Knowledge And Decisions

But no amount of impersonal phrasing about wanting to escape “slums” or the “conditions” there can change the basic fact that what is being attempted is to move away from people whose behavior is regarded as offensive. For exactly the same reason, there is resistance or flight by those in surrounding neighborhoods. Painful as this situation is for all concerned, it is made even more difficult to resolve when the rhetorical misstatement of it becomes a basis for insisting that not only the cost-bearing victims among the excluded group but also the cost-creating members of the same group be relocated. Sometimes this goes beyond the “fair housing” approach of creating a legal right to relocate anywhere on one’s own initiative, to a government policy of creating financial incentives to undo sorting and labeling by deliberately locating subsidized housing in neighborhoods different from those normally inhabitated by the tenants — or even more directly, forcing excluded groups to relocate by demolition of their dwellings by “urban renewal.”

At some point in these political developments, those who believe the rhetoric literally may be puzzled to find themselves opposed by those excluded people who were initially their allies. Cost-bearing members of excluded groups are often much clearer as to what they are doing in trying to sort themselves out from cost-creating members of the same group. The last thing they want to do is to import into their new environment the same cost-creating people whom they have fled. When the building of low-income housing projects in middle-class neighborhoods has been bitterly opposed by blacks already living in such neighborhoods, many white liberals have been shocked by the apparent inconsistency of such behavior with the rhetoric which they and middle-class blacks have shared in earlier struggles for “fair housing” laws. The middle-class blacks are, however, behaviorally consistent in continuing to sort and label by social characteristics (other than race) even if this means opposing former white allies to whom rhetorical consistency is more important.

In short, even the principal victims of that form of social sorting and labeling known as racial segregation do not object to sorting and labeling, as such, but object instead to racial segregation for preventing them from sorting and labeling on other (nonracial) bases. Students of black social history have long noted the difficulties of the small black middle class in attempting to preserve and perpetuate its values and behavior patterns while surrounded by people with very different values and behavior patterns, whom they were forced to live among because the larger society’s sorting and labeling categories were coarse enough not to go beyond race. Objection to sorting and labeling, as such, is an entirely different phenomenon, supported by an entirely different group of people, and taking many forms: objections to school grades, occupational hierarchies, institutional authority, I.Q. tests, and all forms of address, attire, residence or work place differentiation of status or function. Even among individuals, organizations, and whole societies which have cast away particular forms of sorting and labeling, substitute forms reappear, even amidst the most ostentatious egalitarianism. Everyone may be called “comrade,” but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.

The advantages of sorting and labeling may sometimes be mistakenly ascribed to other factors. For example, one of the important things an education system does is to sort and label people, and they may be more valuable to an employer because they have been sorted and labeled, rather than simply because of the education as such. The difference between a “dropout” and a graduate is not merely that one has somewhat more information than the other, as a result of staying in an educational institution longer. Dropouts as a group tend to differ from graduates as a group in perseverance, regularity, and discipline — qualities of value even in jobs where the difference in information between the two groups is of little or no significance. Statistics on income differences between dropouts and graduates often arbitrarily attribute the higher income of the graduate to the value of the education, especially when the statistics are quoted by educational institutions seeking larger appropriations, grants, and public donations.