Contact: Tom Ryan
University of Illinois at Chicago Office of Public Affairs
(312) 996-8279
[email protected]
The African-American middle class, especially workers holding well-paying private-sector jobs, is in danger of disappearing -- and the political and social forces that helped create it may help hasten its demise, concludes a University of Illinois at Chicago sociologist in a new book.
Sharon Collins, associate professor of sociology, has spent more than a decade researching the experiences of the "black business elite," the first wave of African-Americans to enter professional and managerial jobs in the 1960s and 1970s. She has published her findings in "Black Corporate Executives: the Making and Breaking of a Black Middle Class" (Temple University Press, 1997).
The black middle class was "made," Collins says, not only for economic reasons -- because companies needed more workers -- but also in response to "black discontent and the social upheaval of the 1960s." Creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, federal contract set-asides and the expansion of other social welfare programs spurred corporations to hire more blacks, she says.
But while white workers continued to dominate such traditional corporate fields as management, sales and accounting, blacks tended to be tracked into what Collins calls "racialized" jobs, dealing with issues of concern to blacks, such as directing affirmative action or community relations programs.
One man quoted in Collins's book describes his job as "the head black in charge of black people."
Ironically, Collins says, these executives performed valuable services: helping companies conform to federal laws, reducing pressure from external and internal black communities, increasing or protecting the companies' shares of black consumer markets. And socially, they were living the American Dream.
"They had everything," Collins says. "Cars, vacation homes, kids in private schools. They were part of a network of power brokers, they felt like they were on top of the world. They were golden."
But the wave of conservatism that swept the country in the 1980s caused "real fear" among black executives that, as the national mood turned against affirmative action and other race-based programs, their jobs and lifestyles were at risk, she says.
"Their fears were justified," says Collins, whose research included interviews with the 76 highest-ranking black executives in Fortune 500 firms. Many of the "racialized jobs" did disappear and many of the executives who held them "will be lucky to land on their feet economically and socially," she says.
And without such "politically mediated" jobs for blacks to fill, Collins says it will become "harder and harder to replicate these gains, for future sons and daughters of people from humble backgrounds to enter the middle class. I think it probably stops here."
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Note: journalists wishing copies of Collins's book should call Temple University Press: 1-800-447-1656.
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