Suchergebnisse

An extensive literature on newly developing societies shows that the urban economy's entrepreneurial sector can absorb a sizable share of persons who are unemployed and searching for work. Surprisingly, however, little research on the United States has examined entrepreneurship's labor absorption capacity. The present study fills this gap by analyzing Blacks and Whites in northern U.S. cities during the Great Depression, a time of widespread joblessness, particularly among Blacks. The results suggest that, if not for Blacks' uniquely severe resource deprivation, Black entrepreneurship could have absorbed a large number of jobless Blacks. Labor absorption estimates, calculated with 1940 Census data, indicate that one-third of the Black-White unemployment difference is attributable to racial inequality of entrepreneurial outcomes. This historical evidence advances social-scientific understanding of racial inequality during the Great Depression and informs a longstanding debate about the merits of promoting Black business ownership as a strategy for improving Blacks' labor market prospects.

AbstractObjectiveThis study examines the improvement of U.S. natives' social distance attitudes toward Southern, Central, and Eastern (SCE) European ancestry groups in the post‐World‐War II United States, applying the idea that prejudice against these groups was due to racial/ethnic prejudice and social class prejudice.MethodsAnalyzing data from the Bogardus surveys and other published sources, the study tests the proposition that U.S. natives' social distance attitudes toward SCE European ancestry groups improved because social class prejudice against these groups diminished as the groups' educational attainment levels increased from the second‐ to third‐generations.ResultsContrary to modernization and classical assimilation theories, the favorable trend in U.S. natives' social distance attitudes toward SCE European ancestry groups was unaffected by the groups' intergenerational educational mobility.ConclusionThe decline in prejudice against SCE European ancestry groups in the postwar United States resulted from a decrease in racial/ethnic prejudice against these groups, independently of social class prejudice.

Emory Bogardus' 1926 social distance survey revealed, not surprisingly, that native‐born Americans tended to view Southern, Central, and Eastern (SCE) Europeans as far less desirable than Northern and Western (NW) Europeans for most social relationships. This well‐known finding has been attributed to both racial/ethnic prejudice and social class prejudice. The present study investigates the relative contributions of these two forms of prejudice to the total prejudice against SCE Europeans, testing the prediction that social distance attitudes toward European groups in Bogardus' pioneering survey were significantly influenced by group differences in socioeconomic status (SES), net of the NW‐SCE European distinction. The prediction is supported in analyses that consider survey respondents' uniquely intense desires for social distance from those SCE Europeans that were visible because of their relatively high SES, notably, Russian‐ancestry Jews. The study concludes that social class prejudice substantially affected divisions among European ancestry groups in early twentieth‐century America.