As a sociologist of work who studies race and work, I am concerned with how racial economic inequality is created and sustained in U.S. society, and more specifically how the labor market is organized to enable or limit minorities’ access to jobs or mobility into better jobs. Conventional explanations of racial inequality in academia and public policy have typically focused on racial disparities in human capital as the primary explanation for persistent racial economic inequality, and consequently we have invested substantial societal resources to eradicate differences in education. However, even though the human capital gap between blacks and whites has closed substantially over the past 30 years, commensurate earnings, unemployment rates, and occupational status have not. My work is guided by the premise that the process by which workers get allocated to jobs by their race/gender status is more complex than is characterized by many of the predominant explanations of racial economic inequality. The chief objective of my work is to offer a complex and comprehensive way of understanding the seemingly intractable problem of racial economic inequality. My work can be organized into three trajectories that are unified under an interest in examining macro-level structures of social and economic institutions that reproduce racial economic inequality. They
are: 1) metropolitan employment inequality, 2) the gendered dimension of racial exclusion, 3) occupational and educational segregation. |