Will This Be the First Election Where Class Trumps Race?
As stirring as Occupy Wall Street’s exhortations about the 99 percent were, it’s important to realize that they were the symptom, not the cause, of a wider trend. Inequality, of course, has recently become a much more integral part of the American conversation. But it’s more than that: There is now an unprecedentedly widespread understanding of economic class as the primary dividing factor in the nation. Indeed, this year seems to mark a historic tipping point for the United States: the year that our primary concerns about inequality went from being about race to being about class.
Take Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, for example. Something insufficiently noted in the plentiful coverage of it last week is that the underclass emergency that he has identified is white. Those who haven’t read the book may not know that Murray barely discusses black inner cities at all. Nor, however, is his purpose to call special attention to the fact that white people can be very poor as well, a la Nicholas Kristof’s take on the book. Murray treats this white version of the underclass as ordinary and old news, almost as if the term “underclass” had never essentially been shorthand for black ghetto.
One might suppose that Murray chose this in part to avoid reanimating the contempt he elicited in his conclusions about black America in his prior work, including Losing Ground and The Bell Curve. However, it’s notable that no one of consequence has derided Murray for not putting a black face on poverty. Rather, the book is being received in all quarters as a notable, if flawed, statement about inequality.
Other recent news, as unconnected to Murray’s book as Murray’s book is to OWS, tell the same story. We have learned in a report by the Manhattan Institute’s Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor that black people are living under less segregation today than since 1920, and that the drop since just 2000 has been quite extraordinary, even in big cities classically supposed to be hotbeds of racial tension. Glaeser and Vigdor, well aware that plenty of black people are still much too poor in America, conclude that desegregation can no longer be seen as a key item on American’s agenda, compared to—again—inequality in general.
Then last week came news about the achievement gap. The use of that term always used to signal a conversation about race, but the news this time was about class. The achievement gap between the poor and the wealthy has become much greater than that between blacks and whites over the past several decades. Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon has shown that from 1960 to 2007, the gap between rich and poor in standardized test scores grew by 40 percent, while the one between black and white narrowed. A study by University of Michigan researchers has shown that the rich-poor gap in college completion has grown by 50 percent just since the 1980s.