Industrialization and Dominant-Minority Relations...76 CHAPTER 4 Industrialization and Dominant-Minority Relations From Slavery to Segregation and the Coming of Postindustrial Society

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C H A P T E R

4Industrialization and

Dominant-Minority RelationsFrom Slavery to Segregation and the

Coming of Postindustrial Society

One theme stated at the beginning of Chapter 3 was that a society’s subsistencetechnology profoundly affects the nature of dominant-minority group rela-tions. A corollary of this theme, explored in this chapter, is that dominant-

minority group relations change as the subsistence technology changes. As we sawin Chapter 3, agrarian technology and the concern for control of land and labor

profoundly shaped dominant-minority relations in the formativeyears of the United States. Theagrarian era ended in the 1800s, andsince that time, the United States hasexperienced two major transforma-tions in subsistence technology, eachof which has, in turn, transformeddominant-minority relations.

The first transformation beganin the early 1800s as Americansociety began to experience theeffects of the Industrial Revolution,or the shift from agrarian technol-ogy to machine-based, manufactur-ing technology. In the agrarian era,

as we saw in Chapter 3, work was labor intensive: done by hand or with the aid ofdraft animals. As industrialization proceeded, work became capital intensive asmachines replaced people and animals.

The new industrial technology rapidly increased productivity and efficiency andquickly began to change every aspect of U.S. society, including the nature of work,politics, communication, transportation, family life, birth rates and death rates,the system of education, and, of course, dominant-minority relations. The groupsthat had become minorities during the agrarian era (African Americans, NativeAmericans, and Mexican Americans) faced new possibilities and new dangers.Industrialization also created new minority groups, new forms of exploitation and

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oppression, and, for some, new opportuni-ties to rise in the social structure and suc-ceed in America. In this chapter, we willexplore this transformation and illustrate itseffects by analyzing the changing statusof African Americans after the abolition ofslavery. The impact of industrialization onother minority groups will be considered inthe case studies presented in Part III.

The second transformation in subsistencetechnology brings us to more recent times.Industrialization is a continuous process,and beginning in the mid-20th century, theUnited States entered a stage of late indus-trialization (also called deindustrializationor the postindustrial era). This shift insubsistence technology was marked by adecline in the manufacturing sector of theeconomy and a decrease in the supply ofsecure, well-paying, blue-collar, manuallabor jobs. At the same time, there was anexpansion in the service and information-based sectors of the economy and anincrease in the proportion of white-collarand high-tech jobs. Like the 19th-centuryIndustrial Revolution, these 20th-centurychanges had profound implications not justfor dominant-minority relations but forevery aspect of modern society. Work,family, politics, popular culture, and thou-sands of other characteristics of Americanswere, and still are, being transformed as thesubsistence technology continues to developand modernize. In the latter part of thischapter, we examine this latest transforma-tion in general terms and point out someof its implications for minority groups. Wealso present some new concepts and estab-lish some important groundwork for thecase studies in Part III, in which the effects oflate industrialization on America’s minoritygroups will be considered in detail.

INDUSTRIALIZATION ANDTHE SHIFT FROM PATERNALISTICTO RIGID COMPETITIVE GROUP RELATIONS

The Industrial Revolution began in Englandin the mid-1700s and spread from there to

the rest of Europe, to the United States, andeventually to the rest of the world. The keyinnovations associated with the IndustrialRevolution were the application of machinepower to production and the harnessing ofinanimate sources of energy, such as steamand coal, to fuel the machines. As machinesreplaced humans and animals, work becamemany times more productive, the economygrew, and the volume and variety of goodsproduced increased dramatically.

As the industrial economy grew, the close,paternalistic control of minority groupsfound in agrarian societies graduallybecame irrelevant. Paternalistic relation-ships such as slavery are found in societieswith labor-intensive technologies and aredesigned to organize and control a large,involuntary, geographically immobile laborforce. An industrial economy, in contrast,requires a workforce that is geographicallyand socially mobile, skilled, and literate.Furthermore, with industrialization comesurbanization, and close, paternalistic con-trols are difficult to maintain in a city.

Thus, as industrialization progresses,agrarian paternalism tends to give way torigid competitive group relations. Under thissystem, minority group members are freer tocompete for jobs and other valued commodi-ties with dominant group members, espe-cially the lower-class segments of thedominant group. As competition increases,the threatened members of the dominantgroup become more hostile, and attacks onthe minority groups tend to increase.Whereas paternalistic systems seek todirectly dominate and control the minoritygroup (and its labor), rigid competitive sys-tems are more defensive in nature. Thethreatened segments of the dominant groupseek to minimize or eliminate minoritygroup encroachment on jobs, housing, orother valuable goods or services (van denBerghe, 1967; Wilson, 1973).

Paternalistic systems such as slaveryrequired members of the minority groupto be active, if involuntary, participants.In rigid competitive systems, the dominantgroup seeks to preserve its advantage by

Industrialization and Dominant-Minority Relations 77


handicapping the minority group’s abilityto compete effectively or, in some cases,eliminating competition from the minoritygroup altogether. For example, in a rigidcompetitive system, the dominant groupmight make the minority group politicallypowerless by depriving them of (or nevergranting them) the right to vote. Thelower the power of the minority group,the lower the threat to the interests of thedominant group.

THE IMPACT OFINDUSTRIALIZATION ONAFRICAN AMERICANS: FROMSLAVERY TO SEGREGATION

Industrial technology began to transformAmerican society in the early 1800s, but itseffects were not felt equally in all regions.The northern states industrialized first,whereas the South remained primarily agrar-ian. This economic diversity was one of theunderlying causes of the regional conflictthat led to the Civil War. Because of its moreproductive technology, the North had moreresources and, in a bloody war of attrition,was able to defeat the Confederacy. Whenthe South surrendered in April of 1865 andthe Civil War ended, slavery was abolishedand black-white relations entered a new era.

The southern system of race relationsthat ultimately emerged after the Civil Warwas designed in part to continue the controlof black labor institutionalized under slav-ery. It was also intended to eliminate anypolitical or economic threat from the blackcommunity. This rigid competitive systemgrew to be highly elaborate and rigid, partlybecause of the high racial visibility and longhistory of inferior status and powerlessnessof African Americans in the South andpartly because of the particular needs ofsouthern agriculture. In this section, welook at black-white relations from the endof the Civil War through the ascendancy ofsegregation in the South and the massmigration of African Americans to the citiesof the industrializing North.

Reconstruction

The period of Reconstruction, from 1865to the 1880s, was a brief respite in the longhistory of oppression and exploitation ofAfrican Americans. The Union army andother agencies of the federal government,such as the Freedman’s Bureau, were usedto enforce racial freedom in the defeatedConfederacy. Black southerners took advan-tage of the 15th Amendment to theConstitution, passed in 1870, which statesthat the right to vote cannot be denied on thegrounds of “race, color, or previous condi-tion of servitude.” They registered to vote inlarge numbers and turned out on ElectionDay, and some were elected to high politicaloffice. Schools for the former slaves wereopened, and African Americans purchasedland and houses and founded businesses.

The era of freedom was short-lived, how-ever, and Reconstruction began to endwhen the federal government demobilizedits armies of occupation and turned itsattention to other matters. By the 1880s, thefederal government had withdrawn fromthe South, Reconstruction was over, andblack southerners began to fall rapidly intoa new system of exploitation and inequality.

Reconstruction was too brief to changetwo of the most important legacies ofslavery. First, the centuries of bondage leftblack southerners impoverished, largely illit-erate and uneducated, and with few powerresources. When new threats of racialoppression appeared, African Americansfound it difficult to defend their group inter-ests. These developments are, of course,highly consistent with the Blauner hypothe-sis: Because colonized minority groups con-front greater inequalities and have fewerresources at their disposal, they will facegreater difficulties in improving their disad-vantaged status.

Second, slavery left a strong tradition ofracism in the white community. Anti-blackprejudice and racism originated as rationaliza-tions for slavery but had taken on lives of theirown over the generations. After two centuriesof slavery, the heritage of prejudice and racism

EVOLUTION OF DOMINANT-MINORITY RELATIONS IN THE U.S.78


was thoroughly ingrained in southern culture.White southerners were predisposed by thiscultural legacy to see racial inequality andexploitation of African Americans as normaland desirable, and after Reconstruction endedand the federal government withdrew, theywere able to construct a social system basedon the assumption of racial inferiority.

