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CHAPTER 16 Social Tensions and Culture Wars

The ideological and cultural warfare that raged within this country during the 1990s originated in some of the conflicts that had begun in the 1960s. Culture wars intensified after 1992, following Bill Clinton’s electoral triumph, which broke the Republican twelve- year hold on the White House. Deeply disappointed conservatives, particularly those on the Religious Right, believed that Clinton, the first baby-boomer president, epitomized all that had gone wrong with contemporary society and culture. They decried what they perceived to be a wide range of declines. Liberals, tolerant of many of the trends that conservatives denounced, joined by commercial interests profiting from some of them, battled back. They denounced conservatives as fanatics, bigots, and censors.

American society was also driven during these years by profound divisions. An immigration explosion, an unintended consequence of the overhaul of American immigration policy during the heyday of Great Society reformism, revived immigration as a powerful social force and gave rise to demands for imposing new restrictions. An upsurge of multiculturalism, driven by the rights-conscious efforts of second-generation middle-class Asians and Hispanics, challenged the Anglocentrism of American popular culture. These challenges provoked furious responses from the defenders of the status quo. The class and racial divisions that had forever separated African Americans and white people continued in the 1990s, ensuring that black–white racial polarization perpetuated the most serious economic and social fissures of the era.

2000: A DEMOGRAPHIC PROFILE

During the decade of the 1990s, the nation’s population grew from 247 million to 281 million. The decennial increase of 34 million people was the largest ever. One-third of the nation’s population growth in the decade came from the influx of immigrants. Most of the immigrants emigrated from Hispanic countries within the Western Hemisphere or from a Pacific island or Asian nation. The new immigrants flocked to the big cities, but they also spread into all regions of the country.

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As the 1990s ended, there were 56 million Americans who were either immigrants or the children of immigrants, the largest number in U.S. history.

In New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other metropolises, the new Hispanic and Asian populations settled into ethnic neighborhoods where they brought their distinctive cultures, manners, and styles. America’s big cities became home to the most diverse populations in world history.

While cultural diversity brought energy and vitality, and made America’s big cities the most vibrant urban centers in the world, it also exacerbated social tensions. The huge influx of new people during the 1990s triggered an upsurge of nativism. In 1994 California voters approved Proposition 187, a ballot initiative that barred undocumented aliens from access to public schools, health clinics, and all other social services. Federal courts declared most of the initiative’s provisions unconstitutional, and it was never enforced.

In addition, the 2000 census highlighted the growing variety of household living arrangements in America. Nuclear families comprised less than one-fourth of the nation’s households, just as many households were made up of a person living alone. The number of single mothers heading a household increased rapidly during the decade, especially among minority populations. In 1999 there were nearly 14 million single-parent families, most headed by a woman who had never married. Approximately 15 percent of American households were poor, about the same proportion that could be found in this country in 1965. The large increase in poor, single-parent families during the 1990s held ominous implications for millions of America’s children. The rates for teenage eating disorders, drug use, depression, and suicide all rose. Adolescents were one of the highest-risk groups for contracting AIDS.

At the other end of the age spectrum, the 2000 census showed there were 35 million people, age sixty-five and older, living within the United States. Although the age sixty-five and older groups increased rapidly during the 1990s, their proportion of the total population actually declined from 12.6 percent in 1990 to 12.4 percent in 2000. For the first time in the history of the census, the age sixty-five and older population had not grown faster than the total population! In two regions, the Midwest and the South, the proportion of the population aged sixty-five and older actually declined. Among the older population categories, those age eighty-five and older showed the largest percentage increase. Among the age sixty-five and older groups, women significantly outnumbered men. In 2000, there were 20.6 million women to 14.4 million men, roughly 60 percent women to 40 percent men.

BUST, BOOM, AND BUST

Many intertwined problems, worsened by the recession that struck in the early 1990s, hampered the American economy. The recession had two major causes: cuts in military spending in the aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of commercial real estate markets in the wake of the overexpansion of the 1980s. The annual trade deficit ranged between $40 billion and $60 billion. Annual federal deficits continued to run up huge amounts of red ink. The national debt reached $4 trillion in 1992 and was approaching $5 trillion in 1995. The Federal Reserve Board slashed interest rates to thirty-year lows, but the economy did not recover. During the recession, about 9 million unemployed workers struggled to find jobs. Housing starts, new car sales, and business investment plummeted.

