what roles do race and social class continue to play in the united states

By Janis Prince Inniss

America has a long, painful history with race relations, just has prided itself on beingness costless of class conflicts. Most Americans—regardless of their actual income—consider themselves centre class. In what is considered the land of opportunity, most people believe that if you work difficult, regardless of your beginnings, y'all can become wealthy.

While there is some give-and-take in the public arena near race (and to some extent ethnicity), there is less about form. During campaign speeches nosotros hear charges that an opponent is for the rich, at the expense of the mutual folks. Recently, I learned that U.S. Presidential candidate Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton addressed the income gap. On November 19, 2007 in a speech entitled "Economic system: Policy Address on America'due south Economical Challenges, she made the following comments:

(T)he gap between the rich and everybody else has but gotten broader.

In 2005, the last year I could find the numbers for, all income gains went to the top 10 percent of households, while the bottom 90 percentage saw their incomes refuse. That is not the America that I grew upwardly in; that is not the country that I believe is holding out the hope of prosperity for people willing to work hard and take responsibility.

The wealthiest one percent of Americans held 22 percent of America's income. That's an astonishing figure, and it is the highest level of income inequality since the start of the Dandy Low in 1929.

Indeed, the income gap exists and has widened. But what else can we acquire about class by excavation a little deeper? It is well documented that gender and race intersect with class and that these factors determine our relationships to ability and privilege.

This post examines some of the relationships between grade and race— past looking at some of the differences in income, wealth, education and occupation past race. I am looking at these 2 socio-demographic factors for the sake of simplicity, merely bearing in heed that the relationships betwixt gender, course and race are highly interconnected.

Income refers to wages and salaries for work nosotros do. Information technology besides refers to money nosotros brand on our investments. Income in the U.S. has increased significantly over the past decades for all sectors of workers (not merely those in white neckband and professional, managerial occupations simply also for blueish collar workers). At the same fourth dimension however, the divide between the top 5% of wage earners and pretty much everyone else has increment enormously.

A recently released report by the Pew Charitable Trusts entitled "Economic Mobility of Black and White Families" indicates that median family unit incomes have increased since the 1960s but that is less true for black families than it is for white families. (These are the only two groups the written report addresses due to limitations of the data used.)

Researchers performed an intergenerational analysis and looked at how children fare in comparison to their parents in terms of income. They found that the economical benefits that black middle class parents enjoy are mostly non being matched by their children. In fact, the majority of black children of middle class parents autumn beneath their parents in income and economic status, while white children exceed their parents' attainments on those dimensions. Only 31 percent of black children grow upwards to earn more than than their parents, compared to 68 percent of white children in that income range. This decline in income for blacks is constitute not only among middle form, just upper-heart-course children.

Even worse, virtually half (45 pct) of blackness children of eye grade parents fall to the very bottom of the income distribution, compared to 16% minority of white children. Looking at other income groups, blackness children fared ameliorate in the two everyman income groups, although they are always well below the gains of white children.

Wealth refers to assets such as real estate property, stocks and bonds. Wealth in the U.S. is concentrated in the hands of very few people; the top 1% of families held about i 3rd (32.7%) of the nation's total net worth and in fact the top x% of families hold about 70% of the full net worth.

This means that the majority of people – 90% of the population – take less than one third of the nation's total net worth!

Data from the U.S. Census Bureau illustrates the relationship betwixt race and economical resource. Blackness households and Hispanic households held a significantly higher proportion of their net worth in housing than Whites. Black and Hispanic households have a significantly lower proportion in fiscal assets such as stocks and mutual fund shares compared with White households.

Despite a historically large gap in the high schoolhouse completion rates between whites and blacks, in 2000, high school completion rates for whites and Asians are pretty close, with Blacks a non very distant third place. Barely half of Hispanics finished high school; this group has the highest dropout rate of any in the U.S.

Although a big number of blacks exercise attend college today, graduation rates are disappointing for this group and for Hispanics. Asians are the only grouping approaching 50% of their population having attained a Bachelor'southward Degree or higher.

Clearly, education and its relationship to race has an impact on occupation: the types of jobs that people are qualified for and by extension the incomes they can command.

Where practice you fall on each of the four dimensions of class—income, wealth, education and occupation? What role do you think your race plays in your social class standing?

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Source: https://www.everydaysociologyblog.com/2008/01/class-and-race.html

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