Class theories of racial/ethnic relations

SIGNIFICANCE: Class theories of racial and ethnic relations argue that prejudice and racism are inextricably linked with economic exploitation in a capitalist society.

Oliver C. Cox (1901-1974), an African American sociologist, described one of the earliest class-based theories of intergroup relations in Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948). Cox argued that African American workers in the United States were in the same position as exploited workers in any capitalist system. They were underpaid, abused, and exploited by employers who made huge profits. In Cox’s view, the exploitation of Black Americans in the Old South began during slavery, but it persisted even after the end of slavery in 1865. Racial prejudice and discrimination were advantageous in terms of money and wealth to the ruling White community. White workers, although they also received low wages, were not in the same position as Black American workers because they had the advantage of being members of what they believed was the superior race. Cox’s central point was that capitalist exploitation led to the subordination of Africans and that racism was used to justify the inferior status of Black workers.

Exploitation as a Method of Control

Relations between White and Black individuals have been based on a totally unequal exchange virtually from the time of the first contact between Europeans and Africans. The nature of the relationship changed over time, from master and slave to capitalist and wage earner, but the motive remained the same, to make as much money as possible for the dominant White class. Economic exploitation, accomplished first through the use of force and enslavement, created a new underclass. As enslaved people, Black Americans were controlled completely and for their entire lives by their masters. They had no power to control their development, education, or working conditions. Those who exploited the Africans came to believe that only inferior people would allow themselves to become enslaved, and they rationalized their acts by saying that Africans were meant to become enslaved. Although the enslaved people gained their freedom in the 1800s, the economic exploitation of Black Americans did not end.

The earliest advocate of the class theory of race relations was W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), the great African American educator, historian, and sociologist. Beginning with a series of essays published in 1903 as The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois presented his view that economic exploitation was at the root of White American prejudice. According to Du Bois, White individuals had held on to their view of African inferiority for so long because they benefited financially from it. White American workers and business executives prospered because Blacks were forced into low-wage, low-prestige jobs. African Americans worked for less than half the wages of White workers because low-paying jobs were all that was available to them. Du Bois argued that the stability of the economic system was based on keeping Black Americans badly paid, badly educated, and living in a state of almost constant fear through actual and threatened beatings and lynchings. The exploitative nature of American race relations was also shown by the many laws passed in states throughout the country, but especially in the South, that separated people by skin color in every area of life, from education to housing to employment opportunities.

Class and the Colonial Model of Race Relations

Advocates of the class model, such as sociologist Robert Blauner, distinguish between “external” and “internal” colonialism. As occupants of an internal colony, African Americans find themselves in the same position as people in a country subjected to a long period of imperial domination by an outside group (traditional, or external, colonialism). In both cases, the ruling class dominates, exploits, and degrades the people it has conquered economically, socially, and politically. It destroys the culture of its victims, leaving nothing except despair and degradation. All power transfers to a small economic elite of wealthy landowners and businesspeople from the dominant class. In the internal model, exploited people, excluded from full participation in the new economy, form a “colony” within the dominant society.

Members of the excluded population have little wealth, health, or happiness; however, their exclusion enables them to create a separate history and culture, sometimes based on memories of what it was like before “colonization.” According to proponents of the colonial model of race relations, this culture of opposition, sometimes called the culture “behind the veil,” was developed in slave quarters in the American South and still exists in American inner cities. Members of the oppressed class hate and despise the ruling class so much that they want to avoid contact with it at all costs.

The dominant and subordinate classes conflict with each other on many issues, not only economic questions such as wages and jobs. Generations of exploitation and second-class treatment create vastly differing views of everything from education to religion and crime control to politics. Conflicting worldviews are a basic characteristic of exploitative systems of racial and ethnic relations, including colonialism. Capitalism divides society into social classes, and if that society is not homogeneous, it also divides the working class along racial and ethnic lines that prevent workers from seeing themselves as a unified class of exploited people. A working class divided by racial and ethnic hostilities cannot come together to push for economic justice for its members. In this way, the major beneficiary of a racially divided lower economic class is the dominant wealthy class. Marxist theories of race relations make exactly this point.

A newer Marxist perspective described in historian Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) incorporates earlier Marxist theories but adds another factor. Genovese notes that a racial consciousness develops among the exploited class and enables it to challenge the supremacist views of the ruling class. This spirit of nationalism helps the underclass develop a sense of purpose and dignity that enables the group to challenge the economic and political power of the dominating elite.

Impact on Public Policy

Under the class theory of race relations, exploitation can have two different results. Because conflict between the oppressor and oppressed involves more than just economic issues, it can lead to violence and revolution or to an extreme degree of separation between the classes, a separation so great that one group can barely understand the thinking, customs, and morality of the other. Anthropologist Oscar Lewis found evidence of this separation among minority groups in the United States in the 1960s. Lewis called the separate culture developed by the underclass the “culture of poverty.” Many minority groups had experienced poverty and prejudice for so long that they had come to think differently than the White majority about the meaning of their lives and their futures. Work, love, survival, crime, happiness, and contentment meant different things to the poor from what they meant to middle-class Americans. Lewis argued that because of years of discrimination and abuse, African Americans, Latinos, and American Indians had become so different from White individuals that only an act of violent revolt could restore them to lives of dignity and value.

Sociologist William J. Wilson shares some of the views held by advocates of class theories of racial/ethnic relations, although he disagrees with the more revolutionary implications of the “culture of poverty” concept. In The Declining Significance of Race (1978) and several other works, Wilson argues that something similar to a culture of poverty does exist. He also notes that White workers and business leaders benefited economically from racial exploitation, for a long time using US inner cities as a source of cheap labor. Problems began, however, when low-skilled jobs disappeared from urban communities in the 1960s and 1970s as corporations began to move their manufacturing facilities to the suburbs, where land was plentiful and inexpensive, or to Asia and Latin America, where labor was cheaper. Unemployment increased because many people experiencing poverty lacked transport to jobs in the suburbs. The loss of industry led to lower city tax bases and a subsequent decline in the city’s schools. Those African American families who had become middle class, often through education, abandoned the old neighborhoods and headed for the suburbs. The most exploited class, the poorly educated, underskilled, low-wage earning, sometimes welfare-receiving inner-city poor, were left behind. The culture of what Wilson termed the “truly disadvantaged” stressed violence, escape, pessimism, and a lack of value for life.

Wilson’s solutions—to improve schools and encourage corporations to return to inner cities—seemed rather meager, but they significantly impacted social policies adopted in the 1980s and the 1990s. The concept of “enterprise zones,” aimed at encouraging businesses to relocate to inner cities, and the campaign to improve the quality of education found in inner-city schools align with Wilson’s ideas. However, these reforms did not address the question of economic exploitation, nor did they consider the problem of how racial prejudice has been used to justify economic inequality. Those problems, which theories of the class origins of racial and ethnic relations seek to address, remain unresolved.

Bibliography

Back, Les, and John Solomos. Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2022.

Blauner, Robert. Racial Oppression in America. Harper, 1972.

Cox, Oliver. Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics. Doubleday, 1948.

Cox, Oliver. Race Relations: Elements and Social Dynamics. Wayne State UP, 1976.

Healey, Joseph F., and Eileen O'Brien. Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Class: The Sociology of Group Conflict and Change. 9th ed., Sage, 2023.

Parrillo, Vincent N. Understanding Race and Ethnic Relations. 5th ed., Pearson, 2015.

Willie, Charles Vert. Oreo: On Race and Marginal Men and Women. Parameter, 1985.

Wilson, William J. The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. U of Chicago P, 1978.