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Income Inequality Introduction to Inequality

Inequality 3

What is inequality

How is income inequality measured, what causes inequality, what are consequences of inequality, basic facts about income inequality, imf and income inequality.

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Inequality can be viewed from different perspectives, all of which are related. Most common metric is Income Inequality , which refers to the extent to which income is evenly distributed within a population. Related concepts are lifetime Inequality (inequality in incomes for an individual over his or her lifetime), Inequality of Wealth (distribution of wealth across households or individuals at a moment in time), and Inequality of Opportunity (impact on income of circumstances over which individuals have no control, such as family socioeconomic status, gender, or ethnic background). All of these inequality concepts are related and offer different yet complementary insights into the causes and consequences of inequality, hence providing better guidance to governments when designing specific policies aimed at addressing inequality.

Gini coefficient is a typical measure of income inequality. The coefficient varies between 0 and 1, with 0 representing perfect equality and 1 perfect inequality. Most of the analysis is centered on the concept of income inequality as captured by the Gini coefficient, which is available for a large number of countries and relatively long periods. Unless specified otherwise, Gini income inequality refers to disposable income or consumption and thus already reflects any redistribution through taxes and transfers.

Figure. Gini Coefficient of Inequality

gini-coefficient-of-inequality

A range of global and domestic factors — which may reinforce each other — have been proposed in the theory and empirical literature to account for the income inequality trends. The key forces include the following:

  • Global factors , such as technological progress, globalization, and commodity price cycles, play an important role. For instance, technological advancement has contributed to the skill premium, because individuals with higher education have a comparative advantage in using new technologies (Card and DiNardo, 2002). In Western Europe and the United States, technological progress has also translated into a hollowing out of middle-class jobs, a phenomenon known as job polarization (Goos and Manning, 2007).
  • Country-specific factors , such as those related to economic developments and economic stability as well as to domestic policies — including financial integration, redistributive fiscal policies, and liberalization and deregulation of labor and product markets — also play an important role in explaining inequality trends within countries.
  • Global inequality has been declining fast since 1990s . During the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, global inequality increased dramatically, reflecting widening disparities between countries’ per capita income as advanced economies took off sharply compared with the rest of the world. The revival in global economic cooperation in the middle twentieth century ushered in an era of growth and development. Subsequently, per capita GDP growth rates accelerated in less developed countries, particularly in Asia, resulting in convergence in income levels across countries (Bourguignon, 2015). Millions of households were lifted out of poverty. As a result, the global income inequality first stabilized and then started to rapidly decline over the last three decades. However, it should be noted that not all regions of the world experience income convergences with more developed countries. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, income growth on average was more modest than in Asia. Some gains in the reduction of global inequality are likely to be reversed as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. It will likely deteriorate global inequality because advanced economies, in general, have more resources to deal with the fallout from the pandemic and the ensuing recovery effort.

Figure. Global Income Inequality (Gini coefficient)

Global income inequality

Sources: Historical series are from Van Zaden and others (2014), who build on Bourgui-gnon and Morrisson (2002). Recent data is from Lakner and Milanovich (2013).

  • Within-country inequality has risen in most countries. While the progress in the reduction of global inequality over the last thirty years has been remarkable, within country inequalities have increased, especially in advanced economies. Over the past three decades, more than half of the countries and close to 90 percent of advanced economies have seen an increase in income inequality, with some countries recording an increase in their Gini coefficients exceeding two points. Some of key factors behind the increase in within-country income inequality noted in the literature include technological progress, globalization, commodity price cycles, and domestic economic policies such as redistributive fiscal policies, labor and product market policies.

Figure. Change in Income Inequality, 1985-2015 (percent of countries)

Change in Income Inequality

Source : IMF, Fiscal Monitor, October 2017

  • Rising social spending has been used to combat inequality. Fiscal policy is a key policy instrument available to governments to achieve their distributional objectives. In advanced economies, taxes and transfers decrease income inequality by one-third, with most of this being achieved via public social spending (such as pensions and family benefits) ( Immervoll and rel="noopener noreferrer" others 2005 ; Paulus and others 2009 ). The extent of fiscal redistribution is even higher if the redistributive impact of in-kind spending rel="noopener noreferrer" (such as education rel="noopener noreferrer" and health) is included ( Paulus, Sutherland, and Tsakloglou, 2009 ). Thus, it is important to ensure that social spending is adequate, effective and sustainable . Progressive income taxes also play an important redistributive function in some countries. The lower redistributive impact of fiscal policy in developing economies is also a key factor behind their high levels of inequality.

Figure. Redistributive Impact of Income Taxes and Transfers, 2015 or Latest Year

Redistributive Impact of Income Taxes and Transfers, 2015 or Latest Year

Source: IMF Fiscal Monitor, October 2017.

Inequality is at the center stage of economic policy debate across the globe. A fair and equitable distribution of income is a fundamental element of the social contract. Macroeconomic policies (including government tax and spending policies) have significant effects on income distribution and that inequality can have adverse political and social consequences, with the potential to undermine macroeconomic stability and sustainable growth.

Inequality is thus, without any surprise, an important issue for the IMF in all three of its core activities:

(1) lending to support macroeconomic adjustment programs;

(2) macroeconomic surveillance, including related policy analysis; and

(3) technical assistance to build capacity, especially on government taxation and spending.

Historically, distributive issues have been an important part of the IMF’s dialogue with member countries. Work on them has especially intensified in the wake of the global financial crisis that began in 2008.

IMF work on income inequality before the global financial crisis that began in 2008 was particularly influenced by the experience gained from IMF-supported programs. In practice, this experience led to greater attention to integrating social safety nets into adjustment programs and safeguarding access to basic public services in health and education. Other initiatives, such as the introduction of the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility in 1999, brought growth and poverty reduction objectives to the center of program design in low-income countries, as did the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries debt-relief initiative. IMF-supported programs were successful in raising social spending, including in comparison with similar countries without programs.

The IMF has further deepened its work on inequality issues in the years since the beginning of the global financial crisis. This effort has encompassed an expansion of both cross-country analytical studies and country-level assessments of fiscal consolidation and inequality, a variety of fiscal policy instruments to achieve equity goals in an efficient manner, and the macroeconomic gains from strengthening gender equity. An important lesson is that with the right design, government tax and spending policies can help achieve both stronger growth and greater equality of outcomes and opportunities. For example, boosting access to basic health and education services and reducing barriers to female labor market participation can help raise growth and meet equity objectives. Even in the design of fiscal consolidation, a number of options can help reduce budget deficits without aggravating inequality. These include measures to raise revenues from income taxes and targeted (rather than across-the-board) reductions in social benefits. Measures that are good for both equity and efficiency — for example, an increase in revenues from recurrent property taxation — should also be given strong consideration when designing fiscal consolidation packages.

The IMF will continue to strengthen its analytical work on income distribution issues. These efforts will involve further cross-country analysis on different aspects of macroeconomic policies and how they affect income distribution. Work at the country level on income distribution issues will also be deepened. The approach will be selective, and it will be concentrated on countries where these issues are critical. The IMF expects considerable synergies between country-level and cross-country analysis, and the IMF will continue to draw on the profession’s work in these areas. In sum, the IMF will continue to deepen understanding of the nexus between income distribution and macroeconomics, with the goal of providing relevant policy advice.

With the expected increase in income inequality as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic the IMF’s work on inequality issues is expected to become even more intense.

Human Rights Careers

5 Essays to Learn More About Equality

“Equality” is one of those words that seems simple, but is more complicated upon closer inspection. At its core, equality can be defined as “the state of being equal.” When societies value equality, their goals include racial, economic, and gender equality . Do we really know what equality looks like in practice? Does it mean equal opportunities, equal outcomes, or both? To learn more about this concept, here are five essays focusing on equality:

“The Equality Effect” (2017) – Danny Dorling

In this essay, professor Danny Dorling lays out why equality is so beneficial to the world. What is equality? It’s living in a society where everyone gets the same freedoms, dignity, and rights. When equality is realized, a flood of benefits follows. Dorling describes the effect of equality as “magical.” Benefits include happier and healthier citizens, less crime, more productivity, and so on. Dorling believes the benefits of “economically equitable” living are so clear, change around the world is inevitable. Despite the obvious conclusion that equality creates a better world, progress has been slow. We’ve become numb to inequality. Raising awareness of equality’s benefits is essential.

Danny Dorling is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. He has co-authored and authored a handful of books, including Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives . “The Equality Effect” is excerpted from this book. Dorling’s work focuses on issues like health, education, wealth, poverty, and employment.

“The Equality Conundrum” (2020) – Joshua Rothman

Originally published as “Same Difference” in the New Yorker’s print edition, this essay opens with a story. A couple plans on dividing their money equally among their children. However, they realize that to ensure equal success for their children, they might need to start with unequal amounts. This essay digs into the complexity of “equality.” While inequality is a major concern for people, most struggle to truly define it. Citing lectures, studies, philosophy, religion, and more, Rothman sheds light on the fact that equality is not a simple – or easy – concept.

Joshua Rothman has worked as a writer and editor of The New Yorker since 2012. He is the ideas editor of newyorker.com.

“Why Understanding Equity vs Equality in Schools Can Help You Create an Inclusive Classroom” (2019) – Waterford.org

Equality in education is critical to society. Students that receive excellent education are more likely to succeed than students who don’t. This essay focuses on the importance of equity, which means giving support to students dealing with issues like poverty, discrimination and economic injustice. What is the difference between equality and equity? What are some strategies that can address barriers? This essay is a great introduction to the equity issues teachers face and why equity is so important.

Waterford.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving equity and education in the United States. It believes that the educational experiences children receive are crucial for their future. Waterford.org was founded by Dr. Dustin Heuston.

“What does equality mean to me?” (2020) – Gabriela Vivacqua and Saddal Diab

While it seems simple, the concept of equality is complex. In this piece posted by WFP_Africa on the WFP’s Insight page, the authors ask women from South Sudan what equality means to them. Half of South Sudan’s population consists of women and girls. Unequal access to essentials like healthcare, education, and work opportunities hold them back. Complete with photographs, this short text gives readers a glimpse into interpretations of equality and what organizations like the World Food Programme are doing to tackle gender inequality.

As part of the UN, the World Food Programme is the world’s largest humanitarian organization focusing on hunger and food security . It provides food assistance to over 80 countries each year.

“Here’s How Gender Equality is Measured” (2020) – Catherine Caruso

Gender inequality is one of the most discussed areas of inequality. Sobering stats reveal that while progress has been made, the world is still far from realizing true gender equality. How is gender equality measured? This essay refers to the Global Gender Gap report ’s factors. This report is released each year by the World Economic Forum. The four factors are political empowerment, health and survival, economic participation and opportunity, and education. The author provides a brief explanation of each factor.

Catherine Caruso is the Editorial Intern at Global Citizen, a movement committed to ending extreme poverty by 2030. Previously, Caruso worked as a writer for Inquisitr. Her English degree is from Syracuse University. She writes stories on health, the environment, and citizenship.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

Winter 2024

Winter 2024

Our Inequality: An Introduction

Inequality is greater now than it has been at any time in the last century, and the gaps in wages, income, and wealth are wider in the United States than in any other democratic and developed economy. Yet we lack a clear and compelling account of how and why we arrived this point. Our current economic troubles have aimed a spotlight at our inequality problem, but they did not create it. What did?

essay introduction on inequality

This series is adapted from Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality , a resource developed for the Project on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies and inequality.org . It is presented in nine parts. This introduction lays out the basic dimensions of American inequality and interrogates the usual explanatory suspects. The next eight parts will develop a political explanation for American inequality, looking in turn at labor relations, the minimum wage and labor standards, job-based benefits, social policy, taxes, financialization, executive pay, and macroeconomic policy.

Americans today live in a starkly unequal society. Inequality is greater now than it has been at any time in the last century, and the gaps in wages, income, and wealth are wider here than they are in any other democratic and developed economy.

The dimensions of that inequality are both familiar and depressing. A smaller share of national income is flowing to wages and earnings, and—more important—inequality within that labor share is widening. As a result, wage growth has flatlined for a generation [ click here for interactive graphic]. Middle-income workers make no more now than they did in the late 1970s; those in the lower wage cohort have lost ground over that span.

The growing gap in income (including non-wage income like returns on investment or capital gains) is even starker. Between 1979 and 2007, the real incomes of the richest 1 percent almost tripled, while the real incomes of the median household inched up only about 25 percent—and that almost all due to an increase in labor force participation and hours worked .

Growing Together, Growing Apart

Inequality in wealth (the sum total of household savings, home equity, investments, and debts) is starker still [ click here for graphic]. The richest 1 percent claims about a third of the nation’s wealth; the top 5 percent claim over 60 percent. These shares have grown steadily over the last generation. The recession took a big bite out of middle-class wealth (much of which is vested in home equity). And the gains of the recovery have flowed almost exclusively to the richest Americans.

On each of these fronts, inequality has grown more in the United States than it has elsewhere. Nowhere in the industrialized world is there a bigger gap between wage growth and productivity growth over the last two business cycles. Over the last twenty years , the richest Americans started with a bigger share of income than any of their well-heeled peers and gained more than any of them. Among the world’s wealthy countries (those with an average adult wealth of $100,000 or more), the U.S. ranks dead last on the relevant inequality measures.

