The Thinkers
This monthly series will highlight people from Western Pennsylvania who are on the forefront of new ideas in their fields.

---

Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette . Dr. Larry E. Davis, dean of Pitt's School of Social Work, at his office in the university's Cathedral of Learning in Oakland. Age: 59 Position: Dean, School of Social Work, University of Pittsburgh; director, Center on Race and Social Problems. Education: Doctorate, University of Michigan, social work and psychology, 1977; master's degrees in psychology and social work, University of Michigan, 1973-75; bachelor's degree in psychology, Michigan State University, 1968. Previous positions: E. Desmond Lee Professor of Racial and Ethnic Diversity, Washington University, St. Louis, 1998-2001; professor of social work and psychology, Washington University, 1977-1998. VISTA volunteer, New York City, 1969-72. Books, publications: "Black and Single: Meeting and Choosing a Partner Who's Right for You," 1993; "Working With African American Males: A Guide to Practice," editor, 1999; 40 articles in professional journals and other publications. The Series Click here to view other installments in this continuing series.

As the only black dean at the University of Pittsburgh, Larry E. Davis tries to take a thoughtful, balanced, academic view of how much racial attitudes have changed in America.

But sometimes it's hard.

That came home to him again recently when a visiting speaker told him about the comments her limousine driver from the airport had made.

The devastation of Hurricane Katrina was still fresh on everyone's mind, and the limo driver was talking about the mostly poor, mostly black residents who had been stranded in New Orleans.

"You see that mess they have down in New Orleans?" the driver said. "All those poor people? That's what [President] Johnson's Great Society did. It made all those people dependent."

Dr. Davis shook his head, eyebrows arched. "Wow! That was what he got out of that -- that they were poor because of the programs that were designed to get them out of poverty, rather than thinking back further into history and asking, why were they poor to begin with?

"They were poor to begin with because of slavery and Jim Crow, but that didn't occur to him. And that's what's so frightening."

It has left the 59-year-old dean of Pitt's School of Social Work worried about what lessons America will draw from the events in New Orleans.

Unlike many black Americans, Dr. Davis does not believe that the balky government response to Hurricane Katrina was the result of deliberate racial bias. But he's concerned that before long, some will start to blame the homeless, hungry, washed-out blacks of New Orleans because they hadn't worked hard enough to live in a better place, or hadn't kept up payments on cars they could have used to leave town.

"I'm just not sure," he said, "that this is going to open up the doors of understanding that we think it might."

Pitt recruited Dr. Davis from Washington University in St. Louis four years ago. He came largely because of the school's commitment to his idea to set up a Center on Race and Social Problems, a broad-based research institution that was established in late 2002.

He was intentional about the center's name, he said, because "I can't think of any word that's more taboo in our society than 'race.' "

Many African Americans don't like to talk about race, he said, because the legacy of slavery and their slow progress over the past 140 years is shameful to them. Many white Americans don't want to talk about race because they feel guilty about that legacy, or don't want to acknowledge the ways in which they have benefited from hundreds of years of discrimination.

"As a colleague of mine once said," Dr. Davis recalled, "if someone is disadvantaged, then someone else is advantaged."

It is the ability of many white people to disconnect themselves from history and its consequences that bothers him most.

Whenever he hears whites complain about favors done for black people, he thinks:

"We enslaved people for 246 years, we gave them another 100 years of Jim Crow, we made them battle for everything they got in the '60s, we've had 25 years where we've had something approaching [racial] parity in this country, and they say, 'Boy, we've been doing this a long time.'

"My comment to them would be: Let's run affirmative action programs for at least as long as you kept people in slavery.

"If I could convince America of just one thing," he added, "it would be that people do not choose hardship for themselves."

Working-class upbringing

Larry Earl Davis was born and raised in Saginaw, Mich., a blue-collar industrial city. His mother worked for 37 years at the Saginaw Gray Iron Foundry. His father ran an auto shop.

He began thinking about race when he was still a boy, and the prospective title of the next book he wants to write -- "If We Were Slaves" -- is based on a question he asked himself when he was 6.

Trying to figure out white people's attitudes, the boy wondered, "If we were slaves, why are they angry at us? I didn't understand that. The book would deal with how I've tried to answer that question as an adult."

After graduating from high school, Dr. Davis studied psychology at Michigan State University, then got master's degrees in both psychology and social work at the University of Michigan, followed by a doctorate combining both subjects.

Before he finished his studies, he took a three year hiatus that turned out to be the most transformational period of his life.

From 1969 to 1972, he worked as a VISTA volunteer in New York City. He organized community groups, fought for better housing, led educational efforts and found out for the first time what real ethnic variety was all about.

It gave him a strong taste of social work and community activism, and grounded his subsequent studies in the hard realities of urban life.

After earning his doctorate, Dr. Davis went to Washington University in St. Louis, where he would remain for the next 24 years, eventually becoming the first tenured black professor at the school and holding an endowed chair in racial and ethnic diversity.

He became best known there for his 1993 book, "Black and Single: Meeting and Choosing a Partner Who's Right for You," which is now in its third printing.

The book is full of practical advice on dating, relationships, sex and values, but it was driven by one central theme: the fact that there are too few "eligible" black men for black women in this country.

Birth and mortality rates dictate that there are eight black men for every 10 black women, but "once you factor in drug addiction, imprisonment and unemployment," he said, the ratio dips to about five "marriageable" black men for every 10 black women.

Because women also account today for two of every three college degrees being earned by African Americans, this means there is a growing group of well-educated, professional black women who have a hard time finding the kind of black partner they are looking for, Dr. Davis said.

An absence of men
The problem is made worse by the large number of single mothers raising black families, Dr. Davis said, because "I'm convinced the reason black girls are doing better today than black boys is because ... the girls have a better idea from their mothers of what it is to be a woman than the boys do of what it is to be a man. It's hard to be what you've never seen."

He also said the way imprisonment removes black men from the community actually increases the amount of violence, which is primarily committed by young black males who have no role models.

One other key question Dr. Davis has explored has been how the mix of white and black Americans in a given setting affects their interaction.

"It's really the only original idea I've had in my life. I call it 'the psychological majority.' Essentially what that means is that if you compose a group of five whites and five blacks, the group is psychologically imbalanced, because whites will feel they are in the minority.

"Because whites are so accustomed to being the overwhelming numerical majority, in situations where that's not the case, they feel outnumbered even when they are in a slight majority."

This phenomenon helps explain, for instance, why there is more white flight from a neighborhood when the percentage of blacks reaches 30 than when blacks actually become a majority.

"The 'startle pattern' [for whites] comes at 30 percent, and those who can flee do. At a 60-percent black population, the battle's already over, for whose turf it is, whose neighborhood bar it is, whose school it is."

In an odd way, though, this statistical pattern could work in Pittsburgh's favor.

Pittsburgh, with blacks making up 27 percent of the population, is "one of the whitest cities in America" for its size, Dr. Davis said. In his previous hometown, St. Louis, blacks comprise 51 percent of the population.

While blacks lack the political clout in Pittsburgh that they have in cities where they're more numerous, his research suggests that it might be easier for blacks and whites to form alliances here than elsewhere.

He hopes this might benefit Pittsburgh, because as he gets older, Dr. Davis often struggles to keep his hope for racial harmony alive.

"When I was younger, I honestly thought we would wipe out racial prejudice in my lifetime, and when I find people still fighting over some of the same things we fought over, it's terribly disheartening."

But he also feels an obligation not to give up.

"That's the job of those of us who have taken this on as a life mission," he said. "We must try not to become disillusioned in the absence of the grand progress that so many of us thought we would make."