De Jure Segregation

The system of race relations that replacedslavery in the South was de jure segregation,sometimes referred to as the Jim Crow sys-tem. Under segregation, the minority groupis physically and socially separated from thedominant group and consigned to an infe-rior position in virtually every area of sociallife. The phrase de jure (“by law”) meansthat the system is sanctioned and reinforcedby the legal code; the inferior status ofAfrican Americans was actually mandatedor required by state and local laws. Forexample, southern cities during this era hadlaws requiring blacks to ride at the backof public buses. If an African Americanrefused to comply with this seating arrange-ment, he or she could be arrested.

De jure segregation came to encompassall aspects of southern life. Neighborhoods,jobs, stores, restaurants, and parks weresegregated. When new social forms, such asmovie theaters, sports stadiums, and inter-state buses appeared in the South, they, too,were quickly segregated.

The logic of segregation created a viciouscycle. The more African Americans wereexcluded from the mainstream of society,the greater their objective poverty and pow-erlessness became. The more inferior theirstatus, the easier it was to mandate moreinequality. High levels of inequality rein-forced racial prejudice and made it easy touse racism to justify further separation. Thesystem kept turning on itself, finding newsocial niches to segregate and reinforcingthe inequality that was its starting point.For example, at the height of the Jim Crowera, the system had evolved to the point that

some courtrooms maintained separate biblesfor black witnesses to swear on. Also, inBirmingham, Alabama, it was against thelaw for blacks and whites to play each otherin checkers and dominoes (Woodward,1974, p. 118).

What were the causes of this massive sep-aration of the races? Once again, the conceptsof the Noel hypothesis prove useful. Becausestrong anti-black prejudice was already inexistence when segregation began, we don’tneed to account for ethnocentrism. The post-Reconstruction competition between theracial groups was reminiscent of the origins ofslavery in that black southerners had some-thing that white southerners wanted: labor.In addition, a free black electorate threatenedthe political and economic dominance ofthe elite segments of the white community.Finally, after the withdrawal of federal troopsand the end of Reconstruction, white south-erners had sufficient power resources to endthe competition on their own terms and con-struct repressive systems of control for blacksoutherners.

The Origins of De Jure Segregation

Although the South lost the Civil War, itsbasic class structure and agrarian economyremained intact. The plantation elite, withtheir huge tracts of land, remained the dom-inant class, and cotton remained the pri-mary cash crop. As was the case before theCivil War, the landowners needed a work-force to farm the land. Because of the depre-dations and economic disruptions of thewar, the old plantation elite was short oncash and liquid capital. Hiring workers ona wage system was not feasible for them.In fact, almost as soon as the war ended,southern legislatures attempted to forceAfrican Americans back into involuntaryservitude by passing a series of laws knownas the Black Codes. Only the beginning ofReconstruction and the active interventionof the federal government halted the imple-mentation of this legislation (Geschwender,1978, p. 158; Wilson, 1973, p. 99).



The plantation elite solved their man-power problem this time by developing asystem of sharecropping, or tenant farming.The sharecroppers worked the land, whichwas actually owned by the planters, inreturn for payment in shares of the profitwhen the crop was taken to market. Thelandowner would supply a place to live andfood and clothing on credit. After the har-vest, tenant and landowner would split theprofits (sometimes very unequally), andthe tenant’s debts would be deducted fromhis share. The accounts were kept by thelandowner. Black sharecroppers lackedpolitical and civil rights and found it diffi-cult to keep unscrupulous white landownershonest. The landowner could inflate theindebtedness of the sharecropper and claimthat he was still owed money even afterprofits had been split. Under this system,sharecroppers had few opportunities toimprove their situations and could bebound to the land until their “debts” werepaid off (Geschwender, 1978, p. 163).

By 1910, more than half of all employedAfrican Americans worked in agriculture,and more than half of the remainder (25% ofthe total) worked in domestic occupationssuch as maid or janitor (Geschwender, 1978,p. 169). The manpower shortage in southernagriculture was solved, and the AfricanAmerican community once again found itselfin a subservient status. At the same time, thewhite southern working class was protectedfrom direct job competition with AfricanAmericans. As the South began to industrial-ize, white workers were able to monopolizethe better paying jobs. With a combinationof direct discrimination by whites-only laborunions and strong anti-black laws and cus-toms, white workers erected barriers thatexcluded black workers and reserved thebetter industrial jobs in cities and mill townsfor themselves. White workers took advan-tage of the new jobs brought by industrial-ization, whereas black southerners remaineda rural peasantry, excluded from participa-tion in this process of modernization.

In some sectors of the changing southerneconomy, the status of African Americans

actually fell lower than it had been duringslavery. For example, in 1865, 83% ofthe artisans in the South were AfricanAmericans; by 1900, this percentage hadfallen to 5% (Geschwender, 1978, p. 170).The Jim Crow system confined AfricanAmericans to the agrarian and domesticsectors of the labor force, denied them theopportunity for a decent education, andexcluded them from politics. The systemwas reinforced by still more laws and cus-toms that drastically limited the options andlife courses available to black southerners.

A final force behind the creation of dejure segregation was more political thaneconomic. As the 19th century drew to aclose, a wave of agrarian radicalism knownas populism spread across the country. Thisanti-elitist movement was a reaction tochanges in agriculture caused by industrial-ization. The movement attempted to unitepoor whites and blacks in the rural Southagainst the traditional elite classes. The eco-nomic elite were frightened by the possibil-ity of a loss of power and split the incipientcoalition between whites and blacks by fan-ning the flames of racial hatred. The strat-egy of “divide and conquer” proved to beeffective (as it often has both before andsince this time), and states throughout theSouth eliminated the possibility of futurethreats by depriving African Americans ofthe right to vote (Woodward, 1974).

The disenfranchisement of the blackcommunity was accomplished by measuressuch as literacy tests, poll taxes, and prop-erty requirements. The literacy tests wereofficially justified as promoting a betterinformed electorate but were shamelesslyrigged to favor white voters. The require-ment that voters pay a tax or prove owner-ship of a certain amount of property couldalso disenfranchise poor whites, but again,the implementation of these policies wasracially biased.

The policies were extremely effective,and by the early 20th century, the politicalpower of the southern black communitywas virtually nonexistent. For example, aslate as 1896 in Louisiana, there had been



more than 100,000 registered black malevoters, and black voters were a majority in26 parishes (counties).1 In 1898, the stateadopted a new constitution containing stiffeducational and property requirements forvoting unless the voter’s father or grandfa-ther had been eligible to vote as of January1, 1867. At that time, the 14th and 15thAmendments, which guaranteed suffragefor black males, had not yet been passed.Such “grandfather clauses” made it easyfor white males to register while disenfran-chising blacks. By 1900, only about 5,000African American males were registered tovote in Louisiana, and black voters were nota majority in any parish. A similar declineoccurred in Alabama, where an electorateof more than 180,000 black males wasreduced to 3,000 by provision of a newstate constitution. This story repeated itselfthroughout the South, and black politicalpowerlessness had become a reality by 1905(Franklin & Moss, 1994, p. 261).

This system of legally mandated racialprivilege was approved by the U.S. SupremeCourt, which ruled in the case of Plessy v.Ferguson (1896) that it was constitutionalfor states to require separate facilities(schools, parks, etc.) for African Americansas long as the separate facilities were fullyequal. The southern states paid close atten-tion to separate but ignored equal.

Reinforcing the System

Under de jure segregation, as underslavery, the subordination of the AfricanAmerican community was reinforced andsupplemented by an elaborate system of racialetiquette. Everyday interactions betweenblacks and whites proceeded according tohighly stylized and rigidly followed codes ofconduct intended to underscore the inferiorstatus of the African American community.Whites were addressed as “Mister” or“Ma’am,” whereas blacks were called bytheir first names or perhaps by an honorifictitle such as Aunt, Uncle, or Professor. Blackswere expected to assume a humble and def-erential manner, remove their hats, cast their

eyes downward, and enact the role of thesubordinate in all interactions withwhites. If an African American had reasonto call on anyone in the white community,he or she was expected to go to the backdoor.

These expectations and “good manners”for black southerners were systematicallyenforced. Anyone who ignored them ran therisk of reprisal, physical attacks, and evendeath by lynching. During the decades inwhich the Jim Crow system was beingimposed, there were thousands of lynchingsin the South. From 1884 until the end of thecentury, lynchings averaged almost oneevery other day (Franklin & Moss, 1994,p. 312). The great bulk of this violentterrorism was racial and intended to rein-force the system of racial advantage or pun-ish real or imagined transgressors. Also,various secret organizations, such as the KuKlux Klan, engaged in terrorist attacksagainst the African American communityand anyone else who failed to conform tothe dictates of the system.

