SIR ARTHUR LEWIS

The economic status of blacks in the United States is fundamental to our social status in that if our economic status were right, three-quarters of the problems would be solved.

Let us look at a hierarchy of all the jobs in the economic system. Of the highest-level jobs—those paying $20,000 a year and more—blacks, who comprise eleven per cent of the population, hold about 1 per cent. At the second level—jobs paying between $10,000 and $20,000—blacks hold about 3 per cent. In the jobs at the third level—those paying between $6,000 and $10,000—the percentage of blacks is about 7. They hold 14 per cent of the jobs at the bottom of the system. On the three levels with salaries from $6,000 a year upwards, blacks hold about two million too few jobs and the same number too many at the bottom of the hierarchy.

The central economic strategy of the black community has to be to get its fair share of the jobs all the way through the hierarchy: at least 11 per cent at the top and in the middle and not more than 11 per cent at the bottom. Until this happens, the black community is neither making its full contribution to the American economy nor getting its share of the outcome.

sir arthur lewis, ph.d., L.H.D., LL.D., former Professor of Economics and International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, is currently President of the Caribbean Development Bank. He has held professorships in several universities in England and the West Indies. He is an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics and a member of the American Philosophical Society. He has written a number of books on economics and political economy.

The current situation is due partly to deficiencies in education and partly to discrimination, with the educational deficiencies being largely the result of discrimination.

The results of educational deficiencies show very plainly at the top. Only 4 per cent of doctors are blacks because of restrictions in the medical schools. Only 2 per cent of engineers are blacks, only 2 per cent of people in the highest managerial positions, and so on. Blacks are particularly disadvantaged for getting to the top because the people there are recruited from a very few colleges, most of which until recently would take only a few token black students. Two-thirds of all the people in Who's Who in America went to only 50 out of the nearly 2,000 colleges in the United States. Black students could not get into these 50 colleges. The recent irruption of black students into the Ivy League colleges is crucial to the chance of the black community getting its fair share of the highest-level jobs.

In terms of numbers, however, what matters most is the middle rather than the top, since most of the missing two million jobs are in the middle. Here, too, educational deficiencies play a part. Most of these jobs require four years of high school education, and the proportion of blacks who have completed secondary education is less than two-thirds the proportion of whites who have done so. But in the middle, especially in the jobs ranging between $6,000 and $10,000, it is discrimination rather than lack of education that is decisive, for we know that at this level blacks are often better educated than the whites alongside whom they work. This is because blacks are not given jobs they are qualified for, and so have to take inferior jobs. Thus we know that the median income of a white with only an elementary school education exceeds that of a black with four years of high school education, and whites with only a high school education have a higher median than have blacks with a college education.

We also know that one of the reasons why so many young blacks have dropped out of high school has been their knowledge that they would not be given the jobs for which the high school diploma would qualify them. It is necessary to get rid of racial discrimination in jobs if the educational picture is to come right.

In the third layer of jobs, which runs from about $6,000 a year upward, one has to distinguish between white-collar and blue-collar jobs, mainly because the blue-collar jobs arc controlled by unions and hence arc a tougher nut to crack than the white-collar jobs.

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Actually, blacks have moved rather swiftly during the past ten years in the white-collar jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the proportion of blacks in all white-collar jobs rising from 4 per cent to 6 between I960 and 1969. 1 hat is a good deal of progress in nine years. It means that blacks now hold three-quarters of a million more upper-level jobs than they would be holding with the percentage of 1960. It still leaves the black community short of two million upper-level jobs, but those who have worked so hard to make this much progress can take heart and congratulate themselves.

The way one looks at such situations depends partly on one's temperament. If I am crossing the road and a bus knocks me down and breaks my leg, some of my friends will tell me how unlucky I am to have had this happen, while others will say how lucky I am to have escaped so lightly. In the same way, I think, we can congratulate ourselves on having moved so swiftly in the white-collar jobs during the sixties, while recognizing at the same time that there is still a tremendous way to go.