Long-term structural weaknesses of the U.S. economy that had first appeared during the early 1970s persisted into the 1990s. From 1890 to 1970, the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 3.5 percent, adjusted for inflation. That rate of economic growth, sustained over much

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of the twentieth century, more than any other single factor, created a prosperous middle- class society. Since 1973, including the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s, the annual rate of growth has averaged 2.2 percent. Sharply declining growth rates have had devastating impacts on millions of middle-class families. Since the mid-1970s, both real income and the annual share of national income earned by the middle classes have been sinking.

By the mid-1990s, the U.S. economy had recovered from recession. By 1996, American industry once again led the world in productive efficiency. U.S. automakers dominated the markets for popular minivans, light trucks, and off-road vehicles. In 1998 and 1999, American-made, powerful, and expensive sport utility vehicles (SUVs) were the vehicles of choice for those who could afford them.

The stock market soared to record highs in the late 1990s, with high-tech stocks leading the way. The Dow Jones Index of thirty industrial stocks rose from 3,900 in 1992 to a peak of 11,600 in May 1999. The volume of shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange rose exponentially during the 1990s, exceeding a billion shares on many trading days. Profits were extraordinarily large for some of the leading-edge companies. Thousands of employees of aggressive high-tech firms became instant millionaires on paper by acquiring stock options in the companies they worked for. Microsoft became the world’s largest corporation, primarily because of its virtual monopoly of Windows operating platforms. Bill Gates, the CEO of Microsoft and its largest individual stockholder, personified the new economy of the 1990s and became an iconic figure.

There was a downside to the high-flying economy of the late 1990s. Corporate managers enjoyed high incomes while blue-collar workers of the same companies struggled to earn a living wage and sustain their families. Many companies resorted to downsizing to increase profits or to survive in a more competitive environment. IBM laid off more than half its workforce in the 1990s. Millions of families reported a negative savings rate, and consumer debt rose rapidly. Such people proved to be vulnerable to bankruptcies when another economic downturn began in 2000.

During the peak years of the new economy, a 10-by-30-mile strip of Santa Clara County, California, located about 50 miles south of San Francisco, a region that until the 1960s had been noted for its luscious fruits and vegetables, became the center of the microelectronics industry. In this “Silicon Valley,” the consumer electronics revolution that had originated in the 1970s created a vast web of hundreds of high-tech firms that manufactured, distributed, or “processed” new information technologies.

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Silicon Valley attracted extensive media attention, which reinforced its popular image as a place were brilliant, hard-driving entrepreneurs founded companies that churned out technological marvels and accumulated great personal fortunes. America had not seen anything like this generation of electronic buccaneers since the industrial revolution of the 1880s and 1890s. Silicon Valley and the other regions within the United States where high- tech companies flourished were also plugged into the rapidly expanding global economy.

U.S. companies competed fiercely with their rivals in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Silicon Valley also reflected the growing multiculturalism of American society. One-third of the engineers and technical personnel developing the software and hardware driving the new economy were people of Chinese or Indian descent, many of them recent immigrants to America.

In the summer of 1997, Thailand, Hong Kong, South Korea, Indonesia, and several other Asian countries experienced turmoil in their financial markets that abruptly reversed years of robust economic growth and rising prosperity. Asian financial disasters drove stock values down and devalued currencies. It also brought many large banks and corporations to the verge of bankruptcy. Several nations received financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund and were forced to implement harsh austerity programs to stop the financial hemorrhaging.

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These financial and economic crises deepened the long recession that had already engulfed Japan and threatened to slow the Chinese juggernaut. In September 1998 Russia verged on financial collapse. Even the U.S. powerhouse felt the effects of the Asian meltdown and the Russian collapse. Businesses that sold goods and services on Asian markets were hurt. U.S. farmers who sold grain and beef to Asians were especially hard hit. The crisis cost 250,000 American jobs.

CABLE TV AND THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY

The electronic technologies of the late twentieth century changed the way millions of Americans lived, worked, and thought. The revolution in telecommunications created the global information superhighway. The arrival of cable and satellite television in the 1990s offered viewers greatly expanded programming choices. Videocassette recorders (VCRs) allowed viewers to schedule program watching to suit their daily routines. By the mid- 1990s, the rental and sale of movie videos to home viewers became the main source of profit for Hollywood movie studios.

Television came to dominate political campaigning in the 1990s. Politicians raised and spent huge sums of money advertising themselves, their parties, and their programs. They also spent huge sums on negative political advertisements, attacking their opponents. They hired staffs of consultants, who focused on their candidates’ television images. A new generation of wealthy, telegenic candidates sought election as governors, senators, and presidents. The chief prerequisites for many political offices came to be, “Can he or she project a positive, voter-friendly image?” and “Can he or she raise the large amount of money required for seeking political offices?”

