In comparison to white children, black children are 1.5 times more likely to grow up in families in which the head of household did not graduate from high school. In addition, black children are twice as likely to be arrested for property crimes, to be unemployed as teenagers and later as adults, and to become teenage mothers. Black infants are 2.5 times as likely to die in the first year of life and to be born with low birth weights. They are 5 times more likely to be arrested by the police for violent crimes, and they are 9 times more likely to become victims of homicide. The author believes the root of the racial crisis can be traced to a U.S. economy that is characterized by the concentration of wealth among a small minority of households and by falling incomes and equality for the majority. Ways of measuring the political economy of racism are considered, as are ways in which the United States copes with the polarization between wealth and poverty. The author also discusses racial oppression in society as a whole and in the prison system in particular and recommends a new militancy and a new commitment to the "liberation" of all black people.