The New Black Middle Class in the Twenty-First Century by Bart Landry

Author:Bart Landry [Landry, Bart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Ethnic Studies, African American Studies, Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Political Science, Civil Rights, Discrimination & Race Relations, Public Policy, Social Policy
ISBN: 9780813593975
Google: 7P-9DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2018-07-20T05:25:18+00:00

7

From School to Work

A college degree is the second stage, but only the second stage, in the attainment process. Saying that does not diminish the significance of education but signals that the attainment process is not yet complete. From the point of view of Weber, a college degree is a “coin” to be traded in the market for one of the many positions of the middle class. This is true regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender. Yet the graduate’s race, ethnicity, or gender has historically influenced this transition in a positive or negative manner. The negative impact of race was reflected in the remarks of Patrick Harrington, whom I quoted in the last chapter complaining of the limited range of occupations open to black college graduates during the 1970s. In chapter 2 of my 1987 book, The New Black Middle Class, I discussed improvements in the occupational attainment of members of the new black middle class compared to those in the old black middle class. While the old black middle class was restricted to professional occupations serving the black community, the new black middle class that emerged after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 entered a greater variety of occupations, including many in mainstream areas of the economy. It remains to be seen whether this trend continued during the decades following the civil rights era. The increase in black students’ college and graduate school attainment, documented in chapter 6, suggests that much has also changed in the occupational attainment of blacks over the past decades. Whether this change has brought occupational parity with whites in the twenty-first century is the question I will now turn to using both discrete occupational rankings and a summary measure of inequality, the index of dissimilarity (ID).

The index of dissimilarity is a measure of the change that must occur to equalize two distributions. Its variation from 0 to 100 makes it an intuitive and useful measure in social science research. Any number over 0 indicates the percentage of individuals who would have to change place to equalize two distributions. In a comparison of the occupational distributions of blacks and whites, any number greater than 0 represents the percentage of black workers who would need to upgrade occupations to equalize their occupational distributions with that of white workers. An index of 0 would designate parity in their occupational distributions.1 I use the IPUMS-USA data in this comparison for the years 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000.2 For these comparisons, I focus only on those middle-class occupations classified as “professional” by the Census Bureau. These, along with administrative/executive occupations, are “upper-middle-class” occupations and are therefore a test of black achievement at the highest level of the occupational structure. What does a comparison of the dissimilarity index tell us about black upper-middle-class achievement since 1970?

In 1970, the ID for the occupational distributions of all black and white professionals (males and females) was 0.256, showing that almost 26 percent of blacks would have had to change occupations (upgrade) to produce equal racial distributions.

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