The most significant electronic development was the creation of cyberspace, that abstract conceptual region occupied by people linked via global computer networks. The Net grew out of America’s hysterical reaction to the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957. President Eisenhower created the Advanced Research and Design Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense to ensure that U.S. scientists retained their lead over Soviet scientists in developing new technologies applicable to the military. ARPA scientists also turned their attention to computer networking and communications. They sought ways of linking universities, defense contractors, and military command centers in order to promote development of new weapons systems and to sustain vital communication pathways in the event of nuclear attacks. They developed a network, called ARPANET, which went online in 1969. ARPANET linked giant computers housed at four universities: the University of

California–Los Angeles (UCLA), Stanford, the University of Southern California (USC), and the University of Utah.

By the early 1970s, ARPANET was reaching beyond its Cold War origins. More and more users were going online; nonmilitary researchers were developing competing systems of communications. New computer languages were created that made communication among the proliferating networks difficult if not impossible. In 1974 Robert Kahn and Vincent Cerf, two ARPA computer scientists, developed the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), a uniform communications language (or protocol) that allowed all the existing communication networks to function and communicate as a single meta-network. The creation of TCP/IP set the stage for the rapid expansion of the Internet.

When inexpensive personal computers, which were capable of linking to the worldwide telecommunications network, came online in the 1980s, the number of people entering cyberspace increased exponentially. Commercial providers such as CompuServe began making ARPANET accessible to people who were outside the university–military research nexus. The creation of the World Wide Web (Internet) and the development of inexpensive browser technologies in the early 1990s made the information superhighway accessible to millions around

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the globe. The World Wide Web was the creation of Tim Berners-Lee, who invented hypertext, a computer language that facilitated the interactive exchange of text and graphic images. As the twentieth century ended, more than half of all U.S. households had at least one computer and most public schools were online. These new information technologies created an international media community. Telecommunications had become an integral part of the global economy.

MULTICULTURALISM

Driven mainly by the rights-conscious efforts of second-generation immigrants, particularly middle-class Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans, increasing numbers of ethnic groups organized to protest against what they perceived to be their marginalization in American life and against the negative stereotyping of their cultures they saw in films, television, and advertisements. High school and college course offerings became contested arenas. Newly empowered advocates for women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, and fundamentalist religious groups demanded that high schools and colleges revise their curricula. Multiculturalists challenged Anglocentric course reading lists. Literary scholars revised reading lists to include works by women, persons of color, and Third World writers. Historians hastened to rewrite textbooks to include previously neglected or excluded groups.

Historically dispossessed and disadvantaged groups celebrated their unique cultural identities while expressing powerful resentments whose origins dated back hundreds of years to the European conquest of Native Americans and enslavement of Africans in America. In 1999, more than 2 million people identified themselves as Native Americans, more than twice the 1970 total. This figure reflected not only a natural increase in the Amerindian population but also the growing numbers of people of mixed-race ancestry eager to affirm their ethnic roots. A network of tribal-controlled colleges and universities provided Native Americans with relevant education and cultural sustenance. Many tribes energetically pursued various business ventures, from growing wild rice to operating gambling casinos. In August 1998, near New London, Connecticut, on Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation land, the 550 surviving Pequots, grown rich on profits from their Foxwood Casino complex, proudly unveiled a magnificent museum and research center. The museum, built at a cost of nearly $200 million, celebrated the resurrection of a once- powerful Native American people who had struggled for centuries to survive at the margins of the dominant European society that had nearly obliterated them during the seventeenth century.

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Multiculturalist reforms provoked a backlash. For many conservatives, multiculturalism replaced Communism as the nation’s most dangerous enemy. They insisted that these efforts at more inclusive scholarship eroded any sense of a shared national identity. Critics feared that all the counting by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, age, and religious affiliation could lead to a Balkanization of American society. They worried lest identity politics destroy the basic unity of the most successful pluralistic society in world history.

Another multicultural controversy flared in the 1990s over the legal recognition of marriage for same-sex couples. In May 1993, the Supreme Court of Hawaii ruled that the laws barring marriages between same-sex couples were unconstitutional. Responding to the court’s decision, Republican congressmen, fearing that if any state recognized same-sex marriages, all the other states would be forced to recognize these marriages as legal, sponsored federal legislation that would deny recognition of these unions. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which specified that gay couples would be ineligible for spousal benefits. Over thirty states, including Hawaii, enacted similar legislation. Vermont, alone of the fifty states,

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recognized “civil unions” between same-sex couples, allowing them to receive most of the legal benefits of marriage.

