Social Class in the U.S.

What class would you say that you belong in?

upper     upper middle     middle     lower middle     lower



How do Americans feel about class?

The United States has always resisted the pretentiousness of class.  The country was founded partly as a reaction to a monarch, which is in itself a class-based system defined by hereditary status and honorary titles.   Additionally, and maybe because of, its revolutionary history, the U.S. values equality, freedom and individual control over one's own destiny.  Americans do not like the idea of social class.

During the gilded age, the Horatio Alger myth was popularized as a promise of the American possibility of going from "rags to riches" a success story "only in America."  From Princeton professor Jen Hochschild's 1996 book, Facing Up to the American Dream,  Americans believe in the American dream and that success is attainable for anyone.   And from the PEW Research Center, this 2015 publication shows American attitudes about the economy including that 85% of Americans consider themselves middle class, including 93% of those who earned more than $100,000!

This 2015 article from Smithsonian Magazine details a number of sources that show Americans like to believe that they are middle class.

So why bother studying social class in the U.S.?

First, social class does in fact exist and to deny it is to live naively at best and possibly in delirium.  Additionally, although the idea of "middle class" is appealing to Americans, it is difficult to define because the U.S. is so stratified.

Second, social class so strongly shapes us that by understanding it, we will understand ourselves better as well as our fellow Americans better.  And this understanding is not just an understanding of how we think and what we value, but it also is an understanding of our life chances, or what we are capable of achieving and the likelihood that we achieve it.

Finally, social class and inequality correlate with a number of measures of society that show inequality makes societies less healthy, less productive and less desirable.

This 2012 post from Socimages of the Society Pages points to The Equality Trust, a British trust that seeks to limit inequality, especially in Britain.  Here are a few examples of the correlation between inequality and undesirable societal outcomes (for more, see the 2012 post linked above):

Social Class Inequality has been widening in the last few decades.

First, the social class gap is widening.  See this post from Socimages.  Here is one graph from the post.  It explains how income has shifted steadily to the top percentiles over the last few decades.

And here are some charts from Business Insider about the growing inequality in the USA.

Inequality from country to country shows greater inequality has damaging effects on individuals

Second, cross national studies show that social class inequality correlates closely to a number of troubling outcomes such as:  infant mortality, mental illness, drug use, educational achievement, incarceration, obesity, homicide and social trust.

Effects of racism

What is colorism?


How are Americans identified as Black shaped by racism? 
Race and Segregation

1.  Racial Dot Map
https://demographics.coopercenter.org/racial-dot-map/
search the map for examples of segregation.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2018/12/the-most-sobering-thing-about-the-racial-dot-map.html

2. Segregation on college campus. https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardvedder/2018/11/15/racial-segregation-on-american-campuses-a-widespread-phenomenon/#c74ed0444552

3. Segregation in rental market New paper suggests that discrimination causes black renters to pay substantially more than whites for identical homes in identical neighborhoods; the amount of the exploitation is greater the more white the neighborhood
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3200655

Race and Health

American Academy of Pediatrics
https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/Pages/AAP-Addresses-Racism-and-Its-Health-Impact-on-Children-and-Teens.aspx
https://theconversation.com/racism-impacts-your-health-84112?utm_medium=amptwitter&utm_source=twitter

National Center for Biotechnology Information study on breast cancer (2007) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17400570

American Public Health Association study of hypertension/heart disease (2012) https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2011.300523

Study showing lowing hypertension among 1st gen African immigrants compared to multigenerational Americans who are black.

Disparities in health for all races (2010)  https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/healthcare/news/2010/12/16/8762/fact-sheet-health-disparities-by-race-and-ethnicity/

Report on life expectancy from PBS (2016) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/new-report-reveals-persistent-health-disparities-in-the-u-s

Center for Disease Control study of childhood trauma and effects on health (2018) https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/17/648710859/childhood-trauma-and-its-lifelong-health-effects-more-prevalent-among-minorities?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Infant mortality from NY Times (2018) Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as white infants — a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery


Race and Discipline/Criminal Justice

Yale University study of discipline disparities in preschool (2016). Discipline disparities start in preschool from NY Times

Vox shows racism at school from preK-12 in 7 charts (2015).
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9646504/discipline-race-charts

This article from the Sociology of Education (2017)
Read the article and use my annotations to answer questions about it.  Then see the data source from the article below to look up data on your own.

US Dept of Education just released data on racial disparities in every school and school district in America (from preK-12). Here’s how you use the data to show if/how your school discriminates against black students and other marginalized groups. First, lookup the most recent year of data available for your school and/or school district. Right now that’s data on the 2015-16 school year. Here’s where you go:
https://ocrdata.ed.gov/DistrictSchoolSearch#schoolSearch
Here's a link to Samual Sinyangwe's tweet about this.
Click on the Discipline Report on the right side and you’ll see which groups of students your school is most likely to suspend, expel, and refer to law enforcement. You can also see who’s more likely to be arrested at school using the “school-related arrests” tab.

