Economies go through changes that hurt some groups and benefit others. In the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. economy entered an era of international competition that it had not known since the 1920s, when we were the ones exporting to others at low prices, able to exploit the economies of scale of a large domestic market so vital to assembly line production. In these past two decades, however, the tables have turned. Japan, Germany, and newcomers, such as Korea and Taiwan, now complete successfully in the U.S. market. Furthermore, U.S. companies are using other countries' lower-wage labor forces to produce manufactured goods for sale at home. The main fallout of this rapid change has been the “declining middle” – a sustained decline in high-wage manufacturing production jobs – and an expanding bottom and top – low-income and high-income service jobs. The high-income jobs require a college education, so only a small fraction of blacks are even eligible for them. And many of the new low-income (and many of the high-income) jobs have gone to women and immigrants, ready to work hard at lower wages than black men.

Is the changeover from a factory-based, domestic-market-oriented, manufacturing economy using a domestic labor force to a globally oriented information economy the reason that the less-schooled, more manual-labor-intensive African-American labor force has stopped making gains?

Again, taking a close look at historical processes of change helps us understand where we are today.