Inequality in America

Introduction

THE MEN WHO DESIGNED THE US SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT IN THE latter part of the eighteenth century present a frustrating paradox to current students of American politics. The Founding Fathers brilliantly devised a structure of government that would last, relatively unchanged, for well over two hundred years (and counting). They were deeply flawed, however, with respect to their inability to reconcile the sweeping promises they articulated in the founding documents with the reality of widespread and brutal inequality that characterized the nation at that time. We celebrate the Founding Fathers by honoring their birthdays, displaying them on our currency, and studying them in our classrooms. But we need to qualify our admiration because their personal lives and public actions did not fully reflect their rhetoric and broader beliefs. In short, American democracy is at once vibrant because of their vision and imperfect because of their blind spots.

If we are interested in improving American democracy—in making "a more perfect union," as then senator Barack Obama said in his popular 2008 speech on race in America⁴—we are wise to redirect our attention from the individuals who designed the system and occupied key positions in it, to the system itself—the key assertion of this book. We will seek to understand how individual actors (both ordinary citizens and political elites) operate within a system that has largely constrained attempts to rectify what many recognize as injustices.

Inequality in America comes in multiple forms, though this volume focuses primarily on two: poverty and racism. But as we will see, it is impossible to disentangle other types of inequality from issues related to race and economics. Although I do not specifically address inequality related to sexual orientation or physical ability, for example, these factors (and more) are very real and meaningful challenges that affect millions of Americans on a daily basis. While I recognize the interaction among these forces at certain points and address gender in Chapter 8, I mostly focus on the distinct and interrelated elements of race and poverty and the intricacies of the legacy of inequality that has come to characterize American government and politics in its first two centuries.

Poverty and the Myth of Meritocracy

On the surface, understanding poverty appears simple: some have the financial resources they need, and some do not. If we want to understand how one of the wealthiest nations in the world can also be home to so much poverty, however, we need to examine the assumptions that accompany the realities of statistics about poverty. These assumptions help explain why ordinary Americans (the vast majority of whom are not wealthy) are willing to tolerate the existence of widespread income and wealth inequality, as well as abject poverty.

In August 2011, broadcaster Tavis Smiley and scholar Cornel West launched an eighteen-city "poverty tour" to call attention to these issues. The tour culminated in the publication of a book, The Rich and the Rest of Us,⁵ in which the authors lay out a vision for understanding poverty in a more complete (and complicated) way. Subtitled "A Poverty Manifesto," their book serves as a call to action. They ask Americans to eschew the "lies about poverty that America can no longer afford" (e.g., that poverty is a character flaw, that minorities receive the bulk of government entitlements, and that poverty is uniquely urban),⁶ and they advocate for public policies that are designed to lead to economic justice. Their work is powerful because it taps into Americans' shared core values, such as egalitarianism and justice. But other core values, such as individualism, are harder to reconcile with policies that promote economic redistribution. Together, we will explore the spaces where there is commonality and the areas where there is friction between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans on issues relating to racial and economic inequality.

Residing at the core of these differences is the notion of meritocracy, the belief that those who have success earned it while those who do not, did not.⁷ Few would deny that Americans start out life with an unequal chance of financial success. But understanding how injustice is perpetuated requires an understanding of how inequality at birth often manifests in a lifetime of advantage or disadvantage.

In November 2010, Meghan McCain,⁸ a noted blogger and daughter of longtime US senator (and 2008 Republican nominee for president) John McCain, used her space on The Daily Beast blog to criticize former Alaska governor (and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee) Sarah Palin for calling the Bush family "blue bloods" (a reference to their upper-class status). McCain, who considers herself a Republican, charged that such divisiveness within the party was counterproductive. But her response illustrates some core assumptions that most Americans hold about social class in the United States. In her blog entry, McCain ignores institutional factors that constrain poor Americans' chances of becoming blue bloods while enabling the children of wealthy Americans to follow in their parents' footsteps. She writes:

