16,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Work & Society
- Sprache: Englisch
This book provides a reasoned, unflinching description of how race and paid work are linked in U.S. society. It offers readers the rich conceptual and empirical foundation needed to understand key issues surrounding both race and work.
Loscocco trace current patterns to their historical roots, showing that the work lives of women and men from different race and ethnic groups have always been interrelated. The chapters document the U.S.’s multicultural labor history, discuss how labor markets and jobs became segregated, and analyze key racial-ethnic patterns in work opportunities. The book also addresses common misconceptions about why women and men from some racial-ethnic groups end up with better jobs than others. It closes with a look at contemporary developments and suggests steps toward a future in which race-ethnicity will no longer affect work opportunities and experiences.
Race and Work deepens understanding and elevates the discussion of race, racism, and work in an engaging, accessible style. It will be an essential resource for anyone interested in work, race-ethnicity, social inequality, or intersections among race, gender, and class.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 413
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Ähnliche
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Race and Work: Laying the Conceptual Groundwork
Race Hierarchy as an Engine of Economic Privilege
The Racial Other
Theories and Concepts
2 The Roots of Race-Based Work Inequalities
Race in the “New World”
The Invention of the Race Hierarchy and Racist Ideology
The Ideology of Racial Superiority
Race Stratification in Labor Markets and Jobs
Point 1. Whiteness is the Key to Upward Mobility in America
Point 2. Race Trumps Class: Or How Powerful Whites Successfully Use Race to Maximize their Profits
Point 3. The Playing Field Does Not Get Leveled: Cumulative Disadvantage in the Work Histories of African Americans and American Indians
Point 4. Racism and U.S. Capitalism Go Hand in Hand
3 Activism and Entrepreneurship
Resistance Strategies
Entrepreneurship and the Model Minority Myth
4 The Past is in the Present: Persistent Work Inequalities
Part 1. Racial-Ethnic Patterns: Key Indicators Access to Jobs
In the Occupation and on the Job
In the Workplace
Hostility, Exclusion, and Harassment
Part 2. Complicating the Story
5 Explaining Race Differences in Work Outcomes
Individuals and Structures
6 Trending Race and Work Issues
American Capitalism and Increasing Inequality
Incarceration Nation
Immigration
Worker–Job Mismatches and Work–Family Conflict
Interactive Service Work
Careers in the New Economy
7 Reducing Race-Based Inequities at Work
Organizational Change
Social Policy and Social Movements
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
ii
iii
iv
ix
x
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
Work & Society Series
Thomas Janoski, David Luke & Christopher Luke, The Causes of Structural Unemployment: Four Factors that Keep People from the Jobs They Deserve
Karyn Loscocco, Race and Work: Persistent Inequality
Cynthia L. Negrey, Work Time: Conflict, Control, and Change
Marcus Taylor & Sébastien Rioux, Global Labour Studies
RACE AND WORK
Persistent Inequality
Karyn Loscocco
polity
Copyright © Karyn Loscocco 2018
The right of Karyn Loscocco to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station Landing, Suite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9644-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Loscocco, Karyn A., author.
Title: Race and work / Karyn Loscocco.
Other titles: Race & work
Description: Malden, MA : Polity, 2017. | Series: Work & society | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017012650 (print) | LCCN 2017030940 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745696430 (Mobi) | ISBN 9780745696447 (Epub) | ISBN 9780745696409 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745696416 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Discrimination in employment. | Sex discrimination in employment. | United States--Race relations. | Equality--United States. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Organizational Behavior.
Classification: LCC HD4903.5.U58 (ebook) | LCC HD4903.5.U58 L67 2017 (print) | DDC 331.60973--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012650
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
I offer heartfelt thanks to the scholars whose work has inspired and informed my analysis of persistent inequalities in race and work. I hope I have done their important work justice. I am grateful to Richard Lachmann, Melinda Lawson, Hayward Horton, Christine Bose, and Carol Tye, who took time out of extremely busy schedules to read parts of the manuscript. Their suggestions and assurances were extremely helpful. Thank you to the Polity readers who provided insightful suggestions and pointed out blind spots. Special thanks to editor Jonathan Skerrett who wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, launching me into a project that has expanded my horizons. During our journey together I have been consistently impressed with how good he is at his job. I also want to thank editors Rachel Moore and Susan Beer who ushered the manuscript into print with skill and patience.
I was fortunate to have the research assistance of Rachel Sullivan, Elizabeth Harwood, and Wen-Ling Kung at various stages of the research and writing of the book. Very special thanks go to Annemarie Daughtry whose excellent skills and impressive work ethic have been essential throughout the project.
