Housing and Wealth Inequality: Racial-Ethnic Differences in Home Equity in the United States

Housing and Wealth Inequality: Racial-Ethnic Differences in Home Equity in the United States

Lauren J. Krivo
Robert L. Kaufman
Abstract

Recent research has emphasized that large racial differences in wealth in the United States stem from both household flows of income and racially inequitable institutional practices (Oliver and Shapiro 1995; Shapiro 2004). This is particularly clear for the largest share of wealth held by a large portion of households: housing equity (U.S. Census Bureau 2001). Microeconomic factors are central determinants of the acquisition and value of housing (Alba and Logan 1992; Coulson 1999; Krivo 1995; Lewin-Epstein, Elmelech, and Semyonov 1997), and hence racial socioeconomic inequality reproduces stratification in housing wealth across racial groups. However, many studies have also shown that black and Hispanic households are dealt with less favorably than majority whites at each stage of the process, from locating to acquiring to financing housing (Farley 1996; Massey and Denton 1993; Ross and Yinger 2002; Turner 1992; Yinger 1995, 1997). Such differential treatment should reduce minorities' accumulation of home equity compared with whites' in that blacks and Hispanics find it more difficult to purchase homes and to do so with favorable mortgage terms in areas with high values and levels of appreciation (Bradford 2002; Flippen 2001a, 2001b; Krivo 1995; Long and Caudill 1992; Munnell et al. 1996; Ross and Yinger 2002; Turner 1992; Yinger 1995).

Yet, knowledge of how household and market factors contribute to racial and ethnic differences in levels of housing wealth is limited in several ways. First, analyses of wealth inequality among racial-ethnic groups have generally explored the sources of overall wealth (Campbell and Henretta 1980; Conley 1999, 2001; Menchik and Jianakoplos 1997; Oliver and Shapiro 1995; Wolff 2001). Few have examined specific components of wealth, [End Page 585] such as home equity, separately for groups, except in a descriptive manner (Keister 2000a; Kennickell, Starr-McCluer, and Suden 1997; Oliver and Shapiro 1995; see Blau and Graham 1990 for an analytic exception). Studying inequality in total wealth ignores any unique processes that generate racial-ethnic differences in particular types of wealth. We overcame this problem by conducting an in-depth examination of the largest source of wealth for most households with any wealth: housing equity (U.S. Census Bureau 2001; Wolff 1998). Only Parcel (1982), Blau and Graham (1990), and Flippen (2001a) have conducted analyses of racial inequality in the value of home equity in national samples. However, the studies by Parcel and by Blau and Graham are both dated and ignored critical housing and market factors. Although Flippen's research used more recent data, it examined only preretirement households aged 51-61 and excluded housing and market conditions.

Another shortcoming of prior research on both wealth and housing inequality has been a near-exclusive focus on black and white households (Blau and Graham 1990; Campbell and Henretta 1980; Conley 1999, 2001; Horton and Thomas 1998; Keister 2000a; Oliver and Shapiro 1995; Parcel 1982). Research on wealth inequality beyond the black-white divide is in its infancy (Campbell and Kaufman 2000; Flippen 2001a; Hao forthcoming). A larger literature has examined residential segregation and inequality in housing conditions for whites and Hispanics or Asians, but this research has not connected housing conditions to home equity or wealth (Alba and Logan 1992; Alba, Logan, and Stults 2000b; Fischer 2003; Flippen 2001b; Frey and Farley 1996; Krivo 1995; Massey and Denton 1993; Myers and Lee 1998; Rosenbaum and Friedman 2001). We addressed this gap by examining the determinants of inequality in housing equity among whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics in the United States. Examining Asians and Hispanics who have different social positions from blacks, including a younger average age and a greater prevalence of immigrants, should provide a more nuanced understanding of the role of race-ethnicity in the accumulation of housing equity.

Finally, aspects of the institutional and social context of housing have not been examined in previous analyses of racial-ethnic differences in home equity. Social, locational, and financial characteristics of mortgage and housing markets systematically disadvantage minority (particularly black) households compared with white households (Bradford 2002; Holloway and Wyly 2001; Oliver and Shapiro 1995; Ross and Yinger 2002; Turner 1992; Yinger 1995). These housing-market disadvantages could reduce the accumulation of housing equity among racial and ethnic minorities by constraining them, for example, to buy houses of lower value with smaller down payments or to pay more interest for homes that appreciate more slowly. However, lower levels of segregation and other market constraints experienced by Hispanics and Asians suggest that institutional and housing-market factors may not affect the home equity of these racial-ethnic groups as strongly as they do the home equity of blacks. We explored whether institutional and housing-market characteristics have ramifications for inequality in home equity by incorporating the characteristics of mortgages and aspects of the metropolitan housing and racial-ethnic context.

Prior Research
Research on the determinants of the accumulation of household wealth has been dominated by microeconomic explanations, in particular Modigliani's life-cycle thesis that wealth accumulates across the life course until retirement, at which point spending reduces wealth (Keister and Moller 2000). Some studies have also used a status-attainment framework either implicitly (Oliver and Shapiro 1995) or explicitly (Campbell and Henretta 1980; Land and Russell 1996). According to this view, wealth accrues from both current and earlier household economic resources and social statuses. Only a small portion of the literature on wealth has focused on the role of race or ethnicity in the accumulation of wealth. These studies have documented a large and persistent black-white disparity in net [End Page 586] worth, which is considerably greater than racial income inequality (Blau and Graham 1990; Campbell and Henretta 1980; Conley 1999, 2001; Hao 1996; Oliver and Shapiro 1995; Shapiro 2004; Wolff 1998, 2001). For example, the median net worth of whites in 1995 was 8 times that of blacks, and the income ratio was 4 to 1 (Wolff 1998).

Even less is known about other racial-ethnic groups' accumulation of wealth. A few studies have compared the representation of blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and whites among top wealth holders (Keister 2000b; Wolff 1998). Kennickell and his colleagues found that Hispanic and nonwhite households together hold just a quarter of the wealth of non-Hispanic white households (Kennickell and Shack-Marquez 1992; Kennickell and Starr-McCluer 1994; Kennickell et al. 1997). Much smaller differences in wealth exist between Asians and whites (Campbell and Kaufman 2000; Hao forthcoming).

Despite the dominance of microeconomic explanations, it is clear that the wealth gap between blacks and whites is due to more than just intergroup differences in prior statuses or life-cycle characteristics (e.g., Conley 2001; Oliver and Shapiro 1995). Oliver and Shapiro argued that the remaining racial difference is rooted in historic and contemporary processes of discrimination. Residential segregation and other forms of discrimination in housing and mortgage markets are particularly important because home equity is the largest component of wealth for most households.

Although Oliver and Shapiro (1995) documented the persistence of discriminatory housing processes, they did not directly analyze how these processes affect the accumulation of wealth. We suggest that the best way to study the effects of such conditions is to analyze components of wealth separately to model influences that may be unique to any component. For example, racial-ethnic inequality in mortgage lending should influence the accumulation of home equity but not necessarily the accumulation of net worth from financial investments. Analyzing total net worth likely masks the effects of determinants that are unique to single aspects of wealth. Thus, we analyzed home equity to elucidate the role of housing-market and social-context factors in generating racial-ethnic disparities in the largest component of wealth.

Similar to studies of total wealth, the vast majority of research on housing has applied microeconomic and life-cycle approaches. Accordingly, the purchase of a home and the growth of housing equity is considered to result from the greater incomes and needs for space that accrue as individuals get older, marry, and have children. Many studies have found that age, education, income, and marriage are strongly associated with homeownership and the value of owned housing (e.g., Alba and Logan 1992; Coulson 1999; Krivo 1995; Lewin-Epstein et al. 1997; Lewin-Epstein and Semyonov 2000; Rosenbaum 1996). Yet, they have also shown that the economic/life-cycle approach provides an incomplete explanation of racial and ethnic differences in rates of homeownership and net housing worth in the United States. Rather, the accumulation of housing and wealth reflect broader processes of social stratification (e.g., Horton and Thomas 1998; Lewin-Epstein et al. 1997; Lewin-Epstein and Semyonov 2000; Spilerman 2002). The ability to obtain more financially and socially advantageous housing is strongly influenced by the social and historical situations of racial and ethnic groups. In particular, patterns of segregation and discrimination in housing and mortgage-lending markets are prime sources of the considerably poorer housing conditions of blacks and some other minority groups.

Discrimination by brokers, racial-ethnic steering, redlining, and other forms of mortgage-lending discrimination make it more difficult for black and Hispanic households to obtain high-quality housing (Holloway and Wyly 2001; Massey and Denton 1993; Oliver and Shapiro 1995; Turner 1992; Yinger 1995). These practices also limit access to communities with greater status and amenities, such as good-quality schools, parks, and shopping (e.g., Alba, Logan, and Stults 2000a; Flippen 2001b; Rosenbaum and Friedman 2001). Whites' prejudice against living in areas with numerous minorities (especially blacks) also weakens the demand for housing in nonwhite neighborhoods (Bobo and [End Page 587] Zubrinsky 1996; Charles 2000; Farley et al. 1994; Krysan 2002). The result is diminished value and lower appreciation of owned housing and greater difficulty in finding better-quality dwellings. These problems are the most severe for blacks but have also been documented for Hispanics (e.g., Yinger 1995).

Considerable research has used a stratification approach to explore the role of race and ethnicity in the housing market. However, this research has focused primarily on analyses of either residential segregation or inequality in homeownership, not on the sources of differences in the accumulation of equity across groups (Alba and Logan 1992; Alba et al. 2000b; Krivo 1995; Krivo and Kaufman 1999; Massey and Denton 1993; Rosenbaum 1996). This work is informative regarding the sources of inequality in equity because the transition to homeownership is a prerequisite to holding any wealth in a home. Yet, for those who are interested in the wealth-generating potential of homeownership, studies of this dichotomous transition fall short; houses vary considerably in their overall value, and households differ in the likelihood of realizing equity from their homes. A number of studies have partially addressed this limitation by exploring the predictors of the value of owned homes (Horton and Thomas 1998; Krivo 1995; Lewin-Epstein et al. 1997; Long and Caudill 1992). These studies have generally found that blacks and Hispanics own homes of lesser value than do similar whites even when the researchers controlled for the characteristics of dwellings. Such analyses get us closer to understanding the wealth implications of homeownership. However, they provide only a crude indication of the sources of inequalities in actual home equity. These inequalities are dependent not only on housing values but also on other financial and mortgage characteristics, including the amount of the down payment and mortgage, the type and terms of the mortgage, and the level of secondary-mortgage debt.

In the analyses presented here, we sought to rectify these limitations of prior research on race-ethnicity, wealth, and the housing market. In particular, we explored the sources of racial and ethnic inequality in home equity itself (not estimated housing value) for four large groups in the United States: non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, Asians, and Hispanics. The models incorporate locational, life-cycle, socioeconomic, and immigrant characteristics, along with critical factors that represent aspects of mortgages, housing markets, and the racial-ethnic context of metropolitan areas. Using this approach, we assessed the sources of racial-ethnic inequality in one specific component of wealth within its own unique household and institutional context. Our study also updates and broadens the understanding of housing wealth inequality to a recent time across a more diverse set of groups than simply blacks and whites. The inclusion of a variety of racial-ethnic groups is particularly important in light of the ever-growing diversity of U.S. society.

