Inequality exists in all societies, but it does not manifest itself in the same way everywhere and at all times. Among the major systems defining the unequal distribution of valued resources in any particular society are chattel slavery and caste systems at one end of the spectrum to social class systems at the other. Slavery has existed globally and continues to the present, particularly in various countries in Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, and the Arab world (Bales 1999). In the older form of slavery—chattel slavery—one group of people owns not simply the labor of another, but actually owns that person. In the system of slavery in the United States which began in the seventeenth century and ended with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War, the white plantation class owned African slaves. The slave trade ended early in the nineteenth century, but slavery was perpetuated for several more decades by enslaving the children of slaves. In the American South, as in other times and places, slavery was seen as natural and therefore just. This was seen elsewhere as well. In the case of Britain, slavery was outlawed before it was in the US, while in the case of Brazil, which imported more African slaves than any other country in the western hemisphere, slavery would not end until 1888.
Likewise, the idea that inequality is both natural and inevitable is associated with caste systems, where the social status of individuals is connected to their ritual purity or impurity. As with slavery, in a caste system there is no movement out of the status of one's birth. One of the most elaborate examples of a caste system can be found in India. Officially outlawed in 1950, the Indian caste system was supported by the Hindu concepts of karma and dharma. The Hindu religion believes that people experience several lifetimes, during which they suffer, until they achieve perfection. Karma was the belief that in this lifetime, a person is born into a particular caste—high or low—because she or he deserves to be there based on actions in a past life. Dharma refers to leading a moral existence in one's present life. Even the lowliest untouchable who lived with grace according to the rules of caste could be reborn into a higher caste. But this meant that upward mobility in a Hindu caste society could only occur in another lifetime. Both caste systems and slave systems prohibit mobility from one status group to another in this life.
In the American South, after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the treaty ending the Civil War, and the upheaval that took place during the era of Reconstruction, some argue that a system of color caste replaced slavery. This was the era known as Jim Crow that arose gradually in the aftermath of the Civil War and persisted until the civil rights movement a century later (Fredrickson 2002; Dollard 1937). Another example of color caste was the apartheid system in South Africa noted in Chapter 1 wherein the society was divided among whites, coloreds (the term used to refer to mixed race peoples), Indians and Africans in a context where economic, political, and cultural control rested in the hands of the white minority, with the African majority leading impoverished and marginalized lives and the other two castes existing in the interstices between the black and white populations (Frederickson 2008: 137–169).
A third way of distributing valued resources which characterized premodern European history was feudalism, predicated on the division of society into estates. A system of inequality justified by early Christian theology, wealth was tied to ownership of the land. Stewardship of land in rural England, France, Italy and other countries was in the hands of a small minority of the population, including the members of the aristocracy and the church hierarchy. The vast majority of the population consisted of the impoverished peasantry, with a relatively small stratum of other economic sectors—including shop owners, petty government officials, intellectuals, and the like—rounding out the population as a whole. In the centuries before industrialization, a person's position in life was for the most part determined at birth. One was born into the landed aristocracy or born to work the land. In this world, the hegemonic aristocracy and the peasants were mutually dependent on each other. Peasants’ lives depended on their ability to cultivate the land owned by their “lord,” who in turn amassed wealth as a consequence of the system of unequal exchange that benefited the feudal lords at the expense of the peasants. Vast inequalities characterized this world. The extreme differences of wealth were justified by the belief that poverty could be ennobling and that members of each estate had a distinct contribution to make to maintain social order.
When industrialization replaced an economic system predicated on agricultural production and the ownership of land, beliefs about the proper distribution of valued resources began to be rethought. So did beliefs about the heretofore presumed natural and God-given character of a social order predicated on a hierarchal society that resembled a pyramid with the rich at the top and the poor at the bottom. The idea of one group being “naturally inferior” to another by birth was questioned, as was the idea that social mobility from one rank to another ought to be, if not prohibited, at least severely restricted. In this new industrial economy, caste gave way to social class, which should be understood as a social location in the economic order that can have both an ascribed and an achieved character. While at birth individuals acquire a class location predicated on the social class of their parents, the possibility exists—to exactly what extent being open to question—of moving from one class to another due to hard work, intellect, chance, or some combination thereof.
When there is evidence of greater economic mobility, and a sense that many people end up being better off than they once were, there is a call for a corresponding effort to explain why some citizens fail to do as well as others. Put simply, if inequality is not natural or ordained by God, how can we account for it? From the perspective of those who did not see inequality as the result of exploitation and expression, Kingsley Davis and Wilbur Moore (1944) posed the question about why inequality exists in contemporary societies to readers of the American Sociological Review. Their thesis would become known as the classic functionalist account of inequality. Perhaps, they suggested, inequality is inevitable because it is good for society. In their account, occupation stood in for social class, because it was seen as reflecting the impact of education on careers and the impact of occupations on income. Their argument can be summarized rather succinctly:
Davis and Moore's depiction of modern industrial societies is one in which inequality is based on individual achievement. If true, it would mean that inequality is the product of a meritocracy. While meritocratic factors shape contemporary inequality, critics of the classic functionalist argument note that it fails to consider the darker side of inequality. For example, it does not address the fact that once a system of inequality is in place, forces are set in motion that serve to perpetuate it. Self-interest and competition come into play, with those that are early “winners” having resources available to them to maintain their privileged position. It fails to consider the possibility that some types of inequality are dysfunctional (for example, wealthy leaders of drug cartels or other criminal syndicates). Nor does it consider the possibility that inequality may be the consequence of exploitation and oppression. In short, conflict theorists have called into question the underlying assumptions of Davis and Moore's functionalist theory. For our purposes, two recent concepts in theories of inequality are of particular significance: durable inequalities and intersecting inequalities.