I am grateful to my wonderful family and friends for showing interest in the book and for understanding when I disappeared. Additional thanks go out to Kecia Johnson and Dawn Knight-Thomas, who convinced me that I had a contribution to make, and to Dorene Earner for being my mirror and my anchor.
Thank you, again and forever, to my parents, whose generosity and sacrifices made it possible for me to do meaningful work. Thank you to my son Nicholas for letting me know (in his own way) that he values my work, and for being an enjoyable distraction. My biggest debt of gratitude goes to my life partner Larry, for his unflagging support and understanding. Thanks for keeping the home fires burning (and the house from burning down).
I dedicate this book to all of the people who have fought – in whatever ways they could – to create more racial equality. And to those who are part of the resistance now.
Introduction
Discussions of race and work are common at dinner tables, across campuses, and on social and news media pages. Social science corroborates what a cursory look at the content of those discussions shows: people from different race groups see things very differently. While some groups call attention to equal work opportunity as a key unfinished goal of the Civil Rights Movement, others are convinced that whites are now oppressed as much or more than blacks, Latinos, and Asians – particularly when it comes to finding and keeping good jobs.
There are many misconceptions about the economic histories of different racial and ethnic groups. There is confusion about the extent and content of racial disparities in the work realm. Finally, misleading and incorrect information about the reasons for race-based patterns in work and occupations abounds. In these pages you will find the evidence and conceptual building blocks needed for a more accurate discussion of race and work in U.S. society.
Sociology makes a unique contribution to the study of work and race systems because of its emphasis on structure. This is an important corrective to our cultural emphasis on “rugged individualism.” People tend to look to individual behavior and attitudes for explanations, even when there are clear and consistent patterns. It is as though they focus in on the final frame of a video clip, instead of examining what came before. If they watched the whole video clip, their interpretation of the behavior of the person in the single frame might be different. While sociologists certainly acknowledge the important role of agency, or the self-conscious decision-making and actions of individuals, social context is particularly important to the study of race and work. That is because when we believe that work outcomes are the product of individual inputs, we conclude that we all get the work lives we deserve. This is a strong cultural value which can lead some people to overlook large amounts of data showing that structural forces channel individuals into work positions and affect attitudes and behaviors.
Because race and work developed together in the United States, work is an important focus for understanding race, and race should be front and center in the study of work. Society is built around the economy so the effects of racial inequities ripple out well beyond the workplace, into homes, communities, and futures. Work is likewise a key potential site for disrupting race-based inequities and tension. Of course work systems do not exist in a vacuum. Employment systems, occupations, and industries, and the ways they sort people by race, are intricately connected to other systems such as education, polity, and family. Though detailed discussion of other social institutions is beyond the scope of this book, you will see that race-based work and employment patterns affect and reflect patterns in other institutions.
The sociological study of race and work exercises the critical thinking skills prized in today’s business and professional world. It pushes us to reject surface explanations; instead, we go deeper, excavating the sources and consequences of the intertwined work lives of people from various racial-ethnic groups. Though it is common to judge and reason from one’s own limited standpoint, robust thinkers and leaders situate individuals, groups, and events in social context.
Thus, this book presents “the whole video clip” about how race and the U.S. economic system developed together, the role of race in propelling white ethnics into the middle class, the stubborn persistence of racial disparities in unemployment rates, how a racialized immigration process creates race disparities in occupations, and much more. My goal is to provide an unvarnished analysis of race and work in the United States. As others have noted, the language with which we often talk about both American history and race has been sanitized to hide prickly truths (e.g. Moore 1988; Loewen 1995; Bonilla-Silva 2001).
Even well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, there is a great deal of segregation by race in U.S. neighborhoods, schools, churches, and social organizations. The workplace is the single most common arena where adults from different racial and ethnic groups have close and continuing interaction (Estlund 2003). Employers seek job candidates who understand the role of race at work, whether visible or invisible. Perhaps that is motivation for reading this book. Of course it is more important than ever, in this age of constant information and opinion, to be an informed community member, parent, voter, and consumer of the internet. The race and work story told here provides framing, context, and information that contribute to that end.
As the title makes clear, the focus of the book is race. For that reason it does not provide a full analysis of how gender intersects with race to create unique patterns for women and men. Nor is there a full discussion of class variation within race groups. As I will explain a bit more in the next chapter, I made these choices to make the race story clearer. But I hope that readers will keep in mind that race is always created and experienced at the intersection of other major social statuses such as gender and social class.