To make matters worse, demography and geography widen those gaps for many Americans. The gender gap in wages, income, and wealth has closed very slowly, and much of that progress is driven by the collapse of male wages rather than real gains by working women. The racial gap in wages, incomes, and wealth has closed little, and it has widened for those caught up in the startling (and racialized) spike in incarceration in the United States. While racial segregation in our cities has abated somewhat over the last generation, economic segregation —the likelihood that Americans live in enclaves of wealth or poverty—has hardened. Economic mobility, by any measure, remains weak ; the recent spike in inequality has simply hardened that dismal American admonition: “choose your parents wisely.”

How Did We Get Here?

For all the jaw-dropping comparisons—between rich and poor, between then and now, between the United States and other nations—we lack a clear and compelling account of how and why we arrived this point. Our current economic troubles have aimed a spotlight at our inequality problem, but they did not create it.

What did? Conventional explanations generally posit one or both of two plotlines. The first: somebody took the money. This version stresses Wall Street greed and the Bush-era tax cuts and features a plutocracy determined to claim more than its share of private wealth and shoulder less than its share of public goods. The second: something happened to the economy. This version has a backstory in the inexorable march of globalization and technological change, and a more recent plot twist: the recession that began in 2007 and—for most of us—has not yet ended. 

These accounts are not so much wrong as they are misleadingly incomplete, inattentive to longer-term historical trends and to the political choices made across that history. A fuller explanation starts to come into focus when we consider the political and economic conditions that prevailed right after the Second World War. At that historical moment, the United States displayed much narrower gaps between the rich and poor than we do now. The gains of economic growth back then were much more broadly distributed. And working families (at least white working families) enjoyed much greater economic security.

This was no accident or lucky combination of circumstances. It was the outcome of political struggle and policy choices that erected a foundation and a structure for shared prosperity. The inequality of the twentieth century’s early years actually began closing before economic growth took off in the 1940s, as a consequence of the political response to the Great Depression. Thanks to this response, federal support for collective bargaining rights sustained a surge in labor organization that dramatically improving the bargaining power of America’s workers. Other political innovations of the New Deal—ranging from Social Security to the minimum wage—secured a floor for working-class incomes. Postwar social movements, especially civil rights and second-wave feminism, then girded that floor by closing off avenues for discrimination.

The nation’s tax system, meanwhile, and new regulatory obstacles to speculative finance erected something of a ceiling for higher incomes. And substantial public investments—the GI Bill support for access to higher education, mortgage subsidies for veterans, housing projects, the interstate highway system, and the Cold War—kept the rest of the structure in pretty good repair. 

Since then, that structure has essentially collapsed. This collapse is often recounted as an unfortunate but necessary response to changing economic conditions: the world has become a leaner, meaner, more competitive place. As a result, the policies of the New Deal—and the costs they imposed on business—had to go. But there is little evidence to actually support this account. Indeed, the initial handwringing over American economic decline came at a time when our principal competitors, Japan and Germany, boasted both higher wages and more expansive social programs than the United States.

Political choices, not economic necessity, dismantled the New Deal. Future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell would first sketch out the organizational and ideological dimensions of these choices in a now infamous   1971 memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce . The conservative ascendance in state and national politics affirmed these choices across the political landscape, with dramatic consequences: steep cuts in social spending, the political abandonment of organized labor, deregulation and privatization, tax cuts, punitive cycles of unemployment—all justified in the name of lowering business costs, capturing economic efficiencies, and unleashing markets. Such arguments, of course, camouflaged the real goal of the pushback against the New Deal: a redistribution of income upward via the erosion of the hard-earned bargaining power of ordinary Americans. Rising inequality was not a lamentable side effect of America’s new policy framework; it was its intent.

Why Does It Matter?

Such inequality , in the view of many economists , is not just the toll we pay for free markets, but an essential incentive within a market economy. People work hard to avoid poverty and even harder to get rich. Any pursuit of "equal outcomes" would stifle this initiative and, with it, the economic growth on which we all depend. The poor, as they like to say, will find themselves much better off with a thin slice of a growing pie than with a thicker slice of a small one.

There is little evidence—historical or economic—to substantiate such silliness. The “market incentives” argument holds water only as long as hard work is reliably rewarded in the short term (with wages) and in the long term (with economic mobility)—a prospect that has unraveled in the last decade. The economy does not need inequality to grow. In fact, nearly the reverse is true. In our own recent history , sustained economic growth is closely associated with a relatively equitable distribution of economic rewards.  Even the International Monetary Fund has conceded on this point, concluding recently that “ lower net inequality is robustly correlated with faster and more durable growth .”

Stark and sustained inequality discourages those at the bottom of the income distribution ladder (whose hard work goes unrewarded), and encourages those at the top to engage in short-sighted speculation—much of which (think predatory lending and usurious credit card rates) exploits the poor and widens the gap. Inequality matters, most obviously and directly, to those whom it leaves behind. This includes the very poor—the “underclass” or “the truly disadvantaged,” in the social science literature—who have long been cordoned off from the rewards and opportunities enjoyed by most Americans, but also the broad middle class, for whom growing inequality has begun to erode wealth, incomes, living standards, and opportunities.

Inequality also matters more generally, to society at large and to the health and prosperity of all who live within it.  The evidence on this point is overwhelming . Citizens in unequal societies, researchers have shown, are more likely end up sick, obese, unhappy, unsafe, or in jail. These social outcomes, bad in themselves, also undercut the productivity and efficiency of the economy, as the high costs of poor public health, heavy policing, and mass incarceration siphon off our resources and leave our human capital underprepared and underutilized.

More directly, at a certain point, stark income gaps begin to hollow out consumption . “A millionaire cannot wear 10,000 pairs of $10 shoes,” as one advertiser warned on the eve of the Great Depression in 1929, “but a hundred thousand others can if they’ve got the $10 to pay for them, and the leisure to show them off.” Rising inequality in the last generation has created the same tension, eased only temporarily by the availability of consumer credit and home equity. Such efforts to patch together substitutes for aggregate demand create their own inefficiencies—including a bloated and parasitic financial services sector, fed by both the desperate demand for credit from those falling behind and the frantic search for speculative returns by those leaping ahead.

Economic inequality breeds inequality in politics, whose highest goal, in turn, becomes policies that make economic inequality even worse.

Finally, economic inequality endangers democracy . Market power will always shape political outcomes, if only because the rich will always have both the wherewithal and the motive to play a role more influential than any individual votes they might cast. But pervasive or sustained inequality has broader political consequences. Massive inequality tends to tilt public policy toward shortsighted rewards or special treatment (deregulation, tax breaks) and away from the public or collective goods (education, infrastructure) essential to future economic growth. Economic inequality breeds inequality in politics, whose highest goal, in turn, becomes policies that make economic inequality even worse.

Democratic institutions, at their best, provide a basic physical, legal, and fiscal infrastructure in which markets can thrive. These institutions can ameliorate or regulate the excesses of market competition and provide the public goods and services that markets are unable or unwilling to generate on their own. Under conditions of stark economic and political inequality, all of this begins to unravel.

Engines of Inequality?

Inequality is a consequence of a wide (and often bewildering) array of factors and circumstances. Understanding the relative weight of these factors is important—not only because we want a decent and credible explanation of what has happened, but because there is so much at stake in the details of that explanation. Understanding the roots of inequality is the starting point for any political response.

Before turning to the political roots of American inequality, we need to dispense with some common—and mistaken—explanations: the globalization of the American economy, recent technological change, and the demographic transformation of the American family.

I. The World Is Flat

The first culprit for rising inequality is often globalization, or the ease and speed with which goods and services, money, information, production, and labor can move across national borders. In this view, the collapse of American leadership in the world economy in the 1970s yielded a form of globalization that was both more intense and more heterogeneous than what came before; its rewards flowed to emerging or resource-rich economies, and to private interests rather than nations.

With globalization, we see a general trend toward declining inequality between countries and rising inequality within them. In this flat new world, production follows lower labor costs across borders and oceans (most notably in clothing and consumer electronics). The threat of flight or plant closing becomes a pervasive and effective strategy in labor relations. The impact has been starkest on American manufacturing —where we have seen sustained competitive pressures from labor-intensive imports, a diversion of domestic investment, and unrelenting pressure on wages. The local impact in regions and communities more directly exposed to low-wage competition from abroad has been devastating: markedly steeper unemployment, lower labor-force participation, slower wage growth, and higher demands on public services and support.

These are pretty dismal consequences (and prospects). But it is important to understand globalization—and its discontents—in a broader economic and political context. As an explanation for economy-wide wage weakness, the footloose mobility of capital is overdrawn. Much of the economy is rooted in place by labor markets, supply chains, or consumers. Sectors of the economy untouched by liberalized trade shed workers and dampened wages at pretty much the same rate as the rest of the economy in the twenty-five years after 1970. While globalization has accelerated since 1990, wage inequality at the bottom (between low-wage and median-wage workers) has actually slowed over that span. Most of the growth in inequality during this era has been driven by gains made by very high earners—a pattern unlikely to be shaped much by trade.

More to the point, all countries face the forces and consequences of globalization, and yet wage and income inequality is starker in the United States than in most other settings. Indeed, the United States is less exposed to trade than any of its OECD peers, and yet more unequal than almost all of them. It is not globalization (as an abstract and inevitable force) that generates or explains inequality, but the political response to globalization in particular countries.

The demands globalization places on the labor market can lead to a race to the bottom, but they need not. Indeed, globalization widens the wage gap (within and across countries) not universally, but when and where labor protections are weak. It is not trade that generates inequality, but its political terms.

II. The Computer Did It

Others have argued that shared prosperity is undone by technological change. In this view, skill-biased technological change displaces “routine” manual tasks such as working on a production line and creates new tasks and occupations for which skilled workers are better adapted. But it does not displace non-routine, low-wage service jobs. As a result, those with skills and advanced degrees hoard any economic gains and everyone else falls farther and farther behind. We see losses in the middle of the labor market (in sectors like administration, production, and fabrication), accompanied by growth at the edges—in low-wage, low-skill jobs at one end, and in high-wage, high-skill jobs at the other. 

If nothing else, this is a politically attractive kind of explanation for inequality. Technological innovation or change (like globalization) is not something you can control, so there seems little political recourse but to occasionally lament the quality of American education. But, on closer examination, it is not that compelling an explanation.

Despite all the handwringing about our underprepared workforce, the returns on education are not that clear. While those with some college education or better pulled away from the pack in the 1980s and 1990s, that advantage has slowed dramatically. Workers with some college education or a college degree are much more likely now to remain mired in low-wage work than workers with the same educational background a generation ago. The last fifteen years have seen significantly slower growth in high-skill, high-wage jobs than in the economy at large . Even those with the right skills are pounding the pavement.

The evidence linking technological change and inequality is weak with respect to the timing and the nature of that inequality . Over the long haul, technological change has tended tend to push job growth to the margins, but this has occurred monotonously, across eras of relative equality and inequality. The modern trajectory of wage inequality, by contrast, is sharply discontinuous—widening most dramatically between low and median wage workers in the 1980s, and between median and high-wage workers in the last decade.

Since 1969 labor’s share of income has fallen most rapidly in those sectors where union presence withered, not where computers displaced labor.

The notion that inequality is generated by rapid technological change and skill shortages is not sustained by recent American experience. Since 1969 labor’s share of income has fallen most rapidly in those sectors where union presence withered , not where computers displaced labor. Across our last two business cycles, income concentrated not in sectors or regions where skills were most in demand, but where speculative bubbles bloomed and burst. During our most recent recession and recovery, the notion of a “skills shortage” was belied by the fact that job openings and available workers were distributed pretty evenly across the economy. Skilled workers saw no “bidding up” of their wages or increase in their work hours, as one would expect in a shortage. Indeed, most of the growth in wage inequality across the last generation can be found within occupations, and not in their relative share of the labor market. 

Whatever causal importance we assign to technological change, it is hard to see it as a credible account of the different trajectories of inequality across countries. Like globalization, technological change is a challenge faced by all economies. And yet differences across national settings (and especially the outlying status of the United States) remain profound. 

III. Calling Ward Cleaver

A final culprit is demographic trends—particularly changes in family composition. Since income is a “household” measure, the rising proportion of single-parent households is often invoked to explain inequality. Indeed, in the United States the most prosperous family units (married households with a woman in the labor force) are declining as a share of all families, just as the least prosperous (single, female-headed households) are rising as a share of all families. This has been accompanied by a rise in what social demographers call “ assortative mating ,” or the reluctance of men and women to cross an educational or income barrier when they get married. This further widens the gap between affluent dual-income families and all others.

But we need to be careful about what is being observed or explained here, and the mechanisms by which demographic change might contribute to economic inequality. On single motherhood, the United States shares top billing among its OECD peers with Sweden—a country noted for its relative equality. On assortative mating, the United States is in the middle of the pack. And on neither trend do gradual changes in family composition line up in any credible manner with the growth of inequality in the United States. 