Increases in Prejudice and Racism

As the system of racial advantage formedand solidified, levels of prejudice and racismincreased (Wilson, 1973, p. 101). The newsystem needed justification and rationaliza-tion, just as slavery did, and anti-black sen-timent, stereotypes, and ideologies of racialinferiority grew stronger. At the start of the20th century, the United States in general—not just the South—was a very racist andintolerant society. This spirit of rejectionand scorn for all out-groups coalesced withthe need for justification of the Jim Crowsystem and created an especially negativebrand of racism in the South.

THE “GREAT MIGRATION”

Although African Americans lacked thepower resources to withstand the resurrec-tion of southern racism and oppression, theydid have one option that had not been avail-able under slavery: freedom of movement.



African Americans were no longer legallytied to a specific master or to a certain plotof land. In the early 20th century, a massivepopulation movement out of the Southbegan. Slowly at first, African Americansbegan to move to other regions of the nationand from the countryside to the city. Themovement increased when hard times hitsouthern agriculture and slowed down dur-ing better times. It has been said that AfricanAmericans voted against southern segrega-tion with their feet.

As Exhibits 4.1 and 4.2 show, an urbanblack population living outside the Southis a late 20th-century phenomenon. Today,the majority of African Americans continue

to live in the South, but the group is moreevenly distributed across the nation andmuch more urbanized than a century ago.

The significance of this population redis-tribution is manifold. Most important, per-haps, was the fact that by moving out ofthe South and from rural to urban areas,African Americans began to move fromareas of great resistance to racial change toareas of lower resistance. In the northerncities, for example, it was far easier to reg-ister and to vote. Black political powerbegan to grow and eventually providedmany of the crucial resources that fueledthe civil rights movement of the 1950s and1960s.


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Exhibit 4.1 Regional Distribution of African American Population

SOURCES: 1890–1960: Geschwender (1978, p. 173); 1990 (Regional Distribution): Heaton, Chadwick, and Jacobson(2000, p. 26); 2000 (Regional Distribution): U.S. Bureau of the Census (2005, p. 25).


Life in the North

What did African American migrantsfind when they got to the industrializingcities of the North? There is no doubt thatlife in the North was better for the vastmajority of black migrants. The growingnorthern black communities relished theabsence of Jim Crow laws and oppressiveracial etiquette and the greater freedom topursue jobs and educate their children.Inevitably, however, life in the North fellshort of utopia. Many aspects of AfricanAmerican culture—literature, poetry,music—flourished in the heady new atmo-sphere of freedom, but on other fronts,northern black communities faced discrimi-nation in housing, schools, and the job mar-ket. Along with freedom and such culturalflowerings as the Harlem Renaissance came

black ghettoes and new forms of oppressionand exploitation.

Competition WithWhite Ethnic Groups

It is useful to see the movement of AfricanAmericans out of the South in terms of theresultant relationship with other groups.Southern blacks began to migrate to theNorth at about the same time that a hugewave of emigration from Europe that hadbegun in the 1820s came to an end. By thetime substantial numbers of black southern-ers began arriving in the North, Europeanimmigrants and their descendants had hadyears, decades, and even generations to estab-lish themselves in the job markets, politicalsystems, labor unions, and neighborhoods of


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Exhibit 4.2 Percentage of African American Population Living in Urban Areas, 1890–2000

SOURCES: 1890–1960: Geschwender (1978, p. 173); (Urbanization): 1950: U.S. Bureau of the Census (1996);1960–1990: Pollard and O’Hare (1999, p. 27); 2000: U.S. Bureau of the Census (n.d.-d).


the North. Many of the European ethnicgroups had also been the victims of discrimi-nation and rejection, and their hold on eco-nomic security and status was tenuous formuch of the 20th century. They saw thenewly arriving black migrants as a threat totheir status, a perception that was reinforcedby the fact that industrialists and factoryowners often used blacks as strikebreakersand scabs during strikes. The white ethnicgroups responded by developing defensivestrategies to limit the dangers presented bythese migrants from the South. They tried toexclude blacks from their labor unions andother associations and limit their impact onthe political system. They also attempted,often successfully, to maintain segregatedneighborhoods and schools (although thelegal system outside the South did not sanc-tion de jure segregation).

This competition led to hostile relationsbetween black southern migrants and whiteethnic groups, especially the lower- andworking-class segments of those groups.Ironically, however, the newly arrivingAfrican Americans actually helped whiteethnic groups become upwardly mobile.

Dominant group whites became lessvocal about their contempt for white ethnicgroups as their alarm over the presenceof blacks increased. The greater antipathyof the white community toward AfricanAmericans made the white ethnic groupsless undesirable and thus hastened theiradmittance to the institutions of the largersociety. For many white ethnic groups, theincreased tolerance of the larger societycoincided happily with the coming of age ofthe more educated and skilled descendantsof the original immigrants, further abettingthe rise of these groups in the U.S. socialclass structure (Lieberson, 1980).

For more than a century, each newEuropean immigrant group had helped topush previous groups up the ladder of socioe-conomic success and out of the old, ghet-toized neighborhoods. The Irish, forexample, pushed the Germans up and werein turn pushed up by Italians and Poles.Black southerners got to the cities after

emigration from Europe had been curtailed,and no newly arrived immigrants appearedto continue the pattern of succession fornorthern African Americans. Instead,American cities developed a concentration oflow-income blacks who were economicallyvulnerable and politically weak and whoseposition was further solidified by anti-blackprejudice and discrimination (Wilson, 1987,p. 34).

THE ORIGINS OF BLACK PROTEST

As I pointed out in Chapter 3, AfricanAmericans have always resisted their oppres-sion and protested their situation. Underslavery, however, the inequalities they facedwere so great and their resources so meagerthat the protest was ineffective. With theincreased freedom that followed slavery, anational black leadership developed, spokeout against oppression, and founded organi-zations that eventually helped to lead thefight for freedom and equality. Even at itsbirth, the black protest movement wasdiverse and incorporated a variety of view-points and leaders.

Booker T. Washington was the mostprominent African American leader prior toWorld War I. Washington had been bornin slavery and was the founder and firstpresident of Tuskegee Institute, a college inAlabama dedicated to educating AfricanAmericans. His public advice to AfricanAmericans in the South was to be patient, toaccommodate the Jim Crow system fornow, to raise their levels of education andjob skills, and to take full advantage ofwhatever opportunities became available.This nonconfrontational stance earnedWashington praise and support from thewhite community and widespread popular-ity in the nation. Privately, he workedbehind the scenes to end discrimination andimplement full racial integration and equal-ity (Franklin & Moss, 1994, pp. 272–274;Hawkins, 1962; Washington, 1965).

Washington’s most vocal opponent wasW. E. B. Du Bois, an intellectual and activistwho was born in the North and educated at



some of the leading universities of the day.Among his many other accomplishments,Du Bois was part of a coalition of black andwhite liberals who founded the NationalAssociation for the Advancement ofColored People (NAACP) in 1909. Du Boisrejected Washington’s accommodationiststance and advocated immediate pursuit ofracial equality and a direct assault on dejure segregation. Almost from the beginningof its existence, the NAACP filed lawsuitsthat challenged the legal foundations of JimCrow segregation (Du Bois, 1961). As weshall see in Chapter 5, this legal strategywas eventually successful and led to thedemise of the Jim Crow system.

Washington and Du Bois may have dif-fered on matters of strategy and tactics, butthey agreed that the only acceptable goal forAfrican Americans was an integrated, raciallyequal United States. A third leader whoemerged early in the 20th century called for avery different approach to the problems ofU.S. race relations. Marcus Garvey was bornin Jamaica and immigrated to the UnitedStates during World War I. He argued thatthe white-dominated U.S. society was hope-lessly racist and would never truly supportintegration and racial equality. He advocatedseparatist goals, including a return to Africa.Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improve-ment Association (UNIA) in 1914 in hisnative Jamaica and founded the first U.S.branch in 1916. Garvey’s organization wasvery popular for a time in African Americancommunities outside the South, and he helpedto establish some of the themes and ideas ofblack nationalism and pride in African her-itage that would become prominent againin the pluralistic 1960s (Essien-Udom, 1962;Garvey, 1969, 1977; Vincent, 1976).

