ABSTRACT
For more than a century the relation of race and class in American society has been an enigma to social scientists. At the turn of the century the topic was addressed in W. E. B. Dubois’s examination of The Philadelphia Negro (1899). Decades later Allison Davis’s Deep South (1941), Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) and E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie (1957) captured national attention. Still, today this topic is at the center of a passionate controversy. With the publication of William J. Wilson’s Declining Significance of Race (1978) and several treatises by Thomas Sowell, including Markets and Minorities (1981), a new hypothesis is presented. It asserts that class position instead of racial discrimination is the determining factor in the present status and future opportunities of blacks.
Race relations in America have undergone fundamental changes in recent years, so much so that now the life chances of individual blacks have more to do with their economic class position than with their day-to-day encounters with whites.
(Wilson, 1978, p. 1)