Data and Methods
Data
We used data from the national sample of the 2001 American Housing Survey (AHS) to analyze racial-ethnic gaps in household home equity. The AHS is a longitudinal survey of housing units that has been conducted every two years since 1985, with newly built units added at each enumeration. Occupants provide information on the characteristics and costs (including the value and financing) of their dwellings, along with basic demographic data. The 2001 AHS sample included 42,487 occupied housing units (i.e., households).1 The unit of analysis is households because home equity is a household-level concept. We excluded residents of mobile homes and those with missing data for equity, and we further [End Page 588] limited our sample to non-Hispanic whites (28,455), non-Hispanic blacks (4,505), Asians (1,390), and Hispanics (4,208).2


Click for larger view Table 1
Operationalizations of Household and Metropolitan Characteristics

Variables
Dependent variable. Table 1 presents the operationalizations of the variables. Home equity was measured as the total estimated value of an owned home minus the total amount of principal owed on all mortgages on this property (in $10,000s).

Independent variables.Race-ethnicity was measured with a set of dummy variables comparing non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, non-Hispanic Asians, and Hispanics using the respondents' self-identification. Married-couple households were considered non-Hispanic white if both the householder and spouse identified themselves as such. [End Page 589] When a non-Hispanic white was married to a minority person, the household's race-ethnicity was coded as the minority person's group identification. Households with a minority person may be more likely to experience discrimination in the housing market. Intermarriages with whites are more prevalent for Asians and Hispanics than for blacks.3

We included two indicators of residential location as general controls for geographic variation in housing prices: three dummy variables for region and two dummy variables for metropolitan location. Age and age squared represent the nonlinear relationship between stage in the life course and wealth. Socioeconomic status was measured with household income, a dummy indicator of the householder's/spouse's working status and education. For married couples, age and education were the maximum of the householder's and [End Page 590] spouse's values. Several measures describe the family composition of the householder: marital status, racial-ethnic intermarriage, and number of children. The number of years the householder had lived in the current housing unit controlled for the strong effect of length of residence on equity.

Several variables measured the characteristics of immigrants. Two dummy variables distinguished those who were native born and those who were foreign-born naturalized citizens from noncitizens. Households were defined as native born if either the householder or the spouse (when present) was born in the United States. (The presence of one native-born adult should overcome any language and information barriers that constrain immigrants' attainment of housing.) Naturalized citizens included non-native-born households in which either the householder or the spouse became a citizen through naturalization. For foreign-born married couples, years in the United States was the maximum of the householder's and spouse's length of U.S. residence.

We included two housing characteristics that are associated with the greater accumulation of equity: prior ownership and owning acondominium. Mortgage characteristics were measured by the interest rate, a variable-terms dummy variable, and a dummy indicator for FHA, VA, or FHAMfinancing,all of which should reduce levels of equity. Large or inherited down payments assist households to accumulate equity and were incorporated as dummy variables.4

For a subset of metropolitan households, the AHS data identified their specific metropolitan areas of residence (136 Metropolitan Statistical Areas or Primary Metropolitan Statistical Areas were identified).5 These places included 61% of the metropolitan households in our sample (and 71% of those in the nonrural portion of metropolitan areas). For these households, we explored the contextual effects of the characteristics of metropolitan housing markets. Percentage of new housing and median housing value measured housing growth and prices. Residential segregation of blacks from whites and the sizes of the Asian and Hispanic populations represent the broader context of housing-market stratification.6 Segregation indices are from the Racial Residential Segregation Measurement Project (2004); the other metropolitan-context data came from the 2000 Census Summary File 3.

Model and Estimation Issues
Prior analyses of home equity or housing value have usually analyzed samples of homeowners, excluding nonhomeowners because the outcome is censored and cannot be observed for nonowners (e.g., Horton and Thomas 1998; Keil and Zabel 1996; Krivo 1995; Myers and Chung 1996; Parcel 1982). Parcel (1982) included nonhomeowners by assigning them a value of zero for home equity. Applying such methods of analysis results in biased and inconsistent parameter estimates (Long 1997:201-203). In particular, coefficients tend to be underestimated. We used tobit models, which provide consistent estimates of the coefficients by including nonhomeowners and treating their equity as censored (Long 1997:189; see Lewin-Epstein et al. 1997 for an analysis of housing values using tobit techniques).

Tobit analysis is closely akin to techniques for correcting sample-selection bias and is equivalent to combining a probit analysis predicting censoring with a regression analysis predicting the noncensored values of the outcome (Long 1997:204). Tobit regression predicts a latent outcome, which, in our case, is the observed home equity for [End Page 591] homeowners, and has a censored value for nonowners. The coefficients can be interpreted as effects on this latent outcome. For comparability with descriptive statistics, we rescaled the parameters as effects on the censored outcome (Long 1997:210). Using tobit techniques, we first estimated a baseline model that included only race-ethnicity. We then performed progressive adjustments, adding sets of variables to explore how various predictors mediate the relationship between race-ethnicity and home equity. For the metropolitan subsample, we estimated group-specific tobit models to examine similarities and differences in effects across racial-ethnic groups and to assess the influence of contextual aspects of housing-market stratification.7


Click for larger view Table 2
Descriptive Statistics for Home Equity, Homeownership, and Mortgage Characteristics

Results
Table 2 presents descriptive statistics for homeownership, home equity, and mortgage characteristics separately for the racial-ethnic groups. Having any home equity is, by definition, affected by the purchase of a home. It is well known that racial and ethnic differences in levels of homeownership are an important source of wealth inequality, and our data are consistent with this view. Over 70% of white households own their homes, compared with 46% of black households and 49% of Hispanic households. Asians fall between [End Page 592] these extremes, with a homeownership rate of 55%. The basic relationship between homeowning and equity is clear from the means and medians of housing equity. Blacks and Hispanics have notably lower values of mean home equity than do whites, and all three minorities have low median housing equity because homeownership is so much less common. The differences are particularly stark when one compares whites with blacks and Hispanics because less than half these minority households own homes.

Looking only at homeowners shows a similar pattern for whites, blacks, and Hispanics and indicates that Asians hold considerably more net wealth in their houses than do whites. The low levels of home equity for blacks and Hispanics are striking. Even when they purchase homes, over half the black and Hispanic households have less than $52,882 and $60,000 in equity, respectively. In contrast, the white median is at least $20,000 higher. These patterns do not appear to result from group differences in length of residence in their homes. Asians have, by far, the most equity and have lived in their houses for the shortest periods; blacks and whites have spent similar amounts of time in their current homes but evidence a large gap in housing equity.

For the mortgage characteristics, a few interesting patterns stand out. The groups with a large number of immigrants (Asians and Hispanics) have the highest percentages of mortgage holders, which should be associated with less accumulated equity. However, for Asians, this association is offset by other advantages in the mortgage market; many in this group made large down payments, and few have high-interest, variable-term, or FHA/VA/FHAM mortgages. In contrast, black and Hispanic mortgage holders are notably more disadvantaged than white mortgage holders. Both have home loans with higher interest rates than do whites, and they are 1.5 to 2.5 times as likely to pay interest of 9% or more. While the black-white gap in interest rates may seem small (0.39%), it translates into $5,149 more paid by a black mortgage holder than a white mortgage holder over the 30-year course of a median-valued black home loan of $53,882. If this excess were invested, it would yield $11,903 in additional net worth at a 5% rate of return. Similarly, the modest Hispanic-white gap in mean interest (0.17%) means that a Hispanic mortgage holder pays $3,441 more than does a white mortgage holder for a 30-year mortgage on a median-valued Hispanic home loan of $80,000.

Finally, FHA, VA, or FHAM mortgages make up a third or more of all primary home loans for blacks and Hispanics; only 18% of whites and 16% of Asians hold such mortgages. The sizable presence of FHA, VA, or FMHA loans among black and Hispanic homeowners is striking because such loans require lower down payments and cost more than conventional mortgages. Small down-payment requirements encourage lower-income households to purchase homes, which should be financially beneficial, but the higher costs also place these households at risk, since they may not be able to afford the house payments over the long run. Furthermore, and most pertinent to the current research, the low down payments and high interest rates of FHA, VA, and FMHA mortgages contribute to the slower accumulation of equity. This may have important implications for racial-ethnic inequality in wealth, particularly since past research has demonstrated that the greater reliance of minority households on FHA, VA, and FMHA loans is only partly due to these households' lower incomes and wealth (Yinger 1995).

How does racial-ethnic variation in such mortgage characteristics, as well as in household locational, social, economic, and immigrant statuses, contribute to disparities in equity? We explore this issue in the next section. We then consider how the effects on housing wealth of these factors and of metropolitan context vary across whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians.

Sources of Racial and Ethnic Gaps in Equity
Figure 1 presents the results from tobit models that addressed the first issue we just posed. For each group, the left-most dotted bar represents the estimated difference in home equity [End Page 593] from non-Hispanic whites. Each successive bar shows the white-minority difference in equity after a set of predictors is added to the model. The baseline gaps in equity on the left show a pattern that is consistent with the descriptive statistics presented in Table 2. Black households have the lowest equity of the racial-ethnic groups (about $64,000 less than that of white households). Hispanic home equity is also very low relative to that of whites (about $57,000 lower). The Asian-white gap in equity is much less, at only $9,929.


Click for larger view Figure 1
Racial-Ethnic Differences in Housing Equity: Progressive Adjustments

Regional and metropolitan location are added next. Comparing the first two bars for each group shows that location has the largest effect on the home equity of blacks, who are heavily concentrated in central cities and the South, where housing values are relatively low. Asian households are highly concentrated in metropolitan areas in the West (especially California) and parts of the Northeast, where housing prices are very high. Note that the Asian-white gap in equity would be even larger than it is if Asian households were more likely to reside in the lower-priced areas inhabited by whites. To a modest degree, this pattern is also found for Hispanics because of their concentration in the West.

The addition of age to the model shows that Asians and Hispanics have lower net equity than do whites partly because they are younger. When age is controlled, the Asian-white home-equity gap drops by approximately $11,000, and the Hispanic-white gap decreases by nearly $14,000. Age has only a small effect on the black-white gap in equity.

A major source of inequality in the accumulation of housing derives from group variation in household characteristics (socioeconomic status, family composition, and length of residence). Looking at the additional changes in differences in equity when [End Page 594] these factors are added to the model provides support for this view. Blacks' and Hispanics' levels of equity would be much more similar to whites' levels if there were less racial-ethnic inequality in family and socioeconomic status. Indeed, the largest single drop in the black-white gap in equity occurs when these household statuses are added to the model.8 In interpreting this finding, it is important to recognize that some share (often sizable) of the socioeconomic differences among groups results from historic processes of intergenerational reproduction of inequality, as well as from contemporary processes of discrimination in schools, labor markets, and other social institutions. Although clearly central, microeconomic and life-cycle approaches do not fully account for the lower home equity held by black and Hispanic households, both of whom still have significantly less net equity than white households ($28,656 and $25,713, respectively). After location, age, and household statuses are controlled, over 40% of the baseline gaps in equity of blacks and Hispanics from whites remain. The pattern for Asians is somewhat different. Taking household statuses into account increases the net gap in equity, which remains significant.9

The next three sets of factors have been examined less frequently—immigrants' characteristics, prior homeownership, and mortgage traits. As would be expected, immigrant statuses have no effect on the black-white gap in equity because the flow of immigration has been small among blacks. In contrast, immigrants constitute a large share of the Asian and Hispanic populations. Indeed, only 30% of the Asian households in our sample were born in the United States. Foreign birth and shorter lengths of U.S. residence mean that these groups have less knowledge and time to accumulate equity than do whites. As such, the difference in home equity decreases substantially for both when these characteristics are controlled.

Results from the next model demonstrate that the accumulation of equity is heavily contingent on earlier access to homeownership; all three white-minority gaps in equity are notably reduced when prior ownership is controlled. Those who have previously owned a house can use the money earned from its sale to invest in and increase the equity of subsequent housing. Because minority households, particularly black households, confront substantial obstacles in buying homes, they have less access to a major means of further accumulating equity across the life course. Indeed, only about 30% of current black homeowners in our sample had previously owned a house, while almost 60% of white homeowners had done so.