Charles Tilly (1998: 6) defined durable inequalities as “those that last from one social interaction to the next,” which included “those that persist over whole careers, lifetimes, and organizational histories.” Unlike the individualistic focus of Davis and Moore's functionalist account, which views inequalities as arising as a result of the differing attributes of individuals, Tilly (1998: 7) argues that if inequalities prove to be durable—in other words, persisting over time—they must be constructed around categorical distinctions among people, which includes such differences as “black/white, male/female, citizen/foreigner, or Muslim/Jew rather than to individual differences in attributes, propensities, or performances.”
Attempting to offer as parsimonious an explanation for durable inequalities as possible, Tilly (1998: 10) contends that there are two main causal mechanisms, which he identifies as exploitation and opportunity hoarding. Exploitation occurs when powerful people linked by social networks to one another use their power to “command resources from which they draw significantly increased returns” by controlling the efforts of the less powerful and preventing them from reaping the benefits of their efforts. Opportunity hoarding occurs when the networks of the powerful work to obtain a monopoly over the most valuable resources.
While these two mechanisms set the establishment of durable inequalities in motion, they are complemented by two additional mechanisms, emulation and adaptation, which Tilly (1998: 10) contends “cement such arrangements in place.” Emulation refers to the replication of a model of inequality from one setting to another, for example from the workplace to the political system. Adaptation refers to the varied ways that inequalities are played out in everyday life, such as in selecting friendships and neighborhoods based on similar locations in the structures of categorical inequality.
Tilly's argument bears a family resemblance to Marxist accounts. For Marxists, capitalism is predicated on exploitation. Indeed, the economic system cannot exist without the capitalist class exploiting the working classes. The hegemonic class in the capitalist economy is also the ruling class in such a society's political system. His argument also parallels the thesis of Max Weber that says that once people, either individually or collectively, possess something of value, they seek to effect closure that prevents others from coming to possess it as well. This is similar to what Tilly means by opportunity hoarding.
Some critics have argued that Tilly's attempt at constructing an abstract and parsimonious theory fails to do justice to the complexity of inequality, to both the factors that create and sustain it and to the forces that serve to revise or undermine inequality (Laslett 2000). However, for our purposes in this chapter, the general idea of durable inequality based in particular on one specific categorical difference—race and ethnicity—can be a useful tool of analysis.
While the focus of this book is race and ethnicity, people are at one and the same time defined by multiple identities, with other salient aspects of identity including gender, social class, religion, sexual orientation, and disability. In recent years, scholars have become increasingly concerned about the intersecting nature of these identities. In particular, considerable attention has been devoted to the intersections of race, class, and gender. In many instances, the relationship is mutually reinforcing, though this is not necessarily always true. Thus, in the US today whites have higher average incomes than blacks and men have higher average incomes than women. If race and gender were mutually reinforcing, it would mean that black women have lower average incomes than white men, white women, and black men. And this, in fact, is the case.
In what follows, we will explore the intersecting character of inequality, focusing on the case of the US, with a brief comparison to the UK. As will become evident, this chapter is quite different from the preceding one. Whereas Chapter 2 focused on major theories accounting for prejudice and discrimination, this chapter will be highly empirical, the goal being to offer a detailed and cumulative description of contemporary patterns of racial inequality and the broader implications and consequences of those patterns.
The fact that the United States is the advanced industrial nation with the highest level of inequality in the world is virtually undisputed by scholars today. There are a variety of ways that social scientists attempt to understand the extent and the scope of inequality.
One of the most commonly used measuring sticks is income distribution. Employing this measure, we find a highly skewed distribution pattern. In 2009, the bottom fifth of all households with the lowest incomes received only 3.4 percent of the total income earned that year, while the second quintile earned 8.6 percent, the middle quintile 14.6 percent, the next to the top quintile 23.2 percent, and the top quintile earned 50.3 percent. In other words, the top 20 percent of the population possessed slightly over half of all earned income. The top 5 percent of the population—or in other words, those at the top of the highest quintile—earned 21.7 percent of the total. These distribution figures are the most recent in a significant trend that began in the 1970s. During the past thirty years, beginning in 1974, the percentages earned by the lowest quintile fell 2.1 percent, the second quintile lost 3.3 percent, and the third quintile lost 2.7 percent. The fourth quintile has shown small up and down fluctuations, currently down 0.6 percent, and the percent of total income of the top quintile has increased 8.8 percent (US Census Bureau 2009; Jones and Weinberg 2000: 4).
A similar trend is demonstrated by evaluating income inequality over time. During the 1980s, the entire income structure expanded dramatically, with the top stretching upward away from the center and the center moving up away from the bottom. In the 1990s, the gap between the ninetieth and fiftieth percentile continued to grow, increasing inequality between the top tenth and the rest of the population, while at the same time the difference between the fiftieth and tenth percentiles shrank. Since 1999, however, it appears that the decreasing inequality in the bottom half of the income structure has stopped, and has shown signs of increasing while the widening disparity between the top and the middle persists (Mishel, et al. 2003: 152). In fact, the highest incomes have continuously increased at rather rapid rates. In 1979, about 13,500 US taxpayers claimed incomes equivalent to $1 million or more. By 1994, the number earning this much had exceeded 68,000. The disparities between the salaries of executives and their employees have widened considerably as CEO and other executive-level salaries have soared, particularly so since the 1990s. The increased use of stock options as a key component of many executive pay packages has led to much higher levels of income inequality. In 1965, the average CEO earned 24 times more than the average worker. Thirty years later, in 1995, that figure had soared to 100 times the average worker's income. By 2005, the figure hit 262 (Mishel 2006; see also Hacker and Pierson 2010).