As McCain admits later in the piece, she reacted to Palin's accusation personally because she grew up with tremendous privilege. Rather than recognizing that her privilege was unearned (it was a function of her parents' success, not her own work), she dismisses Palin's comment as inappropriate because "blue bloods" is a derogatory term for "families that work hard and achieve a long line of successful people." Here McCain invokes the myth of meritocracy; she believes that hard work leads to economic success (often through education), and she incorrectly (and perhaps unintentionally) suggests that each generation starts from scratch in its achievements.⁹ It is certainly possible that members of each generation of a privileged family work hard in their own right, but the lack of recognition of the head start that subsequent generations have (compared to those who begin life in poverty) is startling. Further, it reflects our collective socialization that urges us to accept the legitimacy of the American political and economic systems. We are taught to believe that those who are financially successful (as well as those who have access to excellent educational institutions) are fully deserving of that privilege, whereas those who are not must have acted badly at some point and, therefore, deserve their poverty. As we will see, however, such a generalization is unfair and harmful because it obscures systemic factors that contribute to poverty (and wealth) so as to rectify injustice.

This dynamic was very clearly at work in the 2016 presidential campaign, as millions of poor, primarily white, voters from rural areas of the country put their trust in billionaire real estate mogul and reality television star Donald Trump. On the surface, it should seem curious that millions of working-class Americans would throw their support behind a person who has never struggled economically a day in his life. There are no easy explanations, but one element is that Mr. Trump represented for millions of Americans a pushback against the cultural elite. That is, even though he is wealthy, he spoke to workers, has created jobs for workers, and openly criticized political correctness and other aspects of a cosmopolitan America that many find offensive.¹⁰ His opponent, Hillary Clinton, embodied that elite class; though she was raised of modest means in a Chicago suburb, most of her adult life was spent in the public sphere. By the time she ran for president, she epitomized "establishment" politics, and the alternative was alluring. As we will discover in the following pages, social class is more than income or wealth. Although it is rooted in economic stability, class encompasses a set of norms that involve many aspects of everyday life, from clothing to love to the value of education, and even the way we use and appreciate humor.¹¹ Wealthy as he is, rural, white Americans¹² found in Donald Trump a fellow American who shared their values and understood their struggles. He promised to help reestablish the American middle class, and they were willing to give him a chance.

Despite our national folklore, America does indeed have a class system that affects individuals' ability to achieve the American Dream. While it is not an officially designated system with titles (such as in Great Britain)¹³ or a rigid caste system (such as in India),¹⁴ Americans clearly recognize differences based on economic circumstances and customs that serve to organize society. Class structure in the United States is disproportionately (though not solely) based on wealth.¹⁵ For that reason, we will address the concept of poverty as opposed to the broader concept of class. Economic and racial inequality will be our primary focus; we will explore the reasons that they exist and the myriad paths to reduce such inequality.

Irrespective of class designations—most Americans believe themselves to be in the middle class,¹⁶ so such labels may carry little useful meaning—we will see that the data characterizing the distribution of income and wealth in the United States clearly reveal a large gap between the rich and the poor. That gap has been growing rapidly over the past thirty years, and, as we will see in Chapter 2, the number of Americans who reside in the middle is shrinking.

This notion of class differences came into sharp focus late in the summer of 2011 when the Occupy Wall Street (OWS or Occupy) movement was born with the launch of a website (OccupyWallStreet.org¹⁷) and a social media campaign, calling attention to the historically high and expanding degree of economic inequality in the United States. Protests began in Lower Manhattan on September 17, 2011, and rallies and demonstrations quickly spread to other cities in the United States and around the globe. The Occupy slogan, "We Are the 99 Percent," refers to the dramatic accumulation of wealth by the top 1 percent of Americans (see Chapter 2).