The last model shows that mortgage characteristics play a small net role in explaining the remaining differences in equity across groups, contrary to discussions in the housing-stratification literature. This finding is surprising, especially for blacks, for whom there is considerable evidence of mortgage-lending discrimination (Holloway and Wyly 2001; Munnell et al. 1996; Ross and Yinger 2002). However, if mortgage variables were added before the other predictors, they would explain a substantial portion of the black-white disparity (15%).

To provide a picture of how the predictors affect home equity, Table 3 presents the full set of coefficients from the final pooled tobit model (i.e., including all the coefficients from the final progressive-adjustment model presented in Figure 1). First, as displayed in Figure 1, black and Hispanic households have significantly lower levels of home equity than do white households, even after a wide range of household characteristics are controlled. This is not the case for Asians, whose net housing equity is comparable to that [End Page 595]


Click for larger view Table 3
Tobit Model of Home Equity, Pooled Analysis

for whites.10 Most of the other predictor variables have significant effects. Households in the South and Midwest have less home equity than do those in the Northeast, while households in the West have significantly more housing wealth. Those who live in a central city, work, and are not married have significantly less equity, while those who live in [End Page 596] suburban areas, are older, have higher incomes, are more educated, have more children, and have lived longer in their current house have more home equity. Both native-born citizens and foreign-born naturalized citizens have much higher levels of home equity than noncitizens ($28,576 and $23,601, respectively); immigrants who have resided in the United States for longer periods also have more equity. Finally, a number of housing and mortgage characteristics significantly influence levels of equity. Previous ownership and owning a condominium increase equity substantially, by $61,700 and $40,253, respectively. Financial access to large or inherited down payments has obvious benefits, as is seen in the large positive coefficients for both types of down payments. The importance of obtaining favorable terms on a home loan is clear: higher interest rates and holding an FHA, VA, or FMHA mortgage both reduce equity. As the descriptive statistics showed, black and Hispanic households are more likely to hold FHA, VA, or FMHA mortgages and loans with higher interest rates, and these mortgage disadvantages are particularly great for black households.

Racial-Ethnic-Specific Models of Home Equity
To explore further the sources of inequality in housing equity across the white, black, Hispanic, and Asian populations, we estimated group-specific models of equity. We limited the sample to households in the metropolitan areas identified in the AHS to explore the influence of the contextual aspects of the housing market.11 The results of these models are presented in Table 4. [End Page 597]


Click for larger view Table 4
Group-Specific Tobit Models of Home Equity

Comparing the coefficients across the four racial-ethnic groups shows that some of the important predictors of home equity affect all these populations. Those with higher incomes and education, those with more years of residence in their houses, married persons, and native-born persons have significantly more housing equity, irrespective of race and ethnicity. Similarly, whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics who have previously owned a house, are condominium owners, or made large down payments all reap the benefits of increased equity. And living in areas with higher housing values leads to greater housing wealth within each of the four populations.

However, differences in the patterns of effects across groups far outweigh these broad similarities. Virtually all the indicators of age, socioeconomic status, and family composition have weaker effects on home equity for the three minority groups than for [End Page 598] whites. Indeed, age, working, widowhood, and intermarriage are not significant for Asians or Hispanics, while working and intermarriage are not significant for blacks. Even more striking are some of the differences in the size of the effects of the significant variables. Black, Asian, and Hispanic households gain substantially lower equity returns to income and education than do white households. Each $10,000 of income increases housing equity for whites by $17,770, but only by $15,900, $9,500, and $15,150 for blacks, Asians, and Hispanics, respectively. A four-year difference in education (e.g., a college versus a high school degree) leads to an increase of almost $20,000 in whites' home equity, but increases of only $12,616 in Asians', $6,852 in blacks', and a mere $2,564 in Hispanics' home equity. Clearly, minority households must have notably higher incomes and levels of education than otherwise similar white households to accumulate as much wealth in their homes.

The influence of length of residence shows a different pattern. Blacks and Hispanics gain considerably less equity than do whites for each additional year of ownership, but Asians accrue equity more rapidly than any other group. Ten years of residence results in an average gain of $31,570 for whites, but only half that much for blacks ($15,830) and 60% of that for Hispanics ($18,940). Asian housing equity would have increased by $48,920 over the same 10-year period, 55% more than for whites. This finding suggests that Asians may operate in a unique housing market, in which the demand for and hence appreciation of homes are great, thereby allowing many such households to accumulate housing wealth rapidly.12 The effects of prior ownership, condominium ownership, and a [End Page 599] large down payment among Asian households are also similar to or exceed those for white households, providing some additional evidence for this interpretation.

The results suggest that the opposite is true for black and Hispanic households, who likely face a weak housing market in which prices and appreciation are low and, hence, the accumulation of equity is slower than in the majority market. Prior ownership, interest rates, and large or inherited down payments all have smaller effects on home equity for blacks and Hispanics than for whites. Along with continued residence in a home as it appreciates, the most direct ways to increase housing equity would be to pay less interest, use the equity from a prior home, and/or otherwise be able to make more substantial down payments. However, these strategies have modest payoffs for blacks and Hispanics compared with whites. For example, the payoff to prior ownership is about $23,000 for blacks, over $33,000 for Hispanics, but close to $85,000 for whites.

Metropolitan characteristics have rarely been included in models of housing value or equity. Examining them separately for the four racial-ethnic groups provides a more nuanced interpretation of housing-market processes, but also reveals some puzzling findings. Consistent with the pattern of effects for the household variables, median housing values have particularly weak influences on the equity accumulated by blacks and Hispanics. Living in an area with a $1,000 higher median housing value is associated with about $500 more equity for whites, but only one fifth as much for blacks (about $100) and one third as much for Hispanics (about $175).

The weak housing-market conditions that blacks face may lead to the expectation of a negative effect of black-white segregation on home equity among blacks. Yet, we found the opposite, in that blacks' home equity is greater when blacks are more segregated. Thus, it appears that blacks operate within a segregated and racially stratified context in which it is difficult for them to accumulate high levels of home equity in the open market. Rather, one of the only ways in which blacks can attain greater home equity is if there is a well-defined separate market for blacks in which demand is high. Another surprising finding is the significant negative effect of percentage Hispanic on blacks' home equity. One possible explanation is that large Hispanic populations create competition with blacks for better housing and that blacks get squeezed out of the portions of the market with the greatest potential for the accumulation of equity.

Although the effects of household characteristics for Asians are mixed, the two significant context effects both indicate a weak housing market among Asians. Higher median housing values are associated with smaller increases in home equity for Asian than for white households, even though the difference is not as great as for the other groups. Furthermore, Asian households have lower home equity when they are a larger share of the population. Thus, Asian households benefit greatly from some personal and housing factors, but contextual forces constrain their accumulation of the same housing wealth as whites.

Finally, one truly puzzling result is that new housing has a positive effect on the home equity of Hispanics, although it is not significant for the other groups (net of household length of residence). This finding may reflect low levels of home equity in older barrios than in newer communities to which Hispanics have gained access.

Discussion and Conclusions
What are the sources of the extraordinary disparities among racial-ethnic groups in their accumulation of wealth? We explored this question by modeling the predictors of the largest share of wealth held by most households: home equity. Two types of models were examined to address our broad question: (1) analyses that combined whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians to evaluate the relative contribution of types of factors to group differences in net average equity and (2) racial-ethnic-specific models that explored differences in the processes that generate equity. Both analyses point to the centrality of racial-ethnic stratification and discrimination for understanding disparities in home equity. [End Page 600]

A key finding from the pooled analyses is that for blacks and Hispanics, the largest drops in differences in equity occur when household statuses (including income and education) are controlled. Considerable past research has demonstrated that racial-ethnic differences in socioeconomic status result from both achievement and discrimination in multiple realms (e.g., schools, labor markets, and families) within and across generations. Thus, the gap in home equity that is due to differences in household statuses represents, in large part, the outcome of processes that take place outside of and prior to entry into the housing market. Thus, processes that create prior social and economic inequality are reproduced as group disparities in the accumulation of housing wealth.

But differential treatment of blacks and Hispanics compared with whites within the housing market, as shown by audit (and other) housing-market studies, is also consequential for the growth of disparities in equity over time. Indeed, after we controlled for household age, we found that past exclusion from the housing market (as evidenced in lower rates of previous homeownership, particularly among blacks) is an important source of the lower home equity that is subsequently attained. This finding is consistent with the sedimentation argument set forth by Oliver and Shapiro (1995), in which they noted that consistent barriers to homeownership for blacks over the course of history continue to impede their potential to generate wealth.

The group-specific analyses further bolster the stratification perspective in that the payoffs to many factors are notably weaker for minority households than for white households. This lesser payoff is particularly uniform across the minority groups for age, socioeconomic status, and housing-market value. The same is true for mortgage and housing characteristics for blacks and Hispanics. These findings are consistent with Flippen's (2001a) study of home equity among preretirement-age whites, blacks, and Hispanics, as well as with considerable evidence that nonwhites are widely discriminated against in the housing market in ways that limit their access to the most-favorable neighborhoods and housing (Alba and Logan 1992; Alba et al. 2000a; Flippen 2001b; Logan and Alba 1993; Massey and Denton 1993; Rosenbaum and Friedman 2001; Ross and Yinger 2002; Yinger 1995). Such discrimination (e.g., providing less information, steering to more heavily minority areas, showing smaller, lower-quality, or lower-value homes) should mute the influence of family and market factors on housing equity, as we found here. Whites' prejudice against living near minorities similarly constrains market processes by reducing the demand for and hence the value and appreciation of homes owned by nonwhites.

The role of market constraints on minorities' accumulation of equity is further evidenced by the way in which the predictors affect entry into the ownership market versus increasing equity once a home is owned. Because a tobit model simultaneously estimates influences on the probability of homeownership and on variation in equity, the effect of each variable can be decomposed into its "direct" influence on equity and its "indirect" effect on equity through the likelihood of homeownership (McDonald and Moffitt 1980). The decomposition results at the bottom of Table 4 show a striking pattern. For whites, all factors affect home equity equally through their influence on the chances of owning a home and on the amount of equity attained after a house is purchased. For blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, the effects are channeled predominantly through homeownership. Thus, if we considered only those who own homes, the differences in effects between whites and minorities would be even larger than those we described. This pattern implies that the role of prejudice and discrimination in diminishing the accumulation of wealth through housing is likely greater than has already been noted, especially for blacks and Hispanics.

Our findings also highlight what is learned by moving beyond the nearly exclusive focus on black-white inequality in past research on wealth and housing. Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are distinctly situated with respect to economic and social positions. When we extend the groups that are examined, it becomes clear that an expanded theoretical and [End Page 601] empirical repertoire is needed to encompass the diversity of social statuses and processes. For example, Asians and Hispanics are strongly affected by their recent histories of immigration but have dissimilar socioeconomic statuses. Such differences from each other and from blacks are reflected in varying sources of gaps in equity across groups. Thus, the immigrant character and young age of the largely foreign-born Asian population are especially important for understanding Asians' initial disadvantage in home equity compared with whites. This is also the case for the Hispanic-white disparity. But, just as for blacks, the influence of immigration is dwarfed by the role of household and economic forces in lowering levels of housing equity of Hispanics relative to whites.

