16

One Nation, Divisible

In which the numbers are expanded to include all Americans, and it is shown that what you see in white America is what is happening throughout all of America.

THIS BOOK HAS focused on the fortunes of whites as a way of stripping away distractions and concentrating on my thesis: Our nation is coming apart at the seams—not ethnic seams, but the seams of class. Having made that case in terms of whites, we cannot try to peer into the future without examining the picture when everyone else is brought into it.

Intuitively, it would seem that adding in the rest of America must make the situation even bleaker for Fishtown, and the separation with Belmont even greater. Problems in white working-class America may have been worsening under the radar, but problems in black America have attracted coverage for decades, and many of the numbers that have gotten so much publicity—the breakdown of marriage, dropout from the labor force, and crime—have used the same measures that I presented in part 2.

It was a surprise to me and perhaps it will be a surprise to you: Expanding the data to include all Americans makes hardly any difference at all. I will not replicate all of the graphs in part 2, but a representative sampling of the indicators will illustrate the point.

Marriage

Figure 16.1 shows what happens to the marriage numbers when blacks, Latinos, and everyone else are added to Belmont and Fishtown according to the same assignment rules that governed the assignment of whites. The lines in the graphs labeled “All Fishtown” thus refer to the entire American working class (and below), and “All Belmont” refers to the entire American upper-middle class (and above). As before, I focus on adults ages 30–49.

FIGURE 16.1. MARRIAGE FOR ALL PRIME-AGE ADULTS

Source: IPUMS CPS. Samples limited to persons ages 30–49.

It is no surprise that the lines for All Belmont and White Belmont are so close together—as of 2010, whites constituted 76 percent of the population of All Belmont, and another 10 percent were East Asians, Southeast Asians, and South Asians, whose demographic characteristics among the college-educated are similar to those of whites.

But All Fishtown was only 63 percent white in 2010. Yet the percentage of married people in All Fishtown in 2010 was the same as in White Fishtown—about 48 percent. How is this possible, when only 42 percent of prime-age Fishtown blacks were married in 2010? The answer for marriage applies to other indicators as well. The racial composition of All Fishtown in 2010 was 63 percent white, 12 percent black, 16 percent Latino, and 9 percent “other.” Fishtown blacks had a somewhat lower marriage rate than whites, but 50 percent of Fishtown Latinos were married and 56 percent of the “Others” were married. Both percentages were higher than the 48 percent among Fishtown whites. Net result: a marriage rate for All Fishtown that was about the same as the marriage rate for White Fishtown.

The same picture emerges for the other indicators in the chapter on marriage. All Fishtown and White Fishtown were not identical as of 2010 on trends in divorce and the never-married population, but they were only a few percentage points apart. Even when we turn to the most notorious of the family problems in the African American community, children being raised by mothers without the father present, All Fishtown and White Fishtown are quite similar, as shown in Figure 16.2.

FIGURE 16.2. CHILDREN STILL LIVING WITH BOTH BIOLOGICAL PARENTS WHEN THE MOTHER IS AGE 40, FOR ALL MOTHERS

Source: NLS Mature Women, NLS Young Women, NLSY-79.

As of 2005, 37 percent of children in White Fishtown were still living with both biological parents when the mother was age 40, compared to 30 percent of children in All Fishtown—a minor difference. The main story line is that the baseline figures in 1960 were 95 percent and 95 percent, respectively, and that the disaster has struck Fishtown no matter which racial aggregation is used—and that the intact family remained strong in Belmont, no matter which racial aggregation is used.

Industriousness

Figure 16.3 shows the story for labor force participation among males ages 30–49.

FIGURE 16.3. MALE LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION BY EDUCATION FOR ALL PRIME-AGE MEN

Source: IPUMS CPS. Samples limited to persons ages 30–49.

As you may recall from chapter 9, the Belmont-Fishtown breakdown for analyzing labor force participation isn’t feasible because so many people who are out of the labor force have no occupation. Figure 16.3 therefore compares men with no more than twelve years of education with those who have at least sixteen years of education. Once again, the percentage for whites as of 2010 was virtually identical with the percentage for the whole population, and for the same reason that the marriage rates were so close: Blacks have a much higher proportion of low-education males out of the labor force than whites, but the growing proportion of Latinos, who have higher labor force participation than whites, made up the difference.

