WILSON: See a lot of people back then felt that we would be free by '93 or '83 or '73 just by removing racial barriers. But the problem is that a system of racial discrimination over a long period of time can create racial inequality, a system of racial inequality that will linger on even after racial barriers come down. That is because the most disadvantaged blacks victimized by decades and centuries of racial oppression do not have resources that allow them to compete effectively with other people. They are at a disadvantage.

So the removal of racial barriers creates the greatest opportunities for the more trained and educated minority members. People develop resources because of the advantages associated with family background and the resources that the parents passed on to the children, financial means, family stability, and peer groups, so on. All of these things place more advantaged minorities in a position where they can compete with other individuals of society when racial barriers are removed. A lot of people back then didn't realize that.

So it was not enough just to talk about equality of freedom of individual opportunity. You also had to deal with the problem of the accumulation of disadvantages associated with previous racial oppression. That's why affirmative action came in. Affirmative action was designed to address that particular issue. But if the more advantaged minorities benefit disproportionately from a program that emphasizes the freedom of individual opportunity. They also benefit disproportionately from affirmative action programs because they are in the best position to compete with other individuals or groups for higher paying jobs, college admissions, promotions, and so on. So affirmative action programs are likely to have a much more positive impact on the more advantaged minority individuals and on the what I call the truly disadvantaged.

So since Kenneth Clark recognizes back almost three decades ago in the speech that he gave -- a commencement address in one of the Southern schools. He said that the masses of blacks now realize -- this is back about 1967--the masses of blacks now realize he said back then that they haven't really benefited significantly from the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement had benefited primarily in a relatively small percentage of middle class and educated blacks.

I think that we should applaud those people responsible for the creation of civil rights legislation because it has had some real positive effects on the substantial segment of the black population. At the same time, another segment has been falling further and further behind because they have not been reached; they have not benefited to the same degree. For example, I think that if you did a careful study of affirmative action programs, you would find that very few inner city blacks or blacks from the inner city ghetto have benefited from affirmative action.

GATES: Why do you think the concerns with class--with economic differentials, structural/economic differentials, and their implications--eluded the analysts of our racial problems for so long?

WILSON: Well, that's a good question. The analysts are now beginning to focus on some of these issues. But our discussion of race was so myopic that we had a tendency to not pay attention to some of these non-racial factors that impacted significantly on the black community. There were some people -- a handful of people recognizing the importance of some of these non-racial factors. For example, the late black economist, Vivian Henderson, stated years ago just before his death that it's as if racism having put blacks in their economic place stepped aside to see changes in technology and changes in the economy destroy that place.

Now that statement is more applicable to the more disadvantaged blacks than the advantaged blacks. Because I think that the disadvantaged blacks have really been hard hit by changes in the economy. The computer revolution, changes in scale-based technology. The internationalization of economic activity had combined to decrease the demand for low-skilled workers. Therefore, the gap between low-scale and higher scale workers is widening. Because of historic racism, they are a disproportionate number of blacks in the low-scale, poorly educated category, and they are falling further and further behind.

Trained and educated blacks are benefiting from changes in the economy in the same way the trained and educated whites are benefiting. You see it in many ways: take a look at black income today. If you divide black income into quintiles, the top quintile has now secured almost 50 percent of the total black income, which is a record. The top quintile in the white population has secured about 44 percent of the white income, which is also a record.

Now it is true that the gap that whites have much higher income, overall wealth, than blacks -- by wealth I mean not only income but assets. But nonetheless if you just look at the distribution of income, inequality is growing more rapidly in the black community surprisingly than in the white community. If you look at the gap between the top quintile and the bottom two quintiles, it is incredible.

GATES: SO that means that the economic shape of the community, the bell curve of class, as I like to call it, has become fixed?

WILSON: That's right. It has really crystallized you see. We should begin to recognize this. Some of our civil rights leaders are beginning to recognize this. Hugh Price, for example, of the National Urban League invited me to join the board of the National Urban League because he wanted to make sure that these issues would be talked about, would be addressed. He recognized that we have to do more than just pursue race specific policies, which are important and necessary. But it is important now for black leaders to recognize that they need to join forces with other groups in society who are concerned about the devastating effects of economic trends on a more disadvantaged segment of the population. I think that we have to become much more aware of the impact of these changes on the black population in particular.

GATES: Herbert Marcuse in 1958, I believe, wrote an essay in which he was highly critical of the civil rights movement. And he said the principal effect of this will be to create a new middle class. From what you are describing, we have two nations; and they are both black. The black community has been severed in two in a way that we could scarcely imagine it in 1960.

WILSON: Actually though, Skip, I would say that you have a kind of professional middleclass group, and then you have what we call sort of the underclass. Then you have another group that is sort of a marginal working class population that is becoming increasingly vulnerable, and I'm worried about this group. These are the working poor and also the people who are just above the poverty line but are still working. There is always the possibility that because of the changes in the economy, the shift in the demand for certain types of workers, for example, de industrialization has really hurt black males.

A lot of these marginal working class folks are going to slip down into the underclass plagued by joblessness or being forced out of the higher paying industrial jobs into the lower paying service jobs. I am really concerned about that. As they get forced down into the low paying service jobs, then they have to compete with the influx of women who have been in the labor market and immigrants. It's really tough. I think the one group that we don't have to worry too much about right now -- the really trained and educated -- those who can enter the computer age...and compete. That group is going to do fine. But the others I think we have to be very, very concerned about. I think that the future of the black masses is something to be worried about.