Robert Frank and Philip Cook (1995) have explored the runaway incomes at the top of the distribution, which are fed by “winner-take-all” markets. The most popular musicians, athletes, actors, artists, authors, car manufacturers, and even producers of food and ordinary household items increasingly tend to receive a disproportionate amount of the monetary benefits in their respective markets, pushing those of only slightly lesser quality (and sometimes of equal quality) far down the income scale, if not out of the market entirely. Indeed, the mean income of the top 5 percent of earners in the United States nearly doubled in a decade, from $138,000 in 1991 to $260,000 in 2001, while earners further down the distribution ladder made comparatively meager gains (US Census Bureau 2003, all dollar figures adjusted for parity).
However, while the income and wage distributions do provide a glimpse of the extent of inequality in the US, a factor that even more profoundly gets at the heart of inequality is wealth. Wealth, determined by a household's assets minus debts, is distributed even more unevenly than income. Wealth is an especially important consideration shaping economic security in changing times. The wealthiest people in the society have in their wealth a buffer from downward economic trends and family and other crises that is not always available to the middle class and when it is it is far more limited, while being largely absent from the working class and the poor. If a household experiences financial hardship—the loss of a job, illness, and so forth—wealth is the cushion that breaks a fall. Given this reality, a significant portion of the US population lives in very vulnerable circumstances. Only one-third of households has any (or has negative) financial assets, and the average family in 1988 held $3,700 in net financial assets, enough to sustain them at the poverty line for a mere three months (Oliver and Shapiro 1997: 69). The economic precariousness of the entire bottom half of the population is in stark contrast to their more affluent counterparts. In 1992, the wealthiest quintile possessed a whopping 84 percent of the wealth in the US, and was the beneficiary of 99 percent of the wealth gain between 1983 and 1989. The bottom 80 percent of households received a mere 1 percent of the increase (Marshall 2000: 5). By 2007, the top quintile of households owned 93 percent of nation's financial wealth. This meant that 80 percent of the population owned only 7 percent of the total financial wealth. As further indication of the highly skewed character of wealth inequality, the top 1 percent of households own 43 percent of financial wealth (Domhoff 2011).
Much of this social class inequality tracks along lines defined by race and gender. First, considering the racial data depicted in Figure 3.1, in 2009 the median income for Asian households was about $65,500, $54,500 for non-Hispanic white households, $38,000 for Hispanic households, and $32,000 for African American households. These annual incomes are complemented by Figure 3.2, which looks at differences in weekly earnings of full-time workers by race.
Whereas only 9.4 percent of non-Hispanic whites were living at or below the poverty line in 2010, 12.2 percent of Asians, 25.3 percent of Hispanics, 26.4 percent of American Indians and Alaska Natives, and 25.8 percent of blacks lived in poverty. Even when they are found in the same occupations and work full-time and year-round, Asian men earn 94 percent of the income of white men, Hispanic men only 86 percent, and black men only 84 percent (Weller 2010).
Figure 3.1: Real median household income by race and Hispanic origin, 1967 to 2009.
Figure 3.2: The racial gap in earning, 2008.
Figure 3.3: Poverty rate by race, 2010 (source: Weller 2010).
Wealth is similarly divided along racial lines. While a quarter of white households possess no wealth or negative wealth, 61 percent of black and 54 percent of Hispanic households fit into this category. While 38 percent of white households lack the financial assets to survive for three months at the poverty line, as many as 73 percent of Hispanic households and 80 percent of black households live in this precarious financial position (Oliver and Shapiro 1997: 86–87). Viewed another way, the median white household possesses $7,000 in net financial assets, in contrast to the zero assets held by the median black household. The median white household has over eight times the net worth of the median black household (Mishel, et al. 2003: 284).
Even considering only middle class households, whether it is defined by income ($25,000 to $50,000, calculated with 1988 dollars), college education, or white-collar occupation, black households possess only 35 percent of the net worth of white households in the first definition, 23 percent by the second, and 15 percent by the third. In terms of financial assets—that which can help prevent financial disaster in extenuating circumstances—black households have between 1 and 4 percent that of whites, with white-collar black households having no net financial assets whatsoever, a figure that excludes equity in a home or vehicle (Oliver and Shapiro 1997: 94). This means that the average black middle class family has to rely almost entirely on income alone for its middle class standard of living, and cannot withstand a single financial obstacle without it becoming a potential financial catastrophe. Figure 3.4 uses data from 2007 to depict the gap in wealth based on race for whites, Latinos, and African Americans, providing an update to the pioneering work done by Oliver and Shapiro (1997) near the end of the past century. This figure is complemented by Figure 3.5, which indicates racial disparities in assets by reporting on differences in the percentage of households that are asset poor. This is, in effect, a measure of the common characterization of people living from paycheck to paycheck. While not quite from paycheck to paycheck, a household is defined as asset poor if does not have the wealth resources to subsist for three months without income during that period.
The disparity in earnings by gender has significantly decreased in recent decades; however, the gap between women and men remains and it is not an insignificant gap. In 1984, full-time, year-round working women of privileged racial groups—white and Asian—made 68–77 percent that of white men in the same occupations; men of the least privileged racial groups—Hispanic and black—earned 84 to 86 percent that of white men. However, since 1984, women of all races combined (irrespective of occupation) have jumped from an average $0.64 per men's dollar to $0.76 per men's dollar. Whereas men's incomes have made little progress since 1973 (then $27,802, and $29,101 in 2001), women's incomes have increased 72 percent—up from $9,649 in 1973 to $16,614 in 2001 (US Census Bureau 2001). This can be construed as welcome change in the right direction. However, substantial inequalities still exist for women. Box 3.1 depicts the impact of the intersection of race and gender as a young black woman describes the precariousness of her employment situation.
