Black Silent Majority

Fortner, Michael Javen

doi:10.4159/9780674496088

Cited by 124 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…The confluence of the malignant and robust heroin trade and the depressed and racialized market for low-skilled labor caused many poverty-stricken African Americans…to sell the drug in order to make a living." 278 In the late 1960s, the effects of the drug trade in New York City reached unprecedented heights, leading to a surge in addiction, crime, and drug-related deaths. While white communities experienced an increase in property crime, specifically car theft, African Americans living in impoverished neighborhoods were threatened by a wave of violent crime, particularly burglary and homicide.…”

Section: The Vietnam War At Home and Abroadmentioning

confidence: 99%

Employment Mobility and the Belated Emergence of the Black Middle Class

Lazonick

Moss

Weitz

2021

INET Working Paper Series

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As the Covid-19 pandemic takes its disproportionate toll on African Americans, the historical perspective in this working paper provides insight into the socioeconomic conditions under which President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign promise to “build back better” might actually begin to deliver the equal employment opportunity that was promised by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Far from becoming the Great Society that President Lyndon Johnson promised, the United States has devolved into a greedy society in which economic inequality has run rampant, leaving most African Americans behind. In this installment of our “Fifty Years After” project, we sketch a long-term historical perspective on the Black employment experience from the last decades of the nineteenth century into the 1970s. We follow the transition from the cotton economy of the post-slavery South to the migration that accelerated during World War I as large numbers of Blacks sought employment in mass-production industries in Northern cities such as Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. For the interwar decades, we focus in particular on the Black employment experience in the Detroit automobile industry. During World War II, especially under pressure from President Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Committee, Blacks experienced tangible upward employment mobility, only to see much of it disappear with demobilization. In the 1960s and into the 1970s, however, supported by the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Blacks made significant advances in employment opportunity, especially by moving up the blue-collar occupational hierarchy into semiskilled and skilled unionized jobs. These employment gains for Blacks occurred within a specific historical context that included a) strong demand for blue-collar and clerical labor in the U.S. mass-production industries, which still dominated in global competition; b) the unquestioned employment norm within major U.S. business corporations of a career with one company, supported at the blue-collar level by mass-production unions that had become accepted institutions in the U.S. business system; c) the upward intergenerational mobility of white households from blue-collar employment requiring no more than a high-school education to white-collar employment requiring a higher education, creating space for Blacks to fill the blue-collar void; and d) a relative absence of an influx of immigrants as labor-market competition to Black employment. As we will document in the remaining papers in this series, from the 1980s these conditions changed dramatically, resulting in erosion of the blue-collar gains that Blacks had achieved in the 1960s and 1970s as the Great Society promise of equal employment opportunity for all Americans disappeared.

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Section: The Vietnam War At Home and Abroadmentioning

confidence: 99%

Employment Mobility and the Belated Emergence of the Black Middle Class

Lazonick

Moss

Weitz

2021

INET Working Paper Series

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“…The claim has been used to mobilize racial minorities around exclusion from majority rule; for example, during the 1960s, Black Power groups presented themselves as the real silenced majority in major cities like Chicago. Conversely, it was used to resist the protagonism of these black militants: the NAACP leader, Roy Wilkins, urged the true black majority, "the silent middle," to resist the capture of the African American political agenda by black militants prioritizing racial issues over crime (Fortner 2015). After the 2008 global financial crisis deepened inequality, Ed Miliband, UK Labour party leader, positioned himself as the spokesman for a law-abiding silent majority.…”

Section: Enacting Silencementioning

confidence: 99%

Representing Silence in Politics

Vieira

2020

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Democratic representation focuses on voice: it conceives voice as that which is represented and as the prime mode of representing. This article argues that this focus is problematic and turns instead to silence to ask a fundamental question: Can representation empower citizens from their silent positions? I approach the question in three parts. First, I offer a new conceptualization of silence, arguing that silence is best understood as the site of a potential or actual presence. Second, I use criteria of domination and displaced involvement to assess attempts to enfranchise silence within the transmission-belt model of representation. Third, I critically engage and strengthen constructivist views of representation by developing these criteria to assess the legitimacy of claims to represent—speak about and for—silent constituencies—namely, the claim to represent an (alleged) silent majority.

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“…Moreover, some parts of the ghetto population, who were especially afflicted with drug-related crimes, supported more repressive prosecutorial policies (Fortner, 2015).…”

Section: After the Civil Rights Movement: Blacks Into Prisonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Political Economy of Prison Labour: From Penal Welfarism to the Penal State

Scherrer

Shah

2017

GLJ

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The article traces the return of prison labour for commercial purposes in the United States. In the age of Fordism, work for commercial purposes was prohibited in prisons; the emphasis was on rehabilitation. This "penal welfarism" gave way to a "penal state" of extremely high incarceration rates and exploitative prison labour. While this shift mirrors the turn to neo-liberalism, it is also the result of specific labour market conditions and racial discrimination. KEYWORDSprison labour; racism; disciplining of the superfluous labour force; United States Prisoners are rarely visible in everyday life. This holds true all the more so for their labour behind iron bars. They also seem to be quite invisible in the field of labour studies. While an increasing number of inmates around the world are forced to work, their working conditions have received scant attention. The relationship between incarceration rates, prison labour, profit interests and the labour market is also understudied.This article addresses both areas of neglect. We want to call attention to the miserable remuneration of prison labour and we want to contribute to a better theoretical understanding of the drivers of prison labour. We have chosen the United States of America as our empirical example. It is the country with the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world, and where inmates are not only working to maintain overall prison operations but also for profitable industries. But most important for theoretical considerations, the high incarceration rates and prison labour for commercial purposes have not been a permanent feature of the American penal system. In fact, in the Fordist period (1940s to 1970s) the level of the prison population was low, work for commercial purposes was prohibited, and emphasis was, at least rhetorically, placed on the reintegration of felons into society. This period, perhaps a bit euphemistically called "penal welfarism", gave way to the current situation of a "penal state". It mirrors the shift from Fordism, the period of a social compromise between capital and labour, to today's neo-liberalism, a period characterised by the hegemony of private property holders. The analysis of this shift will shed light on the relationship between modes of production, the labour market and criminalisation.The parallels between these two shifts, however, should be treated with caution. Just as neoliberalism is not without contradictions, resistance and manifold manifestations across time and nations

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Black Silent Majority

Cited by 124 publications

References 0 publications

Employment Mobility and the Belated Emergence of the Black Middle Class

Employment Mobility and the Belated Emergence of the Black Middle Class

Representing Silence in Politics

The Political Economy of Prison Labour: From Penal Welfarism to the Penal State

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