Separate analyses of blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians further revealed the diversity of processes across groups. Hispanics are much like blacks in the way that discrimination in the housing market appears to suppress the accumulation of home equity, but this is not systematically the case for Asians. In particular, the payoffs to a variety of housing indicators (length of residence, prior ownership, interest rates, large and inherited down payments, and metropolitan housing values) are all dramatically smaller for both Hispanics and blacks than for whites. The consistency of this pattern strongly suggests that these two minority populations cannot hope to attain the housing wealth of majority households because of the ways in which prejudice and discrimination weaken the demand for living with and buying homes from Hispanics and blacks. In contrast, most housing characteristics have payoffs for Asians that are equal to or greater than those for whites, with the notable exception of metropolitan housing values.

Finally, our analyses demonstrate the value of analyzing components of wealth separately to study unique predictors. At the household level, mortgage and housing characteristics are unlikely to affect the accumulation of financial assets (such as stocks or bonds), but are obviously central to understanding both the accumulation of equity, in general, and group disparities in equity. Similarly, there is little reason to believe that metropolitan-level housing contexts would influence trusts and inheritances, but they are important determinants of the accumulation of and inequality in housing wealth. Applying an analogous strategy to the full range of specific types of assets would elucidate the unique forces that affect each and identify the role they play in producing and reproducing overall inequality in wealth.

Our research suggests several avenues for future work on inequality in housing and wealth. First, because of the lack of data, we were unable to consider some mechanisms that may contribute to racial and ethnic inequality in home equity. These mechanisms include differences in market appreciation, inheritance levels (not just receipt), and the social class origins of minority versus majority white households. Second, the AHS data we used do not distinguish Asian or Hispanics subgroups, so we were unable to explore important variation within these panethnic groups. Third, our analyses were cross sectional, with only a few indicators of household history. Because households accumulate wealth over time, research on the accumulation of assets would benefit from longitudinal data and analyses. Unfortunately, no nationally representative surveys have followed the same households over time, collected information on inheritances and families' social origins, and have samples that are large enough for analyzing the populations examined here, let alone a wider and more-detailed array of racial-ethnic groups. Collecting such data in the future would be a boon to research in this area.

In sum, our research on home equity has linked the nascent literature on racial-ethnic wealth inequality to research that has documented large racial-ethnic differences in housing and the quality of neighborhoods. Such inequality in housing has important ramifications for household members' well-being. Housing wealth provides households with economic resources, such as protection against inflation, a hedge against catastrophic events, and access to low-cost home equity loans. In turn, these resources can be used to enhance noneconomic well-being by increasing educational opportunities for [End Page 602] children, leisure activities and health care during retirement, and the like. By directly examining home equity as a component of household assets, we demonstrated that minority groups differ dramatically in their ability to accumulate the same long-term economic resources as do whites. If such inequality could be reduced, blacks and Hispanics would improve their current and future economic and noneconomic well-being.

Lauren J. Krivo and Robert L. Kaufman, Department of Sociology, Ohio State University. Direct correspondence to Lauren J. Krivo, Department of Sociology, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210; E-mail: krivo.1@sociology.osu.edu. We thank Lisa Keister for her comments on this article. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the International Workshop on Social Inequality and Housing, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, June 2001, and at the 2003 annual meeting of the Population Association of America.
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Footnotes
1. A small number of additional units in the AHS sample were occupied in 2001 by individuals whose usual place of residence was elsewhere (n = 708).

2. We also excluded a few households in which individuals from different minority groups were intermarried (e.g., a black householder with a Hispanic spouse). Asian and Hispanic subpopulations (e.g., Mexican, Chinese, or Filipino) are not identified in the AHS.

3. Note that 14.2% and 16.9% of Asian and Hispanic households in this sample were intermarried. Only 2.5% of black households were intermarried.

4. Conventional mortgages generally require a 20% down payment. In our sample, 29.1% of the homeowning households made a down payment of at least 30%.

5. For some households, we know only that they lived within the New York-northern New Jersey-Long Island Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA). In these cases, we used contextual characteristics for the CMSA.

6. Our models excluded several nonsignificant measures: percentage black, Asian-white segregation, Hispanic-white segregation, and the Hispanic and Asian immigrant contexts.

7. The contextual analyses are multilevel, with metropolitan areas as higher-level and households as lower-level units. Thus, we estimated random effects (RE) tobit models with correlated errors within metropolitan areas. For whites, the RE error component is significant, and we present the results from the RE models. The RE error component is not significant for the other groups, and their results are from tobit models without random effects.

8. Supplementary analyses indicate that groups' differences in socioeconomic status are the predominant force in these changes. In fact, the Hispanic-white disparity increases when only family statuses are controlled, while the black-white gap narrows somewhat.

9. Supplementary analyses identified family statuses and length of residence in the dwelling as the prime contributors to this change.

10. One reviewer questioned the degree to which the reduction in group disparities in equity reflects group differences at the point of purchasing a home versus disparities that develop over time, since these may have different implications for social policy. Although a full analysis is beyond the scope of our data, we have several indicators of temporal dynamics (age, length of residence in the dwelling, years in the United States, and prior ownership) that we can use to partially address this issue. Supplementary analyses indicate that the reduction in black-white and Hispanic-white disparities between Models 1 and 7 is predominantly due to group differences that roughly correspond to the point of purchase (77% and 64% of the change, respectively). For the Hispanic-white gap, the cumulating effects of all four temporal factors are important, but for the black-white gap, only prior ownership has a major influence. For the Asian-white gap, group differences at the point of purchase are still important, but in a different way. The disparity in equity increases (it nearly doubles) when only these factors are controlled, and it is the playing out of temporal dynamics that reduces the gap to nonsignificance.

11. To determine if bias is introduced by this sample restriction, we estimated the pooled model for the metropolitan sample. This estimation yielded parallel results to those in Table 3, except that FHA, VA, or FHAM mortgage is marginally not significant in the restricted sample.

12. We considered the possibility that Asians may accumulate equity more rapidly because they acquire shorter mortgages. However, descriptive statistics showed that all four racial-ethnic groups initiated mortgages of nearly identical average length.




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Copyright © 2004 Population Association of America. All rights reserved.

Demography 41.3 (2004) 585-605
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THE POLITICS OF TEACHER EDUCATION: LESSONS FROM NEW YORK CITY

THE POLITICS OF TEACHER EDUCATION: LESSONS FROM NEW YORK CITY

Nicholas M. Michelli
City University of New York
Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 56, No. 3, May/June 2005


