Lost in the Storm: The Sociology of the Black Working Class,1850 to 1990 *

Abstract

Contemporary sociologists implicitly have assumed that the race-class debate has been resolved: Blacks tend to fall in one of two categories—”the black middle class” or the “truly disadvantaged.” However, lost amid the controversies over the supposed privileges of the former and the problems of the latter is the plight of the “forgotten” category of blacks: the black working class. Accordingly, we present a sociological analysis of the black working class and ask: How has the black working class changed compared to its white counterpart from 1850 to 1990? Employing the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) for our analysis, we find that for the last five decades blacks are more likely to be working class than middle class or bottom class. In addition, blacks currently are more likely to be working class than are whites. In fact, in recent decades the percentage of blacks who are working class exceeds those for whites and, indeed, are higher than ever recorded for whites.