Saw this video and thought what an amazing contrast to the videos of Philando Castille, Sandra Band, Terence Crutcher, Levar Jones and the stopping of black men by police.
Watch from 2:30-6:15 and 12:50-18:50
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW6MpM0LTI0

Marshall project details sentencing disparities in the crmjs (2019) https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/12/03/the-growing-racial-disparity-in-prison-time

Equal Justice Initiative founded by Bryan Stevenson reports on sentencing disparities (2019) https://eji.org/news/sentencing-commission-finds-black-men-receive-longer-sentences/

Vox reports on University of Michigan Law School report on sentencing disparities (2014) https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/11/17/16668770/us-sentencing-commission-race-booker

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black-men-sentenced-to-more-time-for-committing-the-exact-same-crime-as-a-white-person-study-finds/

Race and income

https://www.epi.org/publication/black-white-wage-gaps-expand-with-rising-wage-inequality/

Wage gap is worse than in 1979.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/20/wage-gap-black-white-americans?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+morning+briefing+2016&utm_term=191226&subid=17493292&CMP=ema_a-morning-briefing_b-morning-briefing_c-US_d-1

DiAngelo's Racism and Specific Racial Groups

Please read the excerpt titled Racism and Specific Racial Groups from Robin DiAngelo's book, What Does it Mean to Be White?

Here are links to DiAngelo speaking about race.

As you read, look for both generalities and specifics of how to think about racial groups. As you read, please do these two items:



1.  Annotate or make a list of generalities that are important to keep in mind when examining ANY racial group.  

2.  And make a list of insights that you find interesting that apply to specific racial groups.

Additionally, you may find this website helpful.  Pamela Oliver, a professor from UW Madison has made a list of terms that explains the history and nature of racially-based terminology.

Her post is continually updated here.

She also posted a PDF version of this essay on SocArXiv.

The "Asian American Success Story" in Historical Context

HW: Read the section on African Americans for tomorrow.

Historically, it is important to acknowledge the history of racism against Asian-Americans:

What is the long history of discrimination of Americans with Asian heritage?

From the Asia Society's Center for Global Learning:

Beginning in the 1850s when young single men were recruited as contract laborers from Southern China, Asian immigrants have played a vital role in the development of this country. Working as miners, railroad builders, farmers, factory workers, and fishermen, the Chinese represented 20% of California's labor force by 1870, even though they constituted only .002% of the entire United States population. With the depression of 1876, amidst cries of "They're taking away our jobs!," anti-Chinese legislation and violence raged throughout the West Coast.

• 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act—the only United States Iaw to prevent immigration and naturalization on the basis of race—which restricted Chinese immigration for the next sixty years.

• In 1907, Japanese immigration was restricted by a "Gentleman's Agreement" between the United States and Japan.

• By 1924, with the exception of Filipino "nationals," all Asian immigrants, including Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Indians were fully excluded by law, denied citizenship and naturalization, and prevented from marrying Caucasians or owning land.

• ...immigration laws remained discriminatory toward Asians until 1965 when, in response to the civil rights movement, non-restrictive annual quotas of 20,000 immigrants per country were established.

Additionally, remember what we learned about racial formation in the U.S.:

• Ozawa v. U.S.
• Thind v. U.S.
• Japanese internment camps
• Korematsu v. U.S.

How did Americans with Asian Heritage Fight for Civil Rights?
All of this means that Asian-American success was severely limited by racism.  Structural racism prevented Asian immigrant success in the U.S. and that had to be changed before Asian-Americans could thrive.  Asian-Americans did not stay silent in this fight.  They had to fight for equality:

• Richard Aoki learned from the Black Panther Party.
• Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee created AAPA and changed the pejorative label of "orientals" to Asian-Americans.
• Yuri Kochiyama worked so closely with Malcolm X that she held Malcolm X in her arms after his assassination.

Yuri Kochiyama holds the head Malcolm X after his assassination.

And here is Mrs. Kochiyama with the grandson of Malcolm X.

ThoughtCo has a history of the Asian-American Civil Rights movement, the "Yellow Power Movement".

And this article from LA Mag details Gidra, the Asian activist newspaper from 1969-1975.

How did Americans with Asian heritage become "model minorities?"

One way that to prevent a larger coalition of Asian-Americans and African-Americans from fighting for civil rights together was to embrace Asian-Americans while resisting African-Americans.  Additionally, because of geopolitics like the Vietnam war, the Korean War and the threat of communist China, it made political sense to embrace the Asian-American cause.

