Will the Color Line Fade?

Adam Serwer reviews Blurring the Color Line:

"You mean there are no white males qualified?" the conservative commentator Pat Buchanan exclaimed in disbelief in one of his many cable TV appearances at the time the president nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. 



Sotomayor's nomination and the response it drew from conservatives exemplified what the sociologist Richard Alba describes in his new book as the problem of "zero-sum mobility," namely a situation where the number of elite positions is fixed and the majority sees minorities as moving up at their expense. According to Alba, although zero-sum mobility provokes resistance by the privileged majority, non-zero-sum mobility creates a more favorable environment for minorities to gain acceptance, even to the point where ethnic and racial lines fade in significance. Non-zero-sum mobility occurs in situations where minorities can move up without displacing members of the majority group because of economic expansion or the disproportionate aging and retirement of members of the majority. 



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