Reflections on Issues of Race and Class in 21st Century America

August 7, 2015
Reflections on Issues of Race and Class in 21st Century America

The journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies published a symposium (2015) on my book The Declining Significance of Race.  And I had the opportunity to respond to several thoughtful reflections on the book thirty-seven years after its initial publication.  The title “The Declining Significance of Race” lends itself to misinterpretation among those who have either not read the book or not read it carefully.  For such readers the title conveys an optimistic view of American race relations and doesn’t reflect the book’s pessimistic tone about the conditions and future of poor blacks.

In sharp contrast to many earlier studies, the articles in the Ethnic and Racial Studies symposium include a careful discussion of the two major underlying themes of the book—(1) the effect of fundamental economic and political shifts on the changing relative importance of race and class in the life trajectories of African Americans—now extended to all US racial and ethnic groups; and (2) the swing in the concentration of racial conflict from the economic sector to the sociopolitical order—seen in the growing racial divide in US politics, and the conflicts involving race, policing, and the criminal justice system.

Thus, these articles make clear that the book’s original argument was not that race is no longer significant or that racial barriers between blacks and whites have been eliminated.  Rather, in comparing the contemporary situation of African Americans to conditions in the past, their diverging experiences along class lines and the shifting concentration of racial tension from the economic sector to the sociopolitical order indicate that race, although still very salient, has a lesser effect today than economic class in determining life trajectories.  -- William Julius Wilson