Figure 3.4: The racial wealth gap, 2007 (source: Federal Reserve, 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances Public Data Set).
Figure 3.5: Asset poverty by race, 2004 (source: Corporation for Enterprise Development, 2007–2008 Assets and Opportunity Scorecard, analysis base).
Data note: A household is asset poor if it has insufficient net wealth to subsist at the federal poverty level for three months in the absence of income.
Roberta, a mother of two young children, graduated from high school before she had her kids. She had an entry-level clerical job with United Parcel Service and had hoped to move up the managerial ladder in that firm. Her lack of white-collar experience and limited skills made that unlikely, so she left UPS and found a job at Burger Barn, where she was soon advanced to the position of a salaried manager. Roberta earned almost $400 a week as a manager, a yearly gross income of about $19,000.
She could make ends meet on that salary as long as nothing went wrong. Roberta's retired parents were able to take care of her youngest child during her work hours and ferried her older son to and from school, which relieved her of the need to pay for child care. She was living in a public housing project near her parents’ home, and was fortunate to have a two-bedroom apartment for a modest rent. As long as everyone in her family was in good health, Roberta was okay. Unexpected illnesses presented major problems [as she explains], “You have no medical benefits [in my job]. If my kids get chicken pox, I have to take them to the hospital. I have to pay out of my pocket. [Burger Barn] is not paying me that great, you know.”
Source: Newman 1999: 152
Comparisons of racial inequalities between the US and the UK are made somewhat more complicated because of differences in types and levels of data collection. That being said, Britain's racial minorities are generally defined as blacks, South Asians, and others (including the Chinese). Blacks can be further subdivided in the Caribbeans, Africans, and others, while South Asians can be divided into Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis. These are all immigrant groups, the vast majority of which arrived in the UK from the middle of the past century forward, beginning in the post-World War II era when the nation confronted labor shortages and in some instances actively recruited immigrants from former colonies. The vast majority of these immigrants, in fact, came from Commonwealth nations.
Whites have higher average incomes than people of color, but the differences vary depending on the group. The Indian community has the highest average incomes, while the Bangladeshi has the lowest—and not surprisingly, the latter has the highest rates of poverty and the lowest rates of labor force participation (Mason 2000: 43–63). Evidence points to the persistence of discrimination in hiring, but policies aimed at combating discrimination have had some impact in improving opportunities. In terms of the poverty rate, the rate for Indians is comparable to that of whites, while it is twice as high for Black Africans, higher still for Pakistanis, and the highest for Bangladeshis. Related to this, the unemployment rates of the poorest groups is much higher than the white population: for Pakistanis it is twice as high, while for Bangladeshis it is three time higher (Pilkington 2003).
What are the implications of these existing levels of inequality on life chances? This is the topic we turn to in the following section. While a vast majority of Americans claim to embrace the idea of equal opportunity (but not equality of outcomes), the issue becomes one of sorting out the various ways that existing levels of inequality impede the realization of creating an equal opportunity society. In this section, we will explore the following issues: (1) quality of life issues associated with physical and mental health; (2) food and nutrition; (3) housing and neighborhood quality; (4) crime; (5) environmental risk; (6) schooling and the development of human capital; and (7) social capital.
It should be stressed at the outset that this is only a snapshot of aspects of the consequences of inequality. What is clear is that inequality is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon. What follows is by no means intended to be comprehensive. Rather, its purpose is to illustrate some of the key multifaceted elements involved in determining the varied impacts of inequality on different sectors of the disadvantaged population.
Inequality in the United States is in no way limited simply to economics. The “losers” in this unequal society endure a number of consequences deriving from their lower socioeconomic status, consequences that pervade virtually all aspects of life. One of these is a generic term called “quality of life.” While this term can be used to account for a number of factors, we concentrate here on only two: mental and physical health.
To begin with, numerous studies have demonstrated that low socioeconomic status is correlated with a wide range of psychological disorders. Although the direction of causality is still debated, Mary Merva and Richard Fowles’ (2000) study of the mental health of laid-off workers suggests that financial privation, at least in some cases, precedes psychiatric distress. Furthermore, it appears that not only is absolute economic deprivation strongly associated with mental health, but so too is relative deprivation. Increasing inequality causes those in the lower rungs of the wage scale to feel alienated from the rest of society and to increasingly view themselves as inadequate.
Mental health problems frequently result from the negative impacts of poverty and inequality, and once individuals are suffering from a mental illness, they become less likely to find or keep gainful employment. Add to this the fact that the mentally ill are often left untreated, particularly if they do not have insurance to pay for counseling or medication. More of the poor with treatable mental illnesses go untreated than is the case with the general population.
Pressure to “keep up with the Joneses” is strong throughout the society, but for those at the bottom it is especially stressful because success seems to be out of reach. Indeed, the lower class is no less influenced than the middle class by the values of a consumer culture, despite the fact that there are so many goods and services that they cannot possibly afford to purchase. Michael Hughes and Melvin Thomas (1998) demonstrate that African Americans experience a lower quality of life (measurements include life satisfaction, marital happiness, mistrust, happiness, anomie, and health) than whites, even when classified as middle or upper class. The authors suggest that this is due to a “racial tax”—the harmful psychological effects of a long historical legacy of racism.
The physical health consequences of inequality are no less serious. Regardless of the exact measurement used, low-income level and poor health are strongly linked. For example, impoverished African Americans endure disproportionately high incidences of high blood pressure, heart problems, diabetes and its complications, and sudden infant death syndrome. Cancer (among males), sickle-cell anemia, tuberculosis, hypertension, arteriosclerosis, and AIDS also affect significantly higher percentages of blacks than whites. Because of the high concentration of blacks among the poor, it is likely that these are related to poverty and not only to racism. Life expectancy is another factor that varies considerably by race, gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and also location. Arline Geronimus and colleagues (2001) found that the life expectancy at age 16 of a black man living in urban poverty is 42 years.
