnar Myrdal—Or to Praise Him?”Forum For Social Economics, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Fall 1990), 16–32.
Charles V. Willie, Antoine M. Garibaldi and Womie L. Reed, eds.,The Education of African-Americans (Westport, CT: Auburn House, 1991); Wornie L. Reed, ed.,African-Americans, Essential Perspectives (Westport, CT: Auburn House, 1993); Wornie L. Reed with William Darity, Sr. and Noma L. Roberson,Health and Medical Care of African-Americans (Westport, CT: Auburn House, 1993); and Robert Hill, with Andrew Billingsley, Eleanor Engram, Michilene F. Malson, Roger H. Rubin, Carol B. Stack, James B. Stewart, and James E. Teele,Research on the African American Family, A Holistic Perspective (Westport, CT: Auburn House, 1993).
The timeliness of the current inquiry is suggested by the recent publication of a special issue of thePersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin focusing on the self and the collective (October 1994). The introduction by Dale Miller and Deborah Prentice discusses the evolution of psychologists’ interests from the issue of how individuals behave in small groups to the issue of how “groups behave within individuals” (p. 451). They correlate this shift in emphasis with a similar thrust in anthropology, asserting that anthropologists are increasingly treating culture in cognitive terms, as a “conceptual structure.” Miller and Prentice suggest that with this shift “the boundary between the self and culture for anthropologists, like the boundary between the self and the group for social psychologists, has become blurred. It is no longer possible to assert confidently where one ends and the other begins” (p. 451). Turner et al. argue in one article that the emergent properties of group processes entail a shift in self-perception from personal to social identity (John Turner, Penelope Oakes, S. Alexander Haslam, and Craig McGarty, “Self and Collective: Cognition and Social Context,”Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, special issue, The Self and the Collective, 20 (5) (October 1994), 454–463. These authors maintain that this self-categorizing “is inherently variable, fluid, and context dependent, as self-categories are social, comparative and are always relative to a frame of reference” (p. 454). This general perspective is consistent with specific work on the formation of racial identity among blacks by William Cross, who originally posited that individuals with an initial limited attachment to collective racial identity are moved as a result of negative racially based encounters to develop a strong racial group orientation (see William Cross, “The Negro-to-Black Conversion Experience,”Black World (July 1971), 13–27. Similar to the pieces cited earlier, Cross’s update of his work places greater emphasis on the ambiguity between individual identity and group identity (see William Cross,Shades of Black, Diversity in African-American Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). This update also explores the implications of individual deviations from modal indicators of group identity. See also Janet Helms, ed.,Black and White Racial Identity, Theory, Research and Practice (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990).
Kenneth Arrow, “The Theory of Discrimination,” in O. Ashenfelter and A. Rees, eds.,Discrimination in Labor Markets (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 4.
See for example Thomas Sowell,Race and Economics (New York: David McKay Company, 1975); Thomas Sowell,Markets and Minorities (New York: Basic Books, 1981); and Thomas Sowell,Ethnic America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1982).
Alvin Rabushka,A Theory of Racial Harmony (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1974), 4–5.
Rabushka, 6.
Gary S. Becker,The Economics of Discrimination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).
Becker, 16.
Becker, 16.
William Julius Wilson,The Declining Significance of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
John F. Szwed, “Race and the Embodiment of Culture,”Ethnicity 2 (1975), 25. Szwed’s perspective is an example of anthropologists’ treatment of culture as a cognitive construct referenced in note 4.
Gary S. Becker, “A Theory of Social Interactions,”Journal of Political Economy 82 (1974), 1063–1093. The foundations of the present discussion can be found in James B. Stewart, “The Political Economy of Race Relations: Toward an Explanatory and Predictive Theory of Black/White Conflict,” unpublished (1984).
Ubadigbo Okonkwo, “The Economics of Ethnic Discrimination,”The Review of Black Political Economy 3, No. 2 (1973), 1–18.
Okonkwo, 15.
Albert O. Hirschman, “The Changing Tolerance for Income Inequality in the Course of Economic Development,”Quarterly Journal of Economics 87 (1973), 544–566.
Albert Breton,The Economic Theory of Representative Government (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1974). See Appendix for an explanation of the Breton framework.
William C. Wheaton, “On the Possibility of a Market for Externalities,”Journal of Political Economy 80 (1972), 1039–1044.
E. J. Mishan,Welfare Economics: Ten Introductory Essays (New York: Random House, 1969); Martin McGuire, “Group Segregation and Optimal Jurisdictions,”Journal of Political Economy 82 (1974), 112–132.
Mishan, 227.
McGuire, “Group Segregation.”
Breton, “Economic Theory,” 57.
McGuire.
See for example,The Review of Black Political Economy, Special Issue, “Black Community Revitalization: Implementation,” 10, No. 1 (Fall 1979).
Mishan, 226.
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Stewart, J.B. NEA presidential address, 1994. The Review of Black Political Economy 23, 13–36 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02689990
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02689990