A host of commentators, myself included, have argued that class is an increasingly important source of division and distress in American social, economic, and political life. But as my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates and the sociologist William Julius Wilson remind us, race overlays class when it comes to the devastating reality of concentrated poverty. While my own research has focused on the new class divisions that lie at the heart of our post-industrial economy, it was my early experience of the Newark riots that spurred my lifelong interest in cities and urbanism. More than a decade ago in The Rise of the Creative Class, I identified a negative connection between race and the creative economy—specifically, the negative association between high-growth, high-tech firms, and the non-white share of the U.S. urban population.
For the past several years, I have been re-examining the role of race in the creative economy. Today, I report the initial results of that research on the racial divide within the already-advantaged creative class. Specifically, I look at the divide between white (or what the Census defines as non-Hispanic white) and black members of the creative class.