In these pages you will find an analytical rather than a comprehensive review of research on race and work in the United States. The book would be far too long if I tried to include counter findings and critiques of every topic. That means that there is always other research “out there” and I encourage you to find it and evaluate it for yourself. I have chosen to highlight research that illustrates race inequality in the United States. Based on the preponderance of research evidence, I believe that our starting point should be to assume racism and disprove it rather than taking the more common route of having to prove it exists. As noted sociologist Barbara Reskin (2003) has pointed out, when elaborate statistical models show racial disparities the default hypothesis should be that racism is at work; researchers should reject that hypothesis only if they verify another causal mechanism. Further, even small statistical differences matter because racism is hard to measure and any amount can reflect important differences in people’s lives.
The book begins with a brief introduction to the major conceptual tools that will be used in the chapters that follow. The next two chapters provide essential historical context. Chapter 4 presents data documenting systematic patterns as well as fine-grained detail about race and work. It is followed by an explanation for those research findings that uses many of the concepts from Chapter 1. Chapter 6 takes a look at current trends related to race and work. The book concludes with a sketch of how we might move toward greater racial equality in work opportunities and experiences.
I offer what follows in the spirit of deepening understanding and elevating the discussion of race, racism, and work in the United States.
1Race and Work: Laying the Conceptual Groundwork
What is work? If you ask most Americans they would likely say something about employment. Yet there is plenty of work that goes unpaid, such as volunteer work and family work. During the 1970s researchers pointed out the illogic of considering activities done mostly by wives and mothers to be work only when women were paid to do them for someone else’s family (Hall 1994).
The key thing that distinguishes work from other kinds of activity is that it results in something of value to other people. Whether you do something meaningful or menial, whether you define it as work or pleasure, if others gain from it, you are doing work. One of the clearest signals we are doing something useful is when someone pays us to do it.
Work done for pay is organized into specific jobs or occupations, and professions. Sets of work tasks and skills are bundled into occupations and we have a sense of what a person does when we hear that they are a doctor or a web designer, a child-care worker or a home health aide. Yet most jobs require a variety of types of activity and people with the same job title in different companies may be doing somewhat different things; this can happen even within the same organization. Professions are more formalized sets of activities and often require certification or advanced degrees. Careers typically refer to job sequences for which there are increases in pay and responsibility. These may unfold within occupations and professions or across companies.
The jobs we do and the careers we pursue serve as key mechanisms sorting us into “haves” and “have not’s.” Occupations vary not only in wages and salaries, but also in the value society accords to them. When we hear what kind of work a person does we know more than what they do, because occupational groups are also status groups, sharing lifestyles and viewpoints.
The focus of this book is work done for economic gain, because it has been tied to race throughout U.S. history. In addition, working for pay is the central way that most people try to achieve the American dream of a comfortable life; if not for themselves, then for the next generation.
Keep in mind that jobs are vitally important not only as a source of income and the route to a better life, but also as a social anchor and a major potential source of self-worth and meaning. That is why people who are fired, chronically unemployed, or pushed to retire suffer not just a loss of income, but also blows to social status and well-being.
Our chances of getting the best jobs – or any job at all – may seem to depend on our own initiative. That is partly true. But volumes of social science research also demonstrate that our chances depend a lot on our race group membership.
What is race?
Many of us have been taught some version of “there is no such thing as race – there is only the human race.” To eliminate the racial prejudice still very much on display during the Civil Rights Movement, there was an emphasis on universal humanity. Phenotype (e.g. facial features, hair type, and skin tone) or country of ancestry was deemed irrelevant. That was an important corrective. As careful scientific research has shown, people from diverse countries of origin are far more similar biologically than they are different.
It is also common to confuse race and economic or social class, because they are strongly associated with one another not only in the public mind, but also in statistical findings. Yet race exists outside of social class, as Omi and Winant’s (2014) important analysis of racial formation demonstrates. Race has a separate meaning from class and is intertwined with social institutions in distinct, though often connected, ways.
Race is a pigment of our imagination
(Ruben Rumbaut)
Even though it seems that race has something to do with our physical selves, its meaning was, and continues to be, created by people. The ways we define and think about race and racial identities derive from political and cultural actors with conflicting interests and worldviews (Omi and Winant 2014; Bonilla-Silva 1997; Feagin 2004).
The illogic of racial categorization abounds, supporting the DNA evidence that race is not biologically based. For example, it is common to write and talk about skin color as a marker of race, but the skin color of Americans from India is often darker than that of African Americans; the first group is not classified as black while the second always is. It is common to view race as rooted in ancestry – but people with features that suggest some African heritage are classified as black even if many of their ancestors hailed from European countries. In the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case, which made it legal to preserve public spaces for whites only, the plaintiff Homer Plessy was 7/8 European, but his 1/8 African ancestry mattered more. The “one-drop rule” that governed race categorization applied: a person with even a tiny amount of black or indigenous blood was never considered a kind of white person but always a person of color.
