Race, Class, and Inequality: A New Study
Image by Jon Tyson.
In a recent op-ed, Lydia Polgreen said that if Kamala Harris is labeled as a DEI candidate, then J. D. Vance must be as well. She supports this with research from a Tufts University scholar who claims that elite schools, like Yale, where Mr. Vance graduated law school, give extra attention and resources to poor white students to help them succeed. In other words, Affirmative Action effectively applies to those suffering deficits in terms of class. There’s no question that colleges and universities support poor students. But, of course, they first must survive the competitive process for admission. And once in the institution, the white students can’t get DEI protected status, according to an administrator at the University of California, Irvine. It doesn’t protect students who suffer damages from exclusion and who do not fit into one of the racial categories. The “equity” component doesn’t include the category of class, despite claims to the contrary in the popular press.
But it should in these times when ever more wealth is concentrated at the top and at the expense of the working class—when the inequality gap keeps widening. Skin color trumps class for those from racial and ethnic groups who are already protected. But factoring class into the Affirmative Action guidelines will provide even stronger protection for those of color who are also class deprived.
A recent Harvard University study investigated the relation between race and class. It targeted fifty-seven million subjects across the Gen X and Gen Y (Millennial) generations, those born in the late 1970s and those born in the early 1990s, comparing low-income black and white populations. In the white population, it found, the Gen Y group had suffered a decline in income in relation to the Gen X group. In the black population, however, these results were reversed. For the aggregate low-income population, whites suffered a decline of $2050 in income, and blacks accrued a $1420 increase in income across this generational stretch. Over one generation, the black-white racial income gap narrowed. Admittedly, these are not exactly striking figures. But whites have outpaced blacks economically for generations prior to the period covered in this study. And these results preceded the spike in “woke” that occurred in 2020 in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, the top-down cultural revolution that has blossomed in lock step with the Biden administration’s tenure.
The conclusion: “Between two generations, Americans’ ability to break into the middle class has changed. Race has come to play a smaller role in upward mobility while economic class plays a larger role.”
But it’s also true, according to German Lopez and Ashley Wu, who evaluated the study, that “people’s lives aren’t guided by immutable facts like class and race.” In other words, success also depends on the quality of the community the individual grows up in, the status of the family, the availability of work, social networks, the effectiveness of the school system, the presence of nice parks, the absence of crime, etc. The more of these there are in a community, the more positive sentiments there will be about the chance to succeed. And fates are intertwined: success breeds success. These have always disproportionately benefited the white population. But this is changing as well. The study found that the presence of these factors for low-income blacks contributed to their success, while their relative absence for low-income whites inhibited theirs. The greater incidence of these factors in black communities was the result of pockets of improvement in social, economic, and everyday life over the past twenty years or so. Progressive legislative gains and ongoing civil rights activism have seeded sufficient changes that have prevented these improvements from being clawed back (like SCOTUS tried to do in the mid-1990s with Affirmative Action).
The results by region were revealing. For blacks, the improvement was relatively constant across the country, though the southeast performed better. For whites, the reversal for Gen Y occurred mostly in rural America, the mid-west through the mountain states.
This was especially evident in areas that experienced a loss of jobs to China, India and elsewhere from technology and globalization. This began in the 1970s and was responsible for de-industrializing a significant swath of the heartland where manufacturing companies once paid high union wages. This gutted the cultural and financial livelihood of these communities, the negative consequences evident still today. This much is well known. But the impact on black and white employment, according to Lopez and Wu, is a surprise. Whites were pushed out of the work force while blacks found other jobs.
They posit the following explanations for this disparity:
“White workers might have had more wealth or savings to weather unemployment than their black counterparts did, but at a cost to their upward mobility. They might also have been less willing to find another job. A steel mill that shut down could have employed not just one worker but his father and grandfather, making it a family occupation. People in that situation might feel that they lost something more than a job and might not settle for any other work. The places where black workers live were generally less affected by job flight than the places where white workers live. And compared with earlier generations, black workers today are less likely to face racial prejudice in the labor force, making it easier for them to find work. While a white worker might have a generational connection to a steel mill job, a black worker often does not, because segregation kept his parents and grandparents out. These trends add up to decades of lost economic progress for low-income white people and the opposite for black Americans.
This only pertains to the black and white low-income populations. As the study notes, the real issue we face is the widening of inequality overall
(that has increased in the Biden administration). It references this malady in relation to the white population, but this widening is also present in the black population. The structural workings of the neoliberal, monetarist capitalism that oppresses such a formidable swatch of American society keep expanding the capital of the 1% exponentially, irrespective of its skin color.
The question moving forward is whether this systemic force can be checked so that this widening begins to reverse while gains can be made within all the low-income populations. And redrawing Affirmative Action to account for class in a way that preserves the strength of race will help motor this progress.
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