Emily Badger, Claire Cain Miller, Adam Pearce and Kevin Quealy, writing in the New York Times, provide a piercing look at the true nature of economic inequality in the US:
Black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of the most well-to-do neighborhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds, according to a sweeping new study that traced the lives of millions of children.
White boys who grow up rich are likely to remain that way. Black boys raised at the top, however, are more likely to become poor than to stay wealthy in their own adult households…
According to the study, led by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and the Census Bureau, income inequality between blacks and whites is driven entirely by what is happening among these boys and the men they become. Though black girls and women face deep inequality on many measures, black and white girls from families with comparable earnings attain similar individual incomes as adults.
The idea that inequality can be understood and addressed by focusing on class status is not only misguided, it is dangerously inaccurate:
“One of the most popular liberal post-racial ideas is the idea that the fundamental problem is class and not race, and clearly this study explodes that idea,” said Ibram Kendi, a professor and director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. “But for whatever reason, we’re unwilling to stare racism in the face.”
There should be no confusion about what the data tell us:
The research makes clear that there is something unique about the obstacles black males face. The gap between Hispanics and whites is narrower, and their incomes will converge within a couple of generations if mobility stays the same. Asian-Americans earn more than whites raised at the same income level, or about the same when first-generation immigrants are excluded. Only Native Americans have an income gap comparable to African-Americans. But the disparities are widest for black boys.
Eric Levitz, writing for New York Magazine describes how wherever we look, we find systemic economic racism:
if Americans have grown less racist in recent years, their economy most certainly has not. In fact, a flurry of new research suggests that economic inequality between black and white Americans is far greater than members of either demographic realize — and will only grow larger, absent a concerted policy response.
Last week, census data revealed that median household income in the United States hit a record high in 2016 — finally eclipsing the peak it reached in 1999. This finding deserved less celebration than it received. (If you told economists in 1999 that the median American family wouldn’t see a rise for the next 16 years, even as the prices of health, housing, and higher education would all drastically increase, you would not have been called an optimist.) But when one looked to the median income of African-American households, there wasn’t even superficially good news to report: In the last year of the Obama presidency, black families were still earning less than they did in the early 2000s.
This dispiriting reality has myriad causes. But a new study by Northwestern University, Harvard, and the Institute for Social Research in Norway shines light on one of them: Employers are still discriminating against African-American job applicants like it’s 1989.
The researchers arrived at that conclusion after examining the results from every available field experiment on racial discrimination in American hiring that was conducted between 1989 and 2015.
This is not a situation that will simply evaporate by attempting ‘race neutral’ policies to remedy economic equality:
While the prevalence of hiring discrimination has gone unchanged since the late 1980s, the racial wealth gap has radically expanded. As Slate’s Jamelle Bouie notes:
Between 1983 and 2013, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, the wealth of the median black household declined 75 percent (from $6,800 to $1,700), and the median Latino household declined 50 percent (from $4,000 to $2,000). At the same time, wealth for the median white household increased 14 percent from $102,000 to $116,800. It’s an almost unbelievable contrast, and by 2020, black and Latino households are projected to lose even more wealth: 18 percent for the former, 12 percent for the latter. After those declines, the median white household will own 86 times more wealth than its black counterpart, and 68 times more wealth than its Latino one. This isn’t a wealth gap — it’s a wealth chasm.
If nothing is done, that chasm will grow larger. By 2024, “the continued rise in racial wealth inequality between median black, Latino and white households is projected to lead White households to own 99 and 75 times more wealth than their black and Latino counterparts, respectively.”
The necessary perspective to address economic inequality requires abandoning the ‘class not race’ formulation, as Noah Zatz explicates in an article for the journal Law and Political Economy:
… separating race and the economy itself does racist work. It functions to insulate the so-called market economy from racial critique, and to confine matters of racial equality to other spheres. Vice versa, it obscures economic injuries of deprivation, of exploitation, of dispossession when they can only be seen clearly with a racial analysis.
Consider, for instance, insights from Michelle Alexander, Bruce Western, and others showing how racialized mass incarceration produces racial stratification in labor and housing markets, via criminal records exclusions and otherwise. These are not merely effects on economic domains. Rather, as Donna Murch’s analysis of criminal justice debt makes clear, these involve the construction of racial inequality with economic tools themselves justified with racism.