This may be in part due to the fact that those in poverty tend to exhibit more unhealthy behaviors than the rest of the population. Smoking, in particular, appears to be concentrated among those of low SES and among racial minorities. The disparity in health is also in large part due to an under-use of health care. One-third of the African-American deaths above the white death rate are the result of treatable conditions. Much of this is certainly due to the fact that access to health care is severely limited for low socioeconomic status Americans, and the number of people without health insurance has recently increased. In 2003, 15.6 percent of the population was without coverage, amounting to 45 million people, 1.4 million more than in 2002. Employer-provided health insurance is decreasing as health care costs increase, and those who still have insurance via an employer are expected to pay larger portions of the premiums even as quality of care is decreasing due to the increasing adoption of managed care plans. These recent trends most sharply affect the lower classes—as income level decreases, so does access to quality health insurance—and racial minorities, particularly Hispanics, of whom nearly a third have no health coverage (DeNavas-Walt, et al. 2004: 14–15). The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010, is intended to expand health insurance coverage to a sizeable percentage of the previously uninsured. At this writing, the legislation is being introduced incrementally, while simultaneously confronting various legislative and judicial challenges. If the law survives the challenges, it has the potential for addressing some of the most glaring disparities in health care coverage.
Living in hazardous neighborhoods and being exposed to injurious work conditions further endangers the physical health of the disadvantaged. Individuals at the bottom of the social structure are more likely to hold jobs that involve heavy lifting, awkward body postures, exposure to toxic substances, dust, fumes, explosives, acids, and other harmful substances as well as long hours of mechanical, routinized actions. These hazards are also correlated with race. All of these take a toll on the bodies and on the life expectancies of the most disadvantaged sectors of the society.
Food insufficiency is another problem that disproportionately affects racial minorities, low-income households, and female-headed households. Katherine Alaimo and colleagues (1998) estimate that 4.1 percent of the overall US population—between 9–12 million people—does not have enough food to eat either occasionally or frequently. However, in their study of Minneapolis-St. Paul, 15.2 percent of Mexican Americans fell into this category; even when controlling for other economic and demographic factors, twice as many Mexican Americans as whites claimed to experience food deficiency. Nearly 8 percent of African Americans reported food deficiency compared to 2.5 percent of non-Hispanic whites, which at least in part is attributable to disparities in SES. Obviously, SES plays an enormous role in food sufficiency; 14 percent of the low-income population does not have enough food at times. Other studies report even higher percentages of hunger levels. Forty-five percent of children living under the poverty line in 2002 suffered food insecurity. America's Second Harvest, the nation's largest food relief distributor, came to the assistance of 23.3 million people in 2001; the median income for those helped was well below the poverty line (Rank 2004: 38). Getting enough food to eat can be especially problematic for the poor during the winter months. Jayanta Bhattacharya and research associates (2002) found that while both the rich and poor increase heating expenditures in very cold times, the poor compensate for this increase by reducing their food expenditures by about the same cost. While the rich tend to increase their food intake, the poor eat about 200 fewer calories than in warmer months. This “heat or eat” dilemma significantly impacts the nutrition and the health of the poor.
Making matters worse, Chanjin Chung and Samuel Myers (1999) demonstrate that food actually costs more for the urban poor. They found a $16.62 difference in market-basket prices, or the cost for a week's worth of food that meets minimum nutritional requirements, between chain and non-chain grocery stores. Because many chain stores are not located in or near urban poor neighborhoods, and many poor people do not have cars or adequate public transportation, residents have little choice but to shop at closer, but more expensive non-chain stores. Furthermore, these non-chain stores carry a far smaller selection of certain types of foods, particularly fresh produce, meat, and dairy products.
Inequality does not only impact food in terms of insufficiency and hunger. Many people conceive of eating disorders as being primarily white, middle- to upper-class female phenomena, resulting from social pressures to conform to our culture's thin ideal of beauty. However, these disorders have class, race, and sexual orientation dimensions as well. Some women develop bulimia, anorexia, unhealthy dieting, and bingeing as a means of coping with such “traumas” as discrimination and high levels of stress based on the factors just mentioned. For example, many women living in poverty respond to the stress of their lives by using food as a drug. Excessive eating can produce effects similar to alcohol consumption, is far cheaper, and does not result in hangovers that would hinder productivity. This can explain one of the unusual features of contemporary poverty. While there is hunger, it is also true that poor people are more likely to be overweight than the general population. Obesity and its related problems, such as hypertension and diabetes, result not only from overeating, but from eating cheaper but unhealthy foods, particularly those high in saturated fat.
Inequality also profoundly affects housing and neighborhood quality. Housing discrimination based primarily on race remains an endemic problem in the United States, which, combined with a shortage of decent affordable housing, is responsible for the concentration of poverty in select geographic areas. While some of the most overt forms of housing discrimination are far less obvious since the civil rights era, new and more subtle modes of discrimination persist, many of them difficult to detect. For example, John Yinger (1986) has demonstrated that housing agents show blacks 36 percent fewer apartments than they show whites; more to the point, they purposefully do not introduce them to apartments located in predominantly white neighborhoods. To make matters worse, even when SES is controlled, blacks looking to procure housing in black neighborhoods are significantly less likely to be approved for a loan than are their white counterparts. This is in part due to redlining practices and in part due to discriminatory lending policies. And when blacks do move into predominantly white areas, they often must endure the antagonisms directed at them by white residents. Whites searching for new homes will tend to avoid the neighborhood, and as a result, minority households will eventually dominate it. The above is true for Hispanics as well, though to a lesser extent.