Some people reason that if race is a social construction then races are equivalent, and inconsequential, categories. However, race groups have never been equivalent. Race is vitally important because it has been woven deeply into the fabric of U.S. society and is used to pre-judge people. Race is one of the first things people know (or think they know) about others, because it has physical markers associated with it. The meanings given to race are in play all the time. Here is the bottom line: we made race up, and we made it matter. Once the concept of race was created, and people were sorted into different racial-ethnic groups, they did not have the same work opportunities and experiences
Race Hierarchy as an Engine of Economic Privilege
There was an economic motivation for race categorization. In competition for resources and rewards, there are always some groups who have an advantage. A society in which one racial-ethnic group benefits at the expense of others has a racist social structure (Feagin and Vera 1995; Bonilla-Silva 1997). The dominant group has the power and resources to create a race hierarchy that reflects its preeminence, ordering groups from best to worst, from valued to de-valued, from human to “other.”
The most important thing about the social construction of race is that it took a hierarchical form. The notion that there were different human types, called races, that could be classified on the basis of physical characteristics “was not invented until the eighteenth century” by Europeans (Frederickson 2002: 53). The idea to rank people by race came out of pseudo-scientific work in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scientists applied their assumption that the natural world is hierarchical to their understanding of race, creating a race-based ranking system with white (European) at the top. Racial classification studies lent legitimacy to whites’ colonization of people in Africa and Asia, and the subjugation of people of color in the United States (Wander, Martin, and Nakayama 1999). The groups “white” and “non-white” were defined as opposites and the notion of intellectual and moral superiority was a crucial component of the construct of “white.”
The Racial Other
The group at the top of the race hierarchy maintains or improves its social and economic position by oppressing, or literally, keeping down (Frye 1983) people who have been relegated to the “other” racial-ethnic groups. The concept of “the other” is central to academic writing on inequality. The “racial other” is feared, exoticized, rendered invisible, and yet “sticks out like a sore thumb.” The reaction of the dominant race group to the “racial other” tends to be full of suspicion, unease, and confusion. Perhaps most consequential is that the “racial other” is seen first and foremost as a racial group member, while their humanity and individuality are ignored (Madrid 1988). Whether it takes the form of hostility or avoidance, white reaction to the “racial other” leads to disparities in the world of paid work. People of color can also have these reactions to different race and ethnic groups, and even to people within their own group. That is the power of the race hierarchy, embedded at the core of U.S. social life.
The socially constructed notion of race conceived and imposed by whites began as a white/non-white binary in the United States (Corbas et al. 2009). People with roots in Asian and Latin American countries were racialized in relation to whites and blacks, and placed somewhere in between them on the race hierarchy. In the earliest days of immigration, most racial-ethnic groups began – socially and economically – somewhere near the bottom of the race hierarchy. Because race is a fluid social construct (remember, we made it up), not all of the groups assigned to the bottom of the race hierarchy stayed there. As succeeding chapters show, the Asian racial position has been a wedge between the top and bottom positions on the hierarchy, preserving white advantages (Kim 1999).
The privileges and oppression of the race hierarchy were built into all U.S. structures early on. They were expressed mostly in the realm of paid work though, because working for pay is so important, especially to the U.S. version of capitalism (Blauner 2001: 26). Work relationships are central to race processes such as how black and white America developed as connected but separate entities (Bennett 1975: 236). To grasp the connection between race and work, it is useful to know that jobs were also ordered on a hierarchy from best to worst. Then the two hierarchies were transposed onto one another. In any sorting of jobs or occupations, the best were reserved for whites at the top of the race hierarchy and the worst jobs were assigned to the “racial other”: at first African Americans and American Indians, then immigrant groups such as the Chinese and Mexicans, who began at the bottom of the race hierarchy. The merging of race and occupation hierarchies helped it all seem natural.
Throughout history there have been people from every race group, including white, who have contested the organization of people into a hierarchy of unequal groups based on phenotype or country of original ancestry. It has also been typical for groups and individuals defined as the “racial other” to contest or reject that identity. Furthermore there are people from each and every one of the country’s racial-ethnic groups who have achieved the American dream. Some descendants from the most oppressed groups enjoy work roles and standards of living that only the most optimistic of their ancestors could have imagined.
Yet the seeds of a race-based economy that were planted and nourished early in U.S. history bear fruit even today. In order to understand current race-based work inequalities, we have to uncover how and why race became essential to the American economic system. That is the subject of the next chapter.
Though many people think about individuals when they hear the term racist or racism, focusing on systems leads to deeper understanding of how work and race are connected. Replace the images of a hate-spewing malcontent who leaves nasty messages in a co-worker’s locker, or even the mild-mannered vice-president of operations who doubts that Asians make good supervisors, with this: racism is a system of white advantage (Wellman 1993). This definition promotes much better insight into how race and work are intertwined than focusing on individual racists would.