In the chapter on industriousness, the summary indicator was the percentage of households in which the head of household or the spouse worked at least forty hours in the preceding week. Figure 16.4 shows how that indicator looks when we expand the population to include everybody.

FIGURE 16.4. HOUSEHOLD IN WHICH THE HEAD OR SPOUSE WORKED 40 HOURS IN THE PRECEDING WEEK FOR ALL PRIME-AGEADULTS

Source: IPUMS CPS. Samples limited to persons ages 30–49.

In this case, a noticeable gap opened up between White Fishtown and All Fishtown in the 1980s and 1990s, but it closed to nearly zero in the 2000s.

Honesty

At last, we have an indicator that looks considerably worse when we include everybody than when the analysis is limited to whites: imprisonment, as shown in Figure 16.5.

As of the 2004 inmate survey (the most recent one), the imprisonment rate was 63 percent higher for all males than for white males. But when we turn from imprisonment to arrest rates, we’re back to a picture of minor differences between white Fishtown and multiracial Fishtown in the most recent data. Figure 16.6 shows the trends for violent crime.

FIGURE 16.5. INMATES IN STATE AND FEDERAL PRISONS FOR ALL PRIME-AGE MALES

Source: The state and federal inmate surveys. Prisoner sample limited to males ages 20–49. The denominator is based on persons ages 30–49.

A major gap between White Fishtown and All Fishtown developed during the 1970s and 1980s, but by 2009 it had diminished substantially for violent crime and had nearly disappeared for property crime. The juxtaposition of the racial discrepancy in imprisonment and the closing of the racial gap in arrests lends itself to two narratives. One argues that we are currently overimprisoning blacks and Latinos, given the similarity of current arrest rates in Fishtown. The other narrative argues that the reason we have seen arrests drop more among Fishtown blacks and Latinos than among Fishtown whites is because they were imprisoned at higher rates. I will leave it to others to debate the merits of the alternative narratives.

FIGURE 16.6. ARREST RATES WHEN THE SAMPLES ARE EXPANDED TO INCLUDE ALL PRIME-AGE ADULTS

Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports.

Religiosity

In chapter 11, I summarized the difference between Belmont and Fishtown by defining the religious core of a community as the percentage of people who both attended worship services regularly and said they had a strong religious affiliation. The result when other ethnic groups are added to Fishtown is shown in Figure 16.7.

FIGURE 16.7. THE RELIGIOUS CORE FOR ALL PRIME-AGE ADULTS

Source: GSS. Samples limited to persons ages 30–49.

Not only is the religious core as large in All Belmont as it is in White Belmont, it is larger in All Fishtown than it is in White Fishtown. Unfortunately, the difference is not great—14 percent of All Fishtown consisted of people with a strong religious affiliation who also attended church regularly, compared to 11 percent of White Fishtown, and both proportions are quite small.

Happiness

Finally, what about the numbers of Americans who consider themselves to be “very happy”? Once again, being white has little to do with it, as shown in Figure 16.8.

FIGURE 16.8. HAPPINESS FOR ALL PRIME-AGE ADULTS

Source: GSS. Samples limited to persons ages 30–49.

For both Belmont and Fishtown, the differences in the percentages of white Americans and all Americans who reported they were very happy were trivial throughout the time that the GSS has been asking the question.

IN THE PROLOGUE, I said that I would describe the state of white America from 1960 through 2010. That purpose is even proclaimed in the subtitle of the book. No matter how I explained my reasons for doing so, there had to remain some sense among many of you that this was an odd thing to do, and perhaps disturbing, when the United States is moving from a white-dominated culture to one in which whites are just the most numerous of many different races and ethnicities. Now, as we turn to the final chapter and a consideration of where the nation might go from here, it can be said:

We are one nation, indivisible, in terms of whites and people of color. Differences in the fortunes of different ethnic groups persist, but white America is not headed in one direction and nonwhite America in another. We are divisible in terms of class. The coming apart at the seams has not been confined to whites, nor will its evil effects be confined to whites. Coming Apart may have told the story of white America, but its message is about all of America.