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181 While examining the influence of national politics on desegregation trends, we have observed that desegregation trajectories vary dramatically by both demographic status and historical period. In this chapter, we document regional convergences in the patterns of segregation and access to good-quality jobs. When the civil rights movement was at its peak, it represented in part a struggle between the South and the rest of the country. The pre–Civil War South was built on slave labor. The post– Civil War South reinstituted the subordination of black labor through state-sanctioned segregation and Jim Crow laws to limit black democratic participation. The civil rights movement struggled most bravely and was resisted most bloodily in the U.S. South. Not surprisingly, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, the attention of federal regulators was most intense in the South. The extension of civil and voting rights had its most far-reaching effects in the South as well. Remarkably, today the South differs little from the rest of the country in its levels of racial employment segregation, and black men have somewhat better access to skilled working-class jobs in the South than in the rest of the country. The one vestige of southern exceptionalism in racial segregation is a notably higher rate of segregation between black men and white women in the former Confederate states. The demise of southern exceptionalism is perhaps one of the most fascinating , but by no means the only, geographic story present in the EEO data on private-sector employment. At the level of local labor markets, there is considerable variability in labor force composition and dynamics, both of which have important implications for local desegregation trajectories . In this chapter, we also explore the countervailing tendencies of changes in the composition of local labor queues. Increases in the labor Chapter 6 Local Labor Market Competition and New Status Hierarchies 182    Documenting Desegregation market representation of women and racialized minorities and the historical decrease in white male shares of the labor market created the demographic potential for increased equal-status employment integration. With fewer white males in the labor force, there would have been more room for the employment and advancement of others. No reduction in discrimination would have been necessary to produce these gains in view of the fact that there were simply fewer white men in the labor force overall . Conversely, the very same shifts might have produced a sense of competitive threat to white men. If that happened, we would expect increases in discrimination, in both its explicit and subtle forms. Surprisingly, in the analyses that follow we find that competition processes predominate, particularly in the contemporary period. White men tended to gain even greater access to better-quality jobs as the size of competing demographic groups increased. This pattern suggests that the various interactional and organizational mechanisms producing white male advantage tend to strengthen in the face of labor market competition. The more racially and ethnically heterogeneous the labor market the higher the level of white males’ privileged access to good jobs. Consistent with an increase in social closure with increased competitive threat, the reverse holds for white women, black men, and less dramatically black women. This book started from the historical dynamics set in motion by the civil rights movement during a period when the United States was primarily a black and white country. Thus, our focus on the relative distance of white women, black men, and black women from white men fits the demographic trajectories set in motion in the 1960s. In the twenty-first century, this seems a bit dated. Hispanics are now a larger group than African Americans. Asian Americans have grown in size and cultural visibility. The immigration to the United States of people who are neither white nor black has soared. Indeed, current scholarship on race and ethnicity in the United States now focuses primarily on racism and ethnocentrism toward new immigrant communities, their implications for the fate of African Americans, and the very meaning of racial categories in a more diverse America.1 In this chapter, we also explore the relative standing of Hispanic and Asian employees as an addition to our core black-white focus. We use the concept of a labor queue to help organize these comparisons. So far, this book has been organized around the question: are we moving toward equal opportunity? The labor queue approach asks instead: what is the relative ranking of social groups? We ask this question about...

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