The End of the 'Colortocracy'

_"The Emerging Philadelphia African-American Class Structure" by Elijah Anderson, in The Annals (Mar. 2000), American Academy of Political and Social Science, 3937 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104._

Affirmative action and other civil rights measures have done more than bring many blacks into the American mainstream, argues Anderson, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. They also have disrupted the old "castelike" class structure within the black community in Philadelphia and other cities, rendering longstanding distinctions based on shades of skin color less important.

Since the time of slavery, Anderson observes, variations in shades of skin color have made a difference within the black community. An old folksaying put it this way: "If you’re light, you’re right; if you’re brown, stick around; but if you’re black, get back."

In The Philadelphia Negro (1899), the first case study of an African-American community in the United States, black sociologist W.

E. B. Du Bois discerned four classes: On top, Anderson notes, were the well-to-do: lightskinned doctors, lawyers, and others, whose "relatively privileged ancestors were the offspring of slaves and slave masters." Next came an emerging middle class of schoolteachers, postal workers, storekeepers, and ministers, whose skin color was "more brown, sometimes even dark." Below that group was "the solid working class," made up of people, generally migrants from the South, who "tended to be dark-complexioned." Finally, at the bottom of the class structure, says Anderson, were "the very poor who worked sporadically if at all: Du Bois’s ‘submerged tenth.’ "

"One of the most unappreciated but profound consequences" of the civil rights policies intended to promote black equality with whites, Anderson maintains, was "the destabilization" of the castelike system within black society. By giving the same opportunities to dark-skinned blacks as to light-skinned ones, affirmative action policies reduced the relatively privileged position of the light-skinned "colortocracy." "Blacks of all hues" entered formerly white institutions as students, teachers, and workers. Corporations, universities, and government agencies became "the major arbiters and shapers of black mobility," and class positions in the black community "became increasingly dependent on achievement and less on ascription."

Today, the black community in Philadelphia is no longer concentrated in a single area of the city. And the social classes within that community, writes Anderson, "are qualitatively different from those of Du Bois’s time." Members of the new black elite come from various backgrounds and in various hues, are "largely indifferent to earlier rules of the color caste," and live in Chestnut Hill and other predominately white and affluent neighborhoods. Members of the black middle class, often the offspring of industrious working-class parents, live mostly in Mount Airy and other racially mixed areas, though many continue to reside in the old inner-city neighborhoods.

The black working class and underclass have seen the least change, and have been hurt by the loss of manufacturing jobs. Still, says Anderson, "the legacy of past exclusion continues to haunt blacks at all levels of the class structure."