Education policy, including teacher education policy, is largely grounded in political and economic arguments, arguments that have to do with power and resources. Most teacher educators I know believe that education policy should be grounded first in moral arguments with a focus on democratic practice and social justice and in educational arguments that lead to high level understanding and the ability to think critically. Many teacher educators, and even deans of education, are not part of the process to influence the politics affecting the education of educators, perhaps because they find the process distasteful (it sometimes is), do not understand how to act politically, or continue to use moral and educational arguments. Acting politically and morally are not necessarily mutually exclusive concepts.
For the past decade or more, I have tried to influence deans of education and other educational leaders to become active in shaping the policy affecting teacher education, and it is, of course, policy that is the focus of the politics of teacher education. In Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making, Stone (2002) argued that we are in error if we think of policy formation as rational. Instead, Stone argued that “the very categories of thought underlying rational analysis are themselves a kind of paradox, defined in political struggle. They do not exist before or without politics, and because they are necessarily abstract, they can have multiple meanings” (pp. 8-9).
A good example of paradox, and multiple meanings embedded in a political struggle, is the concept of a “highly qualified teacher.” For the first time in our history, we have a legal definition of a highly qualified teacher. In the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), the definition for a highly qualified teacher in any public elementary or secondary school is that generally, the teacher has met state certification requirements (including alternate routes), passed state tests, and has a high level of competency in academic subjects taught measured by an appropriate major or advanced credentialing (NCLB, 2001, pp. 544-545).
And so, a highly qualified teacher knows his or her content, and we know that this is so because he or she has either passed a test, has an academic major, graduate degree, equivalent coursework, or advanced certification or credentialing. (Note that there is a nod to teaching skills for new elementary teachers.) In his review of the research on teaching, former Secretary of Education Rod Paige (U.S. Department of Education, 2003) concluded that although individual teachers make an enormous difference in student achievement, we do not know which attributes matter. Furthermore, Paige cited research that although teacher experience and content knowledge are linked to student achievement, training in pedagogy or field experiences or master’s degrees have not been linked to student success, nor have certification requirements. Curiously, meeting state certification standards is one of the standards for identifying highly qualified teachers (U.S. Department of Education, 2003, p. 2). Of course, there is a great deal of other research that counters this limited perspective that quality depends on content knowledge and two other variables not seemingly in NCLB— cognitive ability and length of service (see, e.g., 235
Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 56, No. 3, May/June 2005 235-241
© 2005 by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education
Darling-Hammond, 2000; Darling-Hammond & Sykes, 2003; Wilson, Floden, & Ferrini-Mundy, 2001). Why would the policy reflect such a narrow definition of the qualities we would look for in a highly qualified teacher? Why would the policy allow one to demonstrate that quality of academic content knowledge by so many means—a test, a major, an equivalence of a major, state certification (a quality the secretary is not confident in)? I think I know. Not too long ago, a senior member of the Bush administration’s education hierarchy (who will remain nameless) met with a group of researchers who were, in part, debating the meaning of having highly qualified teachers for every child— seemingly a core goal of NCLB. After some debate, he interrupted us and said, “Having a highly qualified teacher for every child isn’t an educational issue, it’s an economic and political issue. Some children will have highly qualified teachers and some children will have ‘good enough’ teachers.” Some of us were stunned enough to respond that it was not an educational, political, or economic issue, it was a moral issue. If one starts with an economic and political grounding, the policy that will yield the highest number of highly qualified teachers— or good enough teachers—is the best policy. Of course, we knew then, and still know now, who the children who will settle for “good enough” teachers are—they are children in urban and rural schools, including the more than 1 million children in New York City that I spend my days worrying about and working for. In defining educational practice, politics and numbers often trump the educational and moral arguments.
If we follow Stone’s (2002) logic, and my experience, virtually every public policy decision, then, is grounded in politics and usually economics. If we want to influence education policy, then we must become politically active and try to understand what drives the politics. I do not necessarily mean partisan political action, but I do mean taking a position and trying to influence policy makers and their beliefs. During the course of these years, I have put forth some principles that can guide such work; and in recent years, I have tested those principles in one of the most visible and contentious educational environments, New York City. I will say more about the principles after we examine the policy changes and politics surrounding them in New York City.
POLICY CHANGES AND POLITICS IN NEW YORK CITY
In the past 4 years, major political struggles regarding education have led to significant policy changes, including establishing citywide curricula in literacy and mathematics, mayoral control of education, ending social promotion in third and fifth grade, reorganizing the district into 10 regions and effectively eliminating community school districts, and moving toward the creation of 200 new small high schools. This is the local backdrop for what was happening at the state level. My focus will be largely on the state policy changes and their impact on New York City.
NEW YORK STATE’S STANDARDS FOR TEACHER EDUCATION PROGRAMS
With amazing single-mindedness, the New York State Regents, guided by Commissioner Richard Mills, put together a comprehensive plan to improve teaching in New York, including a set of standards that as I have argued, are among the highest in the nation. The standards, as they were originally developed, came as close to being standards based on educational and moral grounding as I have seen. Elements of the standards include
A required, clearly stated vision that drives the program to prepare teachers.
Evidence of collaboration among arts and science and education faculty as well as K-12 faculty in teacher education.
Evidence of study in general education to establish broad arts and science knowledge for all teachers.
Course work to establish content knowledge (a major or cohesive sequence of 30 credits) and a test of content knowledge.
A full professional sequence focusing on foundations, pedagogy, and inclusive education that includes specific study of literacy and other important areas.
A requirement that more than 50% of course work in teacher education be taught by full-time faculty.
Requiring examinations for teachers in knowledge of liberal arts and science, pedagogy, and subject-specific knowledge related to the area of certification.
Requiring 100 hours of field experiences before student teaching, which must take place at two different grade levels.
Ending transcript review of candidates for certification as a pathway to certification.
Requiring a relevant master’s degree for professional certification within 3 years of initial certification.
Achieving national accreditation for all programs by December 2004.
Every teacher education program within every university in the state—public and private— was required to be “reregistered” with the New York State Department of Education by the summer of 2000 (revisions in certification for school administrators came later). At City University of New York (CUNY), for example, that meant redesigning and submitting more than 350 programs from our nine colleges offering initial preparation for teachers.
THE POLITICS OF NUMBERS AND THE EFFECT ON GREAT IDEAS
These were very high standards that I believe can be traced to the educational beliefs and moral judgments of the policy makers involved. Even when policy is grounded in this way, the hard reality of numbers can take us in different directions. It is not surprising that pressure for high-stakes accreditation faced by colleges, or for finding certified teachers for every classroom, led to policy changes.
One change that emerged even as the policy was evolving was a decision to develop a Regents Accreditation of Teacher Education Program as an alternative to accreditation by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, and ultimately accepting the Teacher Education Accreditation Council as an alternative when the Department of Education approved the Teacher Education Accreditation Council. Much of the politics here were based on perceived costs of various forms of accreditation and concern for meeting some standards, even though some colleges claimed it was the nature of the standards embedded in the accreditation processes that drove the pressure for alternatives.
Overall, I am still amazed that in large measure, these standards became regulation with very few changes, largely because Commissioner Mills and the Regents genuinely believe in the research that pointed to the importance of highly qualified teachers in assuring student success in a state where there are wide achievement gaps between rural, suburban, and urban schools, as well as within districts. The commitment is implicit in the standards just described, which imply a far broader conception of what it means to be a highly qualified teacher than the federal standards. These standards extended to requiring clear, unequivocal statements about beliefs, grounding in pedagogy, foundations, field experiences, and deep content knowledge. Because of his commitment to having qualified teachers in every classroom, Commissioner Mills sued the New York Board of Education to require that a certified teacher be in every classroom in a failing school (called a School Under Registration Review [SURR school] in New York). The commissioner won the suit and overcame an injunction sought by the board. The court required that the standard be met by September 2001. Within 2 years of that, the courts required that every school have a certified teacher in every classroom, a year before the NCLB requirement. This meant that by September 2001, New York would have to hire 12,000 newly certified teachers. The projections for retirement were staggering and combined with the prohibition against hiring uncertified teachers, a standard practice in the city, the political pressure was intense.
The first outcome of the pressure was that the Regents, acting within a few weeks, established policy for New York State’s alternative route to teaching program. Having spent several decades with New Jersey’s alternative route to teaching program, I knew that there was potential for real danger here for the high standards just enacted because of the need to staff urban schools quickly. The politically expedient way of meeting large shortages of certified teachers, especially sudden shortages of the sort California faced when class size was reduced and New York then faced, is to simply redefine certification and lower standards.
The Regents maintained that their standards were sound, although it was clear that some thing had to give to meet the dilemma the court order created. The program that emerged from the Regents is the Transitional B Program, known in New York City as the Teaching Fellows Program. By state policy, all students entering the program had to come with a bachelor’s or master’s degree in the field they would teach and a 3.0 grade point average, and they had to have satisfactorily passed the state examinations in content knowledge and liberal arts and science knowledge. The test of pedagogy would come before final certification and awarding of the master’s degree. The New York City Teaching Fellows Program was crafted during that summer through long meetings of CUNY teacher education faculty, representatives of the then board of education staff, and members of the United Federation of Teachers (the AFT affiliate representing New York’s more than 75,000 teachers). We agreed on the essential elements that had to be present for each new teacher, including an understanding of what it means to teach in a democracy. Each college had to register its Transitional B Programs for state review and approval. What emerged was a program full of political compromises that everyone thought was worth trying, although most agreed that students began teaching too soon—after an intensive 6-week summer “boot camp.” Teacher education faculty and United Federation of Teachers members, working as a team, taught in the summer program. At the end of the summer, the college was required to recommend the candidate for certification. Within 3 years, every Transitional B–certified teacher had to complete a full master’s degree and meet every requirement the Regents had established in policy for certification. Students received a summer stipend, a fully paid master’s degree, and a guaranteed job. Almost all the jobs, however, were in failing schools to meet the court’s initial order. So the most challenged schools got the least prepared certified teachers. In fact, virtually every newly certified teacher, through the Teaching Fellows or college programs, went to failing schools in that year. But there were some other unintended outcomes.
In the 1st year, CUNY saw its number of certified graduates drop. We found out why. In the consent order that enforced the commissioner’s order that every classroom in every SURR school have a certified teacher, the following clause appeared:
Defendants shall fill every vacancy in SURR schools in the Common Branch license area with certified teachers only. . . . If the Defendants hire a certified teacher for a non-Common Branch vacancy, that teacher must be assigned first to a vacancy in aSURR school. (Mills v. Levy, 2000, part 22, p. 2)
The reason our numbers of certified graduates dropped, it turned out, was political savvy on the part of local school principals in schools not in the SURR list, who told many of our best students, “Don’t finish your certification program. If you are certified, I can’t hire you and if you are certified you will have to go to a SURR school.” It was still possible to hire an uncertified teacher with a temporary license in schools not on the SURRlist in that year. The other consequence, of course, was that the least prepared teachers were assigned to the most troubled schools. Since the 1st year of the program, private colleges have joined CUNY in delivering the New York City Teaching Fellows Program, and CUNY has worked with more than 5,000 teachers. There remains a significant tension regarding some issues. From the start, there was debate about whether someone trained as an accountant had the required major to teach mathematics, one of the areas of greatest shortage. Although the board contended that it did, we argued that accountants are more likely to know algorithms for solving problems than have the deep knowledge of mathematics needed to teach for understanding. Of course, the school chancellor asked what our evidence was, and we had good arguments, but not solid evidence. That experience reinforced what we already knew: Hard evidence, quantitative in nature, was going to be a political factor in all future debates.
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We held the line on the state standards, whereas some of our private college colleagues admitted students with backgrounds and preparation we would consider inadequate, responding to the politics of enrollment and economics. Ultimately, yet another program was developed to provide “mathematics immersion” to students with some solid background in mathematics but not a full major. This program recognizes content deficiencies and seeks to address them.
Several years after the initial policy was adopted, the state produced evidence that most of the teachers of mathematics and science came through transcript review rather than the completion of college programs. Transcript review as a pathway to teaching was scheduled to be eliminated by the new teacher education policy, but based on the data the New York State Department of Education proposed that the plan to drop transcript review be eliminated. This became an issue for the New York State Professional Practices and Standards Board, which proposed instead that if the transcript review was to be continued as a pathway to teaching, it be only in areas of demonstrated shortage. A compromise was needed to settle this debate; and although transcript review was continued for all areas, it also is to end by a certain date, at which time further evaluation of needs must be undertaken.
By the beginning of the 2004-2005 academic year, the debate at the state level had turned to the regulation requiring that full-time faculty teach 50% of all teacher education courses. For many programs, including CUNY’s, meeting this standard required a good deal of hiring. In fact, at CUNY a decision had been made to make teacher education a “flagship program,” one that receives special attention that includes centrally distributed lines to attract highly qualified faculty and a set goal of 70% of all classes taught by full-time faculty. Some college presidents, however, have lobbied against this provision for obvious reasons. In one meeting with state officials, an advisory group to the commissioner, on which I also serve, was told that presidents and deans were objecting. We have not found any deans who claimed to be opposed to the policy, but the policy ultimately was changed. In its final form, colleges meeting the state’s minimum pass rate on tests for teachers and accreditation are not required to demonstrate the 50% rule. In fact, CUNY holds to having 70% of courses taught by full-time faculty, so the change is likely to affect small private colleges ultimately. State officials have promised to continue to collect data on the percentage of full-time faculty and to monitor the impact of the change.
There have been other compromises. The date for accreditation has been set back from December 2004 to December 2006 with interim evidence of progress required, and it is likely that the requirement of a master’s degree in 3 years for certified teachers will move to 5 years, as it was in the original regulations. These are reasonable changes that reflect reality. Also on the horizon is a change that would allow teachers to begin teaching in a new certification area with minimum content study. The number of credits was the subject of negotiations, and a compromise was reached with the requirement that teachers complete all requirements for the field within a fixed number of years. The policy changes in New York City during the past 4 years, some generated by the state, some by the city, some by the legislature, and some by the courts have been widespread. Whether grounded in educational, moral, economic, or political grounds, all were shaped by political action in one way or another. What can we learn from this experience?
SOME PRINCIPLES FOR POLITICAL ACTION
Know what you stand for. What is your vision for education in a democratic society? Is it a shared vision? With whom is it shared? It is obviously important for any excellent program to have a clear, unequivocal vision, and our vision is for education that promotes democracy and social justice by providing all students access to knowledge and critical thinking. With that in mind, we try to pick our political battles.
Know where policy is made, the process by which it is made, and who makes it. I learned quickly in my years with the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education Governmental Relations Committee that working with legislative aides was far more important than a ceremonial visit with a senator or representative. In fact, rule making is largely an executive branch function at the state level. Under President Bush, the U.S. Department of Education’s “guidance” on NCLB takes on a life beyond the actual legislation, and here too the real effect of policy is executive regulation at least as much as legislation. A codicil of this principle comes from something attributed to Lyndon Johnson, who is reported to have said, “Make friends before you need them.” I am fortunate that the New York State Department of Education leaders with whom I work are collaborative and genuinely understand the process of compromise while maintaining the highest possible standards.
Be clear in your own mind about how the policy in question relates to your beliefs. There was a time in my career when I thought I was opposed to alternate routes to certification, no matter what their form. I no longer believe that. In the case of New York State, nothing in policy stands in the way of developing teachers with a deep understanding of what it means to teach in a democracy and the moral obligations teachers have.
Be prepared to argue strongly for your position and to compromise. Strong argument is a central component of democracy, and learning how to argue rationally is obviously important. It was very clear to me that the Transitional B Program as proposed did not interfere with the basic conceptions we had about teaching and public education. To argue for the status quo made no sense because the shortage in New York City of certified teachers was real. The alternative of having uncertified teachers was no longer a possibility, fortunately, because of the court case. Some of my colleagues think doing any work to support alternate programs is selling out. I think the opposite is true. Unless we are in the game arguing for our beliefs and willing to compromise, we will have no role whatsoever.
Do not claim to represent a larger constituency than you really do. I have learned that it is almost impossible to have teacher educators agree to present a solid front against a threat—moral, political, economic, or educational. More than once I have claimed that we were united only to find those colleagues had chosen to cut a deal, for whatever reason. In New Jersey, it was raw political pressure placed on presidents. In New York, it was a need for revenues over established principles. I believe one must know whom and what one represents to avoid overstating the case and making claims about unanimity that are not valid.
Get and use data to argue for your positions and to demonstrate the success, or failure, of policy. Of course, this raises the question of what kinds of data. Policy makers, it seems, are into quantitative data, especially data related to gains on tests, whereas, of course, educators know these are not sufficient. We all know the mantra of scientifically based evidence. Our decision in New York City has been to assemble the quantitative data and enhance it with qualitative data. We invested US$600,000 in a project now undertaken by an external team of researchers—labor economists and qualitative researchers—to examine the impact of all the pathways into teaching in New York City. The researchers have used this seed money to assemble a budget of US$3.8 million, including funding from the Carnegie Corporation, the Spencer Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.
My colleague Carla Asher, university director of teacher education initiatives at CUNY, and I identified the central questions we needed to answer. Who chooses which pathway into teaching? Which schools do they go to? How are they received in the schools? Do they stay? If they leave, where do they go and why? What is the effect of each pathway on student achievement using a value-added measure? What can we say about the cost-effectiveness of each pathway, taking into account student gains, other qualitative values, and longevity in the profession? We worked closely with Commissioner Mills in assuring that a full range of data would be available for the study. It will provide measures of the effect of New York State policy on teacher education in the broadest sense. Data from CUNY, the New York Department of Education, and the private colleges involved in teacher education in New York City make this an important study. We are committed also to examining the qualitative aspects of our programs— those important aspects less amenable to standard measures—including preparing teachers who understand democratic practice, know what it means in the classroom, are committed to social justice, and care about urban education. There is a risk here, the risk that the quantitative data will overshadow any qualitative data we bring to bear, but politically, we are convinced that we need to pursue both. The study can be followed on www.teachereducationpolicy.org.
Do not forget the children. It sounds trite, but it is the children and the society that we are in this business for. For them, we must work to prepare teachers who have the deep content knowledge we know they need, but who also understand child development, responsive pedagogy, and are committed to preparing critical and involved future participants in our democracy who have a deep sense of the meaning of social justice. In the politics of teacher education, there will always be someone who will assume we are self-serving. We cannot be. The focus of our service must be the children in schools, and our arguments must be presented in terms of their well-being and the well-being of our democracy. All of our political actions must be in pursuit of this educational and moral principle.
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REFERENCES
Darling-Hammond, L. (2000, January 1). Teacher quality and student achievement: A review of state policy evidence. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 8(1). Retrieved from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n1
Darling-Hammond, L., & Sykes, G. (2003, September 17). Wanted: A national teacher supply policy for education: The right way to meet the “highly qualified teacher” challenge. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 11(33). Retrieved from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v11n33/
Mills v. Levy, Supreme Court of the State of New York Consent Order No.26196/00 (August 24, 2000).
No Child Left Behind, Conference Report to Accompany H.R. 1, 107th Cong., 1st Session (2001).
Stone, D. (2002). Policy paradox: The art of political decision making. New York: Norton.
U.S. Department of Education. (2003). Meeting the highly qualified teachers challenge: The secretary’s second annual report on teacher quality. Washington, DC: Author. Wilson, S., Floden, R.,&Ferrini-Mundy, J. (2001, February).
Teacher preparation research: Current knowledge, gaps, and recommendations (No. r-01-3). Seattle,WA: Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy.
Nicholas M. Michelli is university dean for teacher education at the City University of New York and professor of education specializing in education policy in City University of New York’s Ph.D. in Urban Education. For 8 years, he served on the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education Combined Committee on Governmental Relations, chairing the group for 5 years. He is currently a member of the New York State Professional Practices and Standards Board for Teaching, the Regents primary policy-developing group for the improvement of teaching, including the education of educators. He also serves on New York’s Committee of Practitioners, an agency required by the No Child Left Behind Act to review all state policy before it is enacted. Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 56, No. 3, May/June 2005 241

