Encyclopedia of Sociology

AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES

Sowell, Thomas 1990 Preferential Policies: An Internation-
al Perspective. New York: William Morrow.

Trow, Martin 1999 ‘‘California After Racial Preferenc-
es.’’ The Public Interest 135:64–85.

NATHAN GLAZER

AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES

Research on African Americans covers many im-
portant areas, only a few of which will be discussed
here: theories of white-black relations; the enslave-
ment of African Americans; the development of
an antiblack ideology; the creation of white wealth
with black labor; the idea of whiteness; racial
discrimination today; and possibilities for so-
cial change.

THEORIES OF WHITE-BLACK RELATIONS

Explanatory theories of U.S. racial relations can be
roughly classified into order-deficit theories and pow-
er-conflict theories. Order-deficit theories accent the
gradual inclusion and assimilation of an outgroup
such as African Americans into the dominant
society and emphasize the barriers to progress that
lie within the outgroup. Power-conflict theories, in
contrast, emphasize past and present structural
barriers preventing the full integration of African
Americans into the society’s institutions, such as
the huge power and resource imbalance between
white and black Americans. They also raise larger
questions about the society’s historically racist
foundations.

Milton Gordon (1964) is an order-deficit scholar
who distinguishes several types of initial encoun-
ters between racial and ethnic groups and an array
of subsequent assimilation outcomes ranging from
acculturation to intermarriage. In his view the
trend of immigrant adaptation in the United States
has been in the direction of substantial conformi-
ty—of immigrants giving up much of their heri-
tage for the Anglo-Protestant core culture. Gor-
don and other scholars apply this scheme to African
Americans, whom they see as substantially assimi-
lated at the cultural level (for example, in regard to
language), with some cultural differences remain-
ing because of ‘‘lower class subculture’’ among

black Americans. This order-deficit model and the

accent on defects in culture have been popular

among many contemporary analysts who often

seek to downplay discrimination and accent in-

stead problems internal to black Americans or

their communities. For example, Jim Sleeper (1990)

has argued that there is no institutionalized racism

of consequence left in United States. Instead, he

adopts cultural explanations—for example, blacks

need to work harder—for present-day difficulties

in black communities.

In contrast, power-conflict analysts reject the

assimilationist view of black inclusion and eventu-

al assimilation and the inclination to focus on

deficits within African-American individuals or

communities as the major barriers to racial inte-

gration. From this perspective, the current condi-

tion of African Americans is more oppressive than

that of any other U.S. racial or ethnic group be-

cause of its roots in centuries-long enslavement

and in the subsequent semislavery of legal segrega-

tion, with the consequent low-wage jobs and poor

living conditions. Once a system of extreme racial

subordination is established historically, those in

the superior position in the hierarchy continue to

inherit and monopolize disproportionate socioe-

conomic resources over many generations. One

important power-conflict analyst was Oliver C.

Cox. His review of history indicated that from the

1500s onward white-on-black oppression in North

America arose out of the European imperialistic

system with its profit-oriented capitalism. The Af-

rican slave trade was the European colonists’ Away

of recruiting labor for the purpose of exploiting

the great natural resources of America’’ (Cox 1948,

p. 342). African Americans provided much hard

labor to build the new society—first as slaves, then

as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, and later as

low-wage laborers and service workers in cities.

In the late 1960s civil rights activist Stokely

Carmichael (later renamed Kwame Ture) and his-

torian Charles Hamilton (1967) documented con-

temporary patterns of racial discrimination and

contrasted their power-conflict perspective, which

accented institutional racism, with an older ap-

proach focusing only on individual whites. They

were among the first to use the terms ‘‘internal

colonialism’’ and ‘‘institutional racism’’ to describe

discrimination by whites as a group against Afri-

can Americans as a group. Adopting a similar