Yale prof examines race relations in the Obama era
New Haven >> Race relations in the Obama era are in a state of flux, a Yale expert on economics, immigration and the African American experience said Wednesday.
Likewise, the idea of what it means to be an American stands ready for re-examination, said Gerald Jaynes, who teaches economics and African American studies.
“This flux, this thing we call race relations in the United States, the future of this ongoing experiment in democracy, is probably more difficult at this point in time to extrapolate into the future than at any previous time,” Jaynes said.
On the one hand, demographic trends are likely to make America increasingly more ethnically diverse, he explained. On the other hand, economic inequality looms as one of the biggest threats to the American identity.
Organized by Yale’s Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity, much of the talk centered on what Jaynes termed the “black-white paradigm.” It is the idea that contemporary race relations tend to be viewed only through the prism of the historical relationship between African Americans and Americans of European descent.
Jaynes said the “black-white paradigm” explains everything from whites who feel they’ve lost a measure of their standing in American life to blacks who didn’t believe an African American could be elected president.
Regarding President Barack Obama, Jaynes noted that some critics from the “so-called left” have taken Obama to task for not being forceful enough in the fight against African American poverty. Jaynes said being overt on that topic would be politically unwise for the president, whereas fighting poverty on a broader scale helps poor people of every ethnicity.
Jaynes, who has testified before Congress numerous times on economic issues and served on a variety of local and national boards and agencies, is no stranger to controversy.
For example, he conducted a study in 2000 with sociologist Franklin Wilson that showed immigration did not make a significant negative impact on African Americans. The findings drew considerable criticism from black scholars, Jaynes said.
Similarly, he finds it “problematic” to attribute today’s poverty entirely to the lasting consequences of slavery.
“Far be it from me to say slavery didn’t play some role,” he said, but “more likely, the behavior of all Americans, post-Civil War to today, played a role in where we are today.”
All too often, he explained, people mythologize or oversimplify group dynamics in American society, based on their own particular experience. Younger Americans, for instance, fail to realize that many of today’s African American institutions didn’t exist before the 1950s. Another example is members of the media who refer to “the black community,” when they really mean only the poorest African Americans.
Jaynes admitted that he fell prey to the “black-white paradigm” during the 2008 Democratic primaries. An African American candidate could never get enough white votes to win the nomination, he thought.
“I had fallen into my own trap,” he said.