Douglas Massey has studied the impact of segregation on life chances over several decades and has concluded that residential segregation continues to be a particularly intractable reality in contemporary American life, as the following passage reveals:
Racial discrimination in markets for goods, services, and employment was only banned in 1964; in real estate and insurance markets in 1968, and in lending markets in 1974. Since the close of the Civil Rights Era, access and treatment has improved for African Americans in many markets, with especially large gains in those for goods and services but with significant improvement also in markets for labor, credit, and finance. But in one market progress has been exceedingly slow, almost glacial: that for housing. High levels of discrimination in real estate and high levels of housing segregation are ongoing realities.
Source: Massey 2006: 127
What is the result of this geographic segregation? Douglas Massey and Eric Fong (1990) show that while highly educated black communities can truly uphold a “separate but equal” status with socioeconomically similar white communities, poorer and less educated blacks experience neighborhood conditions inferior to other impoverished populations due to their relative concentration in urban inner city settings. These are neighborhoods characterized by what Massey and Nancy Denton (1993) call “hypersegregation.” Police protection, firefighting, sanitation services, and similar municipal services tend to be of poorer quality in low SES areas, and children have fewer places to play, and an even smaller numbers of safe recreation areas. More youth in these neighborhoods drop out of high school, have decreased childhood IQ, and become pregnant as teenagers. Those who live in impoverished and racially segregated (especially African American, but to a lesser degree Mexican American) neighborhoods suffer significantly higher mortality rates, even when variance in individual characteristics is controlled. In terms of employment prospects, hypersegregated neighborhoods have become “jobless ghettoes” that are plagued by crime, prostitution, drug trafficking, and gang activity. Often, potential employers do not welcome individuals raised in these locales, in part due to discrimination, but also in part due to the underdevelopment of skills in these communities; unfortunately, this inability to find work only reinforces and thus perpetuates disadvantage.
William Julius Wilson has studied the decline in job opportunities in inner-cities. In this passage from his book, When Work Disappears, he describes what many inner-city residents think about the way potential employers treat them:
Many inner city residents have a strong sense of the negative attitudes which employers tend to have toward them. A 33-year old employed janitor from a poor South Side [of Chicago] neighborhood had this observation: “I went to a coupla jobs where a couple of the receptionists told me in confidence: ‘You know what they do with applications from blacks as soon as the day is over?’ Say ‘we rip them and throw ‘em in the garbage.’ “ In addition to concerns about being rejected because of race, the fears that some inner-city residents have of being denied employment simply because of their inner-city address or neighborhood are not unfounded. A welfare mother who lives in a large public housing project put it this way: “Honestly, I believe they look at the address and the—your attitudes, your address, your surround—you know, your environment has a lot to do with your employment status. The people with the best addresses have the best chances, I feel so, I feel so.”
Source: Wilson 1996: 137
Socioeconomic and racial inequality also negatively affects crime and violence. In terms of racial inequality, in 2002 49 percent of all murder victims were black, 49 percent were white, while only 13 percent of Americans are black and 80 percent are white. Blacks are seven times more likely than whites to commit murder, and six times more likely to be murdered. Turning to another type of crime, households earning less than $7,500 were victims of burglary and assault at significantly higher rates than higher earning households (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2003). Why blacks and those of low SES are so much more likely to be exposed to crime is the object of much speculation. Of interest to this discussion, there is empirical evidence indicating that for whites, low socioeconomic status is strongly correlated with violent crime. For blacks, on the other hand, this is not the case.
A possible explanation for this is put forward by Richard Alba, John Logan, and Paul Bellair (1994). In their study, which focused on suburbs, they also found that black SES, and additionally family structure and other personal traits, do not explain the race's disproportionately large exposure to crime. Rather than these factors, they suggest that the culprit is the residential segregation process that locates blacks—even if affluent—in crime-prone areas. Neighborhoods characterized by a high percentage of disadvantaged households (including high levels of lower class families, minority households, and female-headed households), immigrants, and residential instability are less likely to have strong ties to one another and to uphold informal social control, such as watching over neighbors’ property, keeping track of neighbors’ kids, and so forth. Thus, they experience much higher rates of crime and violence because they lack the control necessary to prevent these things from happening.
In general, insofar as high levels of inequality are associated with high crime levels and socioeconomic inequality and racial inequality are intertwined, it is not surprising that disadvantaged racial minorities are involved in crime at a great rate than the general population, both as offenders and victims. There is evidence to suggest that this is particularly the case in instances of violent crime.
The significance of class location and racial identity is reflected in the state's punishment practices for criminal violations. The United States imprisons far more of its citizens per capita than any other advanced industrial nation. It incarcerates approximately 600 individuals per 100,000. The average for other advanced industrial nations ranges from around 55 to 120 per 100,000. The rate in Scandinavian countries, for example, is one-tenth the US rate. Moreover, the US sends people to prison for much longer periods of time than is the case in other economically comparable nations. The typical prisoner in both state and federal prisons is relatively young and relatively poor. It is also the case that blacks disproportionately constitute the largest plurality of the current prison population. At present, the United States imprisons almost 1.5 million individuals, 44 percent of which were black, compared to 35 percent white, 19 percent Latino, and 2 percent other (Human Rights Watch 2002).
A similar scenario can be seen in the use of the death penalty—a practice that has been abolished in virtually all other advanced industrial nations. Mark Costanzo (1997: 84) summarizes the nature of the racial disparities in capital punishment cases in the following way:
Those who are accused of murdering a white victim are more likely to be charged with a capital crime; those convicted of killing a white victim are more likely to receive a death sentence; black defendants who are convicted of killing a white person are the group most likely to receive the death penalty; [and] white defendants who murder black victims are the group least likely to receive a death sentence.
