Black Occupational Change and Education
A study of census data shows that differences in the occupational distribution of the male and nonwhite male labor force in the United States have declined slightly between 1950 and 1970, both overall and within educational groups. However, differences in level of schooling or test achievement between whites and nonwhites cannot explain the underrepresentation of nonwhites in managerial, sales, and skilled manual occupations. The proportionate representation of nonwhites in occupations, instead, is a function of the income of the occupation relative to its educational prerequisites. Equal recruitment of educationally qualified nonwhites into skilled crafts and managerial jobs would significantly upgrade the occupational and income status of about fifteen percent of the nonwhite male labor force.
Race, Education, and Jobs: Trends, 1960-1970
Census and Current Population Survey data for employed males in the U.S. Labor Force as tabulated by color, education and occupation are examined for the years 1960-70. Comparisons showed that while the racial differentials on occupation and education were reduced by 1970, the proportion of the remaining occupational gap which was due to educational level had actually increased. This suggests that the attenuation of job discrimination may have had a more significant role than the closing of the racial educational gap. Policy implications are that it is important to maintain efforts to further reduce educational inequality to reduce the remaining occupational differences. At the same time, there are reasons to believe that much of the remaining occupational differential continued to be due to outright discrimination in the job market.
Commentary on Judith Fingert Chused’s “An Analyst’s Uncertainty and Fear”
Chused’s lovely clinical report is not only a cri de coeur from the trenches by a master clinical analyst. With her honest description of her ongoing countertransference experience and her sensitivity to telling nuance and detail, she provides us with a rare document that allows us to consider the unfolding of the transference-countertransference and intersubjective matrices of the analytic process in all their messiness, complexity, and moment-to-moment unfathomability. Chused avoids the preprocessed, neatly shrink-wrapped reports of momentary countertransference experiences, seemingly quickly thought through, sanitized of their inevitable infiltration by still-unresolved intrapsychic conflicts of the analyst, and transformed into mutative interpretations—in short, the kind of report that we sometimes see in our literature—and instead allows us to focus on a different but equally important realm of intersubjective experience: the enmeshment of irreducible or only partially reducible aspects of the analyst’s and the patient’s intrapsychic lives, as well as their fate in the analytic process and in the post-termination self-analytic reflections of both. Partly because of the richness of Chused’s report, and partly because of the always tentative quality of understanding that may be reached as