The literature on racism in the workplace has shed much light on the impact of racial discrimination on career outcomes, especially with respect to psychological processes (e.g., biases, attributions, perceptions, and decision-making). However, there has been relatively little research on the role of the occupational environment in racial inequality. Because the focus of most previous studies has been on income or types of occupations, a comprehensive understanding of the occupational contexts associated with racism has remained elusive. We argue that certain occupations tend to confer significant systemic, and often implicit, advantages and that racial minorities have less access to occupations with high privilege. Invoking the theory of work adjustment, status process theory, and racial stereotyping, we theorize that the socially desirable occupational characteristics of status, recognition, authority, and advancement constitute occupational privilege and are distributed unevenly across racial groups. Furthermore, we propose that occupational privilege serves to create racial disparities in extrinsic and intrinsic career outcomes. Finally, it was argued that educational level and conscientiousness, two robust predictors of career outcomes, are positively associated with occupational privilege but that the positive associations are weaker for members of racial minorities than for the racial majority owing to negative racial stereotypes. We tested these hypotheses with a large (N = 4,445) longitudinal sample created from two comprehensive datasets collected over 20 years. Results of multi-level regression supported our hypotheses. Thus, our research demonstrates that occupational privilege is a fundamental aspect of racism in the workplace.