How Californians are learning to live with drastic wealth inequality – CalMatters

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In a new book, UC Berkeley sociologists G. Cristina Mora and Tiana S. Paschel seek to understand how we understand the difference between the California we see in the movies and the California we see while we drive our children to school.

The authors of Normalizing inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide we discovered that inequality is not something we fail to notice. We recognize it and then rationalize it in one of three ways:

• Extreme framing where people believe their hard work and persistence will break the norm.
• Spatial comparison, such as “at least it’s better here than in Mexico.”
• Limited blame, a way of attributing structural failures to the poor, homeless, or undocumented.

For both Mora and Paschel, their work is deeply personal. Both are daughters of (im)migrants who grew up in California. Mora grew up in the northeast corner of Los Angeles County with her parents from Michoacán. Paschel’s family moved from Flint, Michigan, and she was raised, as she says, “in parts that most people don’t want to know about and don’t know they care about,” like Fresno, Bakersfield and Sacramento.

Their research is based on surveys of more than 6,000 Californians and more than 100 in-depth interviews.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: You’re both professors at Berkeley, and you’re facing your own mobility head-on. How did that shape the book?

Must: I grew up in one of the most segregated parts of Los Angeles, and now I live in one of the most diverse areas, and I still feel all the anxiety about the status of raising my kids in that place. I don’t have nearly the problems my parents had to keep us safe and housed. A two-bedroom house in Berkeley costs $1.5 million. We pass million dollar homes and camps on the same way to school and my kids need to understand how such great need exists alongside such great wealth. This is by design. This is what we created and this is what we normalized.

Paschel: All my family is in Flint and Arkansas. Compared to my mother’s siblings, she is a success story. By my family’s standards, I am a success story. The movement itself is uncomfortable. It was important for us to talk about it. To be able to say this inequality that is happening here, that we have naturalized, that we are stepping over, walking aside, turning our heads, is something that affects all of us.

Q: My work suggests that people don’t see the inequality, so I keep reminding them. Your book argues the opposite: that Californians see it clearly and reject it. Why is this important?

Must: It is important to think about what reproduces it. Why is California one of the most unequal places? The easy hypothesis is that it’s hidden, that all poverty is hidden on the border or in the desert, or people don’t understand it. But it exists in our faces. …They’ve just developed mechanisms to put it in the background and minimize it and justify it so they can continue to live here.

Paschel: I think one of the most interesting things about the book is that the way people think about inequality is so connected to how people think about their own possibilities and their own futures and their own narratives about the places they call home. It’s a question of identity. So, throwing more data at people so they can finally “see” the problem isn’t going to solve it. Any real intervention must take into account the contradictions and normalization of different types of inequality.

Q: Of the strategies you lay out, which one surprised you the most and which one is the strongest for protecting the status quo?

Paschel: Exclusivity is at stake in almost all strategies. You can intellectually understand in a rigorous and nuanced way the forces beyond your control that create the inequality around you, the forces that you are just an inch or one income bracket or one neighborhood away from, and still believe that because of your fortitude or your hard work, you will be the exception and prevail. It reflects the way California tells its unique, racial story.

Q: When I covered reparations, I received many e-mails from readers focused on one fact: that California was not a slave state, even though the first governor actively tried to ban black people from the state and we had dozens of sunken towns. Does this fit the book?

Paschel: We know that racial violence and racial inequality takes many different forms. Slavery is only one form of racial violence. There are many versions of white-collar violence in California. It is multifocal. My son’s school in San Francisco is celebrating the Lunar New Year, but he wouldn’t know if I wasn’t his mom how many times Chinatowns have been burned down here and across the state. We need a more structured, local understanding of what racism looks like, not just the version canonized in a high school Civil War textbook.

Q: Immigration has obviously been a very busy topic in the last few years. The book describes a narrow scenario: immigrants come here to work, and that in itself is the American dream. How did people express this?

Must: One way to think about it is to hold these contradictions together. Agriculture is the iconic way people imagine working immigrants. So immigrants often say they are exploited. See how hard they work in the fields. No one else will take these jobs. They were in the sun. They know it’s exploitation. And at the same time, these same immigrants have achieved the American dream simply by coming here. We don’t connect the contradiction, and this disconnect is part of how we reproduce the inequalities we don’t like. California has the largest wage gaps between US-born and foreign-born workers, and between documented and undocumented workers, and I kept telling Tiana, and that’s the best-case scenario. California is the state with the best shot and it is the best possible.

Question: How does the narrative of sacrifice play into this?

Must: This is madness. The family leaves everything, loses everything, and then the kid in LA ends up in one of the most segregated, underfunded school districts in the country. But this is the best case. The family left everything for this. Is this the best we can create? One of our interviewees in Fresno, a recent college graduate crushed by student debt, side gigs at work, raised by parents who worked in the fields and fell in and out of homelessness… Ask her about the American Dream and she says, “I think about my parents. They came. They made it.” When she had just described the opposite. The things that were supposed to come back to her aren’t coming back, and she’s in her 30s now.

Q: Any closing thoughts?

Paschel: I think there is a lot to be proud of in this place. I also think there are some beautiful social movements that have come out of that place that suggest that things aren’t so perfect to begin with. You can’t have globally recognized farm worker movements and the Black Panther Party if everything is already perfect. One of the things I’m hoping for is that we stay critical of the things we’re proud of and the things we shouldn’t be proud of here. It makes sense to be proud of our racial diversity and the trajectories of our own families. Where we run into trouble is when we romanticize and pride ourselves on the idea of ​​a place instead of the reality.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.