Pursuit of a truly progressive political agenda can only be premised on an awareness of the intersection of race, gender and economic inequality:
Race, Gender, and Economic Inequality: There are voluminous literatures addressing racial inequality and gender inequality. Some of the issues of greatest interest have been noted above with respect to the economic incorporation of racial and ethnic minorities. Suffice it so say, explanations of gender inequality take a sharply different tack by focusing on gender roles, gender-based employment segregation and discrimination, and the preservation of male privilege in the workplace (e.g. Budig and England 2001, Padavic and Reskin 2002, Charles and Grusky 2004).Fusing the intersection of race and gender has been a serious challenge for students of inequality for theoretical as well as methodological reasons. Theoretically,the narratives about gender inequality invoke a host of conditions that are incommensurate with the circumstances associated with racial inequality and vice versa.This has led researchers to privilege one type of inequality at the expense of the other.Studies of racial inequality typically limit their attention to men while research about gender inequality most focuses on White women and men. As a Venn diagram,overlaying these two approaches neglects the experiences of minority women. However,there is a substantial consensus in the stratification literature that understanding social and economic inequality requires a broader focus that takes into count the intersectionality of multiple hierarchies. That is, that certain types of inequalities cannot be fully understood unless they are viewed in the context of other forms of stratification.The intersection of race and gender for example, cannot and should not be viewed as existing independently of one another (Collins 1998) (pg. 5, emphasis added)
In the years since 2008, much has been written about whether America has become a post-racial society. To be sure, a small group of African-Americans have benefited from changes in American society taking place since World War II. One of them even managed to become elected to the nation’s highest office. However, it would be a mistake to take these exceptions as proof of the rule. On the contrary, for the vast majority of historically disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities—Blacks, Latinos, and American Indians—race matters and it matters mightily for material well-being. It has mattered throughout this nation’s history, it matters today, and there is every reason to believe that it will matter far into the foreseeable future. (pp. 13-14)
Factors presumed to confer economic advantages do so in a stratified manner, distributed according to a hierarchy of rage and gender:
A college education is viewed as a key driver of upward mobility and the primary vehicle to eradicate racial differences in economic success. In reality, while a college degree may result in some improvement in life outcomes, it does little to undo the massive differences in wealth across race.Our data show that black women have far less wealth than white women regardless of level of education. Single white women without a college degree have $3,000 more in median wealth than single black women with a college degree. Single white women with a bachelor’s degree have seven times the wealth of their black counterparts, $35,000 and $5,000 in median wealth, respectively. (pg. 1)
Single young women (under age 40), regardless of race and education, are beginning their adult years with very little if any wealth. Single white women with a college education begin to build more wealth in their 40s, but single white women who lack a college degree have low wealth levels at all ages. On the other hand, married white women, especially those with college degrees, are able to build wealth across age groups.Black women are the most disadvantaged as they show negative median wealth at different ages regardless of marital status. Single black women in their 20s without a degree have zero wealth and the typical single black women with a college degree is $11,000 in debt. Married black women in their 30s and with college degrees are $20,000 in debt. One reason for the wealth gap among college educated single women is that black women have the highest level of student debt and struggle to pay off the debt in early adulthood despite working full-time. Between 2009 and 2012, white women who graduated in the 2007–08 school year paid off an average of 33 percent of their student debt, while black women in that group managed to pay off less than 10 percent of their student debt.6 As a result, black women are less able to build wealth by saving for retirement or purchasing a home. (pg. 2)
Black and white women are positioned differently from one another largely because white women benefit more from wealth being passed down from their families. Intergenerational transfers like financing a college education, providing help with the down payment on a house and other gifts to seed asset accumulation are central sources of wealth building. Given past and present barriers that have kept black families from building wealth, private action and market forces alone cannot be expected to address wide-scale racial wealth inequality that is gendered. (pg. 3)
Inequality does not exist independently of such factors as race and gender discrimination:
As globalization, technological change and the low-road strategy transform the economy, not all groups in the population are equally affected by crumbling wages, sluggish income growth and heightened economic polarization. Indeed,in the United States, high and low wages and high and low household incomes have never been sprinkled randomly among the populace.Historically, people of color and women of all racial groups have earned lower wages (when they have received wages at all). Single-mother households as well as those headed by people of color also have received lower incomes. As such, these groups have most often been poorly housed. The new changes in income reflect this legacy, preserving the divisions of race and gender.