These early leaders and organizationsestablished some of the foundation forlater protest movements, but prior to themid-20th century, they made few actualimprovements in the situation of blackAmericans in the North or South. Jim Crowwas a formidable opponent, and the south-ern black community lacked the resourcesto successfully challenge the status quo until

the century was well along and some basicstructural features of American society hadchanged.

APPLYING CONCEPTS

Acculturation and Integration

During this era of southern segregationand migration to the North, assimilation wasnot a major factor in the African Americanexperience. Rather, black-white relations arebetter described as a system of structuralpluralism combined with great inequality.Excluded from the mainstream but freedfrom the limitations of slavery, AfricanAmericans constructed a separate subsocietyand subculture. In all regions of the nation,black Americans developed their own institu-tions and organizations, including separateneighborhoods, churches, businesses, andschools. Like emigrants from Europe in thesame era, they organized their communities tocater to their own needs and problems andpursue their agenda as a group.

During the era of segregation, a small,black middle class emerged based on leader-ship roles in the church, education, andbusiness. A network of black colleges anduniversities was constructed to educate thechildren of the growing middle class as wellas other classes. Through this infrastruc-ture, African Americans began to developthe resources and leadership that in thedecades ahead would attack, head on, thestructures of racial inequality.

Gender and Race

For African American men and women,the changes wrought by industrializationand the population movement to the Northcreated new possibilities and new roles.However, as African Americans continuedto be the victims of exploitation and exclu-sion in both the North and the South, blackwomen continued to be among the mostvulnerable groups in society.

Following emancipation, there was aflurry of marriages and weddings among



African Americans as they were finally able tolegitimate their family relationships (Staples,1988, p. 306). African American womencontinued to have primary responsibility forhome and children. Historian HerbertGutman (1976) reports that it was commonfor married women to drop out of the laborforce and attend solely to household andfamily duties, because a working wife was tooreminiscent of a slave role. This patternbecame so widespread that it created seriouslabor shortages in many areas (Gutman,1976; see also Staples, 1988, p. 307).

The former slaves were hardly affluent,however, and as sharecropping and segrega-tion began to shape race relations in theSouth, women often had to return to thefields or to domestic work for the family tosurvive. One former slave woman noted thatwomen “do double duty, a man’s share in thefield and a woman’s part at home” (Evans,1989, p. 121). During the bleak decades fol-lowing the end of Reconstruction, southernblack families and black women in partic-ular lived “close to the bone” (Evans, 1989,p. 121).

In the cities and in the growing blackneighborhoods in the North, AfricanAmerican women played a role that in someways paralleled the role of immigrant womenfrom Europe. The men often moved northfirst and sent for the women after they hadattained some level of financial stability orafter the pain of separation became too great(Almquist, 1979, p. 434). In other cases,black women by the thousands left the Southto work as domestic servants; they oftenreplaced European immigrant women whohad moved up in the job structure (Amott &Matthaei, 1991, p. 168).

In the North, discrimination and racismcreated constant problems of unemploy-ment for the men, and families often reliedon the income supplied by the women tomake ends meet. It was comparatively easyfor women to find employment, but only inthe low-paying, less desirable areas, such asdomestic work. In both the South and theNorth, African American women workedoutside the home in larger proportions thandid white women. For example, in 1900,

41% of black women were employed,compared with only 16% of white women(Staples, 1988, p. 307).

In 1890, more than a generation afterthe end of slavery, 85% of all black menand 96% of black women were employed injust two occupational categories: agricul-ture and domestic or personal service. By1930, 90% of employed black women werestill in these same two categories, whereasthe corresponding percentage for employedblack males had dropped to 54% (althoughnearly all of the remaining 46% wereunskilled workers) (Steinberg, 1981,pp. 206–207). Since the inception of segre-gation, African American women have hadconsistently higher unemployment ratesand lower incomes than black men andwhite women (Almquist, 1979, p. 437).These gaps, as we shall see in Chapter 5,persist to the present day.

During the years following emancipation,some issues did split men and women, withinboth the black community and the largersociety. Prominent among these was suf-frage, or the right to vote, which was stilllimited to men only. The abolitionist move-ment, which had been so instrumental inending slavery, also supported universal suf-frage. Efforts to enfranchise women, though,were abandoned by the Republican Partyand large parts of the abolitionist movementto concentrate on efforts to secure the votefor black males in the South. Ratification ofthe 15th Amendment in 1870 extended thevote, in principle, to African American men,but the 19th Amendment enfranchisingwomen would not be passed for another 50years (Almquist, 1979, pp. 433–434; Evans,1989, pp. 121–124).

INDUSTRIALIZATION, THE SHIFTTO POSTINDUSTRIAL SOCIETY,AND DOMINANT-MINORITYGROUP RELATIONS: GENERAL TRENDS

The process of industrialization that began inthe 19th century continued to shape the largersociety and dominant-minority relations



throughout the 20th century. In the 21stcentury, the United States bears little resem-blance to the society it was a century ago. Thepopulation has more than tripled in size andhas urbanized even more rapidly than it grew.New organizational forms (bureaucracies,corporations, multinational businesses) andnew technologies (nuclear power, cell phones,computers) dominate everyday life. Levels ofeducation have risen, and the public schoolshave produced one of the most literate popu-lations and well-trained workforces in thehistory of the world.

Minority groups also grew in size, andmost became even more urbanized than thegeneral population. Minority group membershave come to participate in an increasingarray of occupations, and their average levelsof education have also risen. Despite thesereal improvements, however, virtually all U.S.minority groups continue to face racism,poverty, discrimination, and exclusion. In thissection, we outline the ways in which indus-trialization has changed American society andexamine some of the implications for minor-ity groups in general. We also note some ofthe ways in which industrialization has aidedminority groups and address some of the bar-riers to full participation in the larger societythat continue to operate in the present era.The impact of industrialization and the com-ing of postindustrial society will be consid-ered in detail in the case studies that comprisePart III of this text.

Urbanization

We have already noted that urbanizationmade close, paternalistic controls of minor-ity groups irrelevant. For example, theracial etiquette required by southern dejure segregation, such as African Americansdeferring to whites on crowded sidewalks,tended to disappear in the chaos of anurban rush hour. Besides weakening domi-nant group controls, urbanization also cre-ated the potential for minority groups tomobilize and organize large numbers ofpeople. As stated in Chapter 1, the sheersize of a group is a source of power.Without the freedom to organize, however,

size means little, and urbanization increasedboth the concentration of populations andthe freedom to organize.

Occupational Specialization

One of the first and most important resultsof industrialization, even in its earliest days,was an increase in occupational specializa-tion and the variety of jobs available in theworkforce. The growing needs of an urbaniz-ing population increased the number of jobsavailable in the production, transport, andsale of goods and services. Occupational spe-cialization was also stimulated by the verynature of industrial production. Complexmanufacturing processes could be performedmore efficiently if they were broken downinto the narrower component tasks. It waseasier and more efficient to train the work-force in the simpler, specialized jobs.Assembly lines were invented, the work wassubdivided, the division of labor becameincreasingly complex, and the number ofdifferent occupations continued to grow.

The sheer complexity of the industrialjob structure made it difficult to maintainrigid, caste-like divisions of labor betweendominant and minority groups. Rigid com-petitive forms of group relations, such asJim Crow segregation, became less viable asthe job market became more diversified andchangeable. Simple, clear rules about whichgroups could do which jobs disappeared.As the more repressive systems of controlweakened, job opportunities for minoritygroup members sometimes increased. But asthe relationships between group member-ships and positions in the job marketbecame more blurred, conflict betweengroups also increased. For example, as wehave noted, African Americans movingfrom the South often found themselves incompetition for jobs with white ethnicgroups, labor unions controlled by whites,and other elements of the dominant group.

Bureaucracy and Rationality

As industrialization continued, privatelyowned corporations and businesses came to



have workforces numbering in the hundredsof thousands. Gigantic factories employingthousands of workers became common. Tocoordinate the efforts of these huge work-forces, bureaucracy became the dominantform of organization in the economy and,indeed, throughout the society. Bureaucra-cies are large-scale, impersonal, formalorganizations that run “by the book.” Theyare governed by rules and regulations (i.e.,“red tape”) and are rational in that theyattempt to find the most efficient ways toaccomplish their tasks. Although they typi-cally fail to attain the ideal of fully rationalefficiency, bureaucracies tend to recruit,reward, and promote employees on thebasis of competence and performance(Gerth & Mills, 1946).