The differences, it turns out, are political rather than demographic . Compared to their OECD peers, two-earner families in the United States do fairly well (only 5 percent fall below the poverty line). But American families with only one worker—over a quarter of which fall below the poverty line—are at a much sharper disadvantage than similar families elsewhere. At the same time, the presence of kids (in the absence of policies like family leave and publicly supported child care found in much of the rest of the world) is a distinct economic burden in the United States. While childless American households have one of the lowest rates of poverty incidence in the OECD, those with children have one of the highest. It is not the rise of single-parent households that feeds inequality but the stigma attached to single motherhood—and the policies that flow from that.

Finally, demographic explanations tend to confuse consequence and cause. Wages, income, and wealth are shaped by family structure but they also shape family structure. Those with lower incomes and lower educational attainment, for example, tend to marry earlier and divorce more often. In this sense, single motherhood is a reflection of inequality, not a cause. Finally, most of the measurable inequality (and insecurity) occurs within demographic categories. Inequality and insecurity cut across family types .  The gap is growing not between single moms and everyone else, but between (for example) some parents with kids and other parents with kids. 

Too much competition from China. A skills gap. Too many single moms. In most explications of the inequality problem, this is the conventional roundup of suspects. Yet, at best, this is a line-up of minor accomplices. And the case against each is surprisingly thin.

For starters, none of these explanations do a very good job of explaining the  timing  of increases in wage and income inequality across the last generation—either because the explanatory trends are continuous and the trajectory of inequality is not, or because movement in the explanatory trends do not line up in any chronologically plausible fashion with movement in different kinds of inequality. The suspicions are warranted, but the suspects have decent alibis. 

Each of these explanations is also rooted in global trends. They lack much explanatory weight, therefore, in explaining differences in inequality across national settings. Gradual, continuous, and global patterns of change cannot be used to explain discontinuous spikes in inequality within one national setting. They key variable here is not the broad social or economic trends, but our political response to them.

All of these economic and demographic changes are embedded in a larger institutional and political story. In order to understand U.S. inequality (its growth over time and its exceptionalism), and in order to think about redressing that inequality, we need to focus on differences that matter. The simplest way to do this is to go back to our midcentury sketch of the public policies and institutions—the “New Deal order”—that sustained both a floor for the bottom of the labor market and a ceiling for the top of it. What happened to those policies over the last half-century? How did their fate contribute to rising inequality?

Colin Gordon  is a professor of history at the University of Iowa. He writes widely on the history of American public policy and is the author, most recently, of  Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality .

Wolves of Wall Street: Financialization and American Inequality

It’s no secret by now that the recent spike in American inequality, and the gains rapidly accruing to the wealthy, are driven in large part by “financialization.” Over the last generation, financial services have expanded not with economic growth, but with stagnation and crisis—and their spectacular rise has accounted for about half of the decline in labor’s share of national income. How did things get this bad?

The Perils of Private Welfare: Job-Based Benefits and American Inequality

American inequality is driven not just by the uneven distribution of wages, but also by the uneven distribution of job-based benefits. More than any other country, the United States relies on private employment and private bargaining to deliver basic social benefits—including health coverage, retirement security, and paid leave. The results—on any basic measure of economic security—have been dismal.

The Union Difference: Labor and American Inequality

Under the New Deal order, unions not only sustained prosperity but ensured that it was shared. Since the 1970s, however, the attack on unions has reversed these gains. Today, both union membership and inequality stand roughly at 1920s levels.

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Income and wealth inequality.

essay introduction on inequality

"For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it. We believe that America's prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class." 

—President Barack Obama 1

Introduction

There are many different types of inequality among people: educational attainment, work experience, and health—to name a few. This essay discusses economic inequality: its causes, measurement, and the potential impact of its growth in the U.S. economy.

Economists directly link differences in educational attainment and work experience, also known as human capital, to differences in economic outcomes. That is, formal education and job skills determine how likely a person is to find and hold a stable job that pays good wages. The flow of money from wages is the most important source of income for most people. Over time, regular income from employment allows people to own assets such as a home or a retirement financial portfolio. That stock of assets is called wealth .

Data collected by federal organizations such as the Census Bureau and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (BOG) allow us to measure how unequal the distributions of income and wealth are in the United States. Those data show that, since the 1970s, some individuals and families are earning much more income and accumulating much larger amounts of wealth than the typical family does. 

Data reported by the World Bank allow us to compare the distribution of income across countries. As of 2018, the available data show large international differences in income inequality. Although not all countries in the world have data on income inequality, among those that do, the United States ranks among the top 25% most unequal.

What Causes Inequality?

The root cause of differences in income and wealth across individuals and households is a combination of personal and social factors. Personal factors are unique to individuals and include talent, effort, and luck. Such factors can be either nurtured or hindered by the family upbringing of the individual. Social factors affect groups of people and include education policies, labor market laws, tax codes, and financial regulations. At any moment in time, social factors can overpower personal factors to determine individual prosperity and increase inequality among people. 2

For example, as gradually more married women started working outside the home between 1960 and 2000, their family incomes increased and the differences in income between households became larger depending on whether they had one or two people earning wages. At the same time, differences in the types of jobs women and men tend to hold also contribute to income inequality between genders. 3

Because wealth is accumulated over time, older people are generally wealthier than younger people. For that reason, if there are many more young people than old people in the general population and the old hold more wealth than the young, overall wealth inequality will be high. 4

Finally, some people argue that the type of monetary policy used to ensure steady access to credit by households and businesses during recent economic contractions may contribute to higher levels of income inequality. However, that claim is hotly disputed. 5

How Is Income Inequality Measured?

There are different ways to measure how unequal income is in a country. The U.S. Census measures income inequality as the ratio of the mean, or average, income for the highest quintile (top 20 percent) of earners divided by the mean income of the lowest quintile (bottom 20 percent) of earners in a particular area. Let's say a small county has 500 people earning an income. To measure how unequal those incomes are, the Census surveys and sorts each person's income from highest to lowest, calculates the average income of the 100 people earning the most and the average income of the 100 people earning the least, and divides the first figure by the second figure. 

Figure 1 Income Inequality by County 

SOURCE: U.S. Census via FRED ® , Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?m=QRCJ , accessed June 23, 2021.

Figure 1 shows average county-level income inequality measured between 2016 and 2020. The Census considers the average income over a five-year period to account for the fact that peoples' income changes from year to year. Measured this way, income inequality can be as high as 130 or as low as 5. These measurements mean that the most affluent households in a particular county can earn as much as 130 times or as little as 5 times as much as the least affluent households do.

Another way to measure income inequality in a population is to calculate the Gini index . The World Bank uses that index to measure how much the distribution of income among households deviates from a perfectly equal distribution. The Gini index can take any value between 0 and 100. A value of 0 represents perfect equality: All households earn the same income. A value of 100 indicates perfect inequality: One household earns all the income, and all other households earn nothing.

Figure 2 Gini Index by Nation

SOURCE: World Bank via FRED ® , Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?m=QRFh , accessed April 6, 2021.

Figure 2 shows country-level income inequality measured with a Gini index in 2018. The highest value is 54, and the lowest value is 25. It is important to note that two countries can have very similar Gini indexes despite having very different distributions of income. For example, in 2018, the Gini index for the United States was 41.4 and for Bulgaria was 41.3, despite the fact that those two countries' economic and social histories are very different.

In the United States, since the 1970s, the Gini index has increased at a steady rate, indicating greater income inequality across families. 6 Some research suggests that this growing difference is related to the increased value of the stock market. Wealthier households hold more stocks than poorer households. So, when stock market prices rise, the income of wealthier households grows relatively more and overall income inequality increases. 7  

How Is Wealth Inequality Measured?

The BOG combines information from two different surveys to measure how wealth is distributed among households: It takes the value of a household's assets (e.g., the current market price of a home) and liabilities (e.g., the unpaid part of a mortgage for a home) and calculates the difference between the two, which is called net worth . Next, the BOG sorts household wealth from highest to lowest and reports the net worth of four different groups: the wealthiest 1% of the population, the next 9%, the next 40%, and the bottom 50%.

Figure 3 Share of Total Net Worth Held by Population Groups

SOURCE: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System via FRED ® , Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=O2Kq , accessed April 6, 2021.

Figure 3 shows the share of total net worth held by each of those four groups. In 2021, the wealthiest 1% of the population (about 3.3 million households) held about one-third of total net worth; the next 9% (almost 30 million households) held a little more than one-third; the next 40% (about 133 million households) and the bottom 50% (about 166 million households) together held the rest—less than one-third of total net worth.

The data from the BOG show increasing wealth concentration since 1989, when the data first became available. 8 It is important to note that, over time, some individual households can move up or down between wealth groups, depending on the changing value of their assets. Also, some research suggests the particular nature of some economic fluctuations impacts some households' net worth more than others. For example, the real estate crash associated with the 2007-09 recession resulted in large losses for the poorest 50% of the population. 9

Does Inequality Matter?

The economic impact of growing income and wealth inequality in the United States is an intensely studied question. Economists are debating how to answer that question by analyzing data and creating mathematical models to study it. Because this is ongoing work, there is no single answer.

Some research shows that, in richer countries, more unequal income makes economic fluctuations more pronounced. 10 That finding means that the changes in overall income and employment known as business cycles become more dramatic. Moreover, statistical evidence suggests increased income inequality undermines economic growth due to lower educational achievements (and human capital) among poorer individuals and households. 11 As discussed earlier, education builds a person's human capital and is rewarded with higher income from employment. Finally, research suggests the increasing income and wealth inequality can undermine the use of monetary policy (as we know it) to maximize employment and ensure price stability. 12  

Inequality in individual economic outcomes arises from a combination of personal traits and social conditions. The distributions of income and wealth in a society can be measured in multiple ways: comparing the highest to the lowest earners, calculating an index describing how unequal income is among all individuals, and assessing people's financial wellbeing according to the value of their wealth holdings. Regardless of how we measure income and wealth inequality, their distributions in the United States are becoming more unequal. This trend is likely to impact economic life as we know it. More research is needed to figure out precisely how that may happen.

1 Obama, Barack. "Inaugural Address." January 21, 2013; https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/01/21/inaugural-address-president-barack-obama .

2 For an example of how the use of city maps to assess lending risk after the Great Depression influenced homeownership rates across population groups for decades afterward, see the following article: Mendez-Carbajo, Diego. "Neighborhood Redlining, Racial Segregation, and Homeownership." Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Page One Economics , September 2021; https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2021/09/01/neighborhood-redlining-racial-segregation-and-homeownership .

3 For more on gender and labor markets, see the following article: Mendez-Carbajo, Diego. "Gender and Labor Markets." Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Page One Economics , January 2022; https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2022/01/03/gender-and-labor-markets .

4 For more on aging and wealth inequality, see the following article: Vandenbroucke, Guillaume and Zhu, Heting. "Aging and Wealth Inequality." Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Economic Synopses , 2017, No. 2; https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synopses/2017/02/24/aging-and-wealth-inequality/ .

5 For a contribution to the ongoing debate about the relationship between monetary policy and income inequality, see the following article: Bullard, James. "Income Inequality and Monetary Policy: A Framework with Answers to Three Questions." Presented at the C. Peter McColough Series on International Economics, Council on Foreign Relations, New York, June 26, 2014; http://research.stlouisfed.org/econ/bullard/pdf/Bullard_CFR_26June2014_Final.pdf .

6 The following FRED® graph shows the income Gini ratio of all families, reported by the U.S. Census Bureau since 1947: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=MKYg .

7 For more on income inequality and the stock market, see the following articles: 

Bennett, Julie and Chien, YiLi. "The Large Gap in Stock Market Participation Between Black and White Households." Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Economic Synopses , 2022, No. 7; https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synopses/2022/03/28/the-large-gap-in-stock-market-participation-between-black-and-white-households/ . 

Owyang, Michael T. and Shell, Hannah G. "Taking Stock: Income Inequality and the Stock Market." Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Economic Synopses , 2016, No. 7; https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synopses/2016/04/29/taking-stock-income-inequality-and-the-stock-market/ .

8 For more about the change in wealth distribution over time, see the following post: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. "Comparing the Assets of the Rich, Poor, and Middle Class." FRED ® Blog , October 21, 2019; https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2019/10/comparing-the-assets-of-the-rich-poor-and-middle-class/ .

9 For more on how recessions impact household net worth, see the following article: Mendez-Carbajo, Diego. "How Recessions Have Affected Household Net Worth, 1990-2017: Uneven Experiences by Wealth Quantile." Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Economic Synopses , 2020, No. 38; https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synopses/2020/08/07/how-recessions-have-affected-household-net-worth-1990-2017-uneven-experiences-by-wealth-quantile .

10 For more on the relationship between inequality and economic fluctuations, see the following article: Iyigun, Murat F. and Owen, Ann L. "Income Inequality and Macroeconomic Fluctuations." Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System International Finance Discussion Papers , July 1997; https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/ifdp/income-inequality-and-macroeconomic-fluctuations.htm .

11 For more on the relationship between income inequality and economic growth, see the following article: Cingano, Federico. "Trends in Income Inequality and its Impact on Economic Growth." Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD Social, Employment, and Migration Working Papers , 2014, No. 163; https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/trends-in-income-inequality-and-its-impact-on-economic-growth-sem-wp163.pdf .

12 For more on the relationship between income inequality and monetary policy, see the following article: Cairo, Isabel and Sim, Jae W. "Income Inequality, Financial Crises, and Monetary Policy." Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System Finance and Economics Discussion Series , July 2018; https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/income-inequality-financial-crises-and-monetary-policy.htm .

