Tom Shapiro: There’s a lot more up and down. What works for me is the metaphor of the ladder: If you go up a rung, it represents economic mobility, how much better you do than your parents did. The rungs of the ladder in the last thirty years have gotten further apart. So it’s harder to move from one rung to another. To fall back, the rungs have gotten closer together. It’s easier to fall back.
The story for African Americans is a different than it is for whites. With a combination of a growing economy in the 1950s and 60s in particular, opening up of educational institutions, opening up of some fair housing and some fair lending, we really did see the development of an African American middle class—we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of families. When whites do that, they are much more able to pass that earned middle-class status along to their children, because of the wealth they’ve built up in their homes and other things, and the schools and the educations that their kids get. African Americans don’t. The fall-back of the children of African Americans who have earned that middle-class or professional status, in terms of economic mobility, is pretty great.
White: A lot of people would assume that if your parents achieved middle-class status, the thing that they will be able to bequeath to you, even if it’s not dollars, is a better education. That if they move to a better house it comes with a better public-school system, or if their income increases, they’re able to spend on private schools, or maybe help with college. But that seems to not always work out right?
Shapiro: The move is to a better educational system, but often times not to a significantly better educational system. Middle-class African Americans for the most part, given the high levels of continual residential segregation in the United States, don’t live with their white counterparts. They may live in communities that are adjacent to the black community they move from, so there are more things that are shared with the community of professional African Americans they’ve left than with the white middle-class community.
White: It’s pretty easy to think about all the ways the government has been complicit in racial economic inequality in the past: Jim Crow, housing segregation, the structure of the GI Bill. Many people look at those things and assume they’ve been taken care of, but you say that’s not necessarily true.
Shapiro: I would point, for example, to Social Security. More people are beginning to understand that when Social Security was passed it intentionally excluded African Americans primarily, but also Latinos by excluding agricultural workers, domestic workers, railroad workers—those occupations where workers of color were concentrated. There’s a historical interpretation that says that was very intentional in order to get Southern senators’ support. That’s a massive act of exclusion that pertains not just to 1934, it carries itself forward then for a generation that didn’t have the same chance at retirement security or disability coverage, at all of the things that Social Security helps cover.