GATES: So were we better off pre-1965 as a community, to use that metaphor, than we are today?

WILSON: Again, it all depends on what you look at. If you talk about the overall socioeconomic status of the black population, we are better off because we have a higher percentage of blacks in professional positions, more black homeowners than we had back them, more black college graduates. No question about it.

But on the other hand, if you look at the jobless rate for a certain segment of the population, we are worse off. I think the inner city joblessness is much higher today than it was back in 1960. In my book When Work Disappears, I look at the jobless rate and changes in the jobless rates in some of these neighborhoods. If you take, for example, the neighborhoods that represent the historic core of the black belt in Chicago-- Douglas, Grand Boulevard, Washington Park -- in 1950 a substantial majority of the adults in these neighborhoods were working in a typical week. Nearly 70 percent of all males, 14 and over, held a job in these neighborhoods in 1950. As late as 1960 about 64 percent of all males held such jobs in a typical week.

But today 37 percent -- in 1990 only 37 percent--of all males 16 and over were working in a typical week in these three neighborhoods. If you look both males and females, in 1990 only one in four in Grand Boulevard was working. One in three in Washington Park and only 40% of the adults in Douglas were working. So, for that segment of population things had gotten worse, so we had to dis-aggregate. On one hand if we just look at the aggregate figures I think things, overall, are better. But when we dis-aggregate there are certain segments of the population, particularly the black poor, who are worse off, and then I think black workers, that is people who may not be poor, but have these blue collar jobs. I think they're struggling more today than there were in 1965.

GATES: So what do we do about it?

WILSON: I think, Skip, it's very, very important for black leaders to broaden their vision and their imagination in the public policy arena. To continue to push for very specific policies, affirmative action, these things are necessary and important and we need them. But they're also going to have to join with other forces and call for some sort of economic reform. And not only economic reform, but also educational reform. When I say economic reform, I mean creating situations where we enhance employment. And we could do a lot of things. I mean, I've very, very concerned about the way in which the Federal Reserve Board deals with, places much more emphasis on inflation, and unemployment, and they let unemployment rise in order to lower inflation. These are policies, I think, that we need to re-examine.

I think we need to pay particular attention to the need to work with other countries in developing some sort of international policy where we could coordinate activities to enhance economic growth in the various countries. I also think that we need to talk about the creation of jobs for people immediately, who are jobless, and we need to discuss a possibility of public sector employment and not just try to rely solely on strategies in the private sector. Because my research clearly reveals that if we want to put inner-city workers to work immediately, we just can't rely on the private sector. They don't want to touch them, they don't want to hire them. And they won't hire them unless there's a real shortage of workers. They won't hire them unless we create a situation where employers are looking for workers, rather than workers looking for employers. And how do we do that? If we had a sustained tight labor market that is what we might call full employment over a long period of time, not just five or six years, but say ten or fifteen years. We'd be able to draw back into the labor market a lot of those people who dropped out all together, or have given up looking for work.

And I'm not in the position here to talk about how we do that, how do we generate tight labor markets, but there are folks out there who recognize there are certain strategies that we should be talking about, that we need to pay attention to, to regulating or controlling the labor market. These are things that had to be done. At some point we're going to face up to the problems and come to grips with them.

GATES: In 1978 you published the "Declining Significance of Race." People lined up from here to China within the black community to be upset about that title. People who hadn't even read the book, because they didn't want race to be in decline as a significant variable in their oppression. Why is there reluctance to do exactly what you just said what we have to do, which is to start thinking about other issues that are not race based?

WILSON: Well, a lot of it has to do with our understanding of the way that the world works and we still have a lot of educating to do. And I think that eventually people are going to say, look we're facing a crisis here and we're going to have to change our approach to public policy. I think eventually people are going to be talking more about the kinds of issues that I address in my latest book, and also in the previous book, "The Truly Disadvantaged." It just takes, it takes time.

It's interesting that when the "Declining Significance of Race" was published in 1978, and the second edition came out in 1980, people didn't want to hear this talk about the crystallization of the black class structure. Now, it's common knowledge and nobody questions that there is a this gap developing.

When I said there was a declining significance of race, what I really meant was not that racism was declining, in fact, in the book I talk about the shift of racial antagonisms from the economic order to social political order. What I was trying to suggest was that beginning in the 1960s, for the first time middle class blacks could pass on their class status and resources to their children in the way that whites have always done....

And so what I was trying to show was an accumulation of resources you pass on to your children, leading to the crystallization of a black class structure, meaning that class was becoming more important than race in determining individual black life chances. Now, if people had taken that position seriously, or had that vision, then when talking about public policy they would have been paying much more attention, for example, to the Humphry/Hawkins full employment bill rather than the Alan Bakke affirmative action case. This things were discussed at the same time. No black leader--or I shouldn't say, 'no,'I don't want to be extreme--but few black leaders were really paying much attention to the Humphrey/Hawkins bill which really didn't amount to much. It was much more important, had much greater potential to deal with the problems of the black workers and black poor.