© 2022, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis or the Federal Reserve System.

Asset: A resource with economic value that an individual, corporation, or country owns with the expectation that it will provide future benefits.

Gini index: A statistical measure of income inequality in a population that ranges from 0 (indicating absolute income equality) to 100 (indicating a perfectly inequal income distribution).

Household: A group of people living in the same home, regardless of their relationship to one another.

Income: The payment people receive for providing resources in the marketplace. When people work, they provide human resources (labor) and in exchange they receive income in the form of wages or salaries. People also earn income in the forms of rent, profit, and interest.

Liability: A legal responsibility to pay back money from a loan or other type of debt.

Net worth: The value of a person's assets minus the value of his or her liabilities.

Quintile: Any of five equal groups into which a population can be divided according to the distribution of values of a particular variable.

Wealth: The value of a person's assets accumulated over time.

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Inequality and Globalization: A Review Essay

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Gender Inequality Essay

500+ words essay on gender inequality.

For many years, the dominant gender has been men while women were the minority. It was mostly because men earned the money and women looked after the house and children. Similarly, they didn’t have any rights as well. However, as time passed by, things started changing slowly. Nonetheless, they are far from perfect. Gender inequality remains a serious issue in today’s time. Thus, this gender inequality essay will highlight its impact and how we can fight against it.

gender inequality essay

  About Gender Inequality Essay

Gender inequality refers to the unequal and biased treatment of individuals on the basis of their gender. This inequality happens because of socially constructed gender roles. It happens when an individual of a specific gender is given different or disadvantageous treatment in comparison to a person of the other gender in the same circumstance.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Impact of Gender Inequality

The biggest problem we’re facing is that a lot of people still see gender inequality as a women’s issue. However, by gender, we refer to all genders including male, female, transgender and others.

When we empower all genders especially the marginalized ones, they can lead their lives freely. Moreover, gender inequality results in not letting people speak their minds. Ultimately, it hampers their future and compromises it.

History is proof that fighting gender inequality has resulted in stable and safe societies. Due to gender inequality, we have a gender pay gap. Similarly, it also exposes certain genders to violence and discrimination.

In addition, they also get objectified and receive socioeconomic inequality. All of this ultimately results in severe anxiety, depression and even low self-esteem. Therefore, we must all recognize that gender inequality harms genders of all kinds. We must work collectively to stop these long-lasting consequences and this gender inequality essay will tell you how.

How to Fight Gender Inequality

Gender inequality is an old-age issue that won’t resolve within a few days. Similarly, achieving the goal of equality is also not going to be an easy one. We must start by breaking it down and allow it time to go away.

Firstly, we must focus on eradicating this problem through education. In other words, we must teach our young ones to counter gender stereotypes from their childhood.

Similarly, it is essential to ensure that they hold on to the very same beliefs till they turn old. We must show them how sports are not gender-biased.

Further, we must promote equality in the fields of labour. For instance, some people believe that women cannot do certain jobs like men. However, that is not the case. We can also get celebrities on board to promote and implant the idea of equality in people’s brains.

All in all, humanity needs men and women to continue. Thus, inequality will get us nowhere. To conclude the gender inequality essay, we need to get rid of the old-age traditions and mentality. We must teach everyone, especially the boys all about equality and respect. It requires quite a lot of work but it is possible. We can work together and achieve equal respect and opportunities for all genders alike.

FAQ of Gender Inequality Essay

Question 1: What is gender inequality?

Answer 1: Gender inequality refers to the unequal and biased treatment of individuals on the basis of their gender. This inequality happens because of socially constructed gender roles. It happens when an individual of a specific gender is given different or disadvantageous treatment in comparison to a person of the other gender in the same circumstance.

Question 2: How does gender inequality impact us?

Answer 2:  The gender inequality essay tells us that gender inequality impacts us badly. It takes away opportunities from deserving people. Moreover, it results in discriminatory behaviour towards people of a certain gender. Finally, it also puts people of a certain gender in dangerous situations.

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The United States Healthcare System Systemic Racism and Discrimination Towards American Minorities

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INTRODUCTION

Today, United States citizens live in a society guided by a false consciousness. [1] The presiding culture of the United States (US) has painted a picture – a distorted and surreal mythology – that continues to be admired. This picture is characterized by conservative dogma and intolerance within the political, economic, and ideological spheres of society, leaving individuals unable to ascertain truth. US citizens are provided the inability to see reality for what it is, and instead encouraged to live by a means of pseudo-reality as described by Debord. [2] As a result, many US institutions, including the prison system and the healthcare system, have become platforms of masked discriminatory and racist practices within today’s world of “colorblindness.” The right to universal health care represents yet another opportunity for US institutions to deploy covert and underlying racist and discriminatory tactics, and continues to remain largely unacknowledged by non-minority citizens of the US, contributing to significantly higher rates of untreated health concerns and concomitant higher death rates in US minority populations.

To understand this assertion, it is important to start by examining the ways in which the US prison system acts as a discriminatory and racist institution. Today, African Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities account for roughly 40% of the US population, yet they comprise around 60% of the US’ total incarcerated population. [3] That is, they are disproportionately represented amongst the incarcerated. To put this in perspective, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, nearly “one in every 15 African American men [become] incarcerated, as opposed to only one in every 106 white men.” [4] Looking back to the early 1970s when Black Americans were making progress in obtaining civil rights, there was a substantial increase in the number of incarcerated Black individuals, acting as a “stealth counterweight to political and economic progress.” [5] Thus, prisons were used as a means to suppress the growing success of Black individuals, furthering the disproportionate number of incarcerated minorities.

The prison system is not the only institution within the US that deploys underlying discriminatory, exploitative, and racist tactics towards American minorities. For example, there have been mortgage lending procedures that have “disproportionately exposed minority borrowers to the risky subprime loans that triggered the financial collapse of 2008 and widespread foreclosures in minority communities.” [6] Also discovered have been numerous obscure tax and insurance policies that have targeted neighborhoods with substantial minority populations. [7] There are many more examples of US institutions exploiting and discriminating based upon race, yet minority groups cannot simply avoid these tactics; that is, taking out loans and paying taxes can be essential life tasks for most individuals. Thus, as society continues to be governed by a false consciousness, true reality will indefinitely remain uncertain. This becomes clear, as even today there have been minimal studies regarding the exploration of this institutionalized racism. [8]

As it is clear numerous institutions have and continue to behave in discriminatory ways, it must be considered that the US’ lack of a nationwide right to health insurance represents another means of discrimination based upon race. While at this point in the essay a discussion of the history of slavery within the US may seem extraneous, the lasting effects of slavery continue to play a key role in discrimination towards minorities, contributing to diminished resources for health insurance for minorities in the US. To understand the role of slavery in decreased access to nationwide health insurance, one must come to see the foremost factor as to why individuals do not carry it. That is, “in 2022, 64.2% of uninsured nonelderly adults said they were uninsured because coverage is not affordable, making it the most common reason cited for being uninsured.” [9]   As for the role of long-term effects of slavery, minorities, especially Black Americans, face far greater poverty than their counterparts, predominantly in places where there is a stronger connection to slavery in the past. [10] Thus, as it is commonly understood the southern half of the US to have experienced the largest impact from slavery, this would indicate the largest impact on poverty struggles as a result of slavery would be in the south. Coincidentally, as one might say, “reflecting geographic variation in income and the availability of public coverage, most uninsured people live in the South.” [11]

As Black Americans have faced substantial struggles with poverty due to the lasting effects of slavery and previously exploitative southern economies, bearing in mind the primary reason for not carrying health insurance is a lack of funds, it is plain that past discrimination and racism of yesterday has set the stage for wealth and health disparities and discrimination today . That is, the “average wealth of white households in the United States [has become] 13 times as high as that of Black households.” [12] To further put this problem into context, minorities “made up 45.7% of the nonelderly US population but accounted for 62.3% of the total nonelderly uninsured population.” [13] Looking at minorities other than Black Americans, the uninsured rate for “nonelderly Hispanic (18.0%) and American Indian and Alaska Native people (19.1%) are more than 2.5 times the uninsured rates for white people (6.6%)” [14] Moreover, of the uninsured population, most of the 25.6 million nonelderly uninsured adults were from minority groups. [15]

As posited, Black Americans and other minority groups’ inability to afford health insurance has been created by US citizens themselves, through past legality and support of slavery, leaving lasting effects that have made health insurance unaffordable. In return, some US citizens and their government have failed to remedy the situation, choosing instead to endorse the idea that minorities lack funds to carry health insurance by arguing they are ‘lazy,’ ‘unmotivated,’ or ‘irresponsible.’  In doing so, US citizens have further engaged in the stereotyping of minority groups as inferior through their inability to obtain health insurance. Consequently, through an unfair health insurance access system, US society has maintained a discriminatory attitude towards minority groups. Once there is a determination of a belief of inferiority, a blind eye will indefinitely turn away from discrimination within society’s governance of the false consciousness, leaving its citizens unable to ascertain reality, chiefly developing and supporting their own self interests. Thus, through the contribution and failure to remedy the poverty struggles inflicted on minority groups, including those inflicted on Black Americans largely through the past slavery in the southern US, minority groups, making up 62.3% of all uninsured nonelderly adults, have been made into the problem by society. These individuals have been labeled, ideologically transformed into ‘inferior beings’ per conservative dogma, and thus become further discriminated against with respect to their inability to obtain health insurance in the US.

Considering the ethicality of the lack of a nationwide right to health insurance, one must take the stance of Mill’s Utilitarianism, which revolves around providing the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people through consequence of action. [16] First, it is clear by failing to provide a national right to health insurance, the U.S. is leaving indigent, uninsured groups, largely consisting of minorities, to find the means to fund their own insurance. This may contribute to higher and disproportionate crime rates of minority groups out of need for survival and fulfillment of basic human needs; to institutionalized racism; to false ideologies; to stereotypes wrongly placed upon minority groups; and to untreated illness. The resulting human tragedy is seen in myriad situations: minority woman facing high maternal death rates in childbirth, uninsured minority individuals being turned away from hospitals who only take those with insurance, silent suffering and untreated illnesses including high rates of diabetes and heart disease, and more recently, higher death rates and worse outcomes for minorities as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. [17]

Thus, as the result of a non-existent nationwide right to health insurance, the US is plainly failing to provide the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people and therefore, per Mill, the failure to provide a national right to health insurance is clearly unethical. The lack of national access for all individuals to health insurance is not only an underlying form of racism and discrimination towards American minorities, but it is unethical as well. To address this, American society must alter its picture of the distorted and surreal reality that has been painted, and shatter its lens of the pseudo-reality that shapes many individuals’ view of the world. That is, there becomes the need for a higher form, or a deeper level, of collective experiential consciousness in order for a symbiotic relationship to occur – a relationship advantageous to all simultaneously – in the biological and sociological realms. Only then can the trend of institutionalized racism and discrimination be broken, and as a part of this, only then can all individuals receive access to health insurance and related healthcare that would improve their quality of life.   

[1] Little, Daniel. “False Consciousness.” False Consciousness , www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~delittle/iess%20false%20consciousness%20V2.htm.

[2] Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle . Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Zone Books, 1995.

[3] Harris, Fredrick C., and Robert C. Lieberman. “Racial Inequality After Racism: How Institutions Hold Back African Americans.” Foreign Affairs , vol. 94, no. 2, 2015, pp. 9–20. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/24483477.

[4] Harris, Fredrick C., and Robert C. Lieberman. “Racial Inequality After Racism: How Institutions Hold Back African Americans.”

[9] Drake, Patrick, and Jennifer Tolbert. “Key Facts about the Uninsured Population.” KFF , www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-facts-about-the-uninsured-population/.

[10] O’Connell, Heather A. “The Impact of Slavery on Racial Inequality in Poverty in the Contemporary U.S. South.” Social Forces , vol. 90, no. 3, 2012, pp. 713–34. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/41682675.

[11] Drake, Patrick, and Jennifer Tolbert. “Key Facts about the Uninsured Population.”

[12] Harris, Fredrick C., and Robert C. Lieberman. “Racial Inequality After Racism: How Institutions Hold Back African Americans.

[13] Drake, Patrick, and Jennifer Tolbert. “Key Facts about the Uninsured Population.”

[16] Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. London, Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1863. Pdf. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/11015966/>.

[17] Tai, Don Bambino Geno, et al. “Disproportionate Impact of Covid-19 on Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups in the United States: A 2021 Update.” Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities , U.S. National Library of Medicine, Dec. 2022, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8513546/#:~:text=Black%2C%20Latinx%2C%20and%20American%20Indian,children%20in%20a%20worrying%20trend.

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The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap

How a civil rights ideal got hijacked.

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The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap: How a Civil Rights Ideal Got Hijacked

The fall of affirmative action is part of a 50-year campaign to roll back racial progress.

Nikole Hannah-Jones

By Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer at the magazine and is the creator of The 1619 Project. She also teaches race and journalism at Howard University.

Anthony K. Wutoh, the provost of Howard University, was sitting at his desk last July when his phone rang. It was the new dean of the College of Medicine, and she was worried. She had received a letter from a conservative law group called the Liberty Justice Center. The letter warned that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions, the school “must cease” any practices or policies that included a “racial component” and said it was notifying medical schools across the country that they must eliminate “racial discrimination” in their admissions. If Howard refused to comply, the letter threatened, the organization would sue.

