Race, class and inequality: new research

Image by John Tyson.

In recent articleLydia Polgreen said if Kamala Harris is being named as a DEI candidate, then J.D. Vance should be too. She backs this up with research from a Tufts University scholar who argues that elite schools such as Yale, where Mr. Vance graduated from law school, devote extra attention and resources to poor white students to help them succeed. In other words, Affirmative Action is effectively applied to those who suffer from class disadvantage. There is no doubt that colleges and universities support poor students. But, of course, they must first go through a competitive process for admission. Once at the school, white students cannot obtain DEI protection status, according to an administrator at the University of California, Irvine. It does not protect students who have suffered exclusion and do not fit into any racial category. The capital component does not include a class category, despite claims in the popular press to the contrary.

But this must in a time when more and more wealth is concentrated at the top and at the expense of the working class, when the inequality gap continues to widen. Skin color trumps class for racial and ethnic groups that are already protected. But taking class into account in affirmative action guidelines will provide even stronger protections for people of color, who are also denied class-based rights.

Recent Harvard University study explored the relationship between race and class. It surveyed fifty-seven million people from Generations X and Y (Millennials) born in the late 1970s and early 1990s, comparing low-income black and white populations. Among the white population, the Generation Y group was found to experience a decline in income compared to the Generation X group. However, among the black population, these results were reversed. For the total low-income population, whites experienced a $2,050 decline in income and blacks saw an income increase of $1,420 during this intergenerational time. In one generation, the racial income gap between blacks and whites has narrowed. Agree, these are not exactly impressive numbers. But whites had outpaced blacks economically for generations prior to the period covered in this study. And these results preceded the surge of “wokeness” that occurred in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd, a top-down cultural revolution that blossomed alongside the Biden administration.

Conclusion: “Between two generations, Americans’ ability to penetrate the middle class has changed. Race has come to play a smaller role in upward mobility, while economic class plays a larger role.”

But this is also true, according to German Lopez and Ashley Wuwho praised the study stated that “people’s lives are not governed by such immutable facts as class and race.” In other words, success also depends on the quality of the society in which a person grows up, the status of the family, the presence of a job, social networks, the effectiveness of the school system, the presence of beautiful parks, the absence of crime. etc. The more such people in the community, the more positive sentiment there will be regarding the chances of success. And destinies are intertwined: success begets success. They have always disproportionately benefited the white population. But this is also changing. The study found that the presence of these factors among low-income blacks contributed to their success, while their relative absence among low-income whites hindered their success. The higher prevalence of these factors in black communities has been the result of several improvements in social, economic and daily life over the past twenty years or so. Progressive legislative advances and ongoing civil rights activism have led to significant changes that have prevented the reversal of these improvements (as SCOTUS attempted to do in the mid-1990s with Affirmative Action).

The results by region were revealing. For blacks, the improvement was relatively consistent across the country, although the numbers were better in the Southeast. For whites, the shift in Generation Y occurred primarily in rural America, the Midwest, and the mountain states.

This was especially evident in regions that experienced job losses in China, India and other countries due to technology and globalization. It began in the 1970s and led to the deindustrialization of much of the country’s heartland, where manufacturing companies once paid high union wages. This disrupted the cultural and financial life of these communities, with negative consequences still evident today. This is well known. But the impact on employment for blacks and whites is a surprise, according to Lopez and Wu. Whites were forced out of the labor market, and blacks found other jobs.

They offer the following explanations for this inequality:

“White workers may have had more wealth or savings to cope with unemployment than their black counterparts, but at the cost of their career advancement. They may also have been less likely to look for another job. The closed steel mill might have employed more than just one worker, but his father and grandfather, making it a family affair. People in this situation may feel that they have lost more than just a job and will not accept any other job. Places where black workers live tend to suffer less from job flight than places where white workers live. And compared with previous generations, black workers today experience less racial prejudice in the workforce, making it easier for them to find work. While a white worker may have a generational connection to working in a steel mill, a black worker often does not because segregation kept his parents and grandparents out. These trends are leading to decades of lost economic progress for low-income white people and vice versa for black Americans.

This only applies to low-income black and white populations. As the study notes, the real problem we face is increasing inequality overall.

(This figure has increased under the Biden administration). It mentions this disease in relation to the white population, but this expansion is also present in the black population. The structural mechanisms of neoliberal, monetarist capitalism, which oppresses such a huge portion of American society, continue to exponentially increase the capital of the 1%, regardless of the color of their skin.

The question moving forward is whether this systemic force can be contained so that this expansion begins to reverse while gains can be made among all low-income groups. And redrawing the affirmative action agenda in a class-conscious way that preserves the power of race will help spur that progress.