Issues pertaining to class undercut so much of our society, yet remain for the most part either unacknowledged or willfully unseen. In the past few weeks, we’ve seen news coverage of a variety of issues--home ownership, education, intelligence--in which socio-economic status plays such an undeniable role, and yet often remains overlooked, or at least not articulated to the degree necessary. Reporters and editorialists talk about these issues, but never really speak directly to how it is class—socio-economic status—that exists as the underpinnings behind all of these issues.
In particular, I’ve seen a half-dozen articles looking specifically at the struggles of Black Americans in terms of financial security and home ownership, and recent economic studies that demonstrate that there is no natural difference between Black and White human beings in terms of innate intelligence: it is rather environmental and related to educational opportunities. Both, I think, make for compelling evidence of how class inequality perpetuates itself in our society in a way that is often not directly acknowledged or considered.
Home Ownership
This diary was largely inspired by an editorial by scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. entitled Forty Acres and a Gap In Wealth. Gates studied the family trees of twenty currently-successful Black Americans, and determined that 75% of them had recent ancestors who owned property. For instance, Oprah’s great grandfather picked two tons of cotton in his free time (while learning to read and write) which he then bartered for land in Mississippi. Whoopi Goldberg’s great-great-grandparents received land through the Southern Homesteader Act. Owning this land allowed these families to build inter-generational wealth, to have something to pass along to their children and grand children, to give them a leg up. Give them the security of having a roof over their head and a place to live.
In his Op-Ed, he argues for a program to foster economic opportunities for Black Americans, and suggests that one way to remedy this might be through programs that encourage and enable home ownership. He writes:
The telltale fact is that the biggest gap in black prosperity isn’t in income, but in wealth. According to a study by the economist Edward N. Wolff, the median net worth of non-Hispanic black households in 2004 was only $11,800 — less than 10 percent that of non-Hispanic white households, $118,300. Perhaps a bold and innovative approach to the problem of black poverty — one floated during the Civil War but never fully put into practice — would be to look at ways to turn tenants into homeowners. Sadly, in the wake of the subprime mortgage debacle, an enormous number of houses are being repossessed. But for the black poor, real progress may come only once they have an ownership stake in American society.
Gates mentions the sub-prime mortage debacle, which has hit Black neighborhoods particularly hard. A New York Times article on the suburbs of Cleveland details how lower-income and predominantly-minority areas have been devastated by foreclosures:
At greatest risk in Cleveland’s suburbs are the low- and moderate-income neighborhoods where subprime lending has soared. The practice involves lenders issuing mortgages at high interest rates for people with lower incomes or poor credit ratings, usually involving adjustable rates and sometimes no down payment and no investigation of the borrower’s circumstances.
(snip)
In a report for Shaker Heights, Mark Duda and William C. Apgar of Harvard University found that expensive refinancing deals had been aggressively "push-marketed" in the city’s less affluent west and south sides, bordering Cleveland. They said that "the rising number of foreclosures threatens to undermine the stability" of those areas.
"The moral outrage," Ms. Rawson, the mayor, said, "is that subprime lenders have targeted our seniors and African-Americans, people who saved all their lives to get a step up."
-– Foreclosures Force Suburbs to Fight Blight
The intersection of these two examples is clear: home ownership has helped many Black Americans climb up the socio-economic ladder. Home ownership has many benefits, both in terms of basic human existence, interaction, and financial security. Home owners are able to build equity in their properties, feel a sense of financial security, potentially have access to better education depending on the quality of the public schools, and develop a sense of community with the neighbors and town. Furthermore, a home can become a sort of "insurance" for the future. How many families took out a second mortgage to cover education costs or sold to pay for retirement? The home is almost always the biggest investment most Americans will ever make.
It’s no wonder that people aspire to home ownership, then. That’s what makes these predatory lenders all the more vicious—preying on individuals’ most deeply held dreams for future success, for protecting and providing for their families, failing to disclose the riskiness of the mortgages, and in some cases issuing mortgages that were doomed to fail. I’ve heard stories of folks being tricked into signing for mortgages when they couldn’t even afford the first payment.