THEORIES AND CONCEPTS
Theories are sets of ideas that help to answer both the why and how of racial-ethnic patterns of work. It is at the theoretical level that key concepts are developed, as well as hypotheses about how phenomena such as race and pay are linked. Theories guide analyses of historical and contemporary patterns of race and work, influencing what questions researchers ask, how they go about answering them, and what interpretations they give to their findings.
Any analyst must make choices from among the many theoretical perspectives available. Some key theoretical perspectives on work have not highlighted the importance of racism and white privilege, while theories of race and racism do not always give central emphasis to work. There are commonalities in the best sociological theorizing about race, as scholars build on the work of others, using a different focus or creating a new concept to expand or deepen understanding.
What follows is but a brief overview of the theoretical and conceptual tools guiding this analysis of how and why race and work matter to one another. These will be illustrated further in the coming chapters.
Systemic or Structural Racism
The central sociological insight into how race affects work is that race is an ongoing system or a structure built directly into society. Race categories are created and reinforced as an explicit strategy for gaining material advantages for some by exploiting others. Those with the power to do so claim more resources for themselves, manipulating ideas and messages to justify their dominance. Both because race is not natural and because it matters so much to work and other opportunities, its social construction is continually contested. Though structural theorists accentuate the oppression of people of color by whites, they also recognize the agency and resistance of those whose labor was exploited. Finally, theorists emphasize that racial inequality is created at all levels of society, from macro level institutions to micro-level interactions between individuals.
The capitalist economy that served as the engine of U.S. economic development is a significant part of the race and work story.
Marxist and Neo-Marxist Perspectives
Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism, developed during the transition to industrialization in the 1800s, continues to influence research on work and employment today. Volumes have been written on Marx’s theory of the labor process and it has been thoroughly critiqued, amended, and revised. Here I touch briefly on some key ideas.
In a capitalist system the goal is to maximize profit, or what Marx called surplus value. This surplus value is the “extra” that workers generate after they have done enough labor to cover their wages. Under the feudal system of labor, serfs would work their lord’s land for his benefit and then work for their own sustenance. The lord could see exactly how much work the serfs had done for him and when they were doing it. Under capitalism owners and workers meet in the labor market. Owners have what Marx called the means of production: the buildings and equipment needed to make products or supply services. Workers have only labor power, or the promise of their labor, to sell. Unlike the feudal lord, the owner or employer does not know when the labor of employees is creating profit. Thus owners want to squeeze as much labor as they can from the labor power they have purchased. Yet workers gain nothing from pushing themselves to the limit; in fact their health and well-being will be jeopardized.
Inequality is built into the capitalist system. The only way that owners make a profit – which is the engine of capitalism – is by ensuring that workers do not get the full monetary value of their labor (e.g. Bowles and Gintis 2002). Thus employers and workers constitute separate classes with opposing interests. To ensure profit, owners need to control the execution of the labor potential they have purchased, though it resides in the bodies and minds of employees who work for wages.
One way that owners have exerted control and maximized profit is by breaking down work tasks into smaller components. This was greatly facilitated by industrialization. Former artisans who knew the whole process were turned into easily replaceable cogs in an industrial machine. Capitalists also transformed the labor process such that the conception of work was separated out from its execution, creating two different kinds of work: mental and manual. Jobs requiring mental work were given more social value than those requiring physical labor, as the aim of those conceptualizing the work was to maximize the output of the now de-skilled manual workers. Capitalists seeking profit from the labor of workers gained even greater control by used technology to dictate how people do their work (Braverman 1998). Today, these principles are applied both to service work and prestigious jobs. Even physicians are timed, and their work has become narrower; more of their tasks are performed by technicians, nurses, and assistants who are paid considerably less.
Racialized Capitalism
Major theorists agree that the United States is a racialized capitalist society, though they vary in their language and emphases (e.g. Blauner 2001; Bonilla-Silva 1997; Feagin 2006; Glenn 2002). As discussed below, the racialized economy is also gendered.
There is a long and rich black intellectual tradition emphasizing the link between racism and the economic oppression described by Marx. Scholar and activist W. E. B. DuBois, writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was one of the first to articulate the connection, in addition to illustrating it through rigorous empirical work. Because DuBois was African American, the intellectual debt owed to him has been largely underestimated but his work was path-breaking (Winant 2000).