In income terms, race and ethnicity continue to divide America. Stagnant incomes and rising income inequality have struck particularly hard at blacks and Latinos. Figure 1.5 shows median household income by the racial or ethnic group of the household head, and Table 1.1 lists family poverty rates by race, ethnicity and family structure. (pg. 31)
Of particular interest are the changes in relative incomes over time. Over the past 20 years,as the epochal shifts in the economy took place,Latinos have lost ground relative to non-Latinos.Black household incomes have actually caught up slightly with white incomes, but the full picture is more troublesome. Over the same period of time, a 30-year trend of black hourly wages catching up with white wages was reversed. In terms of hourly wages, controlling for education and labor market experience, black men fell further behind white men, and black women lagged behind white women (Bound and Dresser1998; Bound and Freeman 1992; Corcoran1998; author calculations based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2003b and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment and Earnings January 2003). The black-white employment gap has also widened: In business cycle peak year 1973, black males were 88 percent as likely to be employed as white males, and black women were 105 percent as likely as white women(that is, more likely than white women). Two business cycle peaks later, in 1989, these percentages had slipped to 85 percent and 95 percent,respectively. Even in the 2000 business cycle peak, with unemployment at its lowest since the 1960s, the percentages rose to only 86 percent for men and 101 percent for women (U.S.Council of Economic Advisors 2003, Table B41).Latinos also fell further behind non-Latinos in wages (pp. 31-320
Discrimination remains the principal obstacle to eliminating economic inequality:
Modern and historical forces combine to keep many communities of color disconnected from networks of economic opportunity and upward mobility. Among those forces is persistent racial discrimination that, while subtler than in past decades, continues to deny opportunity to millions of Americans. Decent employment and housing are milestones on the road out of poverty. Yet these are areas in which racial discrimination stubbornly persists. While the open hostility and "Whites Only" signs of the Jim Crow era have largely disappeared, research shows that identically qualified candidates for jobs and housing enjoy significantly different opportunities depending on their race…
These modern discriminatory practices often combine with historical patterns. In New Orleans, for example, as in many other cities, low-income African Americans were intentionally concentrated in segregated, low-lying neighborhoods and public-housing developments at least into the 1960s. In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck and the levees broke, black neighborhoods were most at risk of devastation. And when HUD announced that it would close habitable public-housing developments in New Orleans rather than clean and reopen them, it was African Americans who were primarily prevented from returning home and rebuilding. This and other failures to rebuild and invest have exacerbated poverty -- already at high levels -- among these New Orleanians.
In the case of Native Americans, a quarter of whom are poor, our government continues to play a more flagrant role in thwarting pathways out of poverty. Unlike other racial and ethnic groups, most Native Americans are members of sovereign tribal nations with a recognized status under our Constitution. High levels of Native American poverty derive not only from a history of wars, forced relocations, and broken treaties by the United States but also from ongoing breaches of trust -- like our government's failure to account for tens of billions of dollars that it was obligated to hold in trust for Native American individuals and families…
We cannot hope to address poverty in a meaningful or lasting way without addressing race-based barriers to opportunity. The most effective solutions will take on these challenges together.
