ABSTRACT

In the United States, the essence of racial oppression—our grand apartheid—is a racial division of labor, a system of occupational segregation that relegates most blacks to work in the least desirable job sectors or that excludes them from job markets altogether. The racial division of labor has its origins in slavery, when some 650,000 Africans were imported to provide cheap labor for the South's evolving plantation economy. During the century after slavery, the nation had the perfect opportunity to integrate blacks into the North's burgeoning industries. The chapter argues that the deindustrialization is the principal factor in the genesis of the black underclass in decades. The civil rights revolution was fundamentally a struggle for liberty, not equality. The disjunction between rights and equality entered public discourse even before the legislative goals of the civil rights movement were attained. Politics aside, affirmative action was unquestionably the most important policy initiative of the post-civil rights era.