Racial Equity Without Economic Equity
Is Water on a Grease Fire
Woody McCutchen Managing Member Pinnacle Landings LLC
Why did nearly 62 million Americans vote for Donald Trump in 2016, and a whopping 74,222,958 cast their ballots for him last fall? Assessing reasons for the public’s support for Trump in 2016, University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana Mutz concluded that first and foremost among these was “status threat, not economic hardship.” According to Mutz, “Both growing domestic racial diversity and globalization contributed to a sense that white Americans are under siege by these engines of change[RE1] .”Mutz’s findings refuted the prevalent “left behind” narrative that voters who lost their jobs or experienced stagnant wages punished the incumbent party for their economic misfortunes.
The notion of status threat to which Mutz referred was introduced in the 1950s by Howard Blumer in his paper “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position.” Blumer argued that racial prejudice arose primarily from the relative positions of an in-group and out-group rather than from personal perceptions of other races. In the 1960’s, building on Blumer’s work, Hubert Blaylock identified economic, political, and symbolic threats as the three major forms of group threat that the majority population fears. According to Mutz, the two threats white Americans fear most widely today are their declining share of the national population, and the increasing interdependence of the United States on other countries. While neither of these developments will likely change white Americans’ status as the most economically well-off racial group, symbolically they threaten some whites’ sense of control over the nation’s social and political priorities. In an article entitled “Fake News: Status Threat Does Not Explain the 2016 Presidential Vote,” Johns Hopkins University’s Stephen Morgan disputed Mutz’s conclusion that status threat rather than economic interests decided that election. He contended that her measures of status threat and material interests were so “entangled” that assessing their relative importance was impossible. That debate notwithstanding, no one has denied the ongoing political and social consequences of status threat for America.
Many observers point to the election of Barack Obama, immigration, and conspicuous signs of racial progress as triggers of status threat. To these I would add the selective and misleading use of data supporting our current cry for diversity, equity, and inclusion. To be sure, the disparity in percentages documents systemic inequity in America and dramatizes the need to reduce it. When it comes to poverty, incarceration, health outcomes, educational attainment, employment, housing, or family wealth, the rates are all markedly better for whites than for people of color. In 2019 (pre-pandemic), poverty rates in the US were 9.0% white; 9.7% Asian/Pacific Islander; 17.2% Hispanic; 21.2% black; 24.2% Native American; 14.9% multi-race. In 2018, for another example, black males accounted for 34% of the total male prison population, white males 29%, and Hispanic males 24%.
But we are much more reticent in citing the raw numbers these rates represent. So, while the rates of white and black poverty are 9.0% versus 21.2%, this translates to 17.3 million whites mired in poverty, versus 8.2 million blacks and 10.1 million Hispanics. The raw numbers for incarceration are 430,600 whites, 465,200 blacks, and 330,300 Hispanics. While drawing attention to percentages in order to publicize and reduce the impact of racial inequity, we ignore the raw numbers of whites whom the system has also failed, and encourage some of them to ask, or demand, “What about us?” And even in percentages, 48% of the roughly 106 million people in America who are economically insecure (living in households with incomes less than 200% of the federal poverty level) are white, while 27% are Latinx and 18% black.
Another way in which advocates of diversity, equity and inclusion may be inadvertently exacerbating whites’ perceived status threat is by promoting the projection that by 2042 America will have a majority minority population. According to the US Census Bureau, by 2060 America will be 68.0% white; 15.0% black; 44.3% non-Hispanic white; 27.5% Hispanic; 9.1% Asian; 6.2% 2+ races.[RE2] While common age data [RE3] (white 58 years; Asian 29 years; black 27 years; Hispanic 11 years) supports the notion that US population is trending toward majority minority status, whites will enjoy a significant plurality for the foreseeable future.
A data set deserving much wider attention is the decline of labor income. According to Bureau of Labor statistics, labor’s share of national income versus capital income’s share declined from 63.3% in 2000 to 56.7% in 2016. Concomitantly, the distribution of US aggregate Income shifted from 62% to the middle class[RE4] , 29% to the upper class, and 10% to the lower in 1970 to 43% middle, 48% upper, and 9% lower in 2018. So, while many white Americans fret about the threat they perceive from the outside group below them, the outside group above them is eating their lunch.
So how might we promote diversity, equity and inclusion in America without aggravating the dominant group’s perception of status threat? Policy Link is one of a few nationally recognized research institutes that consistently marries the concepts of racial and economic equity in all of its materials. Reducing both racial and income inequality is essential for America to sustain growth and prosperity. The gaping hole of endemic poverty that systemic racism reserves for people of color is now a multi-racial vortex engulfing our middle class. Racial equity without economic equity will simply expand the ranks of broke Americans, while economic equity without racial equity is impossible.
[RE5] According to the late great legal scholar, Derrick Bell, “One of the pernicious effects of racism is that it often disables those whose interests do converge with people of color from fighting the structures that disempowers them too.” Far too many working-class whites fail to recognize or acknowledge how the inequitable distribution of social resources reduces their well-being and poses the greatest threat to their status. One of Frederick Douglass’s oft-repeated quotes is that “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” If the demand for equity in 21st century America is to have any possibility of success, it must embrace the struggles of Americans of every color and engage white, black, brown, red and yellow in a collective movement to share and sustain growth and prosperity.