Confronting the view that race was a fixed, natural characteristic, DuBois conceptualized whiteness as a social category with economic consequences (Feagin 2010). He also contested negative white beliefs about African Americans. His writing and research, along with that of contemporaries Anna Julia Cooper and Ida Wells Barnett, supported his argument that race is a social force or process; the lives of African Americans could only be understood in specific socioeconomic and political context (Collins 1993; Feagin 2010; Young and Deskins 2001). DuBois was an intersectional thinker who recognized that a race category could not capture the variety of experiences of the people included in it. To help expose the arbitrariness of race hierarchy, he identified distinct classes of African Americans, with different circumstances, attitudes, and practices (Williams 2005). He also emphasized capitalists’ use of race to obscure the exploitation of working-class whites (e.g. DuBois [1935] 1998).
Internal colonialism theory illustrates that communities of color in the United States are in the same position as the so-called Third World nations invaded or colonized by the Western world (Blauner 1972). Patterns of work and wealth cannot be understood without attention to the ways that race hierarchy, or stratification, combines with class position; race groups are sorted into “winners” or “losers,” dominated or exploited. Internal colonialists focus on four economic classes within which race is used to designate “winners” and “losers”: in addition to capitalists and workers, there are managers and supervisors who help capitalists control workers, and small business owners who control their own labor but do not have the economic or political power of capitalists (Barrera 1979).
Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2015) developed a settler colonialism model to better account for the specific experiences of the major racial-ethnic groups whose land and labor fueled U.S. economic development in various times and places. At the center is what Glenn (2015: 60) calls the English colonizers’ creation of “a hierarchy of humankind” based on race and gender, which was then used to justify the “erasure” of indigenous people, the enslavement of blacks, the bonded labor of Chinese immigrants and the theft of Mexican land and wages. The belief in white (European) racial superiority dovetailed with “heteropatriarchy”’ or the superiority of white men over women; property, governance, and wives should be under men’s control. This model of “supreme white manhood” in which white men are leaders and protectors was built into social and legal policies and practices (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013; Glenn 2015: 60).
While Marx emphasized a labor market in which workers and owners meet to exchange labor power for wages, modern scholars contend that race (combined with gender) is used to maximize surplus value. They describe segmented industries and markets: there are desirable core and undesirable peripheral industries and split, or primary and secondary, labor markets with distinct pay scales, benefits, and working conditions. Though all workers meet capitalists in markets to sell their labor power, white men and men of color and white women and women of color compete in different realms.
The concepts of the dual economy and segmented labor markets emphasize that white (men) workers reap benefits in the creation of a tiered system which reserves the best industries and jobs for them (Bonacich 1972; Edwards 1980; Reich 1981). Capitalists gain because competition between race and ethnic groups masks the conflict between owners and workers and keeps the overall price of wage labor low. Different groups of workers can also be played off one another to break strikes or negotiate wage contracts, giving owners the upper hand.
Joe R. Feagin’s prominent theory of systemic racism borrows Marx’s notion of oppression as central to society, casting white racism as an ongoing conflict between those who benefit from racism and those who are held back by it. Just as owners and workers have contentious relationships because of their conflicting class interests, so too do whites and other racial groups clash over aspects of an economic system that is set up to the benefit of only one socially constructed race group. This helps explain why whites have had a stake in denying that racism exists (Feagin 2010, 2014). The theory of systemic racism also adopts Marx’s notion that capitalism has to get inscribed in institutions and systems, its workings rendered invisible, to hide the central conflict on which it is based. Racism, too, gains power from its invisibility.
Institutional Racism
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s influential “racialized social system” perspective calls attention to the ubiquitous nature of racism in the United States. Racial domination is continually created at the social and political, as well as the economic levels of society. It is woven into an elaborate tapestry of formal and informal rules that convey white advantage. Bonilla-Silva emphasizes that racism is not an aberration but a rational, ongoing process rooted in power differences. He added to Omi and Winant’s racial formation perspective the important reminder that racial categories exist because whites benefit from them (Bonilla-Silva 1997; 2015). The domination of whites over people of color was built into the policies and practices of the web of institutions (and their organizations) connected to the economy – such as education (schools), politics (legislatures), and criminal justice (police departments and courts).
White power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular.
(Richard Dyer)
Critical race theory (CRT) came out of the work of legal scholars (e.g. Crenshaw 1993; Bell 1992) to expose supposedly race-neutral laws and policies as laced with racism. CRT explains race-based inequality by focusing on the power structures through which white advantage is embedded in the law and ignored by conservative and liberal thinkers alike. It has expanded to include economic and other social institutions (Delgado and Stefancic 1999).
