ch evolve sequentially. These four economies can be applied to the history of black people. Blacks began their civilizations in Africa, where they lived in communal societies. Slave traders forcibly relocated blacks to America. After their emancipation as slaves, blacks labored under sharecropper conditions similar to feudalism. In modern times, the American capitalist system employs millions of black wage earners (Hogan, 1984, p. 39). Relatively few African Americans own businesses of substantial size. Therefore, the black political economy has merely shifted from slave labor to landless peasantry to wage labor.
The majority of blacks are still dependent for employment upon non-black owned businesses or the government bureaucracy. As such, they are subject to the whims of an alien culture. True improvement in the black political economy will come about only when a substantial number of African Americans control "their material means of survival" (Hogan, 1984, p. 70).
Even as a predominantly wage earning class, African Americans are limited in their contribution to the black political economy by discrimination. For example, the U.S. Census documents the occupational gains made by blacks over the past decades, but it also highlights the disparity among races. Data from the 1989 Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that 13 percent of black men were employed in managerial and professional jobs compared with 27 percent of white men (Feagin, 1993, p. 230). Black men were more likely to be employed in blue-collar occupations than their white counterparts. In general, blacks employed in the professions tended to be over-represented in the lower-paying categories such as social work, personnel, and health care (p. 230).
It is unlikely that racial disparity in employment will improve in the near future. Despite extensive equal opportunity legislation, numerous labor market studies attest to the disadvantages that bla...