Beyond Discrimination: Understanding African American Inequality in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In November 2007, two reports by distinguished research centers turned African American inequality into national news. Their startling and discomfiting data highlighted both the fragility of African American success and the widening fault lines that divide African Americans from each other. Impressive and authoritative as the reports are, they nonetheless remain incomplete because they do not explain how and why African American inequality has changed during the last several decades or the place of gender and publicly supported work in the new black inequality. These omissions matter because adequate and realistic responses to the issues raised by the reports require grasping the sources of the revolutionary changes that have left blacks at once more and less equal. Black inequality no longer results from powerful and interlocking forms of public and private discrimination and oppression. Rather, it is the product of processes beginning with childhood that sort African Americans into more or less favored statuses, differentiating them by class and gender.