This paper examines the saliency of class location for African Americans employing Barrera's (1979) model of multi-racial/ethnic capitalist societies. It employs data from the National Survey of Black Americans to test hypotheses linking class location to two important consequences of the life chances of members of the African-American minority: self-perception and racial group identification. Wright's (1985) exploitation-based model of the class structure of advanced capitalist society is employed to measure class location. The results reveal that class location is a significant predictor of both self-perceptions and levels of racial group identification among African Americans.
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