The stress on rationality and objectivitycan counteract the more blatant forms ofracism and increase the array of opportuni-ties available to members of minority groups.Although they are often nullified by otherforces (see Blumer, 1965), these anti-prejudicialtendencies do not exist at all or are muchweaker in preindustrial economies.

The history of the concept of race illus-trates the effect of rationality and scientificways of thinking. Today, virtually the entirescientific community regards race as abiological triviality, a conclusion based ondecades of research. This scientific findingundermined and contributed to the destruc-tion of the formal systems of privilege basedsolely on race (e.g., segregated school sys-tems) and individual perceptual systems(e.g., traditional prejudice) based on theassumption that race was a crucial personalcharacteristic.

Growth of White-CollarJobs and the Service Sector

Industrialization changed the composi-tion of the labor force. As work becamemore complex and specialized, the need tocoordinate and regulate the production pro-cess increased, and as a result, bureaucra-cies and other organizations grew largerstill. Within these organizations, white-collar occupations—those that coordinate,

manage, and deal with the flow of paper-work—continued to expand. As industrial-ization progressed, mechanization andautomation reduced the number of manual orblue-collar workers, and white-collar occupa-tions became the dominant sector of the jobmarket in the United States. The changingnature of the workforce can be illustrated bylooking at the proportional representation ofthree different types of jobs:

•• Extractive (or primary) occupations arethose that produce raw materials, such asfood and agricultural products, minerals,and lumber. The jobs in this sector ofteninvolve unskilled manual labor, require lit-tle formal education, and are generally lowpaid.

•• Manufacturing (or secondary) occupationstransform raw materials into finished prod-ucts ready for sale in the marketplace. Likejobs in the extractive sector, these blue-col-lar jobs involve manual labor, but theytend to require higher levels of skill and aremore highly rewarded. Examples of occu-pations in this sector include the assemblyline jobs that transform steel, rubber,plastic, and other materials into finishedautomobiles.

•• Service (or tertiary) occupations don’t pro-duce “things,” but, rather, provide services.As urbanization increased and self-suffi-ciency decreased, opportunities for work inthis sector grew. Examples of tertiary occu-pations include police officer, clerk, waiter,teacher, nurse, doctor, and cab driver.

The course of industrialization is traced inthe changing structure of the labor marketdepicted in Exhibit 4.3. In 1840, when indus-trialization was just beginning in the UnitedStates, most of the workforce was in theextractive sector, with agriculture being thedominant occupation. As industrializationprogressed, the manufacturing, or secondary,sector grew, reaching a peak after World WarII. Today, the large majority of jobs are in theservice, or tertiary, sector. This shift awayfrom blue-collar jobs and manufacturing issometimes referred to as deindustrializationor discussed in terms of the emergence of



postindustrial society. The U.S. economy haslost millions of unionized, high-paying fac-tory jobs over the past several decades, andthe downward trend will continue. Theindustrial jobs that sustained so many gener-ations of American workers have moved toother nations, where wages are considerablylower than in the United States, or have beeneliminated by robots or other automatedmanufacturing processes (see Rifkin, 1996).

The changing structure of the job markethelps to clarify the nature of intergroupcompetition and the sources of wealth andpower in the society. Job growth in theUnited States today is largely in the servicesector, and these occupations are highlyvariable. At one end are low-paying jobswith few, if any, benefits or chances foradvancement (e.g., washing dishes in arestaurant). At the upper end are high-prestige, lucrative positions, such asSupreme Court justice, scientist, and finan-cial analyst. The new service sector jobs areeither highly desirable technical, profes-sional, or administrative jobs with demand-ing entry requirements (e.g., physician ornurse) or low-paid, low-skilled jobs with

few benefits and little security (e.g., recep-tionist, nurse’s aide). For the past half cen-tury, job growth in the United States hasbeen either in areas in which educationallydeprived minority group members find itdifficult to compete or in areas that offer lit-tle compensation, upward mobility, or secu-rity. As we will see in Part III, the economicsituation of contemporary minority groupsreflects these fundamental trends.

The Growing Importanceof Education

Education has been an increasingly impor-tant prerequisite for employability. A highschool or, increasingly, a college degree hasbecome the minimum entry-level requirementfor employment. However, opportunities forhigh-quality education are not distributedequally across the population. Some minoritygroups, especially those created by coloniza-tion, have been systematically excluded fromthe schools of the dominant society, andtoday, they are less likely to have the educa-tional backgrounds needed to compete forbetter jobs. Access to education is a key issue


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1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000

Per

cen

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Service

Extractive Manufacturing

Exhibit 4.3 The Changing American Workforce: Distribution of Jobs

SOURCE: 1840–1990: Adapted from Lenski, Nolan, and Lenski (1995); 2002 and 2004 calculated from U.S. Bureauof the Census (2006, p. 407).


for almost all U.S. minority groups, and theaverage educational levels of these groupshave been rising since World War II. Still,minority children continue to be much morelikely to attend segregated, underfunded, dete-riorated schools and to receive inferior educa-tions (see Orfield, 2001).

A Dual Labor Market

The changing composition of the laborforce and increasing importance of educa-tional credentials has split the U.S. labormarket into two segments or types of jobs.The primary labor market includes jobsusually located in large, bureaucratic orga-nizations. These positions offer higher pay,more security, better opportunities foradvancement, health and retirement bene-fits, and other amenities. Entry require-ments often include college degrees, evenwhen people with fewer years of schoolingcould competently perform the work.

The secondary labor market, sometimescalled the competitive market, includes low-paid, low-skilled, insecure jobs. Many ofthese jobs are in the service sector. They donot represent a career and offer little oppor-tunity for promotion or upward mobility.Very often, they do not offer health or retire-ment benefits; have high rates of turnover;and are part time, seasonal, or temporary.

Many American minority groups areconcentrated in the secondary job market.Their exclusion from better jobs is perpetu-ated not so much by direct or obvious dis-crimination as by educational and othercredentials required to enter the primarysector. The differential distribution of edu-cational opportunities, in the past as well asin the present, effectively protects workersin the primary sector from competitionfrom minority groups.

Globalization

Over the past century, the United Statesbecame an economic, political, and militaryworld power with interests around theglobe. These worldwide ties have creatednew minority groups through population

movement and have changed the status ofothers. Immigration to this country has beenconsiderable for the past three decades. TheAmerican economy is one of the most pro-ductive in the world, and jobs, even those inthe low-paid secondary sector, are the pri-mary goals for millions of newcomers. Forother immigrants, this country continues toplay its historic role as a refuge from politi-cal and religious persecution.

Many of the wars, conflicts, and other dis-putes in which the United States has beeninvolved have had consequences for Americanminority groups. For example, both PuertoRicans and Cuban Americans became U.S.minority groups as the result of processes setin motion during the Spanish-American Warof 1898. Both World War I and World War IIcreated new job opportunities for manyminority groups, including African Americansand Mexican Americans. After the KoreanWar, international ties were forged betweenthe United States and South Korea, and thisled to an increase in emigration from thatnation. In the 1960s and 1970s, the militaryinvolvement of the United States in South-east Asia led to the arrival of Vietnamese,Cambodian, and other Asian immigrants.

Dominant-minority relations in theUnited States have been increasingly playedout on an international stage as the worldhas effectively “shrunk” in size and becomemore interconnected by international orga-nizations such as the United Nations, by tiesof trade and commerce, and by modernmeans of transportation and communica-tion. In a world in which two thirds of thepopulation is nonwhite and many impor-tant nations (such as China, India, andNigeria) represent peoples of color, thetreatment of racial minorities by the U.S.dominant group has come under increasedscrutiny. It is difficult to preach principlesof fairness, equality, and justice—whichthe United States claims as its own—whendomestic realities suggest an embarrassingfailure to fully implement these standards.Part of the pressure for the United States toend blatant systems of discrimination suchas de jure segregation came from the desireto maintain a leading position in the world.



THE SHIFT FROM RIGID TO FLUIDCOMPETITIVE RELATIONSHIPSThe recent changes in the structure ofAmerican society are so fundamental andprofound that they are often described interms of a revolution in subsistence technol-ogy: from an industrial society, based onmanufacturing, to a postindustrial society,based on information processing and com-puter-related or other new technologies.