Like many other struggles over cultural change, multicultural battles subsided during the late 1990s. Surveys revealed that most middle-class Americans, regardless of race or ethnicity, embraced a set of core values: maintaining a democratic political culture, working hard, and an emphasis on individual achievement. As the century drew to a close, they appeared to accept the diversity that defined the American multicultural society.

CULTURE WARRIORS

Conservative culture warriors advanced two theses: America was in decline, and liberals caused the culture wars that were rending the nation. These conservatives, many of them on the religious Right, felt marginalized by liberalizing cultural changes, and they were outraged by what appeared to them to be an ever-expanding list of evils such as sexual immorality, violent crime, pornography, and drug and alcohol abuse.

Not all the critiques of cultural trends during the 1990s emanated from the Right. Liberals and Centrists identified different indicators of decline: conspicuous consumption, rising inequality, and a loss of community. These liberal critics feared that unbridled individualism was undermining Americans’ grassroots activism. Affluent Americans were retreating into gated communities. People were becoming more isolated and detached from community concerns.

Culture wars over art in the 1990s, which got extensive media coverage, were particularly nasty. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funded two photographic exhibits that touched off fierce controversy. One of these exhibits featured a photograph of a crucifix in a jar of the photographer’s urine. The other showed an image of the Virgin Mary that had been turned into a tie rack.

Art critics and museum curators defended the exhibits either as imaginative creations or as free expression that must never be censored. Many powerful congressmen, mostly Republicans, but also some liberal Democrats, denounced the exhibits as a misuse of public funds to support trash masquerading as art. Congressional conservatives tried to eliminate the NEA, but it managed to survive on much-reduced funding. Congress also mandated a series of reforms, the most important of which abolished NEA grants to individual artists and required that all grants for projects be clearly spelled out in the initial application.

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Two other cultural battles during the 1990s were over the way American history was remembered. Conservative culture warriors attacked what they called the “politically correct” or “pc” approaches to U.S. history advanced by liberal elites out of touch with mainstream Americans. The first involved a museum exhibit entitled “The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920” staged at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Art. It represented a modest effort to present more realistic images of how Euro-Americans exploited Native Americans during the exploration and settlement of the West. It was too much for many people to accept, and they protested. A few GOP senators threatened to cut the museum’s budget.

The second controversy erupted when the National Air and Space Museum planned a major exhibit that would feature the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. Conservative political leaders, joined by veterans groups, protested the planned exhibit when they learned that it would question the decision to drop the bomb. The project director was forced out, and the exhibit was drastically redesigned.

When it opened, the exhibit featured the aircraft with no interpretive commentary.

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Conservative culture warriors also protested the spread of “political correctness” to many elite college and university campuses. At some institutions of higher learning, in an effort to promote tolerance, liberal administrators promulgated detailed codes of speech and conduct. Some of these codes targeted “hate speech” that students were accused of using toward women, gays and lesbians, and minorities of color. Some professors expressed dismay at working in repressive environments in which newly empowered champions of multiculturalism and “politically correct” speech imposed a new bureaucratic orthodoxy that encouraged an aggressively litigious culture of victimization.

Some of these cultural battles exposed intense regional and class divisions within the nation. Cultural conservatism appealed most notably to working-class white people inhabiting the South, the Plains states, and the Rocky Mountain states. Liberal cultural ideas mostly appealed to well-educated professionals on the East and West Coasts and to the elites who inhabited the metropolitan centers of the East and Midwest.

The culture wars, waged fiercely in the early and mid-1990s, always exaggerated by the media, abated somewhat in the later years of the decade. The influence of the Religious Right diminished, although it remained a cultural and political force, especially in the South. These conflicts had always been waged by engaged partisans of the Left and Right with the great mass of ordinary Americans who occupied a vast middle ground paying scant attention to the controversies.

As the 1990s wound down, it appeared that liberals were winning many of the culture wars. Many Americans, particularly younger Americans, had become more accepting of changing mores in clothes, hairstyling, and piercing and tattooing bodies. They also became more tolerant of a range of personal behaviors, including sexual practices, marriage and divorce, and family life. The permissiveness that had first manifested itself in the 1960s had permeated the culture by the 1990s. Conservative culture warriors ultimately failed to reverse these long-term cultural trends.

This was surely the case for ongoing family trends. High divorce rates, later-age marriages, and cohabitation combined to render the traditional nuclear family—married couples with children—just one of a variety of family styles. There were no longer any cultural norms.

Statistical data from the 2000 census confirmed these trends. Almost a quarter of America’s adult population had never married. Married couples headed approximately half of American households. Households headed by a single female with children under age eighteen accounted for 22 percent of all families with children of that age.