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Wutoh told the dean to send him the letter and not to respond until she heard back from him. Hanging up, he sat there for a moment, still. Then he picked up the phone and called the university’s counsel: This could be a problem.

Like most university officials, Wutoh was not shocked in June when the most conservative Supreme Court in nearly a century cut affirmative action’s final thin thread. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the court invalidated race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Universities across the nation had been preparing for the ruling, trying both to assess potential liabilities and determine the best response.

But Howard is no ordinary university. Chartered by the federal government two years after the Civil War, Howard is one of about 100 historically Black colleges and universities, known as H.B.C.U.s. H.B.C.U. is an official government designation for institutions of higher learning founded from the time of slavery through the end of legal apartheid in the 1960s, mostly in the South. H.B.C.U.s were charged with educating the formerly enslaved and their descendants, who for most of this nation’s history were excluded from nearly all of its public and private colleges.

Though Howard has been open to students of all races since its founding in 1867, nearly all of its students have been Black. And so after the affirmative-action ruling, while elite, predominantly white universities fretted about how to keep their Black enrollments from shrinking, Howard (where I am a professor) and other H.B.C.U.s were planning for a potential influx of students who either could no longer get into these mostly white colleges or no longer wanted to try.

Wutoh thought it astounding that Howard — a university whose official government designation and mandate, whose entire reason for existing, is to serve a people who had been systematically excluded from higher education — could be threatened with a lawsuit if it did not ignore race when admitting students. “The fact that we have to even think about and consider what does this mean and how do we continue to fulfill our mission and fulfill the reason why we were founded as an institution and still be consistent with the ruling — I have to acknowledge that we have struggled with this,” he told me. “My broader concern is this is a concerted effort, part of an orchestrated plan to roll back many of the advances of the ’50s and ’60s. I am alarmed. It is absolutely regressive.”

Graduates attend a Howard University commencement ceremony.

Wutoh has reason to be alarmed. Conservative groups have spent the nine months since the affirmative-action ruling launching an assault on programs designed to explicitly address racial inequality across American life. They have filed a flurry of legal challenges and threatened lawsuits against race-conscious programs outside the realm of education, including diversity fellowships at law firms, a federal program to aid disadvantaged small businesses and a program to keep Black women from dying in childbirth. These conservative groups — whose names often evoke fairness and freedom and rights — are using civil rights law to claim that the Constitution requires “colorblindness” and that efforts targeted at ameliorating the suffering of descendants of slavery illegally discriminate against white people. They have co-opted both the rhetoric of colorblindness and the legal legacy of Black activism not to advance racial progress, but to stall it. Or worse, reverse it.

During the civil rights era, this country passed a series of hard-fought laws to dismantle the system of racial apartheid and to create policies and programs aimed at repairing its harms. Today this is often celebrated as the period when the nation finally triumphed over its original sin of slavery. But what this narrative obscures is that the gains of the civil rights movement were immediately met with a backlash that sought to subvert first the language and then the aims of the movement. Over the last 50 years, we have experienced a slow-moving, near-complete unwinding of the idea that this country owes anything to Black Americans for 350 years of legalized slavery and racism. But we have also undergone something far more dangerous: the dismantling of the constitutional tools for undoing racial caste in the United States.

Beginning in the 1970s, the Supreme Court began to vacillate on remedies for descendants of slavery. And for the last 30 years, the court has almost exclusively ruled in favor of white people in so-called reverse-discrimination cases while severely narrowing the possibility for racial redress for Black Americans. Often, in these decisions, the court has used colorblindness as a rationale that dismisses both the particular history of racial disadvantage and its continuing disparities.

This thinking has reached its legal apotheosis on the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Starting with the 2007 case Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, the court found that it wasn’t the segregation of Black and Latino children that was constitutionally repugnant, but the voluntary integration plans that used race to try to remedy it. Six years later, Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Shelby v. Holder, gutting the Voting Rights Act, which had ensured that jurisdictions could no longer prevent Black Americans from voting because of their race. The act was considered one of the most successful civil rights laws in American history, but Roberts declared that its key provision was no longer needed, saying that “things have changed dramatically.” But a new study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that since the ruling, jurisdictions that were once covered by the Voting Rights Act because of their history of discrimination saw the gap in turnout between Black and white voters grow nearly twice as quickly as in other jurisdictions with similar socioeconomic profiles.

These decisions of the Roberts court laid the legal and philosophical groundwork for the recent affirmative-action case. Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard involved two of the country’s oldest public and private universities, both of which were financed to a significant degree with the labor of the enslaved and excluded slavery’s descendants for most of their histories. In finding that affirmative action was unconstitutional, Roberts used the reasoning of Brown v. Board of Education to make the case that because “the Constitution is colorblind” and “should not permit any distinctions of law based on race or color,” race cannot be used even to help a marginalized group. Quoting the Brown ruling, Roberts argued that “the mere act of ‘separating children’” because of their race generated “ ‘a feeling of inferiority’” among students.

But in citing Brown, Roberts spoke generically of race, rarely mentioning Black people and ignoring the fact that this earlier ruling struck down segregation because race had been used to subordinate them. When Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote those words in 1954, he was not arguing that the use of race harmed Black and white children equally. The use of race in assigning students to schools, Warren wrote, referring to an earlier lower-court decision, had “a detrimental effect upon colored children” specifically, because it was “interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group.”

Roberts quickly recited in just a few paragraphs the centuries-long legacy of legal discrimination against Black Americans. Then, as if flicking so many crumbs from the table, he used the circular logic of conservative colorblindness to dispatch that past with a pithy line: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

By erasing the context, Roberts turned colorblindness on its head, reinterpreting a concept meant to eradicate racial caste to one that works against racial justice.

Roberts did not invent this subversion of colorblindness, but his court is constitutionalizing it. While we seem to understand now how the long game of the anti-abortion movement resulted in a historically conservative Supreme Court that last year struck down Roe v. Wade, taking away what had been a constitutional right, Americans have largely failed to see that a parallel, decades-long antidemocratic racial strategy was occurring at the same time. The ramifications of the recent affirmative-action decision are clear — and they are not something so inconsequential as the complexion of elite colleges and the number of students of color who attend them: We are in the midst of a radical abandonment of a compact that the civil rights movement forged, a shared understanding that racial inequality is harmful to democracy.

The End of Slavery, and the Instant Backlash

When this country finally eliminated first slavery and then racial apartheid, it was left with a fundamental question: How does a white-majority nation, which for nearly its entire history wielded race-conscious policies and laws that oppressed and excluded Black Americans, create a society in which race no longer matters? Do we ignore race in order to eliminate its power, or do we consciously use race to undo its harms?

Our nation has never been able to resolve this tension. Race, we now believe, should not be used to harm or to advantage people, whether they are Black or white. But the belief in colorblindness in a society constructed on the codification of racial difference has always been aspirational. And so achieving it requires what can seem like a paradoxical approach: a demand that our nation pay attention to race in order, at some future point, to attain a just society. As Justice Thurgood Marshall said in a 1987 speech, “The ultimate goal is the creation of a colorblind society,” but “given the position from which America began, we still have a very long way to go.”

Racial progress in the United States has resulted from rare moments of national clarity, often following violent upheavals like the Civil War and the civil rights movement. At those times, enough white people in power embraced the idea that racial subordination is antidemocratic and so the United States must counter its legacy of racial caste not with a mandated racial neutrality or colorblindness but with sweeping race-specific laws and policies to help bring about Black equality. Yet any attempt to manufacture equality by the same means that this society manufactured inequality has faced fierce and powerful resistance.

This resistance began as soon as slavery ended. After generations of chattel slavery, four million human beings were suddenly being emancipated into a society in which they had no recognized rights or citizenship, and no land, money, education, shelter or jobs. To address this crisis, some in Congress saw in the aftermath of this nation’s deadliest war the opportunity — but also the necessity — for a second founding that would eliminate the system of racial slavery that had been its cause. These men, known as Radical Republicans, believed that making Black Americans full citizens required color-consciousness in policy — an intentional reversal of the way race had been used against Black Americans. They wanted to create a new agency called the Freedmen’s Bureau to serve “persons of African descent” or “such persons as once had been slaves” by providing educational, food and legal assistance, as well as allotments of land taken from the white-owned properties where formerly enslaved people were forced to work.

Understanding that “race” was created to force people of African descent into slavery, their arguments in Congress in favor of the Freedmen’s Bureau were not based on Black Americans’ “skin color” but rather on their condition. Standing on the Senate floor in June 1864, Senator Charles Sumner quoted from a congressional commission’s report on the conditions of freed people, saying, “We need a Freedmen’s Bureau not because these people are Negroes but because they are men who have been for generations despoiled of their rights.” Senator Lyman Trumbull, an author of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, declared: “The policy of the states where slavery has existed has been to legislate in its interest. … Now, when slavery no longer exists, the policy of the government must be to legislate in the interest of freedom.” In a speech to Congress, Trumbull compelled “the people of the rebellious states” to be “as zealous and active in the passage of laws and the inauguration of measures to elevate, develop and improve the Negro as they have hitherto been to enslave and degrade him.”

But there were also the first stirrings of an argument we still hear today: that specifically aiding those who, because they were of African descent, had been treated as property for 250 years was giving them preferential treatment. Two Northern congressmen, Martin Kalbfleish, a Dutch immigrant and former Brooklyn mayor, and Anthony L. Knapp, a representative from Illinois, declared that no one would give “serious consideration” to a “bureau of Irishmen’s affairs, a bureau of Dutchmen’s affairs or one for the affairs of those of Caucasian descent generally.” So they questioned why the freedmen should “become these marked objects of special legislation, to the detriment of the unfortunate whites.” Representative Nelson Taylor bemoaned the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866, which he accused of making a “distinction on account of color between two races.” He argued, “This, sir, is what I call class legislation — legislation for a particular class of the Blacks to the exclusion of all whites.”

Ultimately, the Freedmen’s Bureau bills passed, but only after language was added to provide assistance for poor white people as well. Already, at the very moment of racial slavery’s demise, we see the poison pill, the early formulation of the now-familiar arguments that helping a people who had been enslaved was somehow unfair to those who had not, that the same Constitution that permitted and protected bondage based on race now required colorblindness to undo its harms.

This logic helped preserve the status quo and infused the responses to other Reconstruction-era efforts that tried to ensure justice and equality for newly freed people. President Andrew Johnson, in vetoing the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which sought to grant automatic citizenship to four million Black people whose families for generations had been born in the United States, argued that it “proposes a discrimination against large numbers of intelligent, worthy and patriotic foreigners,” who would still be subjected to a naturalization process “in favor of the Negro.” Congress overrode Johnson’s veto, but this idea that unique efforts to address the extraordinary conditions of people who were enslaved or descended from slavery were unfair to another group who had chosen to immigrate to this country foreshadowed the arguments about Asian immigrants and their children that would be echoed 150 years later in Students for Fair Admissions.

As would become the pattern, the collective determination to redress the wrongs of slavery evaporated under opposition. Congress abolished the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1872. And just 12 years after the Civil War, white supremacists and their accommodationists brought Reconstruction to a violent end. The nation’s first experiment with race-based redress and multiracial democracy was over. In its place, the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 ushered in the period of official racial apartheid when it determined that “the enforced separation of the races … neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man … nor denies him the equal protection of the laws.” Over the next six decades, the court condoned an entire code of race law and policies designed to segregate, marginalize, exclude and subjugate descendants of slavery across every realm of American life. The last of these laws would stand until 1968, less than a decade before I was born.

Thurgood Marshall’s Path to Desegregation

In 1930, a young man named Thurgood Marshall, a native son of Baltimore, could not attend the University of Maryland’s law school, located in the city and state where his parents were taxpaying citizens. The 22-year-old should have been a shoo-in for admission. An academically gifted student, Marshall had become enamored with the Constitution after his high school principal punished him for a prank by making him read the founding document. Marshall memorized key parts of the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. After enrolling at Lincoln University, a prestigious Black institution, he joined the debate team and graduated with honors.

But none of that mattered. Only one thing did: Marshall was a descendant of slavery, and Black people, no matter their intellect, ambition or academic record, were barred by law from attending the University of Maryland. Marshall enrolled instead at Howard University Law School, where he studied under the brilliant Charles Hamilton Houston, whose belief that “a lawyer is either a social engineer or he’s a parasite on society” had turned the law school into the “West Point of civil rights.”

It was there that Marshall began to see the Constitution as a living document that must adapt to and address the times. He joined with Houston in crafting the strategy that would dismantle legal apartheid. After graduating as valedictorian, in one of his first cases, Marshall sued the University of Maryland. He argued that the school was violating the 14th Amendment, which granted the formerly enslaved citizenship and ensured Black Americans “equal protection under the law,” by denying Black students admission solely because of their race without providing an alternative law school for Black students. Miraculously, he won.