SEX AND THE CITY: Carrie Bradshaw's queer postfeminism

SEX AND THE CITY: Carrie Bradshaw's queer postfeminism

Jane Gerhard
Endings
In February 2004, the final credits of HBO's Sex and the City (SATC) rolled and a neartotal media frenzy of goodbyes, tributes, commentary, and post mortems on the show ensued, testifying to the importance of the show to many viewers. Decidedly not innovative in its format, the show chronicled the life and loves of Carrie Bradshaw, a thirty-something single writer living in New York City. Where it was innovative, however, was its placement of Carrie in a tight-knit group of female friends with whom she could talk. In its combination of frank sex talk and best girlfriends, SATC became one of the most watched and discussed television series in recent memory.
The popularity of SATC, I believe, is due in part to its place at the juncture of two related trends in recent popular culture: postfeminism and queerness. The show is postfeminist, a term I will explore below, in the ways in which the women of SATC enjoy the fruits of women's post-70s equality. Inmany ways obvious and subtle, the series explores the meaning of women's sexual equality in the wake of the social and cultural achievements of second wave feminism. For postfeminists like Carrie and her friends, gender differences, such as wanting to look sexy and flirt, are playful, stylistic, and unrelated to the operations of social power and authority. Women, if they so chose, can work, talk, and have sex "like men" while still maintaining all the privileges associated withbeing an attractivewoman.At the same time and despite its insistent heterosexuality, SATC is a series that has taken advantage of the narrative possibilities afforded by queerness. By "queerness" I mean narratives, images, and plot structures that can be read as queer, whether or not the characters, actors or writers involved identified themselves as queer. As queer involves attempts to weaken the naturalized and normalizing binaries of sexuality (straight vs. gay) and of gender (masculine vs. feminine), it offers important insights into the show's approach to the women's desires.
Recognizing SATC as postfeminist and queer requires seeing the way the show
shadowboxes with history, or specifically, with second wave feminism. The ghost of 70s feminism haunts SATC through a repressed, nightmarish vision of autonomous womanhood, the lesbian/feminist, a man-hating, definitely humorless, and certainly fashion challenged caricature. Postfeminism is forged against this ghost of the scary lesbian/feminist as are most popular manifestations of "feminism" or "liberated women" since the 1970s. In terms of the origins of queer activists, 70s feminists, lesbian or not, had by the late 1980s became profoundly associated with the critique of male sexuality in the anti-pornography movement. Misnamed "anti-sex" feminists, those who marched to "take back the night" or who publicly spoke out against rape came to symbolize all that "feminism" could say (or not say) in terms of sexuality. Sex without power, sex between equals, sex as "erotica" and not pornography was seen as making up a rigid code of
Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2005
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"feminist" sex practice, according to those who, for instance, liked sado-masochistic sex with their feminism.1 Queer, as a movement and a term, formed in part out of the discrediting of feminism as a force for sexual freedom.
To see Carrie Bradshaw's queer postfeminism, then, is to see her sex life as a roduct of a longer representational history of women, feminist or not, who sought sexual freedom or freer expression of female sexuality. A quick history of a few of her popular cultural predecessors, women who came to be associated with popular feminism in the 1970s, casts light on how, for Carrie nearly forty years later, queer comes to stand in for a lost feminism.
Beginnings: Urban Freedoms and Popular Feminism
The show's title, Sex and the City, pays direct homage to Helen Gurley Brown's (1962) classic Sex and the Single Girl. Brown's story is essentially that of Carrie Bradshaw thirty years earlier: girl comes to city, finds a niche for herself dating married and unmarried men, enjoys the attention, sexual and romantic, and decides to write about her experiences. Brown has no female friends, only boyfriends, who do not find her brash independence troubling.
Likewise, Sex and the Single Girl stressed the connection between women's financial independence and their sexual liberation, noting that needing a man for entertainment was sexy, but needing one for financial support was not. Carrie and her friends live the life described by Brown, living in their own apartments, supporting themselves, and not requiring marriage to keep them financially or sexually afloat.
If Sex and the Single Girl asked if women can stay single and sexy, then Erica Jong's (1973) novel Fear of Flying posed a somewhat different question: can a woman have sex like a man and be happy? Isadora Wing, Jong's heroine, is a seasoned New Yorker and a committed writer who poses questions to herself/the reader in a manner very much as Carrie does on her computer screen. Both Isadora and Carrie have a hearty appetite for sex and have gained a degree of fame for their exploration of female sexuality in their work.
Isadora, most famously, longed for what she called the "zipless fuck." Historically associated with gay men, sex with strangers, or almost strangers, had migrated into instream straight singles culture since the mid 1960s yet it had not been absorbed into dominant norms about what good girls do.2 Jong's novel shocked readers when it held up sex with strangers was a desire that women might also have. The desire not only for sex without husbands, but good sex freed of the burden of love, is a kind of sex that Carrie and her friends often state they want. According to Isadora and to other popular female heroines of the 70s, liberation required that women stand on their own to prove themselves truly independent, symptomatically equating independency with adulthood.3 Yet as Isadora discovers, love and independence don't always work well together. She also learns hat sexual freedom isn't all she had hoped it would be. Isadora's negotiations with love, sex, and selfhood make her a prototype for Carrie Bradshaw who struggles with the many ways in which straight women (historically) do not have sex like men, despite their best efforts.
The last foremother in this brief history of Carrie Bradshaw is Candace Bushnell,
author of the collection of columns entitled, Sex and the City (1996). If Jong, and by
extension Isadora, had some bearing on popular representations of 70s feminism, then Bushnell, and by extension, her character "Carrie," is in dialogue with postfeminism.
Bushnell is the spiritual granddaughter of Helen Gurley Brown, who like Brown, began her career writing for Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. All this ended when she gained attention in 1994 as the New York Observer's resident "Sex and the City" columnist
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(Chris Mason 2000). The column examined her own life (through the voice of her alter ego, Carrie) and the lives of her friends, acquaintances, and New York City's social elite.
Bushnell's view of 70s feminism was that it won for women the right to have sex like men and to earn as much money. Charlotte, who in the column is a British journalist, captured Bushnell's updated view of the zipless fuck: "There's a thin line between attraction and repulsion . . . And usually the repulsion starts when they begin wanting you to treat them as people, instead of sex toys" (Bushnell 1996, p. 43).
In Bushnell's column, these hardened, high powered Manhattan women come
together to bond cynically over the multiple ways men disappoint them, both for wanting to spend the night after sex or for not wanting to spend the night after sex, depending on whose "tale from the city" one is overhearing. It is important to note, however, that in Bushnell's column, these women are not friends, or not friends in the ways that the HBO series defines them. HBO producer Darren Starr took a different piece of 70s feminism for his rendition of Carrie Bradshaw. Unlike Helen Gurley Brown, Isadora Wing or Candace Bushnell, none of whom have girlfriends, Starr put Carrie in a web of committed relationships with other (straight) women. For this Carrie, sisterhood is indeed powerful if not political.4
The relationship, then, between 70s feminism, postfeminism and popular queerness is tangled up in SATC in ways that testify to just how hard it is to learn from our (feminist) elders. While Carrie must reconcile the contrary pulls of wanting true love and wanting a good lover, wanting independence and wanting a husband, neither she nor the HBO audience is granted enough perspective to see that this struggle has a history, that Carrie is not the first to grapple with the paradoxes of "modern" heterosexual femininity. However, the absence of historical memory in SATC is ameliorated by its offering of queer answers to these straight girls' paradoxes. Ironically, SATC's postfeminist dismissal of feminist politics, or the need for a transformation in the social organization of gender, sets the stage for queer knowledge to stand in for feminist insight.
New Answers to Old Problems: Postfeminism and Queer
There is no consensus among media scholars or feminists about the definition of "postfeminism." Part of the term's instability is its adjacent boundaries with a number of related, and themselves relatively unstable, terms. Feminism, antifeminism, third wave feminism, and postfeminism share in the first term's historic vagueness. Contra Catherine McKinnon (1987), the term "feminism" cannot be left unmodified. Indeed, as a term, it increasingly demands qualifiers to stabilize its meaning as it circulates widely in popular, academic, and political discourses, accruing contradictory meanings from all.
Since its advent in 1913, "feminism" as a term has signified equal rights for women,
votes for women, sexual liberation of women, and critiques of male power.5 The term "feminism" had multiple meanings in the 1920s and 30s but it was not until the 1960s and 70s that it began its frightening accumulation of qualifiers, each attempting to specify and clarify the various political stakes for feminists. The growth of modifiers was, in rough chronology, liberal, socialist, radical, cultural, women of color, and lesbian. Each "kind" of feminism traced its origin and its evolution differently, acknowledging affiliations with liberal, nationalist, student and civil rights organizations, among others. By 1990, these specific distinctions had become merely historical, less and less salient to a new generation of gender activists.
CARRIE BRADSHAW'S QUEER POSTFEMINISM 39
If second wave feminism of the 1970s was a case study of political subdivision, then recent feminism is divided along entirely different lines. Beginning with Susan Faludi's 1991 Pulitzer Prize winning Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women, the question was no longer "are you a cultural or radical feminist?" but "is feminism dead or alive?" Were we going through a backlash against feminism, a markedly new third wave of feminism, or a moment of postfeminism? Is the glass of women's activism/gender consciousness half full or half empty? These became some of the questions around which the discussion of feminism revolved.
Faludi inaugurated, but certainly was not responsible for this new era of anti/third
wave/postfeminist confusion. She wrote what can only be described as a jeremiad against the role the media played in the de-escalation and discrediting of second wave feminist politics. Once having been the disseminator of feminist consciousness, now, according to Faludi, the media—popular journalism, news, television, movies, and the experts which feed them—generated a profound antifeminism to ward off the gains of threatening and potentially powerful women. Her message was clear: Women get too powerful; men, via the hegemonic force of media, launch campaigns to convince women of feminism's failure, represented in Backlash as day care crises, a corporate glass ceiling, the difficulty of finding men, and other false issues drummed up by "the man" to keep women down. aludi, along with Naomi Wolf and her bestselling book, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are used Against Women (Naomi Wolf 1991), put antifeminism on the pop-cultural map and did so as avowed feminists.
The cultural work Faludi and Wolf's books did cannot be underestimated. In the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Freidan, and Germaine Greer, Faludi and Wolf produced tomes that addressed, in encyclopedic fashion, the shadowy psychological and institutional crevices in which men hide their power over women. The difference between the anti-feminism that Faludi identified as a backlash and that Wolf interpreted as a new "feminine mystique," was intended to rouse a distracted feminist nation back to action.
Both stressed that the gains won by first and second wave feminists had left the latest generation of women smug in their convictions of equality. That women's victory over discrimination was yet to be won was catalogued in frightening and relentless detail in both accounts. In these formulation, antifeminism, or a broad rejection of feminist goals, transformed 70s feminism into 1990s postfeminism, a conviction rooted in popular culture's view of feminism's redundancy.
