Faded Dreams paints a new and challenging picture of how racial inequality has evolved in America. Martin Carnoy shows that three dominant views of economic differences between blacks and whites--that blacks are individually responsible for not taking advantage of market opportunities, that the world economy has changed in ways that puts blacks at a tremendous disadvantage compared to whites, and that pervasive racism is holding blacks down--do not adequately explain why blacks made such large gains in the past and stopped making them in the 1980s and 1990s. Using a systematic analysis of fifty years of data on income, education, and the variety of jobs that both blacks and whites have held, Faded Dreams offers a powerful argument for active government intervention to improve the education and living conditions of disadvantaged black children.