Nearly two decades later, Marshall stood before the Supreme Court on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Brown v. Board of Education, arguing that the equal-protection clause enshrined in the 14th Amendment did not abide the use of racial classifications to segregate Black students. Marshall was not merely advancing a generic argument that the Constitution commands blindness to color or race. The essential issue, the reason the 14th Amendment existed, he argued, was not just because race had served as a means of classifying people, but because race had been used to create a system to oppress descendants of slavery — people who had been categorized as Black. Marshall explained that racial classification was being used to enforce an “inherent determination that the people who were formerly in slavery, regardless of anything else, shall be kept as near that stage as is possible.” The court, he said, “should make it clear that that is not what our Constitution stands for.” He sought the elimination of laws requiring segregation, but also the segregation those laws had created.

The Supreme Court, in unanimously striking down school segregation in its Brown decision, did not specifically mention the word “colorblind,” but its ruling echoed the thinking about the 14th Amendment in John Marshall Harlan’s lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. “There is no caste here,” Harlan declared. “Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” But he also made it clear that colorblindness was intended to eliminate the subordination of those who had been enslaved, writing, “In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” He continued, “The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race … is a badge of servitude.”

The court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was not merely a moral statement but a political one. Racial segregation and the violent suppression of democracy among its Black citizens had become a liability for the United States during the Cold War, as the nation sought to stymie Communism’s attraction in non-European nations. Attorney General James P. McGranery submitted a brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Truman administration supporting a ruling against school segregation, writing: “It is in the context of the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny that the problem of racial discrimination must be viewed. The United States is trying to prove to the people of the world of every nationality, race and color that a free democracy is the most civilized and most secure form of government yet devised by man. … Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills.”

Civil rights activists were finally seeing their decades-long struggle paying off. But the architects and maintenance crew of racial caste understood a fundamental truth about the society they had built: Systems constructed and enforced over centuries to subjugate enslaved people and their descendants based on race no longer needed race-based laws to sustain them. Racial caste was so entrenched, so intertwined with American institutions, that without race-based counteraction , it would inevitably self-replicate.

One can see this in the effort to desegregate schools after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Across the country, North and South, white officials eliminated laws and policies mandating segregation but also did nothing to integrate schools. They maintained unofficial policies of assigning students to schools based on race, adopting so-called race-neutral admissions requirements designed to eliminate most Black applicants from white schools, and they drew school attendance zones snugly around racially segregated neighborhoods. Nearly a decade after Brown v. Board, educational colorblindness stood as the law of the land, and yet no substantial school integration had occurred. In fact, at the start of 1963, in Alabama and Mississippi, two of the nation’s most heavily Black states, not a single Black child attended school with white children.

By the mid-1960s, the Supreme Court grew weary of the ploys. It began issuing rulings trying to enforce actual desegregation of schools. And in 1968, in Green v. New Kent County, the court unanimously decided against a Virginia school district’s “freedom-of-choice plan” that on its face adhered to the colorblind mandate of Brown but in reality led to almost no integration in the district. “The fact that in 1965 the Board opened the doors of the former ‘white’ school to Negro children and of the ‘Negro’ school to white children merely begins, not ends, our inquiry whether the Board has taken steps adequate to abolish its dual, segregated system,” the court determined.

The court ordered schools to use race to assign students, faculty and staff members to schools to achieve integration. Complying with Brown, the court determined, meant the color-conscious conversion of an apartheid system into one without a “ ‘white’ school and a ‘Negro’ school, but just schools.” In other words, the reality of racial caste could not be constitutionally subordinated to the ideal of colorblindness. Colorblindness was the goal, color-consciousness the remedy.

Using Race to End Racial Inequality

Hobart Taylor Jr., a successful lawyer who lived in Detroit, was mingling at a party in the nation’s capital in January 1961 to celebrate the inauguration of Lyndon B. Johnson as vice president of the United States. Taylor had not had any intention of going to the inauguration, but like Johnson, Taylor was a native son of Texas, and his politically active family were early supporters of Johnson. And so at a personal request from the vice president, Taylor reluctantly found himself amid the din of clinking cocktail glasses when Johnson stopped and asked him to come see him in a few days.

Taylor did not immediately go see Johnson. After a second request came in, in February, Taylor found himself in Johnson’s office. The vice president slid into Taylor’s hands a draft of a new executive order to establish the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, which Johnson would lead. This was to be one of President John F. Kennedy’s first steps toward establishing civil rights for Black people.

Taylor’s grandfather had been born into slavery, and yet he and Taylor’s father became highly successful and influential entrepreneurs and landowners despite Texas’ strict color line.

The apartheid society Taylor grew up in was changing, and the vice president of the United States had tapped him to help draft its new rules. How could he say no? Taylor had planned on traveling back to Detroit that night, but instead he checked into the Willard Hotel, where he worked so intently on the draft of the executive order that not only did he forget to eat dinner but also he forgot to tell his wife that he wasn’t coming home. The next day, Taylor worked and reworked the draft for what would become Executive Order 10925, enacted in March 1961.

A few years later, in an interview for the John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program, Taylor would recall what he considered his most significant contribution. The draft he received said employers had to “take action” to ensure that job applicants and employees would not be discriminated against because of their race, creed, color or national origin. Taylor thought the wording needed a propellant, and so inserted the word “affirmative” in front of action. “I was torn between ‘positive’ and ‘affirmative,’ and I decided ‘affirmative’ on the basis of alliteration,” he said. “And that has, apparently, meant a great deal historically in the way in which people have approached this whole thing.”

Taylor added the word to the order, but it would be the other Texan — a man with a fondness for using the N-word in private — who would most forcefully describe the moral rationale, the societal mandate, for affirmative action. Johnson would push through Congress the 1964, 1965 and 1968 civil rights laws — the greatest civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.

But a deeply divided Congress did not pass this legislation simply because it realized a century after the Civil War that descendants of slavery deserved equal rights. Black Americans had been engaged in a struggle to obtain those rights and had endured political assassinations, racist murders, bombings and other violence. Segregated and impoverished Black communities across the nation took part in dozens of rebellions, and tanks rolled through American streets. The violent suppression of the democratic rights of its Black citizens threatened to destabilize the country and had once again become an international liability as the United States waged war in Vietnam.

But as this nation’s racist laws began to fall, conservatives started to realize that the language of colorblindness could be used to their advantage. In the fall of 1964, Barry Goldwater, a Republican who was running against President Johnson, gave his first major national speech on civil rights. Civil rights leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Roy Wilkins had lambasted Goldwater’s presidential nomination, with King saying his philosophy gave “aid and comfort to racists.” But at a carefully chosen venue — the Conrad Hilton in Chicago — in front of a well-heeled white audience unlikely to spout racist rhetoric, Goldwater savvily evoked the rhetoric of the civil rights movement to undermine civil rights. “It has been well said that the Constitution is colorblind,” he said. “And so it is just as wrong to compel children to attend certain schools for the sake of so-called integration as for the sake of segregation. … Our aim, as I understand it, is not to establish a segregated society or an integrated society. It is to preserve a free society.”

The argument laid out in this speech was written with the help of William H. Rehnquist. As a clerk for Justice Robert Jackson during the Brown v. Board of Education case, Rehnquist pushed for the court to uphold segregation. But in the decade that passed, it became less socially acceptable to publicly denounce equal rights for Black Americans, and Rehnquist began to deploy the language of colorblindness in a way that cemented racial disadvantage.

White Americans who liked the idea of equality but did not want descendants of slavery moving next door to them, competing for their jobs or sitting near their children in school were exceptionally primed for this repositioning. As Rick Perlstein wrote in his book “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of American Consensus,” when it came to race, Goldwater believed that white Americans “didn’t have the words to say the truth they knew in their hearts to be right, in a manner proper to the kind of men they wanted to see when they looked in the mirror. Goldwater was determined to give them the words.”

In the end, Johnson beat Goldwater in a landslide. Then, in June 1965, a few months after Black civil rights marchers were barbarically beaten on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge and two months before he would sign the historic Voting Rights Act into law, Johnson, now president of a deeply and violently polarized nation, gave the commencement address at Howard University. At that moment, Johnson stood at the pinnacle of white American power, and he used his platform to make the case that the country owed descendants of slavery more than just their rights and freedom.

“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair,” Johnson said. “This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

For a brief moment, it seemed as if a grander, more just vision of America had taken hold. But while Goldwater did not win the election, 14 years later a case went before the Supreme Court that would signal the ultimate victory of Goldwater’s strategy.

Claiming Reverse Discrimination

Allan Bakke was enjoying a successful career at NASA when he decided he wanted to become a physician. Bakke grew up in a white middle-class family — his father worked for the Post Office, and his mother taught school. Bakke went to the University of Minnesota, where he studied engineering and joined the R.O.T.C. to help pay for college, and then served four years as a Marine, including seven months in Vietnam. It was there that Bakke became enamored with the medical profession. While still working at NASA, he enrolled in night courses to obtain a pre-med degree. In 1972, while he was in his 30s, Bakke applied to 11 medical schools, including at his alma mater, and was rejected by all 11.

One of the schools that Bakke, who was living in California at the time, applied to was the University of California at Davis. The school received 2,664 applications for 100 spots, and by the time he completed his application, most of the seats had already been filled. Some students with lower scores were admitted before he applied, and Bakke protested to the school, claiming that “quotas, open or covert, for racial minorities” had kept him out. His admission file, however, would show that it was his age that was probably a significant strike against him and not his race.

Bakke applied again the next year, and U.C. Davis rejected him again. A friend described Bakke as developing an “almost religious zeal” to fight what he felt was a system that discriminated against white people in favor of so-called minorities. Bakke decided to sue, claiming he had been a victim of “reverse” discrimination.

The year was 1974, less than a decade after Johnson’s speech on affirmative action and a few years after the policy had begun to make its way onto college campuses. The U.C. Davis medical school put its affirmative-action plan in place in 1970. At the time, its first-year medical-school class of 100 students did not include a single Black, Latino or Native student. In response, the faculty designed a special program to boost enrollment of “disadvantaged” students by reserving 16 of the 100 seats for students who would go through a separate admissions process that admitted applicants with lower academic ratings than the general admissions program.

From 1971 to 1974, 21 Black students, 30 Mexican American students and 12 Asian American students enrolled through the special program, while one Black student, six Mexican Americans and 37 Asian American students were admitted through the regular program. Bakke claimed that his right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act had been violated. Though these laws were adopted to protect descendants of slavery from racial discrimination and subordination, Bakke was deploying them to claim that he had been illegally discriminated against because he was white. The case became the first affirmative-action challenge decided by the Supreme Court and revealed just how successful the rhetorical exploitation of colorblindness could be.

Justice Lewis Powell, writing for a fractured court in 1978, determined that although the 14th Amendment was written primarily to bridge “the vast distance between members of the Negro race and the white ‘majority,’” the passage of time and the changing demographics of the nation meant the amendment must now be applied universally. In an argument echoing the debates over the Freedmen’s Bureau, Powell said that the United States had grown more diverse, becoming a “nation of minorities,” where “the white ‘majority’ itself is composed of various minority groups, most of which can lay claim to a history of prior discrimination at the hands of the State and private individuals.”

“The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color,” Powell wrote. “If both are not accorded the same protection, then it is not equal.” Powell declared that the medical school could not justify helping certain “perceived” victims if it disadvantaged white people who “bear no responsibility for whatever harm the beneficiaries of the special admissions program are thought to have suffered.”

But who or what, then, did bear the responsibility?

Bakke was raised in Coral Gables, a wealthy, white suburb of Miami whose segregationist founder proposed a plan to remove all Black people from Miami while serving on the Dade County Planning Board, and where the white elementary school did not desegregate until after it was ordered by a federal court to do so in 1970, the same year U.C. Davis began its affirmative-action program. The court did not contemplate how this racially exclusive access to top neighborhoods and top schools probably helped Bakke to achieve the test scores that most Black students, largely relegated because of their racial designation to resource-deprived segregated neighborhoods and educational facilities, did not. It did not mean Bakke didn’t work hard, but it did mean that he had systemic advantages over equally hard-working and talented Black people.

For centuries, men like Powell and Bakke had benefited from a near-100 percent quota system, one that reserved nearly all the seats at this nation’s best-funded public and private schools and most-exclusive public and private colleges, all the homes in the best neighborhoods and all the top, well-paying jobs in private companies and public agencies for white Americans. Men like Bakke did not acknowledge the systemic advantages they had accrued because of their racial category, nor all the ways their race had unfairly benefited them. More critical, neither did the Supreme Court. As members of the majority atop the caste system, racial advantage transmitted invisibly to them. They took notice of their race only when confronted with a new system that sought to redistribute some of that advantage to people who had never had it.

Thus, the first time the court took up the issue of affirmative action, it took away the policy’s power. The court determined that affirmative action could not be used to redress the legacy of racial discrimination that Black Americans experienced, or the current systemic inequality that they were still experiencing. Instead, it allowed that some consideration of a student’s racial background could stand for one reason only: to achieve desired “diversity” of the student body. Powell referred to Harvard’s affirmative-action program, which he said had expanded to include students from other disadvantaged backgrounds, such as those from low-income families. He quoted an example from the plan, which said: “The race of an applicant may tip the balance in his favor, just as geographic origin or a life spent on a farm may tip the balance in other candidates’ cases. A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a Black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.”