Yet, despite the rhetorical force and bracing simplicity of "patriarchy" on the move, Faludi and Wolf unintentionally served as midwives to a new set of feminist modifiers. The antifeminism that Faludi and Wolf feared was in ascendance and could ultimately undermine feminist gains was, in other hands, an altogether different beast.
What Faludi saw as Time magazine's antifeminism or insistence that feminism was
dead was, for the writers of television shows like Ally McBeal, a narrative opportunity to explore how women lived with feminism's bittersweet victories. For the viewers of Ally McBeal, L.A. Law, and Designing Women or heroines like Ripley in the Aliens series, these texts were expressing a somewhat hopeful post-revolution feminist sensibility.
Rather than a wholesale loss, for some younger audiences, the images of women in 1990s popular culture were engaging precisely for their mutation of 1970s feminism. Viewers liked the step down from high feminist alert represented in these shows' abilities to show likeable feminine characters "making it" in modern (a.k.a. equal) work settings.
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Well, which is it? Neither audiences nor scholars agree on how best to distinguish
among the latest cluster of feminisms—antifeminism, postfeminism, and third wave. Some scholars see postfeminism and antifeminism as versions of the same phenomena. Tania Modleski, in Feminism without Women (1991) defines as postfeminist texts "that, in proclaiming or assuming the advent of postfeminism, are actually engaged in negating the critiques and undermining the goals of feminism—in effect, delivering us back into a prefeminist world" (Tania Modleski 1991, p. 3). The question she asks of any text is whether it undermines or shores up patriarchal structures against their "potential ruin" (Modleski 1991, p. 87). Others, like Jane Arthurs (2003) and Moseley and Read (2002), see postfeminism as the convergence of popular culture and select aspects of feminism organized through revisiting the distinction between feminism and femininity.6 For them, the tension of postfeminism rests on the shifting line between the (unfeminine) autonomous woman and the (feminine) girlfriend, wife, lover. Finally, Amanda Lotz (2001) links postfeminism to postmodernism and postcolonialism in its attempt to incorporate the lessons learned from the mistakes of identity politics and the critiques made by feminists of color. For Lotz, postfeminist textual attributes include those that "explore the diverse relations to power women inhabit"; critique a conception of oppression not grounded on the multiplicity of identities women occupy; challenge the assumption that race, class or disability activism are not "feminist" issues; and deconstruct binary categories of gender and sexuality. While Lotz's description of contemporary feminist theory is accurate, her use of the term "postfeminism" to describe these developments is ultimately confusing. In fact, the post-identity politics that Lotz identifies represents a hard-won evolution within feminist theory begun in the late 1970s by women of color. Further, the feminism that rejects gender binaries has not abandoned a conception of gender as a system of power. The line between feminist and postfeminist Lotz wants to assert collapses upon closer examination.
That said, Lotz's postfeminism, with its emphasis on diverse expressions of activism, is nearly identical to the self-definitions of third wave feminists, a generation of feminists trained in women's studies classes and by mass marketed feminist writings, including Faludi and Wolf's. These third wavers reject the category woman as a basis for activism, deconstruct gender binaries, and refuse political separatism of any form.7 Third wavers are also informed by queer theory and activism around sexuality and identity. Unlike consumers of postfeminist views of women's equality, third wave feminists, who may or may not engage with popular culture, agree on the need for a gender-conscious activism.
A more useful model of understanding postfeminism, both historically and in the
present, is to see it as a re-negotiation of antifeminist and feminist thought in and through popular representations of women. Today's popular postfeminism explores the new possibilities afforded to women in the wake of feminist legal gains while at the same time reasserts and re-naturalizes what in the nineteenth century was framed as the separate spheres of gender. Separate spheres for our historic moment are not defined through physical spaces along the public/private divide, but through ideas about the distinctive psychological reality of women. In its emphasis on women's unique reality, one that takes place alongside that of men's and children's, this definition of postfeminism marks a change in, or restoration of, heterosexual power relations.
HBO's SATC reproduces the psychological essentialism so prominent in postfeminist representations while also celebrating women.8 At the same time, SATC's interest in female sexuality, the very aspect that connects the show to a history of single women, is also
CARRIE BRADSHAW'S QUEER POSTFEMINISM 41
the feature of the show that connects it to a different, and at times competing, way of representing sexuality and liberation. Queer theory, which emerged out of 70s and 80s gay and lesbian theory and activism and the devastation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, has become a visible presence and formidable rival to feminism on matters of sexuality. For SATC, queerness figures as a narrative structure that directs Carrie and her friends to solutions that exist beyond postfeminist individualism.
Historically, heterosexuality as a distinctive gender and sexual identification has been both omnipresent and oddly invisible. In the history of twentieth-century sexological, medical, and psychological thought, heterosexuality had been theorized as that which is known and knowable, the obvious sexuality against which all other forms of sexual desire are measured, found wanting, and closeted (Jennifer Terry 1999). More recently, scholars of sexuality have challenged the insistent "normality" of heterosexuality, arguing that it is as much a performance as any other constructed identity. As queer gender theorist Judith Butler argued in 1990, heterosexuality operates as much through what it excludes as what it includes:
Part of what constitutes sexuality is precisely that which does not appear and that which, to some degree, can never appear. This is perhaps the most fundamental reason why sexuality is to some degree always closeted, especially to the one whom would express it through acts of self-disclosure. (Judith Butler 1990, p. 5)
For queer-informed gender theorists, heterosexuality exists through a set of self disclosed practices and desires structured by exclusion, by what cannot be disclosed without endangering the performative success of specific heterosexual genders. Legal scholar Janet Halley similarly argues that heterosexuality should be read as an unstated location of "those who have not fallen out of it" (Janet Halley 1993, p. 83). Like Butler's formulation, Halley's highlights the lack of specificity over who is heterosexual and what constitutes heterosexual sexual practice, both which lend the identification a false illusion of homogeneity. In Halley's words:
Despite its representation as monolithic in its nonhomosexuality, heterosexuality . . . is a highly unstable, default characterization for people who have not marked themselves or been marked by others as homosexual . . . The threat of precipitous expulsion from the class of heterosexuals, and from all the material and discursive privileges enjoyed by members of that class, bribes class members into complicity with a pervasive representation of the class as coherent, stable, exclusively loyal to heterosexual eroticism, and pure of any sodomitical desires or conduct. (Halley 1993, p. 83)
While this default class openly expels the homosexual other who marks him or herself as gay, Halley argues that it also "covertly incorporates the homosexual other, an undertaking that renders it profoundly heterogeneous, unstable, and provisional" (Halley 1993, p. 85).
Such accounts of heterosexual instability, produced by academic scholars informed by queer subcultural writings, performances, and practices, do not exist only in university theory seminars. Queer maintains a dynamic relationship with mainstream mass media.
One obvious result of queer visibility is an increasing recognition of lesbians and gay men as
recognizable comedic and dramatic "types." Yet queerness has filtered into popular culture in less obvious ways as well.9 Carrie and her friends live in a world where they enjoy the company of their gay male friends, meet potential sex partners in clubs, bars, and parks, and
42 JANE GERHARD
pledge everlasting love to each other. Even as the main characters are "straight," the narrative queerness of the show alters the representations of their heterosexuality, drawing it out from the shadow of its hegemonic closet. The women's heterosexuality functions as a site where postfeminism and queer mass media interact.
Carrie's World of Love and Ritual
SATC is structured by two major and overlapping themes, both of which testify to the entanglement of postfeminism and queerness. The first, which is potentially the most disruptive to heterosexual allegiances, is that of the committed friendships between the women. The second is the bawdy talk the women engage in about their sexual partners. Explicit sex talk is the feature of the show most celebrated by critics, but also the feature of the series that does the most work towards expelling any potential for heterosexual instability. Together, both the female friendships and the frank sex talk demonstrate the incoherence that Janet Halley describes as a key feature of heterosexuality. In many ways, weekly episodes of SATC can be read as short lessons in the ways in which Carrie manages her incoherent desires. She manages her heterosexual identity not by "leaving" it and taking up a new one, like "becoming" bisexual or gay. Carrie finds satisfactions beyond those offered by men through her committed relationships with her girlfriends—Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha—without whom she would be adrift in a sea of orgasms, shoes, and inadequate boyfriends.
When one tunes into the show, one quickly gathers that these women's girlfriends
are the most valued people in their lives. And indeed, the show insists that these
relationships are more lasting and trustworthy than those with men or potential husbands.
The friends enjoy an intimacy that nostalgically returns female viewers to college dorms, boarding school, or sleep away camp. The friends have their own apartments, jobs and lives, yet thanks to modern communications are in constant contact with each other. If they are not talking on their cell phones with each other, they are walking the streets deep in conversation, or riding in cabs together. Their conversations are as intimate as the sex with men they enjoy. In many episodes, the heterosexual sex is akin to jogging or clubbing, but the talk is the true subject, the process by which the show's narrative, its knowledge and its pleasures, are generated. The pleasures of talking are challenged by the competing ones of eating and stylish self-presentation. The episodes unfold around the friends' shared breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and cocktails. At each gathering, the friends appear in different outfits and are ready to discuss the latest chapter in the chronicle of their sexual and romantic problems. Eating heartily, even if salad or saltwater taffy, literally and metaphorically stands in for other bodily pleasures, pleasures given to oneself yet amplified when done with others. Such eating moments literally structure the show far more than do the women's sexual encounters. Shared meals, in conjunction with the neverending conversations, function as the pauses where the women make sense of their lives, where they try to sort out what matters and what does not. They measure themselves against each other, listening in sympathy or outrage to how one of their friends might handle the same situation.
These conversations, on cell phones or face to face, become the bedrock of their
collective life and of Carrie's sex column. For not only does she get a regular supply of dating stories from her friends, Carrie also gets the discussion and debate about sex and its significance. Through these conversations, in fact, Carrie gets access to a more discursive
CARRIE BRADSHAW'S QUEER POSTFEMINISM 43
and imaginary place where sexual pleasure is not confined only to the bodies of those involved, but to those who get to listen to the stories about pleasure. For example, in season four, when Carrie has a gigantic orgasm with a guy who has an Attention Deficit Disorder, part of the pleasure of that orgasm comes from talking about it to her friends.
