On June 13, 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Federal programs classifying people by race, even for purposes such as creating work opportunities for members of minority groups, are unconstitutional. Conservatives hailed the ruling as the end of an era of affirmative action, or at least the beginning of the end. Just one week after the Supreme Court’s ruling, however, a preliminary report on the new demographic study found that in the employment arena, race still matters a great deal, and so does skin tone.

“Even for people who play by the rules, who go to school and stay out of trouble, there is evidence that blacks have difficulty finding jobs and that dark-skinned men in particular find it hard to get hired,” said James Johnson, co-author of the report and director of the study. Johnson is the E. Maynard Adams professor of business, geography and sociology at UNC-CH and director of the Urban Enterprise Corps at the Kenan-Flagler Business School.

The preliminary report, based on telephone and face-to-face interviews conducted in Los Angeles, is part of a national study released at a New York conference in September. Johnson said that the study was designed to test the view that social welfare programs of the 1960s caused a decline in individual responsibility and family values, resulting in rising rates of joblessness and other social ills in urban America over the last two decades. Lawmakers who accepted this hypothesis are revising programs to discourage reliance on government handouts. But rather than placing the blame for unemployment at the doorstep of social welfare programs, Johnson relates his findings to a shift in the U.S. from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy where more and more jobs require direct contact with the public-a trend that seems to be increasing.

“A dark-skinned man could get a job as long as it was in the back of the shop,” Johnson said, “but when it requires direct interface with the public, the light-skinned people who have job training have one foot up.”

The most significant results of the study came from comparisons of unemployment rates among white, black, light-skinned black men and dark-skinned black men in Los Angeles. In the sample, only 8.6 percent of white males were unemployed, compared with 23 percent of black males in general and 27 percent of dark-skinned black males with similar backgrounds. Light-skinned African Americans were more likely to be working than were their dark-skinned counterparts, although their rate of unemployment, 20 percent, was still high compared with that of white males. Among the 2,000 able-bodied men interviewed in Los Angeles, overall findings showed that being African American and dark in skin tone reduced the odds of working by 52 percent.

Cultural influences such as growing up in a family dependent on welfare, being born in the South or immigrating from Mexico have negative effects on employment. “But,” Johnson said, “those negative effects disappear once you implement statistical controls for education, martial status, criminal records, job training, race and skin tone variables.”

For example, Johnson found that only 10.3 percent of light-skinned African American men with 13 or more years of schooling were unemployed, compared with 19.4 percent of dark-skinned African American men with similar education. Comparable white males have a 9.5 percent rate of unemployment.

Among males who have participated in job-training programs, light-skinned black males actually have a lower jobless rate than their white male counterparts-11.1 percent as compared with 14.5 percent. Dark-skinned African- American males who had job training had a jobless rate of 26.8 percent.

Even among high school dropouts and for those who live in poverty-stricken areas, skin tone made a difference. Dark-skinned African American males with less than 12 years of schooling had a jobless rate of 61 percent compared with 50 percent of light-skinned black men and 18.6 percent of white men with similar schooling. Thirty-three percent of dark-skinned black males who live in poor neighborhoods are unemployed, compared with 18.4 percent of light-skinned black males and 10.4 percent of white males who live in poor areas.

Johnson found that race and skin tone matter even among men with criminal records. Although having a criminal record lowered the chance of employment by 72 percent for all men, the study showed that among those with criminal records, dark-skinned African Americans have a 54 percent jobless rate. The jobless rate for light-skinned black men was 41.7 percent and 25 percent for white males.

The national study included interviews in 8,600 households in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Detroit and Boston, and with 4,000 employers in those cities. Fifty researchers from 15 universities worked on the $6 million project, known as the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality. It was funded by the Ford Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation, both based in New York.