Intersectionality
Path-breaking work by feminists of color improved structural theories of racism with the crucial insight that race combines with gender, social class, and other social status hierarchies to create intertwined systems of oppression and inequality. Crenshaw (1993) showed, for example, that black women were rendered invisible in class action lawsuits that conceived of women as white and blacks as men. Intersectionality theory directs us to both the similarities across systems of oppression and the unique features of each. It is particularly instructive for understanding work, because the economic classes of Marxist theory were not independent from the race and gender systems that facilitated capitalist growth (Acker 2006; Glenn 2002). Though earlier scholars “added” race and gender groups to neo-Marxist theories, intersectional theorists (e.g. Glenn 1991; Collins 1993; Walby, Armstrong, and Strid 2012) caution that the development of economic or class positions cannot be separated from the race and gender positions created through white racism and patriarchy (the domination of men over women).
Intersectional theorists encourage those investigating work inequalities to consider multiple levels of analysis. There is sometimes a tendency to reduce race, gender, and class to social positions or identities, but it is essential to place these in the framework of interlocking systems of race, class, and gender oppression (e.g. Belkhir 2001). As Patricia Hill Collins (1993) emphasized, people experience and resist oppression at the personal level of identity, the group level of shared membership in race, gender, and other social categories, and also at the system level of social institutions.
Racial Ideology
Those who study race inequality underscore the importance not only of physical or economic power but also cultural domination. According to many theorists of social inequality, the ideas and practices disseminated by families, schools, and media are those of a single dominant culture that is white, Anglo, Western, patriarchal, and nativist. As the U.S. economy developed, these white ideas and practices were asserted as superior and normal; all other groups were evaluated on the basis of how closely they fit (Dyer 1997; Collins 2000; Bonilla-Silva 1997, 2006; Feagin 2006, 2010).
Marx and DuBois underscored the importance of cultural ideologies, or belief systems, which serve to legitimate inequalities by providing distorted explanations of social reality. The process begins with categorization which will ultimately be used to parcel out resources (Tilly 1998). The categories we use and the characteristics we associate with them (stereotypes) are organized in cultural schemas that produce the scripts for social interaction (Ridgeway 1997; Kim 1999). According to Bonilla-Silva (2001; 2015) the cultural schemas include a “racial etiquette” that gets attached to positions on the race hierarchy and to the relationships between and among people sorted into those positions. In the United States the script says that American Indians, African Americans, and some Latino groups are lazy or irresponsible, justifying their high unemployment rates. The illusion of fundamental race differences – whether biological or cultural – infuses “lasting social meaning” into physical traits. Ideological fictions about race become a part of social reality, organizing interaction and providing sources of identity, despite their falsehood (Shelby 2003).
Feagin (2013) introduced the concept of the “white racial frame” to emphasize that white ideas and practices became the default. People from all racial-ethnic groups accept white elite definitions of what is appropriate. White racial framing includes not only stereotypes, but also language, images, interpretations, and narratives. Even emotions are racialized, as we are reminded every time there is a report of a non-threatening black man who was experienced by a witness or a police officer as dangerous. The frame has a powerful impact on thought and action, perpetuating systemic racism from one generation to the next (2010: 60).
Bonilla-Silva (2006) developed the notion of color-blind ideology to explain how racism has been hidden, normalized, and denied by the fiction that races are equivalent in the post-Civil Rights era. He and his colleagues note that people engage in color-blind racism when they fail to consider the existence of structured inequalities by race, attributing disparities to “anything but racism” (Bonilla-Silva et al. 2004). When scholars and opinion-makers report race patterns in work and employment without analyzing the racism at the core of those patterns they are not just doing bad social science or journalism; they are also justifying the racist structures that are responsible for those findings (Bonilla-Silva and Baiocchi 2008).
Bobo and colleagues (1997) have developed the similar concept of “laissez faire racism.” The authors point to whites’ professed support for racial equality since the Civil Rights Movement, a signal that race is no longer significant and work systems can be left to operate as they will. But they establish that attitudes are not consistent with behavior, and point to the racism embedded in institutions and organizations as an important site of inquiry irrespective of what white people say they believe.
Counter-Frames
To counteract the dominant cultural scripts that justify racial inequality, scholars study the perspectives of those whose lives are most constrained by those scripts. As DuBois put it, for example, though black folk are “shut out” from the white world by a veiled social structure, they are “gifted with second sight,” seeing through the veil to “the workings of the white world” (1986: 364). A central premise of black feminist thought (Collins 2000) is that we can come closer to the truth by seeking knowledge from those whose marginalization gives them the clear-eyed view of race and gender structures that more privileged race/gender groups lack. Oppressed racial groups actively resist the negative images of their qualities and cultures. They develop positive counter-frames to navigate a world that has been set up for whites (Feagin 2010).