The friends' collective marveling at a night of pleasure, at a forbidden practice, or at specific orgasms, secures the pleasure in time and place, makes it more real, and importantly makes it possible for the speaker (and the audience) to savor it all the more. The connections that are not genital, but are pleasurable, that make sex more real than when one had it, complicates the series' representation of heterosexuality. For what the friends come to want are not only the good nights of sex, but also the pleasures they get from sharing it, through conversation, with that someone special who cares.
Crucially, these friendships, with their problems and jealousies, offer the women an
emotional alternative to the compromising world of boyfriends and potential husbands. The bonds that they forge, and upon which they rely, provide the women with the support that the endless stream of men cannot give them. The friends rely on each other to pay attention to their worries, to care about their latest $400 shoes, to be there when their mother dies, when a boyfriend dumps them, or when they dump a boyfriend.10 Ultimately, in function if not in name, they provide each other with an alternative family. This elective family structure is one that gay men and lesbians have relied on for generations—a selfselected family that willingly meets its members' needs.
The challenge the friendships pose to the women's heterosexual identities is not that such friendships mark them as gay. Rather, the connections they have with each other create an alternative to their boyfriends, an alternative that, by its very existence, grants the women options different from those traditionally signified as "heterosexual" (where women satisfy their desires with one man, serially or monogamously). Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha have created a world within a world or, to borrow historian Carroll Smith Rosenberg's term, a "female world of love and ritual" that supplements the heterosexual world of men in which they also live (Carroll Smith Rosenberg 1975). This bifurcated existence must belong to our history of heterosexuality as a feature of how heterosexuals,
but not only heterosexuals, use passionate bonds with same sex friends to manage what literary critics Dennis Sumara and Brent Davis call the "dissonance between lived experiences of pleasure and desire and culturally sanctioned expressions of heterosexuality" (Dennis Sumara & Brent Davis 1999, p. 193).
One of the projects of feminist historians in the late 1970s was to reclaim women's
friendships from the shadows of the nineteenth-century private sphere. For slave women, as documented by Deborah Gray White and Angela Davis, or for white middle-class women, as documented by Carroll Smith Rosenberg, the culture of separateness forged deep bonds with other women over birth, death, marriage, baptism, and care-taking.11 Women's historians have argued that these private bonds were passionate, that they involved psychological and physical intimacy, and provided support and love that women living in racial/gender hierarchies could not get from men, who like women, lived largely in homosocial worlds.
The historical record leaves little material to determine if genital contact between the women in Rosenberg's study took place, that being one manner of determining if the women could be retrospectively be labeled a lesbian and incorporated into the
(problematic) project of establishing a gay heritage.12 But the evidence leaves ample record of the emotional intensity and devotion women had for their female friends. As Rosenberg
44 JANE GERHARD
suggested, not only should historians be leery of applying twentieth-century labels to pretwentieth-century subjects, but that no clear division can be drawn between homosexuality and heterosexuality in the historical record (Rosenberg 1975, p. 26). Nor on cable television, I might add. If the series' raison d'eˆtre is the detailing of how hard it is to find a man worth committing to in modern Gotham, the show is nevertheless structured around the women's non-heterosexual desires. Its clever innovation was to build the narrative around the very familiar and under-theorized alternative women do have to men, to boyfriends and to the institutions of heterosexuality. The world of love and ritual the four friends create for themselves allows the series' exploration of female heterosexuality to go forward without
marking the women as homosexuals.
Female friendship, then, is the first thematic of SATC. The second is female sexuality itself. Sexual explicitness occurs in two related arenas in the show: showing the women having sex with multiple partners over the course of the series and the characters' use of explicit language to describe to their friends the sex they have had with men. The sex talk, which makes up the bulk of the friends' discussions, is one site of the series' postfeminist sensibility. The tactic of show-and-tell around the women's sex demonstrates that "heterosexual sex" refers to many things besides the missionary position or female sexual subservience. Many critics and viewers initially believed that the sex talk was the aspect of the show that was most innovative and had the most potential to disrupt confining gender
constructions.
The women's frank talk about the explicit sex achieves a number of important effects. First, the sex talk takes place in the context of the friends' conversations, conversations that constitute what is knowable by the show. This knowledge works in the same way that consciousness-raising sessions did for second wave feminists. The women's talk provides an account of the "dissonance" the characters experience between ideas about heterosexual romance and their experience of straight sex. The talk explains what's not comfortable in sex, what they don't like about what this or that lover does, what they would like more of in
sex, what they desire to have happen. But equally important, the talk also insists on the pleasures of heterosexual sex for women. These women are shown enjoying intercourse in an array of positions with numerous partners. The characters love penises and the men who bear them. They love feeling desirable. The pleasure they take in sex, in which they narrate to each other in conversation, both bind them to each other and erotically to heterosexual pleasures. This must be seen as an important contribution the show makes—these women are the subjects of heterosexual sex, not its object.
That said, the series postfeminist sensibility undoes some of its potentially liberating aspects. At the same time the talk focuses on the pleasures of heterosexual sex, it also centers on their search for "the right man." While the show celebrates the friends' pleasurable sexual encounters, these moments of sex are narrated (on multiple levels of the show) in and through the quest for romantic love. The search for lasting romance reproduces the enduring message that woman's ultimate personal and sexual liberation lies with men. While the show demonstrates that it is good to find a hard man, for Carrie and her friends, a good man remains so hard to find.
Paradoxically, the search for the right man, which up until the last season had
inevitably failed, underscores the centrality of the women to each other. In episode forty, "All or Nothing," Samantha gets sick and none of her lovers come to nurse her. In her hour of need, when all the desirability is gone, when there is no make-up, no lacy underwear, and no fancy cocktails, it is Carrie who comes to give her medicine
CARRIE BRADSHAW'S QUEER POSTFEMINISM 45
and wipe her nose. Carrie reassures her lonely and despairing friend that they are not alone, that they have each other. A moment of postfeminist angst—being liberated is not all we were told it would be—is mitigated by the show's queer perspective. Having each other becomes the way these women manage what is often represented as their lonely heterosexuality.
The show returns viewer back to this meta narrative of queer families and even
insists on ritualizing those self-chosen bonds. At the end of season four (episode sixtyfour, "Ring a Ding Ding") Carrie asks Charlotte for a loan with which to buy her literal home and to preserve her symbolic autonomy. At lunch with wine, a now separated Charlotte slides her engagement ring, encased in its original soft velvet box, the symbol of what straight women are said to desire, across the table to Carrie as a down payment for a new home. Carrie inhales sharply, looks up and searches Charlotte's eyes for her meaning. "Will you take it?" Charlotte asks. Carrie takes Charlotte's hand, and whispers, in a voice full of love, "are you sure?" The penultimate scene that haunts Carrie and her friends' inner closet of romantic desire is enacted, but not with the "proper" person straight women imagine themselves sitting across from. Instead of the boyfriend, it is the girlfriend. Not the lesbian girlfriend, but the straight girlfriend. And for this show, at least, and in this literary Gotham, this is indeed the "proper" person, the friend who will always be there.
Similarly, in the final season (episode eighty-eight, "The Ick Factor"), Carrie
demands that her new boyfriend acknowledge the centrality of her relationship with
Samantha. Samantha, recently diagnosed with breast cancer, is the character that is at once the most sexually adventurous and the most vulnerable to fears of growing old alone. During Miranda's wedding, Carrie and Samantha hold hands. Underscoring the family that already exists, the camera turns to Carrie and Samantha as we hear Miranda promise to her husband "to have and to hold, in sickness and health, as long as we both shall live." Boys on the side, indeed. Call the boyfriend to dispose of rodents and girlfriends to dispel fears of growing old alone. What made SATC different was that it regularly suggested that this family of four could be enough to make up a life, a life still worth living without the husband and baby, a life led outside the historic feminine and feminist script.
Yet throughout its tenure, the show walked the fine line between exploring the
potential enough-ness of same sex families while never tipping the women into outright gayness. This unstable project—at once insisting on the women's autonomy from men through their relationships with each other and their heterosexuality—reflect the convergence of postfeminism and queerness in series as it struggled to conceptualize women's freedom, sexually and psychologically. Rather than insisting that Carrie is not straight, we must note the multiple ways in which SATC demonstrates, inadvertently and episodically, that heterosexuals have desires that sometime defy the simple equation between genital contact and sexuality, that sometimes disrupt the lines we draw between homosexuality and heterosexuality, and that sometime crack the false divides between emotional and sexual pleasures. Gender similarity continues to provide the ground of psychological and emotional pleasures as rich as to be closeted. In its postfeminism, SATC's solution to the historic problem of sexuality for women simultaneously reaches backward to nineteenth-century bonds of womanhood and forward to female independence based on those same bonds.
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NOTES
1. See Jane Gerhard (2001), and Lisa Duggan & Nan Hunter (1995).
2. See Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess & Gloria Jacobs (1987) and David Allyn (2000).
3. See Bonnie Dow (1996) and Susan Douglas (1994).
4. See Robin Morgan (1970).
5. See Nancy Cott (1988).
6. Jane Authurs' wonderful analysis of Sex and the City emphasizes the series' relationship to consumerism and to the "interlocking circuits" of women-directed media, including women's magazines, fashion, and celebrity. We differ on our readings of the women's heterosexuality, which Authurs analyzes as ultimately dissatisfying but not to the point where heterosexuality itself is open to evaluation. I am arguing that we can see that the satisfactions of heterosexual sex for the women is complicated by the emotional intimacies the women offer each other.
7. See, for example, B Finden (1995), Karen Green & Tristan Taormino (1997), and Jennifer Baumgardner & Amy Richards (2000).
8. Cultural feminism, a variant and mainstreamed variation of radical feminism, also stresses psychological essentialism. For example, see Jean Baker Miller (1976), Nancy Chodorow (1978), and Carol Gilligan (1982).
9. For example, Entertainment Weekly reported Starsky & Hutch (2004) director Todd Phillips calling the remake of the 70s series a "romantic comedy between two straight men" (March 12, 2004, p. 19).
10. Janelle Brown (1996–1997) calls the centrality of consumerism to postfeminist
sensibilities "a new girl order."
11. See Carroll Smith Rosenberg (1975), Nancy Cott (1978), Deborah Gray White (1985), and Angela Davis (1989), are three of many examples.
12. Taking twentieth-century labels, such as "lesbian" back in time in an effort to
show that "gay people" have always existed is a strategy I appreciate but do not advocate. See Lillian Faderman (1981) for an example of such a history.
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Jane Gerhard received her PhD from Brown University in 1996. Her book, Desiring
Revolution (2001), looks at the tangled histories of feminism and female sexuality in
the US from the 1920s to the 1980s. She currently teaches at the Program for History and Literature at Harvard University and the Women's Studies Department at Wheaton College. Gerhard is at work on a new project that explores the overlapping genealogies of queer theory and postfeminism.
CARRIE BRADSHAW'S QUEER POSTFEMINISM 49