The mantle was carried even more visibly in the 2016 presidential election, as US senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont ran a strong campaign for the Democratic nomination rooted in the call to rectify economic inequality. Both Occupy and the Sanders campaign were successful in calling attention to an issue that was largely ignored by the media (and thus most of the American public) for nearly fifty years. As a result of Occupy, the 2012 presidential candidates were forced to address the issue, and America became positioned for a frank discussion about whether such trends are consistent with our fundamental shared values. Energized by the relative success of the Sanders campaign (he lost the nomination to Hillary Clinton, but not before winning twenty-one states and Puerto Rico¹⁸), young Americans in particular appear eager to continue the discussion and find unique ways to create meaningful change to bring about greater economic justice.

Given our history, we cannot consider these economic factors without also considering race. Race and poverty are not interchangeable demographic markers in the United States: there are wealthy people of color, and there are poor whites. However, poverty is disproportionately African American and Hispanic/Latino^* in America, and issues that uniquely face persons of color are often present irrespective of economic success.

Racial and Economic Inequality Through the Lens of Political Science

The first half of the twenty-first century marks a critical period in the racial history of the United States. By many projections, persons who identify as white¹⁹ will become a numerical minority in the next few decades.²⁰ Barack Obama's election to the presidency in 2008 marked a milestone that just a generation earlier many Americans never expected they would see. Yet the racial tension that surfaced in the shadow of that election, including during his reelection campaign in 2012,²¹ increased awareness of police brutality against African American men (which spawned the Black Lives Matter movement²²) and led to Donald Trump's campaign in 2016,²³ serving as a sober reminder that America's deep racial divisions persist.

In the days after the 2008 presidential election, the term postracial entered the public sphere in a meaningful way. With an image of civil rights legend Jesse Jackson weeping openly in Chicago's Grant Park while the newly elected president gave his acceptance speech as a cultural backdrop, many Americans—white Americans in particular—believed that the history of racial oppression had come to a dramatic close. After all, the most powerful person in the nation was African American. Those who had been skeptical of racism's legacy in the first place believed that the event was simply a bright marker of what they had been saying for decades—racism ended in the 1960s when Jim Crow segregation was abolished legally. On the other hand, those who recognized that racism was more than racial animosity took comfort in the symbolism, if only momentarily.

The belief that America is characterized by a postracial identity dramatically cuts against the lived experiences of generations of persons of color in America. America's poorest and most economically vulnerable citizens are still distinctly black (African American) and brown (Latino and Hispanic). Further, inequality between middle- and upper-class whites and those who hover near the poverty line has increased dramatically in the past generation, suggesting the existence of "two Americas"²⁴ with little evidence of inequality being reversed in the near future. This book documents that inequality through the lens of political science. We will examine racial and economic inequality with particular attention to how public policy and power dynamics in America are influenced by—and perpetuate—disparities in income and wealth, housing, education, crime, immigration, employment opportunities, and health. The reasons for this inequality are complicated, but answers on the political left and right often center on "common sense" or other simplistic frameworks. Potential solutions, however, require a sophisticated understanding of the systems and institutional constraints that set parameters for the attitudes and behaviors of the mass public and political elites alike. In the following chapters, we will explore this complexity with an eye to the achievement of increased equality.

Striving for more equality is not a value-neutral proposition. Equality is a core value for Americans, but that does not mean we are unified with respect to what it means or how to achieve it. In considering this dynamic, it is helpful to think about the difference between objectivity and neutrality.

Scholars and journalists both strive for objectivity—the conscious effort to be attentive to one's biases when analyzing a situation. But in many ways, this goal can never be fully realized. Striving toward neutrality, however, particularly with respect to inequality, is undesirable. Few of us would approach this book with the attitude "Equality—I can take it or leave it." To the contrary, this subject tends to inflame passions. Many Americans have risked and indeed have given their lives in the name of social justice. The friction, as we will see, most often arises when we consider what equality looks like and, if we decide that we have fallen short of achieving it, how to remedy that failure.