As Powdermaker found, many of the families she examined and all the families in my work—working black poor, landed farmers, and Jack -- professed Christian faith. All were actively engaged in church and all desired marriage. Like the sharecropping poor, the landed Byrd patriarch, the quasi-croppers and the mule-renter’s son highly valued marriage, Christian faith, savings and a comfortable home. Often, the black poor and the non-poor shared the Sunday morning religious spaces, some sang in the same choirs and served on the usher board, not because they were members of the same caste, but because they were first and foremost Americans and Christians---imbued with a sense of American’s promise, not just their own. Faith and faith discourses allied them as a community—as a people—with the nation.

After freedom, there were many realities, scenarios, and imaginings. Mostly, there were just questions that would soon be answered. How would families like the Qualls-Harper-Payton-Colemans and the parents of the Sunflower Seven – those examined in this work – climb, and under what conditions, if any, would their subsequent generations thrive? Would the compromises made in a rural Slave Republic continue to distort the pursuit of a more egalitarian union? In the pockets of our nation where anti-slavery movements had formed, would new appeals for African Americans’ full citizenship mobilize the once enslaved and their descendants and provide moral, social, and ethical guardrails, not just political and economic ones?

Income or wage mobility and wealth mobility is not the same phenomena. Wealth often generates income, while income, especially low-wage income, does not generate wealth. Upward economic mobility is made up of both wealth and earnings and political power. While the average white earning power and household wealth have increased over the last four decades, the vestiges of enslavement have meant protracted inequalities and inequities in black earnings and wealth, leading one black Mississippian- a Sunflower County resident- to exclaim, “Most women are like me here, it takes two in a recession, and I have been in a recession all my life.” The long-drawn-out economic contraction Rebecca alluded to as a constant in her life had its roots in the enslavement of her ancestors and the failure of the nation to redress and make whole those it had enslaved, exploited economically, and politically subjugated.

An important change occurred in African American family structure during the era of racialized managerial capitalism: a major increase in the fraction of men and women in the 20s and 30s who were never-married. A fall in marriage-eligible men is a major factor responsible for this change. As per the Darity-Myers index of African American male marginalization, there will be an increase in the fraction of marriage-eligible men (and, therefore, increased marriage) with an increase in their earnings and employment, reducing premature deaths and disability, increasing college enrollment, reducing contact with the criminal legal system and reducing incentives for criminal behavior, and reducing premarital births and dissolution of unions when children are present. This perspective suggests that it is changes in economic well-being that cause changes in family structure, not the reverse. Family functioning is different from family structure. The empirical data suggests that, on average, African American families have strong family functioning.

There are racial differences in treatment by police. As the percent minority increases within a jurisdiction, racial threat effects cause more intense policing against Blacks and Latinx. In response, racial and ethnic minorities use the political process to increase own-group representation and better treatment by police. Police respond to Black protests against abuse of authority with more aggressive policing. There are backlash (more shootings) and diversity (fewer shootings) effects by police in response to affirmative action lawsuits forcing the agency to hire more ethnic and racial minority police. Abuse of force increases when: an officer’s peer has been injured on the job, officers know the race of a civilian prior to interaction, White officers interact with Black citizens, and White officers are dispatched to a Black neighborhood. Police abuse of force has negative academic and behavioral effects on Black and Latinx youth. Mass incarceration has deleterious effects on Black families: reducing the probabilities of marriage and attending college and increasing racial inequality and the probability a child is born to an unmarried mother. Hate crimes are instrumental actions, increasing with racial economic competition. Increases in hate crimes increase racialization among the targeted social group.

Africans were commodities during chattel capitalism, producing that was appropriated by Whites. This was instrumental discrimination: racially differential treatment because it was profitable. Chattel capitalism was ended by government policy, during the US civil war. White control of Black citizenship was the core element of structural racism during servitude capitalism. Instrumental discrimination included convict leasing, debt peonage, sharecropping, and the chain gang: policies that held down black wages and wealth accumulation, reduced public expenditure on services to the African American community, and public infrastructure that transferred wealth from Blacks to Whites. Lynching was used to enforce racial identity norms. Labor market discrimination increased during the Nadir, even as Blacks closed the skills gap with Whites. Black self-help was also expressed in The Great Migration and Urbanization (1914–1965). African American self-help, President Roosevelt’s New Deal, World War II era changes in federal hiring and the utilization of Black troops, and President Johnson’s Great Society gave rise to racialized managerial capitalism. Thereafter, exclusion is expressed as differential socioeconomic opportunities due to racial wealth disparity and identity norms governing access to resources, especially managerial power, along with relatively greater injustice in the criminal legal system and greater exposure to hate crimes.

African American family income is 63 percent of White family income. African American family wealth is 4–14 percent of White family wealth. African American women and men earn 84 percent and 68 percent, respectively, of the weekly wages earned by White women and men; both ratios are lower than during the mid-1970s. It is a multi-decade truism that the African American unemployment rate is twice the White unemployment rate.

The recessions of 1974–1975, 1981–1982, and 2007–2009 were impediments to African American relative and absolute progress after the end of servitude capitalism. In the Non-South, median African American family income stagnated and declined during 1967–2018, and the poverty rate increased during 1967–2018, especially during 1967–1989. Within the South, median African American family income rose during 1967–2018, though median income stagnated during 1974–2000, and the poverty rate declined from 36 percent to 21 percent during 1967–2018, even if there was stagnation during 1974–1989.

Structural racism requires racialized economic agents. Racial identities are a strategically determined social norm, designed for governing differential access to resources, especially wealth, power, and information, as well as protection from other-group antagonism. When applied to the labor market, the differential power of racial groups means that racial identity is a sorting mechanism, such that persons of otherwise equal productive capacity will have racially differential access to employment, compensation, promotion, training, and the probability of layoff according to the manager–worker identity match. Racial identity norms evolve from social interactions between and among persons of alternative ancestral groups. Within these interactions persons select strategies that strengthen or weaken racial identity norms. These social interactions increase the productivity of persons if they are mutually altruistic. Mutually antagonistic social interactions reduce each person’s productivity. Racialization is an ongoing process of social and economic evolution. Self-identification and labeling conventions are social norms that emerge to distinguish social groups. Both actual and perceived skin shade and other physical differences are imprecise and subjective.

Experimental data, observational data, and analyses using automatic association data show that the manager–worker racial identity match influences hiring, pay, and access to managerial resources. Explanations of racial inequality in labor market outcomes depend on the wage–productivity relationship. The manager–worker racial identity match may affect productivity and wages in two ways: managers may use higher pay and better promotion opportunities to raises the productivity and wages of own-group workers; and, managers provide time, assistance, or other resources to own group workers and thereby increase their productivity, employment stability, and opportunities for promotion. Stratification economists link persistent discrimination to job competition. Equally skilled workers may receive different pay for doing the same work because they are employed at firms that are differentiated by the capacity to pay and by the capacity of workers to make firms pay. Equally skilled workers who perform the same job at firms with less competitive characteristics, or who are part of a workforce with lower bargaining power, will receive lower pay.