Women bear the brunt of economic inequality, for themselves, and their families:
Addressing the causes of the gender income gap is key to increasing the financial stability of women and their families. But building their long-term economic security will require a broader range of strategies because, today, the women’s wealth gap is far greater than the income gap. While single women earn about 79 cents on the dollar compared to men, they own only 32 cents. 6 The wealth gap for women of color is a chasm—pennies on the dollar compared to both white women and men.7
As a consequence, women disproportionately suffer the hardships imposed by economic inequality:
Across a series of indicators, we find that women have higher rates of poverty and hardship than men, although the degree of the disparity varies. This result holds for measures of deep poverty, regular poverty, near poverty, and our low-income category. It holds for measures of official and supplemental poverty alike (although the gap is smaller under a supplemental poverty measure). And it holds for a household food insecurity measure. (pg. 25)
Gender disparities in income are rooted in the gender segregation of work:
In a hypothetical world with no occupational segregation, we might expect about 48 percent of workers in every occupation to be women, because about 48 percent of paid worker sare women. This expectation is wildly off the mark. In reality,occupations vary enormously in the share of workers who are women, ranging from about 3.5 percent in occupations such as home appliance repairers to 95 percent in occupations such as secretaries and child care workers. This is a simple—but profound—form of gender inequality that is too often seen as natural or inevitable.As of 2016, about half of women would need to shift into anew occupation to eliminate all occupational segregation by gender. This hypothetical desegregation effort could occur if49 percent of women moved out of their current female-dominated occupations and into male-dominated occupations.1 (pg. 30)
Despite her best efforts, a woman is unlikely to ‘pull herself out’ of lower-paid employment, because of the obstacles she faces each time she applies for a job:
There is a growing body of field-experimental evidence on gender discrimination in hiring in the United States. This evidence points to the deep and persistent consequences that gender discrimination has for employment outcomes.It is not the case, however, that all types of women are disadvantaged or that they’re disadvantaged to the same extent at the early moments of the hiring process. Rather, the average “gender effect” hides significant complexity, and recent research highlights how gender works with other applicant characteristics and contextual forces to produce disparate outcomes. At the individual level, gender intersects with an applicant’s parental status, social class background, and prior employment history to affect the likelihood of receiving a callback for a job. (pg. 35)
Similar dynamics can be observed when we look at the effects of racial discrimination in creating and maintaining income and wealth inequality:
A massive academic and policy literature has sought to determine what drives the racial income gap and why it has remained so intransigent over the past 50 years. Sophisticated audit studies have shown that racial discrimination remains a key force at all levels of the labor market (Gaddis 2015; Pager 2003). Regression based decomposition analyses suggest that observable characteristics, such as work experience and educational background, play some role, although the magnitude of their contribution is debated (Blinder 1973; Neal and Johnson 1996; Wilson and Rodgers 2016). Some portion of the gap is explained by occupational segregation,itself influenced by discrimination and pre-market factors (Hamilton, Austin, and Darity 2011; Tomaskovic-Devey 1993).This article argues that one underappreciated driver of the racial income gap has been the shape of the income distribution itself. Over the past 40 years, there has been a dramatic increase in the share of economic resources going to the very wealthy combined with income stagnation for everyone else. This shift has disproportionately harmed African Americans, who remain over-represented in the less affluent portions of the income distribution (Bayer and Charles 2016; Juhn, Murphy,and Pierce 1991; Wilson and Rodgers 2016 (pp. 182-183)
Blacks did make real strides up the income distribution despite continued disparities in parental wealth (Nam et al. 2015; Oliverand Shapiro 1995), access to high-quality education (Darling-Hammond 1998; Kozol1991; Orfield and Lee 2005), family structure (Bloome 2014), and treatment in the labor market (Gaddis 2015; Pager 2003). But just as they were working their way up the income distribution, the distribution itself was collapsing down around them. This meant that they were denied the economic rewards that previous groups of Americans received upon mass entry into the middle class. Their upward relative mobility has amounted to a rearguard action that merely prevented the exacerbation of an already large racial income gap. Moving forward, today’s high levels of income inequality further encumber the difficult struggle for racial economic equality. Because the income distribution has become so unequal, each hard-won increase in relative status (outside the very top) now translates into a smaller absolute rise in income. (pg. 183)
