Jeffrey Fellows suggested: "the lower [black] quintiles may also be rising because of sectoral shifts toward industries and occupations that are more highly represented by blacks." While it seems to me absurd to attempt to infer structural changes in the economy based on comparative data on black/white income quintile groups (esp. since the black absolute and relative increases seem too insignificant to have justified this much theorising--to say nothing of the questionable value of any racialised data), I think JF's hypothesis is quite provocative--though I don't think the focus is usefully put on sectors defined by their overrepresentation of blacks as this says nothing about what it is about those sectors explains their relatively faster growth. One wonders whether the US is going through a similar process as Britain a century ago as there is slow growth, if not outright, decline, of the industries which once formed the basis of economic domination (steel, autos, shipbuilding, machine tools); perhaps too much capital remained tied up in antiquated fixed capital and too little surplus value was produced to keep up with continuously growing minimum amount of capital required for business in spheres with a high organic composition. Meanwhile the few newer high technology industries in which there is a high organic composition such as semiconductors and computer hardware employ too few of the workers released or unabsorbed by the once dominant traditional industry. There is then growth in industries which a much lower organic composition of capital. Not only may these firms may be labor intensive, they may be unskilled labor-intensive, which may create relative opportunity for African-American workers whose skills have remained underdeveloped in a racist country. Perhaps then the tight labor market is a better indicator than this comparative black/white data of this structural devolution from an economy of advanced industries in which there was a high organic composition of capital to one in which the most rapid growth--despite a few advanced high technology industries-- is in labor intensive, low skill sectors. I would also like to make a point I made earlier again: the overrepresentation of blacks among the incarcerated is indeed alarming, but this does not mean that race explains why the US has relatively higher incarcertation rates or how crime is defined or what punishments are meted out for which crimes. There may be an interesting class-based critique of the nature of the criminal justice system, which can easily be ignored if we are simply criticising the system because the sentences received by black working class or lumpen criminals are harsher than those received by their white counterparts. This would be a perfect example of how slaves jockeying for position in their servitude miss the big picture, but I haven't read David Garland's Punishment and Modern Society or Jeffrey Reiman's The Rich Get Richer and The Poor Get Prison. Rakesh Grad Student UC Berkeley
