Recent research from leading American universities has produced strong evidence that the civil rights revolution of the past half century has failed African Americans economically and educationally. Angela O’Rand and Mary Elizabeth Hughes, both professors of sociology at Duke University, reveal in their book The Life and Times of the Baby Boomers, released last week, that black Americans born between 1946 and 1964 earn only two thirds of what American whites earn-no more, relative to whites, than their parents and grandparents earned. Even more surprising is O’Rand and Hughes’s finding that African Americans were graduating at the same rate as whites eighty to ninety years ago, but that graduation rates for blacks peaked in the mid-1950s-at the start of the movement for racial integration. Professor Richard Sander, of the UCLA School of Law, reports on studies that indicate that affirmative action and similar programs has made blacks admitted to elite universities less likely to pursue Ph.Ds after four years of competition with white and Asian undergraduates than are black at state universities (from Stephen Cole and Elinor Barber’s Increasing Faculty Diversity, Harvard University Press, 2003), while Dartmouth psychologist Rogers Elliott and three colleagues discovered that half of blacks admitted to college by racial preferences abandon majors in science due to their academic disadvantage (”The Role of Ethnicity in Choosing and Leaving Science in Highly Selective Institutions,” 37 Research in Higher Education, 681, 695-696, 1996). Professor Hughes notes that the persistent failure to achieve racial equality in income and education “?suggests there are very deep root causes here, not one-answer causes.” Granted the cause isn’t the stock answer of “racism”-but it’s more than likely that race explains a good deal of the problem.

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