The great divide - continued
Although Wilson generally doesn't talk much about himself, he acknowledges that his upbringing in a small mining town some 40 miles from Pittsburgh had a significant impact on his life. His father, who was a coal miner and steelworker, died of black lung disease at the age of 39, leaving a wife and six children. It was left to ``Billy,'' then a teenager, to care for his younger siblings while his mother cleaned other people's homes.
A family garden and Mrs. Wilson's work as a domestic put food on the table, though Wilson says he and his siblings knew real poverty and hunger at times. Still, he says, there is a difference between the poverty his family knew and the desperate straits the urban and rural poor now find themselves in. ``We were poor, but there was always the feeling that things would improve and get better,'' he says. ``Now, I think there are many people who simply feel stuck. There is no way out for them, no opportunities to advance.''
He recalls that he and his sisters and brothers were expected to improve themselves by going to college. And he credits his father's sister, a social worker who lived in New York, with encouraging him to achieve by taking him to museums in the summer, giving him books to read, and praising his accomplishments in school. ``Everyone needs someone like my aunt in their life,'' notes Wilson. ``She was always encouraging and praising me.''
In fact, his aunt supplemented a partial scholarship Wilson received from the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which allowed him to attend Wilberforce University, a black university in Ohio. Wilson continued his studies at Washington State University, where he received a doctorate in sociology. He began his teaching career at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. By the time his first book, Power, Racism & Privilege, was published in 1973, Wilson had moved from UMass to the University of Chicago, where he lived and worked for 25 years.
Wilson is married and has four children, including two from a previous marriage. His wife, Beverly, a former teacher and manuscript editor, spends a good deal of her time at the couple's second home in New Mexico. During the controversy over The Declining Significance of Race, the fact that Beverly Wilson is white raised the ire of some of critics who had questioned his allegiance to his race.
The Wilsons' two children, Carter, 23, and Paula, 21, are both in college. Carter is a philosophy and religious studies major at the University of Virginia. Paula is an art student at Washington University, in St. Louis.
Those who know Wilson well tend to use words like ``serious,'' ``scholarly,'' and even ``stiff,'' to describe him. Massey, who was recruited by Wilson to the University of Chicago, recalls running into him after a business trip several years ago and hearing Wilson describe with horror the demeanor, dress, and music of a group of youths who were aboard the same plane.
``Apparently, they were listening to some music, 2 Live Crew, I believe, that Bill found distasteful,'' recalls Massey. ``He was really outraged by the way they were dressed, their style and way of talking. It was clear to me that he is pretty out of touch with what is happening among American youth today.''
At the same time, Wilson confesses to having a special admiration for someone like National Basketball Association star Charles Barkley, known for his brash, in-your-face attitude. Although Wilson says he doesn't always agree with Barkley's views, he admires Barkley's reputation as a team player and his determination to succeed, despite his relatively small size for a professional basketball player. ``There is no pretense with Barkley,'' says Wilson, a smile creasing his face. ``He doesn't pretend to be something that he's not.''
Charles Ogletree, a professor and director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, says that he's seen Wilson's more relaxed side. Ogletree remembers a dinner at the home of Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard, when Wilson was being courted by Gates and others from the university.
Shortly after Wilson arrived, Ogletree recalls, ``You could see a transformation occur. You could see him taking off his coat, loosening his tie. ... He knew he was among friendly adversaries and friends. So you could see him relaxing and letting go. It was clear that he felt he was in a nurturing and intellectually challenging environment.''
That meal was part of a five-year effort by Gates to convince Wilson to leave Chicago and come to Harvard. The courtship began with a trip by Gates to Chicago, where he and Wilson had lunch. ``He was nice. He was personable,'' Gates recalls. ``But it was like the batboy talking to Willie Mays. I felt as if he was appraising me and saying to himself, `Hey, come back when you grow up, kid.'''
Gates persisted. ``Once a year, I'd drop him a note. Whenever I'd see him, I'd say, `We're coming to get you.' Then, two years ago, I was at the home of Vice President Al Gore, and Bill was there, too. I hugged Bill, and I said, `I'm coming to get you.' But this time he looked at me and said, `Well, if you're coming, you'd better come soon.'''
Wilson still wavered, however, so Gates pulled out all the stops at his dinner party, inviting Harvard president Neil L. Rudenstine and such prominent Harvard African-American scholars as Ogletree, Cornel West, Orlando Patterson, Anthony Appiah, and Leon and Evelyn Higginbotham. What ensued, says Ogletree, was the kind of dinnertime discussion that was common in the days of W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, something akin to the debates Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X engaged in at the height of the civil rights movement.
``I think he was impressed by our candor,'' says Ogletree. ``He seemed genuinely overwhelmed by the seriousness of the discussion and our willingness to challenge each other about the premises surrounding the positions we had taken. ... I don't think there was a critical mass of black intellectuals in Chicago who not only understood his point of view but were willing to challenge it.''
The coup de grace came at the end of the meal. ``Everyone went around the table, the whole gang,'' recalls Gates. ``Each person said why they felt it was important for Bill to join us. Then we wrote letters telling him how happy we'd be if he would come.''