Presenting what they call counter-stories, CRT scholars ensure that the voices of oppressed and marginalized racial-ethnic groups are heard (e.g. Yosso 2006; Sue 2003). This project has also been taken up by historians and sociologists critical of “status quo” historical understanding. Their aim is to provide a more accurate record of the experiences and contributions of women and men of color, as well as the sociohistorical processes that created white advantage (Zinn 1980/1995; 2004; Takaki 2008; Glenn 2002; Amott and Matthaei 1991). Chapters 2 and 3 are delivered with these goals in mind.
The concepts of color-blind and laissez-faire racism highlight the attitudes and actions of policy-makers and employers, whose decisions contribute to race-based inequities in work opportunities. Yet analysts using such concepts keep the notion of systemic racism front and center. They note that decision-making and welcoming versus hostile actions take place in the context of work organizations built on racist economic foundations. Structural theorists view color blindness as problematic because it hides racism within the confines of culture (e.g. Bonilla-Silva 2006). Instead of culture being understood as a fluid entity, it is used as a new way to assert that there are essential differences between race groups. Thus the colorblind observer may acknowledge that African Americans, American Indians, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans are not biologically inferior, but point to their inferior cultures as the reason these groups are at the bottom of the race hierarchy.
Thus to fully understand why race-based inequities in employment and wealth persist into the twenty-first century, we have to attend to the power of images and ideas about racial and ethnic groups written into dominant cultural scripts (Omi and Winant 2014; Bonilla-Silva 2015; Feagin 2010). We also need to showcase evidence from the lives of the “racial others” that directly contradicts those messages.
One final note about work organizations: they are affected by what goes on in the wider social and cultural world, as the institutionalist perspective on work highlights (e.g. DiMaggio and Powell 1991). This theoretical approach also encourages us to examine the “culture wars” that erupt in society, as challenges to elite white culture, and attempts to protect it, affect relations between labor and capital as well as dynamics within particular work organizations.
Social Interaction Perspectives
In reflecting on his internal colonialism model of race inequality in the United States, Bob Blauner cautioned against overemphasizing structure as impersonal forces divorced from people. He urged that we pay attention to the individuals who are crucial to supporting racism and also to getting rid of it (2001: 193). Luckily there are theorists who take their analytic lenses and zoom in on how social inequality is created through the actions of individuals. Social interaction (SI) perspectives on inequality lead us to the “relationships and practices” that create race-based differences in work and wealth (Schwalbe 2007). Like the structural theorists of racism discussed, authors in the social interaction tradition emphasize that people of color act against their oppression. For example, Roscigno (2007) has noted the vital role of resistance in shaking up racist social practices.
A noteworthy strand of this work focuses on the actions not just of employers but also of occupational gatekeepers and employees at all levels. For example, founding father of sociology Max Weber’s notion of social closure, especially as developed by Parkin (1979), has been influential in attempts to understand how work inequities are created and maintained (e.g. Tomaskovic-Devey, 1993; Tilly 1998; Elliott and Smith 2001; Massey 2007). The central idea is that people who have the power to do so hoard resources and other opportunities for themselves, actively keeping others out. All manner of boundaries are drawn around whiteness, in order to protect the advantages of this race position.
Charles Tilly (1998) theorized that there are three major social processes thorough which dominant groups hoard resources. Dominants keep a disproportionate share of the value added by the labor of “racial others,” actively deny equal opportunity, and use threats or actual violence to maintain control over key resources – among which good jobs are arguably one of the most important. These are the mechanisms behind owners’ creation of segmented industries and labor markets discussed earlier, as well as white-only labor unions. These mechanisms also played out in white mob activity (often with tacit or overt support from the state) that eliminated other race groups from competition by driving them out of thriving Chinatowns or black communities (Glenn 2015). Jaspin’s (2007) research shows that white mobs commonly flipped counties from black to white – and that many of them remain essentially all-white today.
Theories of cognitive processes help explain the staying power of color-blind racism. Aversive racism refers to the subtle psychological process through which people who have egalitarian views justify racial bias. They do so by ignoring both their own feelings and behavior as well as structures of racism. Well-meaning people might be uneasy, anxious, indifferent, or disgusted when they encounter a person who has been categorized as the “racial other” (Cortina 2008). If those feelings lead them to avoid co-workers of color, they explain it in other terms. Aversive racism allows people to view themselves as non-biased, reaping the rewards of race privilege without guilt (Dovidio and Gaertner 2004; Pearson, Dovidio, and Gaertner 2009). A key point is that they are often unaware that this is what they are doing. The notion of biased social cognition is at the heart of Loury’s (2006) contention that stigma attaches to the “racial other” in U.S. society, such that people are likely to attribute negative employment outcomes or poverty to failings of the group rather than to structured racism. Feagin and Vera (1995) describe the importance of “sincere fictions” used by whites to define themselves as good people even as they enjoy the benefits of systemic racism.