As the subsistence technology has evolvedand changed, so have American dominant-minority relations. The rigid competitivesystems (such as Jim Crow) associated withearlier phases of industrialization have givenway to fluid competitive systems of grouprelations. In fluid competitive relations, thereare no formal or legal barriers to competitionsuch as Jim Crow laws. Both geographic andsocial mobility are greater, and the limita-tions imposed by minority group status are

less restrictive and burdensome. Rigid castesystems of stratification, in which groupmembership determines opportunities, adultstatuses, and jobs, are replaced by more openclass systems, in which there are weaker rela-tionships between group membership andwealth, prestige, and power. Because fluidcompetitive systems are more open and theposition of the minority group is less fixed,the fear of competition from minority groupsbecomes more widespread for the dominantgroup, and intergroup conflict increases.Exhibit 4.4 compares the characteristics ofthe three systems of group relations.

Compared with previous systems, thefluid competitive system is closer to theAmerican ideal of an open, fair system ofstratification in which effort and compe-tence are rewarded and race, ethnicity,gender, religion, and other “birthmarks”are irrelevant. However, as we will see in


Exhibit 4.4 Characteristics of Three Systems of Group Relationships

Fluid

Advanced Industrial

Variable. Status stronglyaffected by group.Inequality varieswithin groups

Most complex. Groupand job less related.Complex specializationand great variationwithin groups

More common. Highestrates of equal-statuscontact

Common

Least. Minority groupshave more ability topursue self-interest

Rigid

Early Industrial

Mixed. Elements ofcaste and class.Status largelydetermined by group

More complex. Joblargely determinedby group but somesharing of jobs bydifferent groups

Less common andmostly unequal

More common

Less. Minority groupshave some ability topursue self-interest

Paternalistic

Agrarian

Caste. Groupdetermines status

Simple. Determinedby group

Common but statusesunequal

Rare

Maximum. Minoritygroups have littleability to pursueself-interests

Subsistence Technology

Stratification

Division of labor

Contact betweengroups

Overt intergroupconflict

Power differential

Competitive

SOURCE: Based on Farley (Ed.) (2000, p. 109). Majority-Minority Relations (5th ed.). Copyright © 2005. Reprintedby permission of Pearson Education, Inc. Upper Saddle River, NJ.


chapters to come, race and ethnicity con-tinue to affect life chances and limit oppor-tunities for minority group members evenin fluid competitive systems. As suggestedby the Noel hypothesis, people continue toidentify themselves with particular groups(ethnocentrism), and competition forresources continues to play out along grouplines. Consistent with the Blauner hypothe-sis, the minority groups that were formedby colonization remain at a disadvantage inthe pursuit of opportunities, education,prestige, and other resources.

GENDER INEQUALITYIN A GLOBALIZING,POSTINDUSTRIAL WORLD

Deindustrialization and globalization aretransforming gender relations along withdominant-minority relations. Everywhere,even in the most traditional and sexistsocieties, women are moving away from theirtraditional “wife/mother” roles, taking onnew responsibilities, and facing new chal-lenges. Some women are also encounteringnew dangers and new forms of exploitationthat perpetuate their lower status and extendit into new areas.

Changing Gender Relationsin the United States

The transition of the United States to apostindustrial society has changed gender rela-tions and the status of women on a number oflevels. Women and men are now equal interms of levels of education (U.S. Bureau of theCensus, 2006, p. 147), and the shift to fluidcompetitive group relations has weakened thebarriers to gender equality along with the bar-riers to racial equality. The changing role ofwomen is also shaped by other characteristicsof a modern society: smaller families, highdivorce rates, and rising numbers of singlemothers who must work to support their chil-dren as well as themselves.

Many of the trends have coalesced tomotivate women to enter the paid labor forcein unprecedented numbers over the past half

century. Women are now employed atalmost the same levels as men. In the year2004, for example, 66% of single women(vs. about 70% of single men) and about61% of married women (vs. about 77% ofmarried men) had jobs outside the home(U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2006, p. 392).Furthermore, between 1970 and 2004, theparticipation of married women with chil-dren in the workforce increased from a littleless than 40% to almost 70% (U.S. Bureauof the Census, 2006, p. 393).

Many female workers enter the paidlabor force to compensate for the decliningearning power of men. Before deindustrial-ization began to transform U.S. society,men monopolized the more desirable,higher-paid, unionized jobs in the manufac-turing sector. For much of the 20th century,these blue-collar jobs paid well enough tosubsidize a comfortable lifestyle, a housein the suburbs, and vacations, with enoughmoney left over to save for a rainy day orfor college for the kids. However, whendeindustrialization began, many of thesedesirable jobs were lost to automation andto cheaper labor forces outside the UnitedStates and were replaced, if at all, by low-paying jobs in the service sector. Thus, dein-dustrialization tended to drive down men’swages, and many women were forced totake jobs to supplement the family income.This trend is reflected in Exhibit 4.5, whichshows that, from the early 1970s until themid-1990s, average wages for men havebeen stagnant or actually declining.

A large number of the “new” femaleworkers have taken jobs in a limitednumber of female-dominated occupations,most of which are in the less well-paid ser-vice sector, and this pattern of occupationalsegregation is one important reason forthe continuing gender gap in income. Forexample, Exhibit 4.6 lists some of the occu-pations that were dominated by females in1983 and 2004 along with the percentagesof females in comparable but higher-statusoccupations. For example, 93% of nursesand nearly 100% of dental hygienists werefemale in 2004. The comparable figures for




0

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45000

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1980

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1988

1990

1992

1994

1996

1998

2000

2002

Do

llars

Men

Women

Exhibit 4.5 Median Earnings for Full-Time, Year-Round Workers Over Age 15 by Gender,1966–2003

SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of the Census, De-Navas, Proctor, and Mills (2004).

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RN

Docto

r

Denta

l Hyg

.

Dentis

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Elem T

chr

Univ. P

rof

Lega

l Ass

istan

t

Lawye

r

Sec’y

Execu

tuve

Per

cen

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emal

e

1983 2004

Exhibit 4.6 Gender Composition of Selected Occupations, 1983 and 2004

SOURCE: Calculated from U.S. Bureau of the Census (2006, pp. 401–403).


physicians and dentists were 29% and22%, respectively.

In part, this occupational segregation isa result of the choices women make tobalance the demands of their jobs withtheir family obligations. Whereas men areexpected to make a total commitment totheir jobs and careers, women are expectedto find ways to continue to fulfill theirdomestic roles even while working full-time,and many “female jobs” offer some flexibil-ity in this area (Shelton & John, 1996). Forexample, many women become elementaryeducators despite the relatively low salariesbecause the job offers predictable hours andlong summer breaks, both of which canhelp women meet their child care and otherfamily responsibilities. This pattern of gen-der occupational segregation testifies tothe lingering effects of minority status forwomen and the choices they make to recon-cile the demands of career and family.

Exhibit 4.6 also shows that gender segre-gation in the world of work is declining,at least in some areas. Women are movinginto traditionally male (and higher-paid)occupations, as reflected by the rising per-centages of female physicians, dentists, uni-versity professors, and lawyers. Also, someof the occupational areas that traditionallyhave had high concentrations of women—for example, the so-called FIRE sector, orfinance, insurance, and real estate—actuallybenefited from deindustrialization and theshift to a service economy. Job opportuni-ties in the FIRE sector have expandedrapidly since the 1960s and have providedopportunities for women to rise in the socialstructure, and this has, in turn, tended toelevate the average salaries for women ingeneral (Farley, 1996, pp. 95–101). Themovement of females into these more lucra-tive occupations is one reason why the gen-der gap in income is decreasing, as reflectedin Exhibit 4.5.

Changing Gender RelationsAround the World

How have deindustrialization and glob-alization affected women internationally? In

part, the trends worldwide parallel thosein the United States. According to a recentUnited Nations report (United Nations,2000), indicators such as rising educationlevels for women and lower rates of earlymarriage and childbirth show that womenaround the world are moving out of theirtraditional (and often highly controlledand repressed) status. They are entering thelabor force in unprecedented numbers virtu-ally everywhere, and women now compriseat least a third of the global workforce.

Although their status is generally rising,the movement away from traditional genderroles also exposes many women to newforms of exploitation. Around the globe,women have become a source of cheap labor,often in jobs that have recently been exportedfrom the U.S. economy. For example, manymanufacturing jobs formerly held by men inthe United States have migrated just south ofthe border to Mexico, where they are held bywomen. Maquiladoras are assembly plantsbuilt by corporations, often headquartered inthe United States, to take advantage of theplentiful supply of working-class femaleswho will work for low wages and in condi-tions that would not be tolerated inthe United States (for a recent analysis ofthe Mexican female labor force and themaquiladora phenomenon, see Parrado &Zenteno, 2001).