Liberal and conservative critics of popular culture agreed that there had been an egregious decline in standards and taste during the 1990s. Commercialized sex was rampant, and often very profitable. Surveys showed that two-thirds of late-night television shows had some sexual content including simulated intercourse. The “adult entertainment industry” took in billions of dollars annually during the decade. The “gross-out” capacity of popular culture made a quantum leap. Rappers vied with one another in the use of offensive language and misogyny. The Jerry Springer Show, a popular afternoon television talk show, featured a succession of guests who humiliated themselves before large audiences. Fights between enraged guests, whether staged or not, enlivened the action and significantly increased the number of viewers.

Sex and violence increasingly dominated television programs and movies. The violent world of televised professional wrestling attracted massive audiences. Huge, powerful men, often amped on steroids, engaged in nonstop mayhem for the amusement of crowds who knew that the matches were scripted. Cops, featuring police videos of real chases, fights, wrecks, and arrests, was a long-running popular television show of the era. Local television news focused on live-action coverage of car wrecks, crime scenes, raging fires, and storm damages. News directors instructed their staffs: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Hollywood released films saturated with computerized special effects, blaring sound

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tracks, violent action, profanity, nudity, and “gross-out” humor. (Scatalogical jokes were the favorites of adolescent boys who made up the largest part of the film-going audience.)

Even as pundits of both Left and Right continued to characterize television as a cultural wasteland and corrupter of young people, it was evident in the nineties, as in earlier eras, that discerning viewers could find many well-crafted shows such as The Cosby Show and Frasier to watch. Sports coverage improved, and significant annual events such as the NCAA College Basketball Tournament, the World Series, and the Super Bowl attracted large audiences and generated billions of dollars of advertising revenue.

Hollywood produced a large number of films enjoyed by moviegoers of all ages: historical epics, spy thrillers, and romantic comedies with the inevitable happy endings. Hollywood also brought out numerous serious films such as Rain Man, a well-crafted story starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise about an autistic man with extraordinary cognitive abilities and a materialistic striver who find their common humanity. Steven Spielberg directed Schindler’s List, a film about a German businessman who employed Jews in his factory in Poland to save hundreds of people who would otherwise have perished in Nazi death camps during World War II. Woody Allen, the quirky, angst-ridden independent filmmaker, produced a solid body of work throughout the 1990s, the best of which was Bullets Over Broadway, a comedic treatment of the Jazz Age. Art cinemas survived in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, showing mostly foreign films that appealed to sophisticated cinephiles.

High culture was alive and well in America in the 1990s. American corporations, foundations, and wealthy individuals lavishly funded the world’s most extensive cultural infrastructure. Museums, art galleries, opera companies, repertory theaters, and symphony orchestras flourished mostly in the large urban centers. Millions of well-educated affluent Americans made up the large appreciative audiences for accomplished artistic and literary performers.

BLACK AND WHITE, BUT NOT TOGETHER

In the mid-1990s, African Americans remained divided along class lines. At one end of the social spectrum, a large and growing class of black professionals and businesspeople enjoyed affluent lifestyles. In 1998, 12 percent of college students were black, roughly equal to their ratio of the general population. In 1998, nearly half of African Americans in the workforce held white-collar, middle-class jobs. At the other end of the spectrum could be found the impoverished inner-city blacks, representing one-third of the African American

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population of approximately 30 million. The poorest of the poor, representing perhaps 10 percent of the African American population in 1998, comprised the “underclass.”

Although intact families, thriving churches, and other strong institutions could be found in the inner city, this culture of decency often was overwhelmed by a staggering array of social pathologies. As factory jobs once open to urban workers disappeared, inner-city unemployment rates soared. With good jobs no longer available locally, young people faced life on mean streets or held marginal service-sector jobs in car washes or fast-food restaurants. Inner-city pathologies such as high crime rates, drug abuse, welfare dependency, and teenage pregnancies derived from more fundamental problems: lack of good educational and job opportunities.

Festering ethnic antagonisms exploded in May 1992, when a California jury acquitted four white police officers charged with savagely beating an African American suspect, Rodney King. A bystander had videotaped the incident, and portions of the tape were repeatedly broadcast. To nearly all who observed the gruesome sequences, the television camera presented compelling images of police brutality. The verdict to acquit the four policemen, rendered by a politically

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conservative suburban jury containing no African American members, ignited the most violent race riot in the nation’s history, which swept through South Central Los Angeles. Thousands of businesses were looted, and many of them were burned. Fifty-four people were killed, and thousands were injured. Property losses reached $850 million.

