The American Dream is generally understood to be the idea that America is a land of opportunity that permits upward mobility, freedom, and equality for people of all classes who work hard and have the will to succeed.
Standing against this laudable idea is the reality for many in Rochester and more generally in the U.S. In this regard, no matter how one looks at the underlying issues, poverty and an inability to be upwardly mobile are problems for many Rochesterians. The causes of this insalubrious state of affairs are complex, but to think clearly about salient determinants of the American dream, it is helpful to look at this dream through the lenses of race and income or class.
The fact that systemic racial discrimination has prevented many Black Americans, and more generally racial minorities, from attaining the American dream is well-known. However, in recent times, several authors have contended that income or class ought to be given as much and maybe even more weight than race when contemplating policy designed to promote upward economic mobility.
New research with big data by Raj Chetty and his colleagues sheds valuable light on this race vs. class distinction in the context of the American dream. These researchers looked at several decades of anonymized census and tax records and focused on 57 million children in the U.S. The objective was to control for inflation and to then measure the economic mobility of these children, i.e., their ability to rise to the middle and upper classes in America.
To comprehend this research, imagine four children born into low-income families. A Black child and a white child born in 1978 (Gen Xers), and a second pair of one Black and one white child born in 1992 (Millennials). The research finds that Black millennials born to low-income parents had an easier time rising up the economic ladder than the previous generation did. By contrast, white millennials born to low-income parents had a harder time being upwardly mobile as compared to their white Gen X counterparts.
More generally, for white children in the U.S. born between 1978 and 1992, earnings rose for children from high-income families but fell for children from low-income families, increasing earnings gaps by parental class or income by 30 percent. At the same time, earnings rose for Black children at all parental income levels, thereby attenuating the white-Black earnings gap for children from low-income families by 30 percent (though the gap remains large).
Another way of saying this is that as far as earnings are concerned, class gaps between Black and white Americans increased but race gaps decreased. An important takeaway from this research is that the finding about gaps is not limited to the metric of income; it also holds for other metrics such as educational attainment, standardized test scores, and mortality rates.
What explains these results? Simply put, the community one grows up in matters greatly. Particularly salient here is the employment status of a child’s parents. Related to this, children’s economic outcomes later in life are potently connected to the parental employment rates of peers they are more likely to interact with. The central conclusion from this research is that class is becoming more important in America while race is becoming less so.
In his 1964 tome “Why We Can’t Wait,” Martin Luther King Jr. sagaciously advocated not for a “Bill of Rights” for Blacks but instead for a “Bill of Rights” for the disadvantaged of all races. Consistent with this perspective, the research delineated here shows that we should pay more attention to class in policymaking because attaining the American dream is increasingly more dependent on one’s class and less on one’s race.
Amit Batabyal is a Distinguished Professor, the Arthur J. Gosnell professor of economics, and the Interim Head of the Sustainability Department, all at RIT, but these views are his own.
Assuming you’re not arguing it’s one or the other, but a shift in the weight of the factors? How much of the result is a factor of race as opposed to class? It seems that often we hear the argument that it’s all one or all the other. I would find it hard to buy a poor White child has an equally difficult time as a poor Black child to get ahead. Am I wrong?
I am curious as to what the gap in achievement of financial and education success has been between the black and white people of the 1992 cohort.
“Simply put, the community one grows up in matters greatly. Particularly salient here is the employment status of a child’s parents. Related to this, children’s economic outcomes later in life are potently connected to the parental employment rates of peers they are more likely to interact with.”
In sociology the group that a person aspires to become a member of is known as one’s “reference group.” The old saying is “Birds of a feather flock together.”
Who you hang out with is one of the major influencers of what one’s life will become.
America is more segregated by class than it is by race. Changing one’s race is very difficult although some people try to pass. Class though is very malleable and what makes America great. A poor kid from a lower class family can become President or a CEO. The so called “American dream” makes this possible and it is why people are literally dying in some cases to immigrate her.
Thanks for an interesting article.
Another interpretation of these results is that the real-world progressive policies enacted to attempt to reduce the gap between white and other race progress has been successful. I’m no arguing that class barriers aren’t also a problem, but let’s be realistic – in the last 20 years we’ve seen any number of DEI initiatives that the right so vehamently denies are either necessary or working, be enacted. And over that same period of time the racial division has REDUCED but n ot been ELIMINATED and it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine that this reduction in inequity was a direct result of those policies.
Now that said does this mean we shouldn’t try for policies that also address class inequality, in ADDITION TO racial inequalilty – yes we should strive for that. But we also should not minimize the success that striving to create more equality between races has already achieved.
I applaud the deep statistical evaluation of this study. I just question whether it addresses ALL the conclusions it could address about economic policy as it affects race.