Political Economy of Racism

Michelle Holder is Professor of Economics at John Jay College, City University of New York.Jeannette Wicks-Lim is Research Professor at the Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

• AcknowledgmentsList of Figures and TablesPart One: How We Use Stratification Economics to Analyze Anti-Blackness in the United States1 Introduction2 The Construction of Race and the Origins of Racism in the United States3 Afro-Latinxs and Anti-Blackness4 An Intersectional Approach to Stratification EconomicsPart Two: Demonstrating How Anti-Blackness Stratifies the U.S. EconomyPrimer to Part Two5 Education: Unequal Access, Unequal Outcomes6 Unemployment, Occupational Crowding, Wage Inequality And Anti-Blackness in the Labor Market7 Wealth and Anti-Blackness: The Case of Black Women8 The Criminal Legal System: Hardening the Racial Divide9 ConclusionNotesReferencesIndex

"Holder and Wicks-Lim's exceptional volume provides a long overdue reckoning with the central role of anti-Blackness in the US economy. The Political Economy of Racism challenges popular mythology about racial outcomes by providing a theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded analysis of the history of anti-Black racism and its persistence in stratifying the US into a racial order that provides structural advantages on the basis of Whiteness and disadvantages of Blackness. As a beacon of light at the end of a very dark tunnel into which the US is rapidly moving."Nina Banks, Bucknell University"This is a landmark publication in stratification economics - an approach that examines socioeconomic and wealth inequality within and between social groups. From this perspective racial groups differ according to their access to resources, not biogenetic characteristics. It is a must-read for a wide audience: an undergraduate introduction, a reference text for graduate students, an important source for activists and policymakers, a guide for theorists, and it provides for general readers a highly informative text on inequality."Patrick L. Mason, University of Massachusetts Amherst