The Los Angeles police, poorly led and confused, were initially slow to respond to the riot, and events spun out of control. National Guard troops were rushed to Los Angeles to quell the rioters. Before order was restored and peace returned, approximately 12,000 people were arrested for looting and arson, most of them young black and Hispanic males.

The riot was reminiscent of the 1965 Watts upheaval, but there were significant differences. The 1965 riot had pitted blacks against whites. The 1992 riot had much more complex ethnic dynamics, reflecting the ethno-racial diversity of the nation’s second-largest city. One observer called it the nation’s first “multicultural riot.” Blacks attacked other blacks as well as whites. Hispanics attacked whites. Blacks and Hispanics both attacked Asians. Gangs of African American and Hispanic thugs also engaged in violence and looting. These violent actions exposed the deep divisions and animosities among various groups. The division was sharpest between whites and various minorities. An affluent West Side white woman stated, “We don’t know and don’t care about the problems of the inner cities … most of us don’t even know where South Central is ….” The King verdict obviously triggered the riot, but the underlying causes appeared to be a potent mix of ethno-racial antagonisms, poverty, and neglect, all exacerbated by a severe economic recession that hit poor people, working-class people, and small business owners especially hard.

In 1995, an ironic sequel to the Rodney King case occurred. From January to October, a former star athlete turned TV sportscaster, film actor, and rent-a-car pitchman, O. J. Simpson, stood trial for the murder of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. After a lengthy trial, a jury acquitted Simpson of all charges.

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FIGURE 16.1 Soldiers of the California National Guard holding a group of young rioters in South Central Los Angeles, May 1992.

Source: José Ivey.

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Because of the political and cultural contexts in which the trial occurred, it acquired a significance that far transcended the guilt or innocence of one prominent individual. All of the major media provided constant coverage of the trial for months. Cable TV watchers could catch analyses and perspectives on the trial from ex-prosecutors and ex-defense lawyers. Millions of Americans became personally involved in the “trial of the century.” Attorneys for both sides and the judge, Lance Ito, often played to the ever-present television cameras. Due process became judicial theater and Hollywood showbiz. A brutal double murder became sensational prime-time entertainment.

In the eyes of a substantial majority of viewers and expert commentators, prosecutors presented a strong case based on physical evidence that implicated Simpson beyond a reasonable doubt in the two murders. The fact that Simpson, whose resources matched those that Los Angeles County could allocate for the trial, could afford a battery of high- priced attorneys to mount a successful defense proved to many Americans that he was immune to the justice system. Simpson’s acquittal also reinforced the widely held notion that there was one standard of justice for the rich and another, harsher standard for the poor. The antics of the attorneys on both sides, the often erratic behavior of Judge Ito, and most of all the outcome of the trial suggested to many observers that the U.S. system of criminal justice had produced a farcical miscarriage of justice. The trial also raised an ominous question: Maybe the traditional jury system did not work in a racially polarized society?

Looming over the trial was the ugly reality of racism. Because the murder victims, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, were white, and because Simpson was a black celebrity, racial attitudes in this country became central to the outcome of the trial and the way people viewed that outcome. The jury, consisting of nine African Americans, eight of them women; a Hispanic male; and two white women, reached a verdict of acquittal within four hours. The jurors rushed to judgment without seriously considering the evidence, much of it quite complex and technical, presented by 133 witnesses who testified during the long trial.

The black–white racial chasm that existed in this country was highlighted on October 4, 1995, when the clerk of the court read the jury’s verdict. Around the country, wherever crowds of black Americans had gathered to hear the verdict, they cheered loudly and hugged each other at what appeared to them to be a triumphal deliverance. Wherever crowds of whites had gathered to hear the verdict, they stared in disbelief at what appeared to them to be an awful miscarriage of justice. Polls showed that 87 percent of black

Americans agreed with the jury’s verdict; 65 percent of whites believed Simpson to be guilty as charged. These numbers dramatically revealed that white and black Americans stared uncomprehendingly at each other from across a vast cultural divide.

Seemingly lost in all of the furor over the verdict of acquittal was the fact that Simpson still faced civil suits brought by the families of the murder victims accusing him of the “wrongful deaths” of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. On February 4, 1997, in a civil trial conducted in a West Los Angeles courtroom before a mostly white, middle-class jury that did not include a single African American, in which a stern judge excluded the television cameras and kept a rigid order, Simpson was convicted of being responsible for the “wrongful deaths” of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. The survivors were awarded a total of $33.4 million in compensatory and punitive damages. There was far less media coverage of the civil trial and little noticeable public reaction to the verdicts.

