New Power Elite

The New Power Elite

By Richard L. Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff

March/April 1998 Issue

Today, more than 20 years since the beginning of affirmative action programs and the social change that led to them, Jews, women, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans sit on the boards of the country's largest corporations; presidential cabinets have become increasingly diverse; and the highest ranks of the military are no longer filled solely by white men.

The rules, however, remain the same as in 1956 when C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite described the exclusively white, male, and Christian makeup of the leading members of America's political, military, and business institutions. The broad social movements of the 1960s and '70s sought to diversify this elite--and, in the process, shift its values to reflect greater social equity--but failed to change the most important factors in attaining membership. Indeed, the diversity "forced" upon the power elite has given it buffers, ambassadors, and tokens through the women and minorities who share its prevailing values. Discrimination is still widespread, and the ascension of different groups, albeit uneven, depends on four factors:

CLASS: For the most part, it takes at least three generations to rise from the bottom to the top. Fully one-third of women in the elite are from the upper class. Most of the Cuban Americans and Chinese Americans come from ruling-class families displaced by political upheaval. The Jews and Japanese Americans are the products of two- and three-generational climbs up the social ladder. And the first African Americans to serve in cabinets and on the boards of large corporations tended to come from the small black middle class that predated the civil rights movement.

EDUCATION: The women and minorities who make it into the corporate elite are typically better educated than the white males who are already a part of it, but time and again they emerge from the same institutions: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and MIT on the East Coast; the University of Chicago in the Midwest; Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley on the West Coast.

SKIN COLOR: African Americans and Latinos who do make it into the power elite are lighter-skinned than other prominent members of their racial group. As Colin Powell told Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the New Yorker, explaining his popularity among whites: "Thing is, I ain't that black."

"IDENTITY MANAGEMENT": As Terie Miyamoto, an Asian American U.S. West executive, puts it, the challenge is to move into a "comfort zone" with those who decide who is and is not acceptable for inclusion. Cecily Cannan Selby, the first female board member of Avon Products, cites her first dinner with the previously all-male Avon board: The tension in the room, she says, was visibly reduced when she lit up a cigar. Hedging against traditional stereotypes, Jewish and black executives must be properly reserved, Asian American