One Nation Divisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming

Chapter 2. The Paradox of Inequality in the History of Gender, Race, and Immigration

Chapter 2 The Paradox of Inequality in the History of Gender, Race, and Immigration I n the last half of the twentieth century the Civil Rights movement and the Women’s movement swept across the United States. Although neither reached all its goals, each gained many of its objectives and, in the process, transformed the nation. Yet, in the decades of these movements’ greatest successes, Americans became massively more unequal. How did this happen? This chapter answers the question by tracing multiple inequalities across the century and finding a common pattern among them. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, inequality —deep, durable, pervasive—emerged from the clash of the old and new Americas. Whether named or not, it haunted public life and drove the politics of both reform and reaction. The same could be said for the turn of the next century. In both eras, economic globalization registered in deeply divided social structures, making America one nation divisible . This chapter, then, is about the outcome of the processes set in motion early in the century and described in chapter one. It is a story of both continuity—the persistence of deep enduring divisions based on wealth, work, gender, race, and ethnicity—and of astonishing change and mobility along each of the same axes of social experience. Understanding inequality requires burrowing deeply into the history of America’s social structure and political economy. It calls for historical analysis because inequality is always changing and in motion, a set of usually self-replicating relationships captured only incompletely and imperfectly by the coefficients with which it is measured by social scientists . Measures that gauge the distribution of resources remain, of course, essential. By themselves, however, they tell little about how unequal distributions of resources took shape or what sustains or challenges them over time. Because inequality always rests on comparisons between at 63 least two individuals or groups, it is by definition a relational idea—and relations are always in motion. That is why measures taken at single moments are at best snapshots, partial glimpses into a moving process, starting points for analysis, not its end. In this chapter, we take some snapshots that portray inequalities at points in time, but we focus on the process as well. Ultimately, our concern is with how and why the character of inequality has changed in twentieth-century America. What is Inequality? In modern American history, inequality has been a process with six primary features. It is paradoxical, historically and geographically contingent , multidimensional, state-sponsored, gendered. and self-replicating. We first define each of these terms and then illustrate them with examples drawn primarily from the history of African Americans, women, and immigrants. The approach to inequality sketched here does not intend to ignore or minimize the force of racism, sexist beliefs, or ethnocentrism . Its intent, rather, is to shift the focus away from individualist interpretations and toward structures and processes erected partly on beliefs in group difference or inferiority but, which once set in motion, operate with their own logic. These structures and processes give inequality its durability, and its history. Inequality is both durable and fluid. This is why it is paradoxical. What sociologist Charles Tilly terms durable inequality runs through American history. By durable inequality, Tilly means persistent inequalities among paired categories (for instance, black and white, male and female) over time. To these may be added the rough shape of the inequality pyramid and the relative rewards flowing to different occupations. Tilly identifies a set of mechanisms that reproduce durable inequalities. We will return to these after describing inequality’s twentieth century history.1 For now, the point is continuity: the remarkable resilience of major configurations of inequality. But there is more to the story. Inequality is also fluid. The amount of movement always has been vast with individuals and groups losing as well as gaining economic and social rank. In recent decades, poverty among blacks has declined dramatically even though the ratio of black to white poverty remains about the same or is worse. Women have demolished one gender barrier to work after another, but still earn much less than men. This is the paradox of inequality. Inequality has a history and geography; it varies with time and place. This is why it is contingent. Changes in income distribution—for example, the share of income flowing to percentiles of the working population—do not by themselves capture inequality’s history. For the way in...