Is the subordinate position of the black population ultimately derived from the stigma of color, or is it due to the black population’s inferior class or economic position?¹ Even when both the race and class categories are employed, either the question of primacy is raised or class and race are affirmed simultaneously without a coherent statement about their interaction. Race is frequently employed to include unique historical roots and culture; class is often enlarged to embrace a variety of economic characteristics. The choice of category or emphasis forms the basis of arguments about the determinants of black status and the...

The hopeful changes many expected from the civil rights movement in the sixties proved unwarranted. By the mid–seventies, many liberals and conservatives had come to believe that the civil rights movement had outlived its usefulness.¹ Throughout the first half of the eighties we witnessed a resurgence of racially motivated incidents throughout the country that appeared to signify a hardening of white resistance and a serious interruption in the economic progress and social integration of blacks. These developments constitute the “disgrace” that informs the title of this chapter.

In the course of the civil rights movement’s relative success in the...

Almost all discussions of black issues inevitably make reference to the legacy of slavery. In this allusion to the past, one becomes aware of the extent to which the present makes history. The past is forever being discovered and rediscovered—almost as if it were in fact changing because of present exigencies and events. “One must reflect uneasily,” writes a southern historian, “that there was a connection between the long hot summers of the violent sixties, those dreadful academic quarrels, and the publication of some good and very bad books on slavery.”¹ The human need to adapt to contemporary conditions,...

Majority opinion would declare, I believe, that “intelligence” is inherited in the same axiomatic way that majority opinion once believed the world was flat and the planet Earth was located at the center of the universe. Parents believe that they often see “inherent” differences among their children whom they erroneously think are raised in identical environments. Not uncommonly it is said that “Mary Ann has the brains of her grandmother.” Folk wisdom abounds with examples of family members and friends who suffered equally from poverty but, like cream, only some rose to the top. It cannot be all environment. While...

Slavery not only produced a legacy that justified the use of scientific IQism against blacks; it also generated a frame of mind, however modified over time, legitimizing institutional racism—a phrase that has been overused and ill-defined.

My concern in this chapter is less with the wide range of diffuse discriminatory practices that prevail in a variety of areas, and more with the way institutional racism operates to produce or reproduce dominant-subordinate relations in specific situations. While mechanisms (e.g., conforming to the racial preferences of others), sources (e.g., employers, employees, and consumers), and manifest forms (e.g., black-white differences in career...

Discussion of the black underclass brings out the worst in all of us. In the course of everyday life, white and black leaders, white and black scholars, and, not least, white and black “plain folk” hear references to a black underclass, a term that suggests the existence of an evil, threatening cancerous growth in our midst.¹ Perceptions and images are often conjured up to serve a larger agenda that is frequently far removed from the particular conditions that produce a black underclass. The most blatant case in point is the use of Willie Morton, a black convict, in the 1988...

I have argued that the civic disgrace that followed the civil rights movement demanded a perspective that focused on race-class relational subtleties. Existing perspectives (rational individualism, class determinism, and non-Eurocentric culturalism) were inadequate to the task of integrating analysis, strategies, and public policies. I have indicated in what sense the legacy of slavery still affects white views of black mental capacities. I have shown how the economics of dominant-subordinate relations overcrowd blacks into the lower portions of each occupational group (e.g., professional and kindred workers) and in the lower-ranked groups (e.g., service and semiskilled operative workers) more generally. I have...

Concluding chapters frequently suggest beginnings to other books. The choice here is either to summarize my arguments in the previous chapters or try to introduce some new considerations. Although I have chosen the latter course, I shall nevertheless attempt to relate concerns about the decade ahead to what I have argued so far.

The civil rights movement, followed by the War on Poverty, was linked to the Democratic party and the extension of the liberal welfare state, which had its origins in the New Deal programs of the 1930s. In the course of the white backlash to the social justice...