The weakening of traditional genderroles has increased women’s vulnerability inother areas as well. A global sex trade inprostitution and pornography is flourishingand accounts for a significant portion ofthe economy of Thailand, the Philippines,and other nations. This international indus-try depends on impoverished women (andchildren) pushed out of the subsistence ruraleconomy by industrialization and globaliza-tion and made vulnerable for exploitationby their lack of resources and power(Poulan, 2003).

Across all these changes and around theglobe, women commonly face the challengeof reconciling their new work demands withtheir traditional family responsibilities.Also, women face challenges and issues,such as sexual harassment and domestic



violence, that clearly differentiate theirstatus from that of men. In this context,minority group women face a double disad-vantage because the issues they face aswomen are overlaid on the barriers of racialand ethnic prejudice and discrimination. Aswe shall see in Chapters 5 to 10, minoritygroup women are often the poorest, mostvulnerable, and most exploited groups inU.S. society and around the globe.

Modern Institutional Discrimination

Virtually all American minority groupscontinue to lag behind national averages inincome, employment, and other measures ofequality despite the greater fluidity of grouprelations, the greater openness in the U.S.stratification system, dramatic declines inovert prejudice, and the introduction ofnumerous laws designed to ensure that allpeople are treated without regard to race,gender, or ethnicity. After all this change,shouldn’t there be more equality?

In fact, many Americans attribute the per-sisting patterns of inequality to the minoritygroups’ lack of willpower or motivation toget ahead. In the remaining chapters of thistext, however, I argue that the major barrierfacing minority groups in late industrial,post-Jim Crow America is a more subtle butstill powerful form of discrimination: mod-ern institutional discrimination.

As you recall from Chapter 1, institu-tional discrimination is built into the every-day operation of the social structure ofsociety. The routine procedures and poli-cies of institutions and organizations arearranged so that minority group membersare automatically put at a disadvantage. Inthe Jim Crow era in the South, for example,African Americans were deprived of theright to vote by overt institutional discrimi-nation and could acquire little in the way ofpolitical power.

The forms of institutional discriminationthat persist in the present are more subtleand less overt than those that defined theJim Crow system. In fact, they are oftenunintentional or unconscious and are mani-fested more in the results for minority

groups than in the intentions or prejudicesof dominant group members. Modern insti-tutional discrimination is not necessarilylinked to prejudice, and the decision makerswho implement it may sincerely think ofthemselves as behaving rationally and in thebest interests of their organizations.

When employers make hiring decisionsbased solely on educational criteria, theymay be putting minority group membersat a disadvantage. When banks use strictlyeconomic criteria to deny money for homemortgages or home improvement loans incertain run-down neighborhoods, they maybe handicapping the efforts of minoritygroups to cope with the results of the bla-tant, legal housing segregation of the past.When businesspeople decide to lower theiroverhead by moving their operations awayfrom center cities, they may be reducingthe ability of America’s highly urbanizedminority groups to earn a living and educatetheir children. When educators rely solelyon standardized tests of ability that havebeen developed from white, middle-classexperiences to decide who will be placed incollege preparatory courses, they may belimiting the ability of minority group chil-dren to compete for jobs in the primarysector.

Any and all of these decisions can and dohave devastating consequences for minorityindividuals, even though decision makersmay be entirely unaware of the discrimi-natory effects. Employers, bankers, andeducators do not have to be personally prej-udiced for their actions to have negativeconsequences for minority groups. Moderninstitutional discrimination helps to perpet-uate systems of inequality that can be just aspervasive and stifling as those of the past.

To illustrate, consider the effects of past-in-present institutional discrimination,which involves practices in the present thathave discriminatory consequences becauseof some pattern of discrimination or exclu-sion in the past (Feagin & Feagin, 1986,p. 32). One form of this discrimination isfound in workforces organized around theprinciple of seniority. In these systems,which are quite common, workers who



have been on the job longer have higherincomes, more privileges, and other bene-fits, such as longer vacations. The “old-timers” often have more job security andare designated in official, written policy asthe last to be fired or laid off in the event ofhard times. Workers and employers alikemay think of the privileges of seniority asjust rewards for long years of service, famil-iarity with the job, and so forth.

Personnel policies based on seniority mayseem perfectly reasonable, neutral, and fair.However, they can have discriminatoryresults in the present because in the past,members of minority groups and womenwere excluded from specific occupations byracist or sexist labor unions, discriminatoryemployers, or both. As a result, minoritygroup workers and women may have feweryears of experience than dominant groupworkers and may be the first to go whenlayoffs are necessary. The adage “last hired,first fired” describes the situation of minor-ity group and female employees who aremore vulnerable not because of someovertly racist or sexist policy, but becauseof the routine operation of the seeminglyneutral principle of seniority.

It is much more difficult to identify, mea-sure, and eliminate the more subtle formsof modern institutional discrimination, andsome of the most heated disputes in recentgroup relations have concerned public policyand law in this area. Among the most con-troversial issues are affirmative action pro-grams that attempt to ameliorate the legacyof past discrimination or increase diversity inthe workplace or schools. In many cases, theSupreme Court has found that programsdesigned to favor minority employees as astrategy for overcoming overt discrimina-tion in the past are constitutional (e.g.,Firefighters Local Union No. 1784 v. Stotts,1984; Sheet Metal Workers v. EEOC, 1986;United Steelworkers of America, AFL-CIO-CLC v. Weber, 1979). Virtually all of thesedecisions, however, were based on narrowmargins (votes of 5 to 4) and featured acri-monious and bitter debates. More recently,the Court narrowed the grounds on which

such past grievances could be redressed, andin the eyes of many observers, dealt seriousblows to affirmative action programs (e.g.,Adarand Constructors Inc. v. Pena, 1995).

One of the more prominent battle-grounds for affirmative action programs hasbeen in higher education. Since the 1960s, ithas been common for colleges and universi-ties to implement programs to increase thenumber of minority students on campus atboth the undergraduate and graduate levels,sometimes admitting minority studentswho had lower grade point averages or testscores than dominant group students whowere turned away. In general, universitieshave justified these programs in terms ofredressing past discriminatory practices orincreasing diversity on campus and makingthe student body a more faithful representa-tion of the surrounding society.

To say the least, these programs have beenhighly controversial and the targets of fre-quent lawsuits, some of which have foundtheir way to the highest courts in the land.The future of these programs remainsunclear. At present, a number of states havebanned affirmative action programs in theiruniversities and colleges, but the legality ofthese outright bans remains in some doubt.For example, in 1996, the voters inCalifornia passed an amendment to the stateconstitution that banned all use of racial, eth-nic, or sexual preferences in education, hir-ing, and the conduct of state business. In thespring of 2001, after years of protest andpressure by a variety of groups, the govern-ing body of the California system of highereducation ended the ban on affirmativeaction. This decision seems mainly symbolic,however, because the university system can-not exempt itself from the state constitution.

Recent lawsuits have upheld some affir-mative action programs in higher educationbut only under very limited conditions. Inthe spring of 2003, the U.S. Supreme Courtruled in two cases involving the Universityof Michigan (Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratzvs. Bollinger).

The Court ruled that the university’s lawschool could use race as one criterion in



deciding admissions, but that undergradu-ate admissions could not award an auto-matic advantage to minority applicants.Both rulings were split, and these decisionswere widely interpreted as, at best, weakendorsements of very limited affirmativeaction programs. The administration ofPresident Bush took the side of the plaintiffsin both cases (i.e., in opposition to affirma-tive action) and made it clear that, whilerespecting the law, they were opposed toaffirmative action in general and would notplace a high priority on these programs.

Although the Supreme Court did not endaffirmative action with these decisions, theseprograms appear to be very much in danger.Furthermore, there is very little support foraffirmative action in the society as a whole.According to a public opinion survey con-ducted in 2004, affirmative action based onrace is supported by only 12% of whiterespondents and, perhaps surprisingly, by lessthan a majority of black respondents (45%).Also, affirmative action for women is sup-ported by about 18% of men and 40% ofwomen (National Opinion Research Council,2004).

It would not be surprising to see all affir-mative action programs end in the next 5 to10 years, and if they do, one of the few tools

available to combat modern institutionaldiscrimination will be eliminated.