Two weeks after the conclusion of the first Simpson trial, another dramatic event accentuated the black–white racial divide rending the American social fabric. The controversial leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, led a “Million Man March” on Washington, D.C. About

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500,000 black men gathered on the mall in front of the Washington Monument. For the huge gathering, it was a day of atonement and renewal and an affirmation of their black manhood. For most of the participants, it was a deeply moving experience.

The publicity generated by the arrest of Rodney King, the riot, and O. J. Simpson’s trial, all highlighted the continuing ethno-racial divide and also called attention to some troubling aspects of the American criminal justice system. More than 6 million people were either on probation or serving time in prisons in 1999, triple the number in 1980. Ethnic and racial minorities accounted for more than two-thirds of the inmates, even though they made up 25 percent of the total population. The huge increase in the number of people on probation and in prison was attributed mainly to the stepped-up war on drugs. Even though studies showed that approximately 80 percent of cocaine users were white and blacks constituted perhaps 12 percent of drug users, African Americans made up over 50 percent of all people arrested for drug possession.

Despite the high rates of arrests and incarcerations of African Americans, experts assessing the status of black people during the nineties identified several indicators of progress. Polls showed that many white people expressed more liberal racial attitudes. Middle-class African Americans were also gratified that affirmative action policies had survived the backlash and were in place in major corporations and elite universities. Black people took pride in the successful military careers achieved by those who took advantages of opportunities available to them in America’s most integrated institution. African American political leaders won mayoralty elections in several major cities that did not have black- majority populations, including New York, Minneapolis, and Denver.

Most important, black people made economic gains during the 1990s. Median household income rose more rapidly for blacks than for whites. Income for African American married couples, which had been about two-thirds of income for white married couples, rose to nearly 90 percent during the 1990s. At the other end of the income spectrum, black poverty declined rapidly during the decade. One-third of black families were officially defined as poor in 1990. By the end of the era, it had declined to about a fifth of all black families.

However, persisting conditions ensured that black–white relations remained the nation’s most profound socioeconomic problem. The greatest obstacle to progress was the enduring power of social class, more powerful than race. While middle-class blacks made significant progress in the 1990s, and the number of poor black families living in poverty was much reduced; the average net worth of African American families declined relative to that of whites. The poverty rate for blacks in 2000 was nearly three times what it was for whites.

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Unemployment rates for black people remained more than twice as high for whites. African Americans were far more likely than whites to lack health insurance and far more likely to not know that they were eligible for means-tested programs such as food stamps or Medicaid. Life expectancy of blacks lagged well behind that of whites in 2000. It was 71.2 years for African Americans, 77.4 years for white people.

The most serious of the many problems afflicting poor black families was the worrisome issue of child poverty. In 2000, nearly one-third of African American children under the age of eighteen resided in a poor household. Like the children in low-income white families, poor black children had serious health problems including high rates of asthma, diabetes, and learning disabilities.

Inner-city public schools continued to face formidable obstacles. Continuing residential segregation combined with Supreme Court decisions to resegregate public education during the 1990s. Far fewer black students attended public schools that were 50 percent or more white in

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2000 than in the early 1970s. Because of the high concentration of African Americans in many large cities of the North and Midwest, segregated schools were more common in the North than in the South. Similar trends toward greater school segregation also separated Hispanic Americans from whites.

The education most Latino and black youngsters received in these segregated schools was generally inferior. Per-pupil funding for predominantly black and Latino inner-city schools was usually much lower than for the mostly white schools in the suburbs. Substantial black–white and Hispanic–white gaps in achievement test scores persisted, and they widened in the 1990s. Two long-standing trends also persisted during the decade: The lower the social class of the student, the lower the test score, and African American and Hispanic students had considerably lower median test scores than whites at every level of social class. How to close or at least narrow these class and ethnoracial gaps in test scores continued to challenge the best efforts of reformers, educators, psychologists, and parents as the twentieth century drew to a close.

HISPANIC AMERICANS

In 1998 the nation’s 23 million Hispanics represented America’s fastest-growing minority. Hispanic Americans comprised a diverse group. They included 16 million Mexican Americans, concentrated in California and in the American Southwest; 1 million Cuban Americans, most living in south Florida; and between 1 million and 2 million immigrants from the Caribbean region and Central America, living mostly on the East Coast or in California. The Hispanic American population also included 2 million Puerto Ricans, who were American citizens by birth.