Vice versa, scholars and advocates have been showing how economic inequality yields racially specific vulnerability. For instance, people of color get racially profiled, stopped by the police, and then fined. The fines cannot be paid because of lack of income, assets, and credit. At the next stop, they now are vulnerable to arrest because of an outstanding warrant, and, if the encounter deteriorates, to getting shot and possibly killed, again mediated by racialized attributions of uncooperativeness and threat. These kinds of race/class interactions have been ubiquitous among high profile police killings of working class Black men such as Eric Garner, Walter Scott, and Alton Sterling…
The usual conceit here is that looking at differences among white people somehow factors out race to reveal the independent influence of class or gender. So we see class (not race) operating in the large swing between white college graduates (48% for Trump) versus whites with no college degree (66% for Trump). Intersectionality, though, teaches us that class, gender, or race often are not “independent” influences in this way. For example, if class were independent of race, then class differences among people of color should operate like class differences among whites. But these data show that working class people of color turned out overwhelmingly for Clinton. Indeed, they supported Clinton at slightly higher rates (76%) than those with college degrees (72%), a “class” effect in the opposite direction than for whites. This simple analytical point shows that class did not operate independently of race. It recalls Stuart Hall’s insight that “race is the modality in which class is lived.”
Thus, drawing conclusions about class from data about white people ignores working class people of color and consigns them to pure “race” voters. It reproduces a racially unmarked but implicitly white concept of the working class, one that is especially problematic against the backdrop of racially stratified stereotypes of who is and is not “hard working.” Using, as has become common, the racially qualified term “white working class” is an improvement, but too often it goes without an accompanying analysis of how whiteness shapes class among white people nor how class matters to people of color.
Limiting class analysis to white people erases issues tremendously important to the material circumstances of people of color. Generations of research detail the economic devastation inflicted on Black communities from the decline in manufacturing jobs. Likewise, the more recent assault on public employment and public employee unions has dislodged critical footholds in middle-class jobs, especially among women of color. Treating these as “economic” issues, and therefore outside questions of racial justice, dangerously circumscribes racial critique. It also insulates those perpetuating such neoliberal policies from accountability in racial justice terms. (emphasis added)
One factor that perpetuates the notion that a complete and productive analysis of economic inequality can be effected in a ‘race neutral’, class-based manner is blindness to the persistence and extent of racial economic inequality. In an article appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [PNAS], Michael W. Kraus, Julian M. Rucker, and Jennifer A. Richeson demonstrate that most Americans (especially Whites) fail to recognize the problem exists at all:
An important, often overlooked, facet of economic inequality in the United States is that it is a product of historical and present day forms of racism—labor, housing, and other policies and practices—that have systematically disadvantaged racial/ethnic minorities in their pursuit of economic opportunities. One result of these historical and ongoing forces is a vast and persistent economic disparity between Black and White families in the United States (1), of which Americans seem largely unaware.The present research documented both the pervasiveness and magnitude of this general lack of awareness and relevant sociostructural correlates and began to explore the psychological processes and motives that promote or undermine awareness and/or acknowledgment of societal racial economic inequality.The results of the present studies suggest that Americans largely misperceive race-based economic equality. Indeed, our results suggest a systematic tendency to perceive greater progress toward racial economic equality than has actually been achieved, largely driven by overestimates of current levels of equality. Although this tendency to overestimate current racial economic equality was observed among both White and Black Americans, there was also a significant status divide in the magnitude of these misperceptions: high-income White Americans’ overestimates of current racial economic equality were larger than those generated by low income White Americans and by Black Americans across the income distribution. (pg. 10329, emphasis added)
Previous diaries about systemic economic racism and the racist basis of economic inequality:
Anti-Capitalist Meet-up: ‘Color-Caste’: W.E.B. DuBois on Race and Class. (May 6, 2018)
’Black Marxism’: To fight economic inequality, fight systemic economic racism. (long read) (Nov. 1, 2017)
from The Root: Want to fight economic inequality? Then fight systemic economic racism. (Oct. 16, 2017)
Think economic issues matter? Want to fix income inequality? Then fight discrimination. (Feb. 3, 2017)