Racial inequality remains a painful and central feature of daily life in the United States. Yet few would deny that decades of political struggle have transformed the nation’s racial landscape. In this article, we seek to advance long-standing sociological efforts to disentangle this braiding of persistence and change. Specifically, we intervene in two ways designed to build on national studies of inequality trends for black and white Americans. First, by shifting measurement to the state level, we reveal distinctive subnational trajectories and dynamics of convergence that have been obscured by the field’s emphasis on aggregate national trends. Second, by drawing on relational theories of boundaries and positions, we develop a new empirical strategy for measuring racial inequalities over time. Identifying two key analytic dimensions (exclusion and subordination), we analyze the relative positions of whites and blacks in two domains (work and housing) across the decades from 1940 to 2010. Our results suggest that racial inequalities rooted in boundary-based dynamics of social closure (exclusion) proved far more durable than inequalities tied to inferior positions alone (subordination). Moreover, we find evidence of a significant nationalization of racial relations, with subnational units converging on a more uniform structure of racialized relations over time. We conclude that the period from 1940 to 2010 was marked by a “consolidation” of racial exclusion (i.e., convergence around relatively stable levels of inequality) paired with the comparatively greater “equalization” of racial subordination (i.e., stronger convergence around more substantial declines).

中文翻译：

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不平等的立场：1940-2010 年美国种族不平等趋势的关系方法

种族不平等仍然是美国日常生活的一个痛苦和核心特征。然而，很少有人会否认，几十年的政治斗争已经改变了这个国家的种族格局。在本文中，我们寻求推进长期的社会学努力，以解开这种持久性和变化的编织。具体来说，我们以两种方式进行干预，旨在建立对美国黑人和白人不平等趋势的全国研究。首先，通过将测量转移到州一级，我们揭示了独特的地方轨迹和趋同动态，这些轨迹和动态被该领域对总体国家趋势的强调所掩盖。其次，通过利用边界和位置的关系理论，我们开发了一种新的经验策略来衡量种族不平等随着时间的推移。确定了两个关键的分析维度（排斥和从属），我们分析了 1940 年至 2010 年几十年间白人和黑人在两个领域（工作和住房）中的相对位置。我们的结果表明，种族不平等植根于基于边界的社会动态事实证明，封闭（排斥）比仅与劣势（从属地位）相关的不平等更加持久。此外，我们发现种族关系显着国有化的证据，随着时间的推移，地方单位在种族关系的更统一结构上趋于一致。我们得出的结论是，从 1940 年到 2010 年，种族排斥的“巩固”（即围绕相对稳定的不平等水平趋同）与种族从属地位的相对更大的“平等化”（即，