Most Hispanics, regardless of their national origins, immigrated to America in search of a better life for themselves and their families. Millions have found success. Family, church, and cultural institutions have sustained hard-working people in America. But life remained harsh for millions of Hispanic families. In 1998, 20 percent of Mexican Americans and one- third of Puerto Ricans lived in poverty. Hispanic communities often were devastated by alcohol and drug abuse, soaring crime rates, and high rates of school dropouts and teenage pregnancies.

As American society fragmented in the 1980s and 1990s, the ideal of a common national culture proved to be ever more elusive. Americans appeared to share mainly consumerist experiences, such as shopping at malls and watching prime-time television programs and sporting events. To many immigrant families, becoming an American was defined primarily

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in residential and economic terms: reside in the United States, get a good education, and get a well-paying job. Earn money, accumulate wealth, buy a home in the suburbs, provide well for your family, and join the higher echelons of the consumer republic. Questions of politics and culture were downplayed.

ASIAN AMERICANS

Fed by continuing high rates of immigration, the Asian American and Pacific Islander populations continued to grow rapidly during the decade of the 1990s. People from Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, and China continued to come to the United States in large numbers. In 1998, 11 percent of Los Angeles’s 3.5 million residents were Asians.

Strengthened by family cultures and prizing academic success, Asian Americans showed high rates of college attendance and upward mobility. However, Asian American communities experienced generational tensions as young people got caught between the tug of traditional ways and the lure of American popular culture.

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FIGURE 16.2 (a) Distribution of Hispanic population in the United States. (b) Distribution of Asian population in the United States.

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WOMEN AND WORK

By the late 1990s, women had smashed through many sexist barriers in higher education and in the workplace. In many fields that had long been virtually closed to women, such as medicine, law, engineering, and business management, large numbers energetically pursued productive careers. There were also large increases in the number of women holding public office in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1996, the number of working mothers with children exceeded the number of mothers with children not working outside of the home. In 1998, one-fourth of all doctors and lawyers were women. By 1999, women constituted almost half of the total workforce.

But as increasing numbers of women moved into formerly male-dominated occupations and professions, disparities continued in the pay women received for performing comparable work. Women who worked full-time in 1999 earned about 73¢ for every dollar a man earned. Many working-class women still confronted a segregated job market in the late 1990s. Sixty percent of working women held “pink-collar” jobs. Many women who had reached managerial positions in business in the late 1990s felt that they were paying too high a personal price for their professional successes. Others complained that they could not fulfill family obligations at home and perform their jobs at the highest levels.

Long-term structural changes in the economy adversely affected working women. The rise of service industries and the implementation of new technologies created millions of new jobs for women but also created new limits and liabilities. Automated offices became the sweatshops of the 1990s. Many businesses, to cut costs, hired part-time and temporary clerical workers. These contingent workers typically received lower pay and fewer benefits than full-timers.

Cultural changes also have accompanied the advent of women into the workplaces of America. Most notable was the change in women’s consciousness. Many women in the late 1990s felt that they were equal to men in the marketplace and had greater ambitions and expectations than previous generations of women. But traditional values and stereotypes also exhibited strong staying powers. Advertisers no longer celebrated domesticity as a woman’s only appropriate realm, but they still advised the successful female professional to keep her weight down and be attractive. Women spent far more of their incomes on clothes, beauty aids, cosmetic surgeries, diet, and exercise programs than men.

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Howard Rheingold, Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (1993) Cecelia Rosa Avila, Third Generation Mexican American (1988) Jesse Jackson, Common Ground (1988)

Elaine Bell Kaplan, “Talking to Teen Mothers” (1995) RESEARCH AND EXPLORE

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Sign at a Gay Pride March

Brief Bibliographic Essay

William L. O’Neill, A Bubble in Time: America during the Interwar Years, 1989–2001 is a fine recent informative and entertaining book, which identifies the major political, social, cultural, and ideological trends shaping that particular decade. James T. Patterson, Restless Giant, Chapters and are concerned with culture wars, multiculturalism, and black–white race relations. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America is the best study of those cultural battles. David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism makes the case that most middle-class Americans embrace common core values and have accepted the diversity multiculturalism is promoting without undermining our basic cultural unity. Ellis Cose’s The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Are Middle-Class Blacks Angry? is an important and disturbing book. See William Wei’s The Asian American Movement for study of a large, diverse group of Americans who are making rapid gains in education, wealth, and influence. For the matter of women’s pay issues, see Sara M. Evans and Barbara J. Nelson’s Wage Justice: Comparable Worth and the Paradox of Technocratic Reform. On contemporary drug problems plaguing Americans, see Erich Goode’s Drugs in American Society.