The potential interactions between overall economic structure and racial disparities have not gone unnoticed within sociology or economics. The interaction between macro economic shifts, segregation, and racial disparities forms a core pillar of the scholarship of William Julius Wilson (1978, 1987, 1996, 2009). Throughout his work, Wilson has emphasized the importance of “indirect structural forces,”such as changes in the types of jobs available or the spatial locations of those jobs, in shaping racial disparities (Smelser et al. 2001). Although these forces appear orthogonal to questions of racial inequality and do not necessarily have their origins in any racialized process, they have disproportionately harmed African Americans and other groups that are concentrated among the less affluent parts of society.Economists have also noted that changes to the overall economy may have different effects on different racial groups. African Americans are particularly affected by the business cycle, with boom periods—most notably the full-employment economy of the late 1990s—being especially good for black incomes and bust periods being especially bad (Freeman and Rodgers 1999; Wilson 2015).The most direct predecessors to this article are studies that have found the national rise in income inequality to be a major contributor to the black–white earnings gap. (pp. 186-187)
Large racial gaps in living standards have persisted in the decades since the civil rights movement. In 1968, the median family income among African Americans was 57 percent as large as that among whites. In 2016, the ratio was 56 percent. This racial gap in living standards has hardly budged despite real if incomplete progress in reducing racial gaps in college attendance and high school achievement (Jencksand Phillips 2011; Ryan and Bauman 2016).In this article, I have shown that the near-perfect stability in overall black–white income ratios is the result of two large but diametrically opposed trends. On the one hand, African Americans have made meaningful progress up the income distribution. The median African American had a family income at the 25th percentile of the national distribution in 1968 and had climbed to the 35th percentile in 2016. A similar upward trajectory in rank terms occurred throughout the African American income distribution. This improvement is limited, certainly, but it is not nothing.However, these relative gains were offset by changes to the income distribution that allocated a much smaller share of the national income to the poor and middle class, in which African Americans were and continue to be disproportionately concentrated, and a much larger share to the top 10 percent and especially the top 1percent—the portions of the distribution that remain the most disproportionately white. As the very rich absorbed larger and larger shares of the economy, the middle class slid back, reducing the payoff in dollars that was associated with progress in rank. These two forces almost perfectly balanced each other, resulting in hardly any net change in black–white income ratios.It is important to note that the mechanism I have described based on rising inequality at the national level operates distinctly from racial differences in family structure, which also contribute to racial disparities in family income. Previous research has documented that differences in family structure between whites and blacks are a major reason for the continued presence of racial disparities in family income (Bloome 2014; Isaacs 2007). But this trend cannot explain the phenomenon described here. Racial differences in family structure contribute to the rank gap between blacks and whites because they result in African Americans clustering in family structures, such as single-parent families, with systematically lower incomes than the family structures that are more common among whites. Despite these differences in family structure, I have shown that there was a net decrease inthe black–white rank gap in family income from 1968 to 2016. Because of rising inequality, however, that progress in rank terms did not translate into similar progress in dollars. (pp. 195-196)
That is, the benefits of periods of economic prosperity (and the policies deemed to promote them) do not benefit all wage-earners equally.
Rather, as is the case in every other social, political and economic domain, White males reap the rewards to a massively skewed degree, even among those White males classified as poor, low-income and working class:
For decades, an increasingly loud chorus has claimed that economic inequality is primarily driven by class, with other possible reasons for disparities, such as race, playing a lesser role. They say that it is counterproductive to focus on inequality between races—instead, it is better to consider the inequality between all of America’s poor and its increasingly rich elite. A new study (pdf) by economists at Stanford, Harvard, and the US Census Bureau seems to refute that idea.
The paper, which assesses data on intergenerational economic mobility for 20 million US children and their parents, shows that when it comes to racial inequality, primarily between black and white Americans, class can’t explain the gap.