While 58 percent of the defendants executed between 1976 and 2004 were white, at 34 percent, blacks are overrepresented. Moreover, as of 2004, blacks and whites had nearly reached parity in terms of their respective percentages of the death row population, with blacks registering at 42 percent and whites at 46 percent (NAACP Legal Defense Fund 2004).
The capacity of the state to punish its citizenry is a reflection of its monopoly on the power to do so. The need to punish large numbers of citizens is related to levels of inequality. It is not fortuitous that the United States has the highest level of inequality among the advanced industrial nations and it also has, by far, the highest level of incarceration along with being the only one routinely using the death penalty. Social control, in short, is more problematic and difficult to achieve in highly unequal societies.
Those at the bottom of the social class system and the racial hierarchy are not only endangered by greater violence and crime, but also by environmental hazards. Because minimizing pollution and toxic wastes is costly, plants that produce these byproducts tend to carefully locate themselves in areas where land is less expensive, where residents are not likely to protest their presence, and where challenges to their mishandling of wastes is least likely. These locations are found in low SES and minority communities. In the Southeast, 26 percent to 42 percent of households proximal to (within the same census tract as) a hazardous waste landfill live in poverty. Other sources of environmental dangers plague the disadvantaged as well. As many as 68 percent of urban African American children living in households earning less than $6,000 yearly suffer dangerous levels of lead in their blood. On the other hand, white children in families above $15,000 experience unsafe lead levels at a rate of only 12 percent. Likewise, impoverished children are nearly 40 percent more likely to be exposed to cigarette smoke in the home than those above the poverty line. Air pollution (carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide) from stoves and heating systems is also far more prevalent in low-income homes. Water pollution affects primarily rural, low SES populations, including poor Mexican Americans residing near the nation's southern border. As noted earlier, a variety of environmental risks are associated with various low-income occupations (Evans and Kantrowitz 2002).
While these and related environmental risks have profound effects on their victims’ health, often due to daily exposure year after year, other less apparent environmental factors also deeply influence the lives of the urban poor. First, exposure to high levels of noise pollution is also linked with low SES. Not only does constant clamor often result in hearing damage, but also it has been shown to elevate stress, to impede the execution of complex tasks, to hinder children's mastery of reading, and to undermine the development of certain crucial “interpersonal processes” related to the emergence of altruism and the control of aggression. Furthermore, it may also spur feelings of helplessness and inhibit motivation—apparently from the individual's inability to control the noise.
Overcrowding (less than one room per resident) is yet another environmental risk factor associated with SES. Living in crowded conditions has virtually the same results as noise exposure and also contributes to the spread of infectious diseases. Overcrowding is not limited to the home. This also translates to outdoor space, both in the yard as well as in park areas: children in low-income New York City neighborhoods average about 17 square yards of park space per child, whereas the rest of the city's children each have 40 square yards (Evans and Kantrowitz 2002).
While there are many environmental risks, such as air pollution, that are shared by all sectors of the population, it is clearly the case that environmental risks in general disproportionately impact lower income people and disadvantaged racial minorities.
Race and social class inequality, more than gender inequality, result in vast educational disadvantages for lower class and minority children. These inequities appear to be rooted in three main factors: unequal funding for schools; family structure and parental involvement in their child's education; and discrimination. First, school funding is based largely on local property taxes. This means that schools located in areas populated primarily with lower class households are going to have significantly smaller budgets than schools in wealthier middle to upper class districts. However, this inequality is exacerbated in the inner cities, where lower class youth and racial minorities are likely to be concentrated. Operating inner city schools tends to be more expensive than running suburban schools. The school properties themselves tend to cost more, and the upkeep and insurance of the buildings, which are often old and subject to frequent vandalism, demands a larger portion of the educational budget than elsewhere. Furthermore, other needs of inner cities, such as large police forces and fire departments, compete with the neighborhood schools for limited local tax revenues.
Despite Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision that found that segregated schools led to racially unequal educational opportunities, a half century after the decision, American schools are undergoing a process of resegregation. In a study conducted by Harvard's Civil Rights Project, the researchers have determined that the gains made in the 1960s and 1970s have eroded and particularly in the 1990s, the rate of resegregation has increased dramatically. At present, 70 percent of black students attend schools that contain predominantly minority student populations, while Latinos have, too, witnessed increasing levels of educational segregation (Street 2005). Thus minority students, particularly poorer ones, increasingly attend public schools that are inferior to those of their white counterparts.
In general, less money is spent per capita on the education of low SES and minority youth than on higher social class whites. Somewhat more debated is the effect of this on disadvantaged students. The frequently cited Coleman Report, which appeared in 1966, convinced many that school characteristics, most of which can be linked directly to the school's economic resources, have very little bearing on student achievement. The report argued that the single most important factor was the role played by parents. However, more recent research has contradicted this finding. School resources and class size both appear to affect students’ test scores, and going to underprivileged schools has been demonstrated to be as strong a predictor of low future SES as intelligence. It is not surprising that youth who attend schools that utilize dated textbooks and have inadequate or no science labs, inadequate library materials, underpaid teachers, large classrooms, and a lack of access to computer technologies are at a significant disadvantage compared to those who attend schools with well-paid instructors, are provided individualized attention, and have access to up-to-date educational materials.
Coleman was not entirely wrong since family characteristics and parental involvement do affect education by race and SES as well. Vincent Roscigno and James Ainsworth-Darnell (1999) have shown that high SES parents tend to provide their children with more household educational resources (periodicals, reference materials, computers, books, calculators), enroll their children in more non-school classes involving art, music, or dance, and take their children on more cultural trips to museums, historical sites, concerts, and so forth. Interestingly, while white students who receive these household benefits appear to benefit from them (as measured by higher grades and test scores), black students do not receive the same educational return.