In numerical terms the greatest progress has been at the clerical level and in other such white-collar jobs. This is helped by a change that is occurring in educational patterns. Many employers have traditionally recruited large numbers of young people at the high school level, for example, to be secretaries, bank clerks, or sales personnel in stores. It was easy to get intelligent and highly-motivated young white people at the high school level, say, twenty years ago, when the proportion going on to college was small; so it was difficult in those days for blacks to get such jobs no matter how many high school diplomas they might hold. For instance, in 1960 only 2 per cent of secretaries were black. Now the situation has changed. With half the white youngsters going on to college, it is not so easy to pick up intelligent, motivated young white people at the high school level. Some employers arc upgrading and taking only college graduates for what used to be high school jobs. Others have turned to the black high schools and are at last giving the black youngsters a chance. In the last few years we have seen blacks in increasing numbers as secretaries or bank clerks, in department stores, and in other jobs from which they were previously barred.

Of course, quite soon most of the good young blacks also will be going on to college; but in the meantime we shall have thrown down barriers that nobody is going to raise again. At present, the percentage of blacks going to college is only about half that of whites. Here also we have a gap to close.

This shortage of white high school graduates, which is opening the way for black high school graduates in the white-collar jobs, should have an important side effect in forcing business corporations to take an active interest in the quality of education for black children. For decades these corporations have interested themselves in the quality of white high schools, because the white children were their future employees. They have cheerfully paid higher school taxes and have encouraged their executives to sit on school boards and participate in PTA's. They have heard that black schooling was poor, but they have not felt any need to do anything about it. Now that the corporations are having to recruit from the black high schools, they arc going to be forced to take an interest in the quality of black education.

When we turn from the white-collar to the blue-collar jobs, the prospect is not so optimistic. The liberal racial attitude that we now find at the top of the white establishment has scarcely sifted down to the blue-collar level. Many of the people here are sons of recent immigrants who came to America from eastern and southern Europe long after the American Civil War. If you ask them, they will say, "We owe the Negro nothing. We never owned slaves. Our fathers came to the States just as poor and illiterate as the Negroes, and we have worked our way up entirely by our own efforts. We never took anything from the Negroes, so there is no reason why we should give up for them what we have earned for ourselves. It is the WASPS who need to have a conscience about Negroes, not we." The thing that is missing from this recital is their failure to recognize the barriers that these same people have put in the way of Negro advancement, the refusal of their trades unions to accept Negroes or to take them as apprentices, their refusal to work under Negro supervisors or foremen, which denies promotion to blacks, or their insistence upon confining blacks into overcrowded ghettos. These people have done more than any other group to put barriers in the way of the economic advancement of blacks in America.

Some progress has been made even at the blue-collar level. At the end of the 1950's and in the early 1960's, the AFL-CIO launched a campaign to open all unions to Negroes, and by now nearly every union in the nation is, in theory, open. Theory is not, however, always the same as practice. Neither does what happens on the shop floor always conform to what the national leadership may genuinely want. It is on the shop floor that questions of promotion arc decided, that men are selected for special training, and so on, and it is at this level that racial prejudice takes the highest toll, preventing the employment and advancement of black workers. This is a bitter struggle that black workers will be fighting for some time; the emergence of militant black trade union leaders is going to play a major role in it.

Some black leaders believe that this struggle can never be won, that white employees will never concede equality and promotion to black employees. Therefore they deduce that the only way for blacks to get their fair share is to establish their own black economy alongside the white economy. This has become a subject of heated argument in black circles. Some leading black economists denounce the whole conception of a separate black economy as a blind alley. They argue that small business has a precarious hold in the American economy, and that encouraging black capitalists in this direction would mainly use up a lot of energy and capital without contributing significantly to the well-being of millions of black workers. To them what we need is an all-out assault on the white corporations to ensure that black employees in American business get fair training and promotion.

I think the correct approach to this controversy is to distinguish between the types of business that will surely go black and the types of business that are going to remain under white control for a very long time. Blacks can expect to control most of the service industries in the ghetto areas: the professions, like medicine, the church, the barber shops, the undertakers' establishments, restaurants, the small shops (insofar as small shops can stand up to the big chains), and even perhaps some of the financial business like banking and insurance. But the proportion of people employable in such service trades is much less than half. Most blacks have to work in manufacturing, railway transportation, or other kinds of business dominated by the giant corporations; and as far ahead as we can see there is not much prospect of blacks taking over or creating such giant corporations. There is not going to be a black General Motors in the near future. But General Motors employs a vast number of black employees, whom it mostly keeps at the very bottom of its organization.

