Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

In a sequence that I find hard to interpret other than as an act of collective punishment for the uprisings of the 1960s and early ’70s, California’s informally segregated, formally choked-of-funds public schools no longer prepared black and Hispanic students for the tertiary education required for technology jobs of any collar. Assembly-line managers preferred foreign-born workers, who had fewer rights than their American-born colleagues. Members of the region’s black working class found themselves, like an increasing share of the population in general, boxed into the low-wage service and informal sectors of employment.