Parental interaction with their children also facilitates educational success. Hence, children in single-parent households tend to operate at an educational disadvantage; single parents supervise their children's homework less often and generally have less contact with their children. Research provides evidence that a high level of parental involvement in a school boosts student achievement. However, since single working parents generally have little time available to attend PTA meetings and other such activities, their students do not receive this benefit to their education to the same extent as more privileged students in two-family households. Moreover, female-headed households are disproportionately characteristic of minority families and lower class families, reflecting the interactive impact of race, class, and gender (Pong 1998).
Finally, simple discrimination appears to explain much of the leftover disparity in educational achievement between blacks and whites. The racial difference in academic success is profound. African Americans on average are as many as four years behind white students in reading, math, science, and writing. They are more likely to be held back a grade. They are less likely to attend and complete college. They are vastly underrepresented at the top of national test distributions. Although black students at higher SES schools score higher on the SAT than do those at lower SES schools, they do not perform as well as their white classmates. While many of these differences can be explained by the aforementioned economic and family factors, these do not fully account for the differences. Although discrimination is far less easy to operationalize, it seems highly likely that racial discrimination also plays a part in educational inequality.
Although women do not experience significant educational differences from men before graduating from high school, there are gender disparities in higher education. In many ways, of the many inequalities discussed in this chapter, this may be the arena in which women and men are nearly equal, with women sometimes even surpassing men. A slightly higher percentage of women (among whites and in virtually all minority groups) enroll in college and graduate with two-year, bachelors, masters, and professional degrees compared to men. However, only 37.3 percent of PhD degrees were earned by women in 1992, and they remain a minority among college and university faculty. Additionally, women tend to be disproportionately enrolled in less selective schools; men still enroll in and receive degrees from choice institutions at higher rates than women (Jacobs 1996).
Many of these factors related to higher education provide evidence for the perpetuation of racial disparities. A smaller percentage of African Americans and Hispanics enroll in colleges and universities than do whites; in 2000, 39 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old whites were enrolled, 31 percent of blacks, and 22 percent of Hispanics. Additionally, the percentage of degrees earned by blacks decreases as the level of the degree increases, earning 11 percent of associate's degrees, 9 percent of bachelor's, 8 percent of master's, 7 percent of professional, and 5 percent of doctorate degrees. For Hispanics, the respective percentages are 9 percent, 6 percent, 4 percent, 5 percent, and 3 percent (Hoffman, et al. 2003: 93–97).
Education has a direct effect on the development of human capital, or one's skill, education, and experience that can be used to secure a quality position or to advance in the job market. As mentioned above, lower class students and racial minorities do not receive educations equivalent to their more advantaged counterparts, and therefore are often at a human capital disadvantage that starts early in childhood. Insofar as the school system in the nation fails to provide genuinely equal educational opportunities, it serves to reinforce existing inequalities rather than contributing to overcoming them.
Figure 3.6: Percentage of the population twenty-five years and over with a bachelor's, degree or more, by race, in the US.
Inequality not only leads to vast discrepancies in social capital, but also perpetuates it by deterring upward mobility for those at the bottom of the social structure and by facilitating it for those already near the top. Nan Lin (2000: 786) describes social capital as “the quantity and/or quality of resources that an actor (be it an individual or group or community) can access or use through its location in a social network.” Access to these resources, then, enables people to attain higher paying and more prestigious jobs as well as other quality of life benefits.
While social capital is important to the attainment of socioeconomic status, its benefits are distributed highly inequitably by initial SES location, gender, and race. Since individuals tend to maintain social networks with others of similar characteristics, the networks of members of the lower class tend to consist primarily of other low SES contacts. These connections tend not only to be lacking in the number of beneficial resources for socioeconomic advancement, but also lack the diversity of resources that are available to those of higher SES. In his review of the literature, Alejandro Portes (1998) explains that all too frequently for inner city residents, social networks do not reach outside of the inner city, and therefore, their knowledge of and ability to obtain good jobs is severely limited. Furthermore, since inner city communities tend to be more transitory, even the social ties within these poor locales are likely to be less extensive and more tenuous as a result.
Clearly, these factors have implications for race as well. African Americans have less extensive networks than Hispanics and whites, with whites having the largest networks. Since blacks are often segregated in certain neighborhoods, their social networks consist largely of other African Americans, which is not advantageous in an economy more or less dominated by whites. Even in the middle and upper classes, blacks often have relatively few weak ties to white networks, instead forming strong social ties among themselves (Lin 2000). These differences play out in explicit ways, for example, when a person seeking a job begins to turn to people they know who might assist them. Blacks tend not to have the social capital that will work to their advantage. But social capital also works in more implicit ways, as well. The example of IQ scores, which are the product of the social forces that shape one's background, is revealing. Black children adopted by white families tend to demonstrate higher IQ scores than those adopted by black families, but black children adopted by black families that have ties to racially diverse networks or predominantly white networks have higher IQs than those in black families that do not have these social network characteristics. It appears that disparities in social capital between blacks and whites contribute to the lower socioeconomic attainment of blacks.
This chapter reveals that the US is far from a nation that can be defined as offering its citizens equal opportunity for economic success. Given that blacks and Native Americans (the data contained herein for the latter is somewhat more limited) have been in the country since before its founding, and since they continue to lag behind whites and others in the society, they offer vivid testimony of the continuing impact of what Tilly has called durable inequality. Income disparities persist, while the huge disparities in wealth distribution reveal the economic precariousness of most racial minorities. Moreover, as a substantial section of the chapter documents, income and wealth inequalities have profound implications for all facets of people's lives, from where they live and go to school to what sorts of jobs they are likely to have, to their health and well-being.
