Tariq Modood

Educational progress for African-Americans and Latinos in the United States from the 1950s to the 1990s: the interaction of ancestry and class

Class processes – reflected in differential educational opportunity for persons whose parents had little education or money or both – have impeded progress in erasing educational differences among racial ancestry groups in the United States. For people whose parents had similar amounts of education and money, African Americans or Latinos bear less in the way of a direct burden than they did 25 or 50 years ago. But because a person’s educational opportunities depend on how much education her parents had and African Americans and Latinos have parents who did bear the full racial burden, large gaps persist today. Thus the class dynamics of educational stratification pass on to the present generation the discrimination and exclusion of previous generations. Class differences in educational opportunity decreased from the 1920s to the 1970s. Since then progress has slowed to a halt and then reversed. The cohorts born since 1960 are divided by a sharp resurgence of economic inequality.