Edward Laumann, the George Herbert Mead Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and chairman of the sociology department, says the timing was right for Wilson, whose children were grown and who was at a natural crossroads in his life. Harvard also may have been attractive because of the school's close ties with the Washington policy-making establishment, Laumann says. But the recruiting effort would have been hard for anyone to resist. ``Gates laid out the dog,'' he says. ``He had a whole bunch of people at the dinner, and they told Bill they wanted him at Harvard. They wooed him, and that played a big role in getting him to come there.''
For Wilson, the ideas may have been more important than the ego-stroking. ``Here was an opportunity,'' he says, ``to be part of a group of like-minded people who understood what I was trying to do and who were also involved in exciting work.''
When The Declining Significance of Race was published in 1978, many in the civil rights movement accused Wilson of being a traitor to his race. One Chicago activist publicly rebuked him, calling Wilson an ``Uncle Tom.'' The American Association of Black Sociologists charged Wilson with undermining gains made during the civil rights movement.
``It was regarded as very much against the interests of black people to have someone suggest for a minute that race was not always the basis for certain problems, that class also played a role,'' says Laumann.
Even today, mention of the book raises hackles in some quarters. Charles Willie, a black sociologist at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, says he carried on a 10-year feud with Wilson over the book, which Willie describes as a work that ``blamed the poor for being poor.''
But the thesis of the book - that economics, as well as racism, is an underlying cause of the deterioration of many urban neighborhoods - is a notion that Wilson adheres to this day. He says that the last two decades have not been prosperous for unskilled Americans of any race, and that poor whites and blacks may have more in common than poor blacks and middle-class blacks. ``Although race is clearly a significant variable in the social outcomes of inner-city blacks, it's not the only factor,'' he writes in his latest book.
``Americans have common interests and concerns that cross racial and class boundaries - such as unemployment and job security, declining real wages, escalating medical and housing costs, the scarcity of quality child care, [and] the sharp decline in the quality of public education.''
Indeed, without blaming the black middle class for fleeing poor and increasingly inhospitable urban neighborhoods, Wilson says that their departure sped the decline of those neighborhoods by removing the buying power that supported businesses and jobs. This, too, rankles critics. ``Bill has made a big point about black out-migration playing a role in segregating the black poor,'' notes Massey. ``The truth is, the black middle classes are still caught between a rock and a hard place. ... They really have a harder time putting distance between themselves and the urban poor.''
Wilson has hardly forgotten the bitter debate that raged over the book, and he still feels the sting of the criticism. ``I have never said, nor did I mean, that racism had ended or declined,'' Wilson says today. ``Racism is still very much alive.''
Now, 19 years after The Declining Significance of Race was published, much of what Wilson predicted - widening class divisions between higher- and lower-income blacks and increased isolation of the inner-city poor - has come to pass. And with the gains of the civil rights movement, race is no longer the sole or even primary means of examining the issues, Wilson says. ``For the first time in the 20th century,'' he says, ``middle-class and upper-middle-class blacks are now in a position to pass on privileges to their children that they could not have passed on before, because race dominated everything.''
There is a story that Wilson tells students in the class he teaches at Harvard called ``Race, Class, and Poverty in Urban America.'' The story is meant as an analogy, a real-life example of how and why racial antagonism occurs - and one that also illustrates how economics, as well as racism, can be a cause of racial problems.
Wilson recalls that while strolling through the streets of the Swedish town of Uppsala in 1978, he and a friend from Singapore came across a wall on which was scrawled the words ``Niggers go home.''
``Not to worry,'' said Wilson's friend. ``This is not directed at you.'' Instead, the angry words had been painted in reaction to the thousands of Italian guest workers who had flooded an already swollen job market.
Seated in front of a blackboard in a classroom at the JFK School of Government, Wilson tells 22 graduate students that the paint-spattered wall was symbolic of the impact economic change can have on race and ethnic relations; intolerance does not occur in a vacuum.
``Racial antagonism is part of a situation,'' Wilson says, his eyes scanning the classroom. He pauses a moment to bring the argument closer to home. The current wave of anger that has swept this country over US immigration, for example, is caused in part by some of the same economic factors that created the tensions facing those Italian guest workers when they traveled to Sweden for jobs almost 20 years ago. ``The truth is, whenever there is economic stagnation, people are more susceptible to demagoguery,'' Wilson says.
At the same time, Wilson notes that racism has had a profound and long-ranging impact on the lives of African-Americans. He points to the years between the end of the Civil War and 1880 as a period when significant educational strides were made by freed black men and women, with black enrollment in Southern public schools rising from 91,000 to 785,000, surpassing white enrollment in some communities. But by 1880, several factors, including a depressed economy, combined to halt and eventually reverse those gains. New laws were introduced that reduced education expenditures for black students in some states, cut their teachers' pay, and reduced the number of hours the students could spend in school.
As he looks up from his notes, a fleeting expression of regret and anger passes across Wilson's face. ``Can you imagine?'' he asks the class. ``Can you imagine what might have happened if they had been allowed to proceed at that pace?'' Then, voice rising, he urges the class to consider the possibilities.
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