Abstract

A major paradox in U.S. sociology has been the relative dearth of studies in recent years on the black working class, despite the historic importance of this class in African American and U.S. historical development. Central to this anomaly have been "underclass"-informed studies that have artificially defined the black poor, especially black women, as distinct from the working class, and the elite-focused, new urban politics literature that has generally ignored the role of the black working class in contemporary urban economic and political change. The class-relational, historically and geographically sensitive understanding of class embedded in black urban regime theory, combined with theoretical and empirical "uplinks" to extra-local economic and political changes and influences, provides an effective strategy to redirect sociological research back toward the black working class