Ethnicity-based research and politics: snapshots from the United States and New Zealand.

• Author: Baehler, Karen

Abstract

Some developments in poverty and ethnic inequality have followed similar trajectories in New Zealand and the United States, as have the political responses to such developments. This paper examines episodes in both countries in which political backlash against controversial policy analysis threatened to block worthy research and debate. Drawing on recent controversies over Simon Chapple's paper on Maori socioeconomic disparities, this article calls for a political climate that will support vigorous research into the full range of factors needed to explain advantage and disadvantage.

INTRODUCTION

Simon Chapple was a senior analyst in the New Zealand Department of Labour in 2000 when he wrote "Maori Socio-Economic Disparity", a wide-ranging paper that marshals evidence intended to show, among other things, that disadvantage in New Zealand is more closely tied to age, marital status, education, skills, and geographic location than it is to ethnicity, broadly conceived. (2) Although the paper did not issue clear recommendations for policy, Chapple's conclusions pointed toward a gap-closing policy that would target pockets of disadvantage defined geographically and perhaps by sub-cultural features, rather than by targeting services to Maori as Maori.

As is well known, leaders of the ACT party used the Chapple paper to fuel a backlash against the Government's "closing the gaps" policy in late 1999 and early 2000. The attacks by MPs Muriel Newman and Richard Prebble were reinforced by favourable commentary on Chapple's analysis from less extreme quarters, such as Simon Upton's web-based opinion column (Newman 2000, Prebble 2000, Upton 2000). Ultimately, the momentum of the Chapple-induced debates contributed to the Government's decisions to remove the phrase "closing the gaps" from its vocabulary, to re-label the Government's policy "social equity," and to commit to fighting economic disadvantage rather than ethnic disparities (Young 2000a). This wave of backlash then produced a counter-backlash in which supporters of the Government's original policy sought to discredit Chapple's reasoning (3), and, ultimately, Chapple himself (Young 2000b).

This article draws on a somewhat similar episode in the history of American policy analysis in order to (1) illustrate the dangers of silencing debate about racial and ethnic disparities, and (2) discuss elements of an agenda for furthering our understanding of the Maori/non-Maori gap in labour market and Other outcomes.

BACKLASH AND THE COSTS OF SILENCE--AN AMERICAN INSTANCE

Observers of the American scene have witnessed what can happen when a policy analyst foresees a social problem but political backlash silences debate and blocks action.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, now retired from the United States Senate, was a senior official in President Lyndon Johnson's Labor Department in 1965 when he wrote The Negro Family: A Case for National Action. That report warned the country that the achievements of the civil rights era could be endangered by the growing trend toward breakdown of the African-American family. He hypothesised from available evidence that the social disorganisation suffered by blacks who migrated to the cities after World War II had grown so deep that it could not respond to improvements in economic indicators, even to the achievement of full employment. According to his thesis, deprivation and disorganisation had formed their own vicious circle.

At the centre of that vicious circle sat the demographic evidence about family structure. Although Moynihan was not the first analyst to describe the breakdown of the black family in terms of divorce, out-of-wedlock births, sole-parent families headed by women, and welfare dependency (see, for example, Frazier 1939), he provided new statistical evidence and a model to explain it in his 1965 report. Most importantly, he caught the attention of President Johnson's White House with his warning that black patterns of family breakdown and welfare receipt endangered the achievements of the civil rights movement. In Moynihan's own words (1986:27):

My hypothesis was that a group in which a very large proportion of children are raised in the generalized disorder of welfare dependency will have a disproportionate number of persons not equal to their opportunities. In consequence, there would not be equal results. President Johnson took up the message in his 1965 commencement address at Howard University, pledging to the graduates a renewed assault on "the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity--not just legal equity but human ability--not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result" (quoted in Moynihan 1986:33). Black civil rights leaders applauded the president's speech. The White House began planning for a national conference to pursue the president's pledge to close outcome gaps.

But by the time the White House conference convened in 1966 under the banner "To Fulfill These Rights", the subject of the black family had become all but taboo. In the year between President Johnson's speech and the conference, many influential civil rights leaders had labeled Moynihan's report a subtle form of racism because of its unflattering portrayal of the black family (Wilson 1987). (4) The renunciation of the Moynihan report by black leaders was so effective that it led to an unofficial ban on political discussions of black family dynamics and social structure. Social scientists, policy analysts and political figures of all races cut a wide path around the subject for 10 years after publication of what has come to be known as the Moynihan Report.

Research Constricts and Policy Shifts

How does a social science and public policy community as diverse and sprawling as the United States maintain a virtual ban on a research topic for more than a decade? Firstly, and most obviously, no one wanted to experience the wrath that had been visited upon Moynihan. The threat of political backlash made it easy to put the problem of race-based social structure in the too-hard basket. Secondly, the experiences of the African-American population bifurcated in the 1970s, and the rapid rise of a successful, highly visible black middle class--the great success story of the post-civil rights era--made the problems of the ghetto easier to forget.

As the within-group class differences for blacks began to overshadow between-group racial differences, sociologist William Julius Wilson (1978) reported "the declining significance of race" as an explanation of American social outcomes. His pronouncement was promptly taken out of context and used to support the false assertion that blacks as a group had reached parity with whites and that full equality of opportunity had been realised at last (Wilson 1987). For those who held this view, a natural corollary followed: that inner-city blacks who did not take advantage of equal opportunity and did not make the step up to the middle class suffered from strictly personal and behavioural failings rather than systemic or structural obstacles (Gilder 1981, Murray 1984, Sowell 1984).

The virtual moratorium on serious study of black social structure that followed the Moynihan controversy left a void into which conservative scholars poured their theories of behavioural poverty (Wilson 1987). Since then, political disputes about socio-economic disparities across races have often taken an overly simple, bimodal form: disadvantage is...