SOCIAL CHANGE ANDMINORITY GROUP ACTIVISM

This chapter has focused on the continuingindustrial revolution and its impact onminority groups in general and black-whiterelations in particular. For the most part,changes in group relations have been pre-sented as the results of the fundamentaltransformation of the U.S. economic institu-tion from agrarian to industrial to late indus-trial (or postindustrial). However, thechanges in the situation of black Americansand other minority groups didn’t “justhappen” as society modernized. Althoughthe opportunity to pursue favorable changewas the result of broad structural changes inAmerican society, the realization of theseopportunities came from the efforts of themany who gave their time, their voices, theirresources, and sometimes their lives in pur-suit of racial justice in America. Since WorldWar II, African Americans have often beenin the vanguard of protest activity, and wefocus on the contemporary situation of thisgroup in the next chapter.


MAIN POINTS

• Group relations change as the subsistence technology and the level of development of the largersociety change. As nations industrialize and urbanize, dominant-minority relations change frompaternalistic to rigid competitive forms.

• In the South, slavery was replaced by de jure segregation, a system that combined racial separationwith great inequality. The Jim Crow system was motivated by a need to control labor and was rein-forced by coercion and intense racism and prejudice.

• Black southerners responded to segregation in part by moving to northern urban areas. The north-ern black population enjoyed greater freedom and developed some political and economicresources, but a large concentration of low-income, relatively powerless African Americans devel-oped in the ghetto neighborhoods.

• In response to segregation, the African American community developed a separate institutional lifecentered on family, church, and community. A black middle class emerged, as well as a protestmovement.

• African American women remain one of the most exploited groups. Combining work with familyroles, black females were employed mostly in agriculture and domestic service during the era ofsegregation.


• Industrialization continued throughout the 20th century and has profoundly affected dominant-minority relations. Urbanization, specialization, bureaucratization, and other trends have changedthe shape of race relations, as have the changing structure of the occupational sector and the grow-ing importance of education. Group relations have shifted from rigid to fluid competitive. Moderninstitutional discrimination is one of the major challenges facing minority groups.

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW AND STUDY

1. A corollary to two themes from Chapter 3 is presented at the beginning of Chapter 4. Howexactly does the material in the chapter illustrate the usefulness of this corollary?

2. Explain paternalistic and rigid competitive relations and link them to industrialization. Howdoes the shift from slavery to de jure segregation illustrate the dynamics of these two systems?

3. What was the “Great Migration” to the North? How did it change American race relations?

4. Explain the transition from rigid competitive to fluid competitive relations, and explain how thistransition is related to the coming of postindustrial society. Explain the roles of urbanization,bureaucracy, the service sector of the job market, and education in this transition.

5. What is modern institutional discrimination? How does it differ from “traditional” institutionaldiscrimination? Explain the role of affirmative action in combating each.

6. Explain the impact of industrialization and globalization on gender relations. Compare andcontrast these changes with the changes that occurred for racial and ethnic minority groups.

INTERNET RESEARCH PROJECTS

A. Everyday Life Under Jim Crow

The daily workings of the Jim Crow system of segregation are analyzed and described in a collec-tion of interviews, photos, and memories archived at http://www.americanradioworks.org/features/remembering/. Explore the site, look at the photos, listen to the clips, and analyze them in terms of theconcepts introduced in this chapter.

B. The Debate Over Affirmative Action

Update and supplement the debate on affirmative action presented at the end of the chapter. Startwith newspaper home pages and search for recent news items or opinion pieces on the issue. Searchthe Internet for other viewpoints and perspectives from other groups and positions on the politicalspectrum. One place you might start is http://aad.english.ucsb.edu/, a Web site that presents diverseopinions on the topic and brings many different voices to the debates. Analyze events and opinions interms of the concepts introduced in this chapter, especially modern institutional discrimination.

FOR FURTHER READINGBluestone, Barry, & Harrison, Bennet. 1982. The Deindustrialization of America. New York: Basic

Books.An important analysis of the shift from a manufacturing to a service-based, information society.

Feagin, Joe R., & Feagin, Clairece Booher. 1986. Discrimination American Style: Institutional Racismand Sexism. Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger.

A comprehensive and provocative look at modern institutional discrimination.



Pincus, Fred. 2003. Reverse Discrimination: Dismantling the Myth. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.An excellent review and analysis of the myths and realities surrounding affirmative action.

Geschwender, James A. 1978. Racial Stratification in America. Dubuque, IA: William. C. Brown.Wilson, William J. 1973. Power, Racism, and Privilege: Race Relations in Theoretical and Sociohistorical

Perspectives. New York: Free Press.

Woodward, C. Vann. 1974. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (3rd rev. ed.). New York: OxfordUniversity Press.

Three outstanding analyses of black-white relations in the United States, with a major focus on thehistorical periods covered in this chapter.

NOTE1. Women (of all races) were not given the right to vote until the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S.

Constitution in 1920.




P A R T I I I

UnderstandingDominant-Minority Relationsin the United States Today

CHAPTER 5

African Americans: From Segregationto Modern Institutional Discrimination and Modern Racism

CHAPTER 6

Native Americans: From Conquestto Tribal Survival in aPostindustrial Society

CHAPTER 7

Hispanic Americans: Colonization,Immigration, and Ethnic Enclaves

CHAPTER 8

Asian Americans: Are ChineseAmericans and JapaneseAmericans “Model Minorities”?

CHAPTER 9

New Americans: Immigration andAssimilation

CHAPTER 10

White Ethnic Groups: Assimilation andIdentity—The Twilight of Ethnicity?

101


In Part III, we turn to contemporary intergroup relations in the United States. The empha-sis is on the present, but the recent past also is investigated to see how present situationsdeveloped. We explore how minority and dominant groups respond to a changing

American society and to each other, and how minority groups define and pursue their own self-interest in interaction with other groups, American culture and values, and the institutions ofthe larger society.

The themes and ideas developed in the first two parts of this text will continue to be cen-tral to the analysis. For example, the case study chapters are presented in an order thatroughly follows the Blauner hypothesis: Colonized groups are presented first, and we endwith groups created by immigration. We also will continue to rely on the concepts of theNoel hypothesis to analyze and explain contemporary dominant-minority patterns.

The history and present conditions of each minority group are unique, and no two groupshave had the same experiences. To help identify and understand these differences, a com-mon comparative frame of reference—stressing assimilation and pluralism; inequality andpower; and prejudice, racism, and discrimination—is used throughout these case studies.

Much of the conceptual frame of reference employed in these case studies can be sum-marized in six themes. The first five themes are based on material from previous chapters;the sixth is covered in forthcoming chapters.

1. Consistent with the Noel hypothesis, the present condition of America’s minority groups reflectstheir contact situations, especially the nature of their competition with the dominant group (e.g.,competition over land vs. competition over labor) and the size of the power differential betweengroups at the time of contact.

2. Consistent with the Blauner hypothesis, minority groups created by conquest and colonizationexperience economic and political inequalities that have lasted longer and been more severe thanthose experienced by minority groups created by immigration.

3. Power and economic differentials and barriers to upward mobility are especially pronounced forgroups identified by racial or physical characteristics, as opposed to cultural or linguistic traits.

4. Consistent with the themes stated in Chapters 3 and 4, dominant-minority relations reflect theeconomic and political characteristics of the larger society and change as those characteristicschange. Changes in the subsistence technology of the larger society are particularly consequen-tial for dominant-minority relations. The shift from a manufacturing to a service economy(“deindustrialization”) is one of the key factors shaping dominant-minority relations in theUnited States today.

5. The development of group relations, both in the past and for the future, can be analyzed interms of assimilation (more unity) and pluralism (more diversity). Group relations in the past(e.g., the degree of assimilation permitted or required of the minority group) primarily reflectedthe needs and wishes of the dominant group. Although the pressure for Americanizationremains considerable, there is more flexibility and variety in group relations today. One impor-tant variation on the theme of assimilation is segmented assimilation. This concept was intro-duced in Chapter 2 and will be applied in this part to post-1965 immigrants, particularly inChapter 9.

6. Since World War II, minority groups have gained significantly more control over the directionof group relationships. This trend reflects the decline of traditional prejudice in the larger societyand the successful efforts of minority groups to protest, resist, and change patterns of exclusionand domination. These successes have been possible, in large part, because American minoritygroups have increased their share of political and economic resources.

UNDERSTANDING DOMINANT-MINORITY RELATIONS IN THE U.S. TODAY102


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Industrialization and Dominant-Minority Relations...76 CHAPTER 4 Industrialization and Dominant-Minority Relations From Slavery to Segregation and the Coming of Postindustrial Society