Race, Class, and Income Inequality

Abstract

The basic thesis of this paper is that class, defined within the Marxist tradition as common position within the social relations of production, mediates racial differences in income returns to education. That is, class position is viewed as a determinant of the extent to which education can be transformed into income, and thus it is hypothesized that much of the commonly observed racial difference in returns to education is a consequence of the distribution of racial groups into class categories. The results of the study strongly confirm this perspective: the differences in returns to education between black and white males largely disappear when the regression equations are run within class positions.