This is the seventh of a nine-part series exploring conversations I’ve had with my cousin about racism. Ben and I are both white; I’m progressive and he’s conservative. We’re trying to listen to each other with respect, even as we try to change each other’s minds.
Let’s take another look at wealth.
In my last post, I glossed something over, and I want to return to it now.
I said that because of wealth disparities between Black and white Americans, it can be hard to tell how much our different outcomes in health, education, wealth, and criminal justice stem from unconscious racial bias. The data show that bias and systemic racism do play an important role—but wealth disparities play a role too.
This begs the question: Why are white Americans wealthier on average than Black Americans?
The answer might seem obvious. At least until the 1960s, a long history of racist policies kept most Black Americans in poverty. But a couple generations have passed since then, and that might seem like a reasonable amount of time for a group to lift themselves up. So why are so many Black people still struggling?
To Ben, today’s wealth disparities are due mainly to well-intentioned but harmful welfare policies that were put in place since the 1960s. He believes those bad policies have led to a culture of victimhood that can hinder Black people’s gumption.
To progressives like me, the problem is more about lingering unconscious bias that leads to systemic racism, which continues to hold Black people back despite the gains of the Civil Rights Movement.
But there’s another force at work here, too. It’s a force that challenges all Americans living in poverty, of all races and ethnicities. This force is our country’s social safety net—or lack thereof.
Because our safety net has so many holes, our country has an upward mobility problem. That means inequalities have a tendency to linger across generations.
Upward mobility, like equal opportunity, is still just a dream.
Americans perceive our country as the Land of Opportunity, a place where anyone with enough grit can lift themselves up by the bootstraps and climb from poverty to success.
According to Wikipedia’s article on “Socioeconomic mobility in the United States,”
That Americans rise from humble origins to riches, has been called a “civil religion”,[4] “the bedrock upon which the American story has been anchored”,[14] and part of the American identity (the American Dream[15]).
But although rags-to-riches stories do sometimes happen here, they’re not common. The reality is, study after study shows the United States to have less upward social mobility than other developed countries.
Consistently, the countries with the highest upward mobility are Nordic—Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, the Netherlands—as well as Canada, and followed closely by Germany and France.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Social Mobility Index, which ranks countries by the ability of citizens to move up to higher economic strata, the U.S. ranks 27. That puts us just below Portugal, South Korea, and Lithuania.
One study found that:
42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent)—a country famous for its class constraints.[29] Meanwhile, just 8 percent of American men at the bottom rose to the top fifth. That compares with 12 percent of the British and 14 percent of the Danes. Despite frequent references to the United States as a classless society, about 62 percent of Americans (male and female) raised in the top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths, according to research by the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Similarly, 65 percent born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths.[4][30]
~ Wikipedia, “Socioeconomic mobility in the United States”
The land of the free?
Despite what we Americans imagine, opportunity in our country is still tied closely to the accident of birth. The countries that have done the best job of rectifying this have done so by ensuring that certain services—education, health care, daycare, paid family leave—are available universally, to all their citizens, regardless of wealth.
The Scandinavian countries changed their education systems, social policies and legal frameworks to create societies where there is a higher degree of mobility. That made their countries more into the land of opportunity that America once was.
~ “‘Scandinavian Dream’ is true fix for America’s income inequality” by Tami Luhby, CNN Money
In America, social services are distributed unequally. Which family you’re born into makes a world of difference. You might grow up with daycare, health care, and good schools, or you might have financially strained parents, no daycare or health care, and a neighborhood with struggling schools. Those differences affect whether and where you go to college, how much income you earn, your health, and a myriad of other factors that stick with you for decades.
Americans tend to understand that other countries have more social services than us, and to know that those services are more evenly distributed. But what we don’t often realize is the freedom those services bring.
Author Anu Partanen moved to America from her native Finland, and she laments the freedom she didn’t realize she had until she moved here and lost it.
Americans don’t seem to realize that there are citizens in other parts of the world, like the Nordic region, who have acquired other kinds of freedoms that Americans lack….
Are you free when you’re a rugged cowboy, alone on the prairie, with no one asking anything of you, and no one giving anything to you? Or is it when you are a homesteader, off the grid, growing your own food, and relying on your family and neighbors when you need help? Or is it when you know that you can become whatever you want and make your own choices regardless of your parents’ wealth or abilities, and when you can rest assured that should you or your family falter, your society will be there to keep you on your feet?
…When I look at my Nordic friends now, they seem so free to me. They work and have children, they engage in hobbies, they travel the world, and they never seem to worry about really going broke. They have health care, day care, and pensions. They can study whatever they want, and they don’t have to risk their financial future to do so.
~ The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life by Anu Partanen
Various studies show that the more unequal a country is, the harder it is to climb the economic ladder. Until we repair the gaping holes in our social safety net—until we can guarantee certain basic services to all Americans—then people starting at the bottom will have a tough time moving up.
The lack of upward mobility co-conspires with historical racism.
Once upon a time and not very long ago, blatantly racist policies like slavery, segregation, and redlining placed Black Americans firmly at the bottom of the economic strata. No one disputes this.
Eventually those policies ended, at least on paper. But they ended in a country where, once you’re at the bottom, it’s especially hard to escape. So, while it was racism that placed so many Black Americans in poverty, our inequitable system has played a major role in keeping them there.
In other words, it doesn’t require bad welfare policies to explain why many Black communities are still struggling. It doesn’t even require systemic racism. Our flawed social safety net, and our lack of upward mobility, are enough to explain why someone whose grandparents were poor is having trouble escaping poverty today.
It’s still worth talking about systemic racism, which absolutely plays a role and needs to be addressed. And I’m also not throwing out all Ben’s notions about bad welfare policy, although I shudder at the implications of phrases like “culture of victimhood” and “lack of gumption.” Ben and I will keep talking about this.
But I want us all to talk about upward mobility and the social safety net too. As long as we fail to fix this broad problem—a problem that affects poor Americans of all colors—the racist policies of the past will continue to plague communities of color as they endeavor to lift themselves up.