The findings come from the Equality of Opportunity project, spearheaded by Stanford economist Raj Chetty, revealed particularly stark results about the prospects for black boys. Black American men, even from wealthy families, are much more likely to end up in lower income brackets than white men who grew up poorer...
The lack of economic mobility and the racial inequality gap paints a picture of two different Americas. In “good” neighorhoods with low poverty rates, high test scores, and a large fraction of college graduates, upward mobility is higher for both blacks and whites but the gap between them is actually wider than in other places. In short, white boys benefit more from growing up in these areas than blacks…
In the US, the economic inequality gap between races will never close unless policies are directed specifically at improving upward mobility for black men. The report says policies that reduce inequality for a single generation, such as temporary cash transfers, minimum wage increases, or basic income programs, isn’t enough to close the gap over time. (emphasis added)
If economic inequality is to be ameliorated, the policies proffered to address it must explicitly target gender and racial discrimination. In other words, effective polices cannot be ‘race and gender neutral’, or they will simply fail (as they always have failed), precisely because such ‘economics/class only’ policies leave the fundamental framework of inequality in place:
In this article we apply a process oriented life course perspective integrating intersectionality into a comparative analysis of intertwined longitudinal work and family life courses. We offer an in-depth longitudinal thick description to jointly explore the gendered and racial privileges and disadvantages that black men, white men, black women and white women experience in the interaction of work and family life courses. In other words: Do white men have the possibility to combine any family formation processes with any type of work career? Do black women have the same possibilities? Which constraints do white women and black men experience in combining work and family lives? The analysis centers on black and white women and men during their most active family formation and career building phase between the age of 22 and 44.Our analysis reveals a significant association between work-family life courses for all intersectional groups except for white men. White men are the only group who can combine all different types of family life courses with any type of more or less successful work careers. In contrast, black men only have access to careers of high occupational prestige, if they are in long-term stable co-residential relationships, enter fatherhood at later ages and have no more than one child. For black women we cannot identify any very high prestige career patterns in significant numbers, but even medium prestige careers are mostly accessible for black women who have few children later in life and/or who have no partner. For white women the highest prestige work careers are also accompanied by a typical pattern of late parenthood or childlessness. (pg. 2)
Among black men and women a lack of parental resources and employer side characteristics of discrimination might be more powerful explanatory factors for who sorts into which work-family life course type. In particular discrimination on combined intersectional categories (e.g. black single mother) is likely to be much larger than the additive effect of each of these categories separately (Pager 2003).In addition the availability of support with child care in kinship networks, including the availability of grandparent care might be a crucial factor especially for black men and women who try to balance parenthood with unstable, inflexible and irregular work hours(Carrillo et al 2017). (pg. 20)
This conception is clearly articulated in a report prepared for Funders for a Just Economy:
“Folks within the traditional labor movement are increasingly seeing the need to build solutions that have impact at these intersections versus seeking a more transactional change that gets less at systemic change or long-term infrastructure and power.”
“You can build worker and community power, but duplicate male and white supremacy. We are seeing more and more leaders who do not want to replicate exploitative and more patriarchal kinds of power. If you do not shift that, ultimately we do not achieve the change we seek.” (pg. 7, emphasis added)
The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean has similarly recognized that inequality must be addressed in an intersectional manner, if it is to be eliminated:
�Inequality is a concept that includes, but transcends income andrelates to the uneven exercise of rights, and unequal access to opportunities and capacity development, and unequal results
� Inequality is a multidimensional phenomenon that acts as a formidable barrier for poverty eradication and sustainable development
� Poverty reduction - especially ´to reach the furthest behind first´ -requires equality-oriented policies
� Promoting greater equality not only helps to safeguard the economic, social and cultural rights of all people, but also fosters growth, development and greater social cohesion, all necessary conditions to reduce poverty (slide 9)