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157 Chapter 8 Stratification by Race and Gender T O THIS point, our focus has been stratification along the socioeconomic gradient, largely governed by success at school. Conditions and experiences in the early years set the foundation; in the later years, the opportunities afforded by that success materialize or are closed off by its lack. Doing well in school surely is not the only path to upward mobility or status preservation at the high end, but in the modern era it is the one most deeply embedded in the national psyche and through labor market processes in social structure. It therefore is limiting that so few of the Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP, or Youth Panel) urban disadvantaged complete college. Many do not even complete high school. For them, the path to upward mobility through school has little relevance. The previous chapter identifies some of the things that hold them back: their families are not well positioned to help them advance through schooling; they live in high poverty, and for some violent, neighborhoods; they attend high-poverty schools; their balance of school-based risk and protective factors is heavy on risk and short on protection; their employment in early adulthood is erratic or absent; and their attempts at postsecondary education, when they do enroll, mostly are unsuccessful. Further, for many family responsibilities come into play: women shouldering the burdens of parenting alone and the Done Alls, whose family life includes parenting with a spouse or partner. There are many more Done All women, but they have attracted much less attention, probably because they pose no obvious social problem. Still, from a stratification perspective, their family life is just as relevant as that of single mothers because a second earner in the household, or a first earner with superior earnings prospects, makes a large difference for women’s economic well-being. Apart from these details of family structure, the status attainment framework used in chapter 7 sheds little light on stratification by race and gender: the socioeconomic destinations of black men, black women, 158 The Long Shadow and white women all are at parity with those of white men (the compared with group) when equated statistically for family background in the first stage of the analysis. They emerged as significant only after phasing in controls for a variety of life-course experiences. This appearance of parity was not anticipated at the outset, yet such a conclusion has an impressive lineage in William Julius Wilson’s (1978) “declining significance of race” thesis. Although advanced some thirty-five years ago, and controversial at the time (Morris 1996; Willie 1978), it nevertheless has currency still. For example, according to Robert Putnam, quoted in Garance Franke-Ruta (2012), “. . . what we are talking about [how people escape poverty] is now as least as much about class itself and not just about . . . race.” Wilson argued that class disadvantage and not racial disadvantage has become the major impediment to the advancement of African Americans in urban ghettos.1 Chapter 7, though, brought to light a form of inequality hidden below the veneer of socioeconomic parity . Race and gender are integral to it and schooling incidental. It is inequality specific to earnings. Intersectionality in Earnings Attainment Thus far we have assessed the importance of race and gender versus socioeconomic status (SES) origins in generating social inequality using a mode of analysis that assumes the causes of inequality are additive in their consequences. The logic is to isolate effects of each potentially disadvantaging attribute apart from the others, but that separation misses consequences that trace to distinctive profiles of disadvantage: rather than inequality being partly this and partly that, perhaps it originates at their intersection (Warikoo and Carter 2009). The intersectionality perspective takes us to a very different account of urban disadvantage in the urban context, one in which race and gender jointly are central. Taking white men as the frame of reference in the previous chapter and comparing them with white women, African American women, and African American men sheds light on this intersectionality by revealing white men’s earnings advantage over others. Had we taken a different approach, contrasting the experience of African Americans against whites, on the one hand, and of women against men, on the other, those disparities would not have emerged as in table 7.2, and repeated in table 8.1. They would not because the earnings differences at issue are not simply a matter of race or of gender, but rather of...

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