ABSTRACT
Race relations in America have undergone fundamental changes, so much so that the life chances of individual blacks have more to do with their economic class position than with their day-today encounters with whites. Blacks were denied access to valued and scarce resources through various ingenious schemes of racial exploitation, discrimination, and segregation, schemes that were reinforced by elaborate ideologies of racism. In the economic sphere, class has become more important than race in determining black access to privilege and power. Students of race relations have paid considerable attention to the economic basis of racial antagonism, particularly to the theme that racial problems in historical situations are related to the more general problems of economic class conflict. Most of the industrial period of race relations, the growth of the black middle class occurred because of the expansion of institutions created to serve the needs of a growing urbanized black population.