But, of course, a (white) farm boy from Idaho did not descend from people who were enslaved, because they were farmers from Idaho. There were not two centuries of case law arguing over the inherent humanity and rights of farm boys from Idaho. There was no sector of the law, no constitutional provision, that enshrined farm boys from Idaho as property who could be bought and sold. Farm boys from Idaho had no need to engage in a decades-long movement to gain basic rights of citizenship, including the fundamental right to vote. Farm boys from Idaho had not, until just a decade earlier, been denied housing, jobs, the ability to sit on juries and access to the ballot. Farm boys from Idaho had not been forced to sue for the right to attend public schools and universities.

In Bakke, the court was legally — and ideologically — severing the link between race and condition. Race became nothing more than ancestry and a collection of superficial physical traits. The 14th Amendment was no longer about alleviating the extraordinary repercussions of slavery but about treating everyone the same regardless of their “skin color,” history or present condition. With a few strokes of his pen, Powell wiped this context away, and just like that, the experience of 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow was relegated to one thing: another box to check.

Yet at the same time Powell was drafting this ruling, cases of recalcitrant school districts still refusing to integrate Black children were making their way to the Supreme Court. Just 15 years earlier, the federal government called up National Guardsmen to ensure that handfuls of Black students could enroll in white schools.

Indeed, Powell wrote this opinion while sitting on the same court as Thurgood Marshall, who in 1967 became the first Black justice in the Supreme Court’s 178-year history. In Brown, Marshall helped break the back of legalized segregation. Now, as the court deliberated the Bakke case, a frustrated Marshall sent around a two-and-a-half-page typed memo to the other justices. “I repeat, for next to the last time: The decision in this case depends on whether you consider the action of the regents as admitting certain students or as excluding certain other students,” he wrote. “If you view the program as admitting qualified students who, because of this Nation’s sorry history of racial discrimination, have academic records that prevent them from effectively competing for medical school, then this is affirmative action to remove the vestiges of slavery and state imposed segregation by ‘root and branch.’ If you view the program as excluding students, it is a program of ‘quotas’ which violates the principle that the ‘Constitution is color-blind.’”

When Marshall’s arguments did not persuade enough justices, he joined with three others in a dissent from a decision that he saw as actively reversing, and indeed perverting, his legacy. They issued a scathing rebuke to the all-white majority, accusing them of letting “colorblindness become myopia, which masks the reality that many ‘created equal’ have been treated within our lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens.”

Marshall also wrote his own dissent, where he ticked off statistic after statistic that revealed the glaring disparities between descendants of slavery and white Americans in areas like infant and maternal mortality, unemployment, income and life expectancy. He argued that while collegiate diversity was indeed a compelling state interest, bringing Black Americans into the mainstream of American life was much more urgent, and that failing to do so would ensure that “America will forever remain a divided society.”

Marshall called out the court’s hypocrisy. “For it must be remembered that, during most of the past 200 years, the Constitution, as interpreted by this court, did not prohibit the most ingenious and pervasive forms of discrimination against the Negro,” he wrote. “Now, when a state acts to remedy the effects of that legacy of discrimination, I cannot believe that this same Constitution stands as a barrier.”

At the end of his lengthy dissent, Marshall pointed out what had become the court’s historic pattern. “After the Civil War, our government started ‘affirmative action’ programs. This court … destroyed the movement toward complete equality,” he wrote. As he said, “I fear that we have come full circle.”

The Reagan Rollback

In 1980, having just secured the Republican nomination for the presidency, Ronald Reagan traveled to Mississippi’s Neshoba County Fair to give an address. It was there in that county, a mere 16 years earlier, that three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by Klansmen, among the most notorious killings of the civil rights era.

Standing in front of a roaring crowd of about 10,000 white Mississippians, Reagan began his general-election campaign. He did not mention race. He did not need to. Instead he spoke of states’ rights, replicating the language of Confederates and segregationists, to signal his vision for America.

Despite the Bakke ruling, affirmative action continued to gain ground in the 1970s, with a deeply divided Supreme Court upholding limited affirmative action in hiring and other areas, and the Jimmy Carter administration embracing race-conscious policies. But Reagan understood the political power of white resistance to these policies, which if allowed to continue and succeed would redistribute opportunity in America.

Once in office, Reagan aggressively advanced the idea that racial-justice efforts had run amok, that Black Americans were getting undeserved racial advantages across society and that white Americans constituted the primary victims of discrimination.

A 1985 New York Times article noted that the Reagan administration was “intensifying its legal attack on affirmative action” across American life, saying the administration “has altered the government’s definition of racial discrimination.” As early as the 1970s, Reagan began using the phrase “reverse discrimination” — what the political scientist Philip L. Fetzer called a “covert political term” that undermined racial redress programs by redefining them as anti-white. Reagan’s administration claimed that race-conscious remedies were illegal and that hiring goals for Black Americans were “a form of racism” and as abhorrent as the “separate but equal” doctrine struck down by Brown v. Board.

Reagan, who had secretly called Black people monkeys and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the establishment of the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. Yet in the first commemoration of that holiday in 1986, he trotted out King’s words to condemn racial-justice policy. “We’re committed to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed, and so we oppose the use of quotas,” he said. “We want a colorblind society, a society that, in the words of Dr. King, judges people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

This passage from King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech has become a go-to for conservatives seeking to discredit efforts to address the pervasive disadvantages that Black Americans face. And it works so effectively because few Americans have read the entire speech, and even fewer have read any of the other speeches or writings in which King explicitly makes clear that colorblindness was a goal that could be reached only through race-conscious policy. Four years after giving his “Dream” speech, King wrote, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.” And during a 1968 sermon given less than a week before his assassination, King said that those who opposed programs to specifically help Black Americans overcome their disadvantage “never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the Black man’s color a stigma; but beyond this they never stop to realize that they owe a people who were kept in slavery 244 years.”

But as the sociologist Stuart Hall once wrote, “Those who produce the discourse also have the power to make it true.” Reagan deftly provided the road map to the nation’s racial future. Tapping into white aversion to acknowledging and addressing the singular crimes committed against Black Americans, conservatives, who had not long before championed and defended racial segregation, now commandeered the language of colorblindness, which had been used to dismantle the impacts of legal apartheid. They wrapped themselves in the banner of rhetorical equality while condemning racial-justice activists as the primary perpetrators of racism.

“There’s this really concerted, strategic effort to communicate to white people that racial justice makes white people victims, and that when people demand racial justice, they don’t actually mean justice; they mean revenge,” Ian Haney López, a race and constitutional law scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. “Black people are treated as if they are just any other Americans. There is no history of racial subordination associated with Black people. There is no structural or systemic racism against African Americans. By 1989, it’s over. Reactionary colorblindness has won.”

Diversity vs. Redress

Perhaps no single person has more successfully wielded Reagan’s strategy than Edward Blum. In 1992, Blum, who made his living as a stockbroker, decided to run for Congress as a Republican in a Texas district carved out to ensure Black representation. Blum was trounced by the Black Democratic candidate. He and several others sued, arguing that a consideration of racial makeup when creating legislative districts violated the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause. Despite the fact that until a 1944 Supreme Court ruling, Texas had selected candidates through all-white primaries, and the fact that the district had been created in part in response to the state’s history of Black-voter suppression, Blum’s side won the case, forcing a redrawing of legislative districts in a manner that diluted Black and Latino voting power. Since that victory, Blum has mounted a decades-long campaign that has undermined the use of race to achieve racial justice across American life.

Blum is not a lawyer, but his organizations, funded by a mostly anonymous cadre of deep-pocketed conservatives, have been wildly effective. It is Blum, for instance, who was the strategist behind the case against the Voting Rights Act. When the Supreme Court again narrowly upheld affirmative action in college admissions in the early 2000s, Blum set his sights on killing it altogether. In that 2003 case, Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the majority opinion preserving limited affirmative action but putting universities on notice by setting an arbitrary timeline for when the court should determine that enough racial justice will have been achieved. “It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student-body diversity in the context of public higher education,” O’Connor wrote. “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” The use of the term “racial preferences” is key here. Instead of a policy created to even the playing field for a people who had been systematically held back and still faced pervasive discrimination, affirmative action was cast as a program that punished white Americans by giving unfair preferential treatment to Black Americans.

Blum didn’t wait 25 years to challenge affirmative action. His case brought on behalf of Abigail Fisher, a soft-spoken white woman who sued the University of Texas at Austin, after she was denied admission, went all the way to the Supreme Court. The court ultimately upheld the university’s admissions program. In his second attempt, Blum changed tactics. As he told a gathering of the Houston Chinese Alliance in 2015: “I needed Asian plaintiffs.” In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Blum’s group argued, and the court agreed, that affirmative-action programs discriminated against Asian Americans and, at the University of North Carolina, also white students. But many saw Blum’s use of another historically marginalized group in the lawsuit as an attempt to neutralize any argument that those targeting affirmative action opposed racial equality.

Blum’s success relied on defining affirmative action as a program about “visual diversity,” treating race as a mere collection of physical traits and not a social construct used to subordinate and stigmatize. When colleges seek diversity, he said, they are “really talking about skin-color diversity. How somebody looks. What’s your skin color? What’s the shape of your eyes? What’s the texture of your hair? Most Americans don’t think that the shape of your eyes tells us much about who you are as an individual. What does your skin color tell the world about who you are as an individual?” This reasoning resounds for many Americans who have also come to think about race simply as what you see.

Blum has described racial injustice against Black Americans as a thing of the past — a “terrible scar” on our history. As he awaited the court’s ruling last April, Blum told The Christian Science Monitor that today’s efforts to address that past were discriminatory and in direct conflict with the colorblind goals of Black activism. He said that “an individual’s race or ethnicity should not be used to help that individual or harm that individual in their life’s endeavors” and that affirmative action was “in grave tension with the founding principles of our civil rights movement.” But the civil rights movement has never been about merely eliminating race or racism; it’s also about curing its harms, and civil rights groups oppose Blum’s efforts.

Yet progressives, too, have unwittingly helped to maintain the corrupt colorblind argument that Blum has employed so powerfully, in part because the meaning of affirmative action was warped nearly from its beginning by the Supreme Court’s legal reasoning in Bakke. When the court determined that affirmative-action programs could stand only for “diversity” and not for redress, many advocates and institutions, in order to preserve these programs, embraced the idea that the goal of affirmative action was diversity and inclusiveness and not racial justice. Progressive organizations adopted the lexicon of “people of color” when discussing affirmative-action programs and also flattened all African-descended people into a single category, regardless of their particular lineage or experience in the United States.

Campuses certainly became more “diverse” as admissions offices focused broadly on recruiting students who were not white. But the descendants of slavery, for whom affirmative action originated, remain underrepresented among college students, especially at selective colleges and universities. At elite universities, research shows, the Black population consists disproportionately of immigrants and children of immigrants rather than students whose ancestors were enslaved here.

So, at least on this one thing, Blum is right. Many institutions have treated affirmative-action programs as a means of achieving visual diversity. Doing so has weakened the most forceful arguments for affirmative action, which in turn has weakened public support for such policies. Institutions must find ways, in the wake of the affirmative-action ruling, to address the racism that Black people face no matter their lineage. But using affirmative action as a diversity program — or a program to alleviate disadvantage that any nonwhite person faces — has in actuality played a part in excluding the very people for whom affirmative action and other racial redress programs were created to help.

Taking Back the Intent of Affirmative Action

Just as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund used the Brown v. Board of Education ruling as a legal catalyst for eliminating apartheid in all American life, Blum and those of like mind intend to use the affirmative-action ruling to push a sweeping regression in the opposite direction: bringing down this nation’s racial-justice programs and initiatives.

Right after the June ruling, 13 Republican state attorneys general sent letters to 100 of the nation’s biggest companies warning that the affirmative-action ruling prohibits what they call “discriminating on the basis of race, whether under the label of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ or otherwise. Treating people differently because of the color of their skin, even for benign purposes, is unlawful and wrong.” Companies that engage in such racial discrimination, the letter threatened, would “face serious legal consequences.”

The letter points to racial-justice and diversity-and-inclusion programs created or announced by companies, particularly after the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer. In response to the killing, a multigenerational protest movement arose and faced violent suppression by law enforcement as it sought to force this nation to see that the descendants of slavery were still suffering and deserved repair. Corporations took a public stance on racial justice, vowing to integrate everything from their boardrooms to their suppliers. Monuments to white supremacists and Confederates that had stood for 100 years were finally vanquished from the public square. And many colleges and other institutions vocally committed to racial justice as an ethos.

But that fragile multiracial coalition — which for a period understood racial redress as a national good needed to secure and preserve our democracy — has been crushed by the same forces that have used racial polarization to crush these alliances in the past. Conservatives have spent the four years since George Floyd’s murder waging a so-called war against “woke” — banning books and curriculums about racism, writing laws that eliminate diversity-and-inclusion programs and prohibiting the teaching of courses even at the college level that are deemed racially “divisive.”

In other words, conservatives have used state power to prepare a citizenry to accept this new American legal order by restricting our ability to understand why so much racial inequality exists, particularly among the descendants of slavery, and why programs like affirmative action were ever needed in the first place.

“Something really stunning and dangerous that has happened during the Trump era is that the right uses the language of colorblindness or anti-wokeness to condemn any references to racial justice,” Haney López told me. “This rhetoric is a massive fraud, because it claims colorblindness toward race but is actually designed to stimulate hyper-race-consciousness among white people. That strategy has worked.”

