Economic Imperatives and Race Relations

Abstract

Drawing on secondary sources, the authors analyze how contemporary U.S. social institutions continue to produce racial differentials despite considerable pressures for institutional changes to reduce or eliminate those differentials. They argue that the post-Civil War industrial revolution brought economic imperatives that shaped the labor pool and created occupational segregation by race. The principle of racial segregation subsequently permeated other social institutions, most notably the political, educational, and residential institutions, to form the American apartheid system by 1918. Between the world wars, the United States strove for global economic dominance by a state collaboration with corporate interests to maintain the apartheid system. The apartheid system was the basis for the 1945 achievement of U.S. economic dominance. During the phase of unchallenged economic dominance, Black resistance combined with global criticisms of racism to dismantle the apartheid system. When U.S. global economic dominance faded in the 1970s and 1980s, a White back-lash occurred against Black economic and political gains.