I find it cynically ironic that the greed of sub-prime lenders eager to take advantage of lower-income Americans who could not technically afford a mortgage is what may cause the coming economic collapse. In short, the eagerness of the dominant group to take advantage of the weak may bring us all down. Of course, it’s already hurting the lower-income borrowers, who have been foreclosed on and may already be homeless. And it’s probably not going to hurt those mortgage brokers too badly, unless they were already living beyond their means.
The "Intelligence" "Gap?"
The furor started when Nobel Laureate James Watson claimed some evidence that Black people are inherently less intelligent than White people. (Google it if you really feel like reading more.) Several new research papers, however, thoroughly debunk this claim, and demonstrate that any discrepancy is more due to class inequality than race.
First, from The Freakonomics Blog, Levitt details a study he conducted (recently rejected by a leading journal) in which he found no difference in intelligence amongst one-year-olds of either race:
The striking result we find is that there are no racial differences in mental functioning at age one, although a racial gap begins to emerge over the next few years of life.
So what does this mean for the genetics vs. environment debate? Quoting from our abstract, "the observed patterns are broadly consistent with large racial differences in environmental factors that grow in importance as children age. Our findings are not consistent with the simplest models of large genetic differences across races in intelligence, although we cannot rule out the possibility that intelligence has multiple dimensions and racial differences are present only in those dimensions that emerge later in life."
Similarly, Psychology Professor Richard Nesbitt details on the Opinion pages his own research, which suggest that hereditary factors are not the key in determining any gap in achievement. In a piece entitled All Brains are the Same Color, he writes:
In fact, the evidence heavily favors the view that race differences in I.Q. are environmental in origin, not genetic.
The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates of heritability have been based almost exclusively on studies of middle-class groups. For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to recent research by Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia. This means that for the poor, improvements in environment have great potential to bring about increases in I.Q.
This makes sense. Think about how much class status determines access to early-childhood education, and how often the quality of education is directly related to a family’s ability to either pay tuition to get their kids out of "bad" public schools, or to buy a house in a town with good public schools. Remembering Gates’ data about the overall wealth inequality between Black and White families, it’s no surprise that a disproportionate number of Black children find themselves in failing schools. They just don’t have any way out of them. Nesbitt continues:
Most important, we know that interventions at every age from infancy to college can reduce racial gaps in both I.Q. and academic achievement, sometimes by substantial amounts in surprisingly little time. This mutability is further evidence that the I.Q. difference has environmental, not genetic, causes. And it should encourage us, as a society, to see that all children receive ample opportunity to develop their minds.
Sounds a lot less like an "intelligence" gap than it is an opportunity gap, an economic gap.
It’s easier for people to "see" race than it is for them to "see" class, I think. It’s easier for someone like Watson to say "Black people are less smart" than it is for him to say "Black people are extraordinarily more socio-economically disadvantaged on the whole than White people, particularly in terms of access to quality education from an early age. " It’s just a bit too wordy for him, I guess.
So. Home ownership and education. Both hugely impacted by class – no big surprise there. I do think it’s notable, however, to think about how these issues intersect, and especially how they play out for many Black Americans.
For more on these issues, teacherken has a great diary on the Gates editorial and cskendrick has one on home foreclosures.
Issues of class and labor seem to pop up quite a bit on Daily Kos as sidebars or as impacting other topics in important ways, but they don't get their own diaries as often as they perhaps should. Yet work and class have enormous relevance in American life. Almost all of us must work for a living. Most of us who work owe a great debt to organized labor - even if we are not ourselves members of unions, we benefit from the advances unions have made over the years, in safety conditions, limited hours and overtime pay, benefits, child labor laws. And while a shrinking percentage of American workers are represented by unions, not only do union members earn more than their nonunion counterparts, but nonunion workers in highly unionized industries and areas benefit from employer competition for workers, leading to better pay and conditions. Class issues, too, apart from the question of organized labor, are central in many of the political struggles of the day. From bankruptcy legislation to the minimum wage to student loans, legislation affects people differently based on how much they make, what kind of access to power and support they have.
With this series we aim to develop an ongoing discussion around class and labor issues. Such ongoing discussions have emerged in the Feminisms and Kossacks Under 35 series, and, given the frequent requests for more (and more commented-in) diaries on these issues, we hope this series will accomplish the same. Entries will be posted every Tuesday night between 8 and 9pm eastern. If you are interested in a writing a diary for this series, please email Elise or MissLaura and we will arrange for you to be put on the schedule.