Today we have a society where constitutional colorblindness dictates that school segregation is unconstitutional, yet most Black students have never attended a majority-white school or had access to the same educational resources as white children. A society with a law prohibiting discrimination in housing and lending, and yet descendants of slavery remain the most residentially, educationally and economically segregated people in the country. A society where employment discrimination is illegal, and yet Black Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as white Americans, even when they hold college degrees.

Despite these realities, conservative groups are initiating a wave of attacks on racial-equality programs. About 5 percent of practicing attorneys are Black, and yet one of Blum’s groups, the American Alliance for Equal Rights, sued law firms to stop their diversity fellowships. In August, it also sued the Fearless Fund, a venture-capital firm founded by two Black women, which through its charitable arm helps other Black women gain access to funding by giving small grants to businesses that are at least 51 percent owned by Black women. Even though according to the World Economic Forum, Black women receive just 0.34 percent of venture-capital funds in the United States, Blum declared the fund to be racially discriminatory. Another Blum group, Students for Fair Admissions, has now sued the U.S. Military Academy, even though the Supreme Court allowed race-conscious admissions to stand in the military. Another organization, the Center for Individual Rights, has successfully overturned a decades-long Small Business Administration policy that automatically treated so-called minority-owned businesses as eligible for federal contracts for disadvantaged businesses.

Last year, a group called the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation sued the City and County of San Francisco over their funding of several programs aimed at eliminating disparities Black Americans face, including the Abundant Birth Project, which gives stipends for prenatal care, among other supports, to Black women and Pacific Islanders to help prevent them from dying during childbirth. Even though maternal mortality for Black women in the United States is up to four times as high as it is for white women, conservatives argue that programs specifically helping the women most likely to die violate the 14th Amendment. Even as this lawsuit makes its way through the courts, there are signs of why these sorts of programs remain necessary: It was announced last year that the Department of Health and Human Services opened a civil rights investigation into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for allegations of racism against Black mothers following the death of a Black woman who went there to give birth.

It is impossible to look at the realities of Black life that these programs seek to address and come to the conclusion that the lawsuits are trying to make society more fair or just or free. Instead they are foreclosing the very initiatives that could actually make it so.

And nothing illuminates that more than the conservative law group’s letter warning Howard — an institution so vaunted among Black Americans that it’s known as the Mecca — that its medical school must stop any admissions practices that have a “racial component.” Howard’s medical school, founded in 1868, remains one of just four historically Black medical schools in the United States. Howard received nearly 9,000 medical-school applicants for 130 open seats in 2023. And while almost all of the students who apply to be Howard undergraduates are Black, because there are so few medical-school slots available, most applicants to Howard’s medical school are not. Since the school was founded to serve descendants of slavery with a mission to educate “disadvantaged students for careers in medicine,” however, most of the students admitted each year are Black.

That has now made it a target, even though Black Americans account for only 5 percent of all U.S. doctors, an increase of just three percentage points in the 46 years since Thurgood Marshall’s dissent in Bakke. Despite affirmative action at predominantly white schools, at least 70 percent of the Black doctors and dentists in America attended an H.B.C.U. H.B.C.U.s also have produced half of the Black lawyers, 40 percent of Black engineers and a quarter of Black graduates in STEM fields.

Even Plessy v. Ferguson, considered perhaps the worst Supreme Court ruling in U.S. history, sanctioned the existence of H.B.C.U.s and other Black-serving organizations. If institutions like Howard or the Fearless Fund cannot work to explicitly assist the descendants of slavery, who still today remain at the bottom of nearly every indicator of success and well-being, then we have decided as a nation that there is nothing we should do to help Black Americans achieve equality and that we will remain a caste society.

What we are witnessing, once again, is the alignment of white power against racial justice and redress. As history has shown, maintaining racial inequality requires constant repression and is therefore antithetical to democracy. And so we must be clear about the stakes: Our nation teeters at the brink of a particularly dangerous moment, not just for Black Americans but for democracy itself.

To meet the moment, our society must forcefully recommit to racial justice by taking lessons from the past. We must reclaim the original intent of affirmative-action programs stretching all the way back to the end of slavery, when the Freedmen’s Bureau focused not on race but on status, on alleviating the conditions of those who had endured slavery. Diversity matters in a diverse society, and American democracy by definition must push for the inclusion of all marginalized people. But remedies for injustice also need to be specific to the harm.

So we, too, must shift our language and, in light of the latest affirmative-action ruling, focus on the specific redress for descendants of slavery . If Yale, for instance, can apologize for its participation in slavery, as it did last month, then why can’t it create special admissions programs for slavery’s descendants — a program based on lineage and not race — just as it does for its legacy students? Corporations, government programs and other organizations could try the same.

Those who believe in American democracy, who want equality, must no longer allow those who have undermined the idea of colorblindness to define the terms. Working toward racial justice is not just the moral thing to do, but it may also be the only means of preserving our democracy.

Race-based affirmative action has died. The fight for racial justice need not. It cannot.

Top photo illustration by Mark Harris. Photograph by Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine focusing on racial injustice. Her extensive reporting in both print and radio has earned a Pulitzer Prize, National Magazine Award, Peabody and a Polk Award. More about Nikole Hannah-Jones

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Essay on Social Class Inequality & Discrimination

Need to write a social class inequality essay? Discrimination and injustice might take place everywhere: in the spheres of education, healthcare, and so on. Find here critical reviews of three articles on the topic. Get inspired to write your own story of social class and inequality!

Introduction

  • The War Against the Poor
  • Middle of the Class
  • When Shelter Feels Like a Prison

Works Cited

There are several attitudes that the middle class and the rich have towards the poor. These attitudes stem from the belief that the world is a just place and people get what they deserve. If one works hard enough and perseveres he or she will be rich. However, the poor person is in that state because of poor decisions such as immorality, crime and alcoholism, lack of ambition and perseverance.

These negative attitudes have caused the middle class and the rich to distance themselves from the poor. The stereotyping of the poor is the genesis of class discrimination. The poor have been excluded as the rest of the nation goes on with their lives.

In this paper, I analyze three articles on social class and inequality to find out whether the authors’ views agree with mine on the negative attitudes towards the poor by the middle class and the rich and the way they have distanced themselves from the poor.

Social Inequality in The War Against the Poor

Herbert Hans, in his article the war against the poor instead of programs to end poverty is arguing that government officials are not addressing poverty but instead making life difficult for the poor. Welfare expenses have always been small however the budget is becoming more and more restrictive.

The poor are being accused of enjoying welfare instead of looking for a job and making sure they remain childless throughout their adolescence. The middle class and the rich feel they are working so hard and the poor are not. These poor people are lumped together with the criminals and accused of making the streets unsafe. The poor have become an excuse or scapegoat for the problems in society. Instead of admitting the decline in morality, the poor are accused of being the only ones with unmarried lovers. Once they get their life in order then they can receive welfare. They are being forced to live up to moral expectations that the working class and the rich speak but do not practice (Hans, 2007, pg 506).

Clearly class bigotry needs to be addressed. The poor have moral failings that are highly noticeable than the middle class but it does not mean it is at a higher proportion. The rich and middle class have access to counseling facilities to tell them their moral failings is as a result of prior abuse or disease.

The poor do not want to marry the fathers of their babies as they are jobless. There is actually scarcity of work; it is not true that the poor do not want to work. The government should address poverty through actively engaging in job creation initiatives and ensuring the actual crime of the poor does not fall below a certain percentage.

The War Against the Poor: Critical Review

The author’s views on class discrimination agree with my views. He concurs that judging the poor harshly for their moral failings and the ability to secure a job is wrong. The middle class and the rich also have moral failings and the middle class has also been experiencing unemployment as jobs are scarce.

Crime and mental illnesses should be viewed as some of the effects of poverty. It is not that the poor and mostly the Blacks have higher criminal tendencies. The middle class and the rich to stop discriminating against the poor and having someone to blame.

The author has also highlighted other concerns that I agree with. Hans says that the government, politicians and public are making life tougher for the poor. I agree with Hans that the focus should be on creation of jobs for the poor. If the country does not stop attacking the poor, the morale, quality of life and economic competitiveness will only go down.

Discrimination in Middle of the Class

The article Middle of the class published in the Economists is an argumentative piece of writing that questions the sustainability of the American Dream. America has always been defined as a country where anyone can become rich or wealthy if they just work hard. Shows like American Idol prove this.

The country has had presidents from humble backgrounds like Benjamin Franklin who was the 15 th child of a candle maker. However the equality of opportunity in America for all its citizens is rapidly diminishing.

The author gives the statistical figures on how the rich have become richer while the poor have become even poorer widening the income gap even more. Secondly social mobility has gone down. A lower and lower percentage of people are able to change the social class they are in through increase in earnings over a period of ten years.

There have also been changes in the economy with a shift towards technical skills requiring workers who have a university degree. This has caused a high increase of the income gap between college and high school graduates. It has become hard to climb the corporate ladder or change jobs if one does not have a university degree. The author suggests that the American society is becoming an educational stratified society

in other words a meritocracy. The rise in university education is also providing a hurdle for middle class families to attend elite universities. The representation of the rich in these elite universities has increased more than the representation of the poor. The mean income of the families that have enrolled their children in Harvard is $150,000(The Economist, 2007, pg 528).

During the period 2001-2004, States found themselves facing a budget squeeze. They responded by increasing the fees of state colleges where the middle class take their children to learn. This proves that the American system is enforcing more income inequalities through educational differences. The rich children are more likely to get a degree than a child from the bottom quarter income level.

There is also a worrying trend in the society that further aggravates class and educational stratification. The chances of an individual getting access to a good education, a good job and good prospects in life is determined by the family the person is born into.

College graduates tend to marry college graduates. Therefore in the graduates home the returns of the degree is double and their children benefit even more with opportunities to attend better schools.

There is therefore great trouble in being poor. If in the American society to be socially mobile you must have a great education, a job and married with children then the rich start off with higher advantages.

There needs to be policy changes where the method by which schools are financed is changed and giving more federal help to poorer colleges. This will only happen when the American politicians and the public recognize there is a problem.

Middle of the Class: Critical Review

The author, like Hans concurs with my argument that the poor are being judged too harshly in society. The reason the poor are not able to support themselves is not that they are lazy or lack ambition.

Rather there is a limitation on the equality of opportunity when it comes to the middle class and the poor in the corporate world. The country is being affected by globalization and technology changes; therefore the requirement of a degree is becoming mandatory.

If what it takes to succeed in the American corporate society is the attainment of a degree then the government should ensure that children from all social backgrounds have access to this type of education. Making education costs high does not help the poor and middle class at all.

It only goes to aggravate the existent inequalities between the rich and the poor. As the author has given statistics, in the last few years the rich have been becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer. The government needs to step in and address the situation.

Social Inequality in When Shelter Feels Like a Prison

The two articles narrated on the stereotypes held by society towards the poor while the article in the Economist discusses the widening gap between the rich and the poor. Both papers focus on the poor. The third article written by Charmion Brown tells of the author’s experiences growing up in a homeless shelter. The real life story further reinforces my argument on the distancing of the poor by society.

In light of her first hand experiences in the place she feels she can only compare it a prison. First of all, the place is cramped with four bunk beds fitted in each tiny room (Browne, 2007, pg 531).

There is absolutely no privacy. One has to take care of their things or they will be stolen. There is a queue for food for the homeless. The author learnt that if you do not make the line two hours before the kitchen is open, one would miss food. There are no curtains in the bathrooms yet the facility is being shared by more than one hundred people. The author felt like the place was a prison.

When Shelter Feels Like a Prison: Critical Review

The author’s experiences in the shelter confirm my views on the abandonment of the poor and homeless in the shelters. The author narrates how the social workers are rare and have no time for them. It is a prison. The government and public needs to stop abandoning the shelters. The living conditions needs to be improved. In my argument I had put forward the assumptions society has concerning the poor people.

They are not successful because they are lazy. The author cautions society and informs them that there were people from broken homes in the shelter due to drug abuse, AIDS and early pregnancy and not because they are lazy. The poor also lack knowledge on how to improve their lives.

The three articles have gone further to reinforce my argument on the existence of negative attitudes and stereotypes for the poor in society. Hans goes further to explain that it is because the poor have become a scapegoat to make other members in the society better. In my argument I had put forward the way society views the world in black and white. The hardworking succeed the poor are the lazy ones.

The article in the economist supports my argument and goes ahead to tell society that actually there is a limitation on equality of opportunity in the country. One may desire a job but he cannot get that job. In my argument I also said that the society distances itself from the poor. The article, When Shelter feels like a Prison clearly shows the abandonment of the poor by society.

Browne, Charmion. “When Shelter Feels Like a Prison” Writing in the Disciplines: A Reader for Writers . Ed. Mary Kennedy. 6 th Ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. 2007. Print.

Hans, Herbert. “The war against the poor instead of programs to end poverty” Writing in the Disciplines: A Reader for Writers . Ed. Mary Kennedy. 6 th Ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. 2007. Print.

The Economist. “The Middle Class” Writing in the Disciplines: A Reader for Writers . Ed. Mary Kennedy. 6 th Ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. 2007. Print.

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