So, while the development of black capitalism in the ghettos and outside is a useful part of black economic strategy, much more important at this time is to try to remove the barriers that arc keeping blacks at the bottom of white organizations in which most of us have to work.

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The prejudice of his white fellow-workers is not the only obstacle to the black worker's progress. Another obstacle for the northern Negro is the pressure resulting from the continuous immigration of Negroes from the southern states to the point where there are now just as many blacks in the North as in the South. Since the migration has been particularly rapid since 1945, more than half the adult blacks now in the North were educated, or rather failed to be educated, in the South. The northern economy is a highly sophisticated mechanical one. When people lacking education and overt skills come into it, they cannot compete with machines at $1.50 an hour. The deficiencies of the southern education therefore strike them hard. The migration also puts great pressure on overcrowding the ghettos. This migration is likely to continue for at least two decades, and while it continues the economic situation of northern blacks will continue to be grave unless the South can really be forced to give its black citizens a decent education.

But migration is not the only cause of northern poverty. Beyond this lies a failure of the social will that I can best describe in the following way:

If we take the world's ten leading industrial countries, in Europe, North America, and Australasia, the United States is distinguished by being the only one that still retains what Karl Marx called a "lumpenproletariat," that is to say, a bottom class of extremely depressed people—unemployed, homeless, illiterate, and with a high propensity for crime. I say "still retains" because all the European countries used to have such a class—you can read about them in the novels of diaries Dickens—but this class has been abolished in northwest Europe as part of a deliberate policy, which has included excellent elementary schools, replacement of slums by public housing, universal health measures, and full employment. If we take the ten leading countries, the United States is at or near the bottom in all the indices of social health. It has the highest rate of maternal mortality in childbirth, the highest rate of infant mortality, the highest rate of illiteracy, the highest crime rate, and so on.

Americans persuade themselves that theirs is a racial problem, but in fact it differs in no way from the similar European problem of fifty years ago. It is simply a class problem. Actually there are more than twice as many whites as blacks living below the poverty line. But somehow the idea that this is primarily a black phenomenon is promoted, so that those who want to keep the blacks in filth succeed in keeping twice as many whites in filth, too. But I do not think that any American doubts that if the United States wished to abolish its "lumpenprolctariat" it could do so even more quickly than has been accomplished in western Europe, given its much greater resources.

The needs of the black working class are simple; they are the same as those of workers everywhere in the world. As do all workers, blacks look to the government for decent houses, good schools, good public health services, and full employment.

As for full employment, the Republican Governors Conference voted three years ago that the federal government should become an employer of last resort. That is to say that any unemployed person should be able to get employment from the federal government. And if we could link this with a decent housing program, new schools and hospitals, and the currently popular measures for rescuing the environment, the government would indeed have no difficulty in providing work for all who sought it. The poverty problem is not difficult to solve if we give our mind to it. What is lacking is the social will.

I said at the beginning that if we could solve the economic problem, three-quarters of the racial problem would be solved. In most countries where racial tension prevails it is based on both class and culture, in the sense that one of the races holds a superior economic position. Part of the tension between blacks and whites in the United States derives from the economic inferiority of the blacks. This part would disappear if the economic status of blacks were the same as that of whites; that is to say if blacks had 11 per cent of all the jobs all the way up the economic ladder. Moreover, the economic tension is usually more bitter than the cultural tension. If one could get rid of the economic tension, the two races would still be separate and would still, for the most part, live their own social lives, but without class tension cultural tension would be much reduced.

We are not going to solve the economic problems without a bitter struggle, especially to get for the black population its proper share of middle and upper jobs. But it took a bitter struggle to win our legal rights, and I have no doubt that similar perseverance will also win our economic rights.

Reprinted From: JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND HEALTH Vol.9 No. 4 October 1970