Jeff Guo of the Washington Post interviewed Ellen Wu, author of the book Color of Success.  The interview is available here:
The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans: Washington Post analysis

...according to a recent study (2016) by Brown University economist Nathaniel Hilger, schooling rates among Asian Americans didn't change all that significantly during those three decades. Instead, Hilger's research suggests that Asian Americans started to earn more because their fellow Americans became less racist toward them.
How did that happen? About the same time that Asian Americans were climbing the socioeconomic ladder, they also experienced a major shift in their public image. At the outset of the 20th century, Asian Americans had often been portrayed as threatening, exotic and degenerate. But by the 1950s and 1960s, the idea of the model minority had begun to take root. Newspapers often glorified Asian Americans as industrious, law-abiding citizens who kept their heads down and never complained. 

Some people think that racism toward Asians diminished because Asians "proved themselves" through their actions. But that is only a sliver of the truth. Then, as now, the stories of successful Asians were elevated, while the stories of less successful Asians were diminished. As historian Ellen Wu explains in her book, "The Color of Success," the model minority stereotype has a fascinating origin story, one that's tangled up in geopolitics, the Cold War and the civil rights movement.

From NPR,
'Model Minority' Myth Again Used As A Racial Wedge Between Asians And Blacks'

[Promoting the myth of the Model Asian minority] showcase a classic and tenacious conservative strategy, Janelle Wong, the director of Asian American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, said in an email. This strategy, she said, involves "1) ignoring the role that selective recruitment of highly educated Asian immigrants has played in Asian American success followed by 2) making a flawed comparison between Asian Americans and other groups, particularly Black Americans, to argue that racism, including more than two centuries of black enslavement, can be overcome by hard work and strong family values."

"It's like the Energizer Bunny," said Ellen D. Wu, an Asian-American studies professor at Indiana University and the author of The Color of Success (excerpted here). Much of Wu's work focuses on dispelling the "model minority" myth, and she's been tasked repeatedly with publicly refuting arguments like Sullivan's, which, she said, are incessant. "The thing about the Sullivan piece is that it's such an old-fashioned rendering. It's very retro in the kinds of points he made."

From CNN,
The truth about Asian Americans' success (it's not what you think)
By Jennifer Lee
August 4, 2015

Based on a survey and 140 in-depth interviews of the adult children of Chinese, Vietnamese and Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles -- fellow sociologist Min Zhou and I explain what actually fuels the achievements of some Asian American groups: U.S. immigration law, which favors highly educated, highly skilled immigrant applicants from Asian countries. Based on the most recent available data, we found that these elite groups of immigrants are among the most highly educated people in their countries of origin and are often also more highly educated than the general U.S. population.

Take Chinese immigrants to the United States, for example: In 2010, 51% were college graduates, compared with only 4% of adults in China and only 28% of adults in the United States. The educational backgrounds of immigrant groups such as the Chinese in America -- and other highly educated immigrant groups such as Korean and Indian -- is where the concept of "Asian privilege" comes in.
When highly educated immigrant groups settle in the United States, they build what economist George Borjas calls "ethnic capital."
This capital includes ethnic institutions -- such as after-school tutoring programs and after-school academies -- which highly educated immigrants have the resources and know-how to recreate for their children. These programs proliferate in Asian neighborhoods in Los Angeles such as Koreatown, Chinatown and Little Saigon. The benefits of these programs also reach working-class immigrants from the same group.
Ethnic capital also translates into knowledge.
In churches, temples or community centers, immigrant parents circulate invaluable information about which neighborhoods have the best public schools, the importance of advance-placement classes and how to navigate the college admissions process. This information also circulates through ethnic-language newspapers, television and radio, allowing working-class immigrant parents to benefit from the ethnic capital that their middle-class peers create.
Our Chinese interviewees described how their non-English speaking parents turned to the Chinese Yellow Pages for information about affordable after-school programs and free college admissions seminars. This, in turn, helps the children whose immigrant parents toil in factories and restaurants attain educational outcomes that defy expectations.
The story of Jason, a young Chinese American man we interviewed, is emblematic of how these resources and knowledge can benefit working-class Chinese immigrants. Jason's parents are immigrants who do not speak English and did not graduate from high school. Yet, they were able to use the Chinese Yellow Pages to identify the resources that put Jason on the college track.
There, they learned about the best public schools in the Los Angeles area and affordable after-school education programs that would help Jason get good grades and ace the SAT. Jason's supplemental education -- the hidden curriculum behind academic achievement -- paid off when he graduated at the top of his class and was admitted to a top University of California campus.
This advantage is not available to other working-class immigrants.

From the American Psychological Association,
Hyper-Selectivity and the Remaking of Culture: Understanding the Asian American Achievement Paradox by Lee and Zhou

From Contexts,
How hyper-selectivity drives Asian Americans’ educational outcomes
by Jennifer Lee

Hyper-selectivity benefits all members of an immigrant group, because these groups are more likely to generate “ethnic capital,” which manifests into ethnic institutions like after-school academies and SAT prep courses that support academic achievement. The courses range in price tags (some are freely available through ethnic churches), so they are often accessible to the children of working-class Chinese and Korean immigrant parents. Hence, the hyper-selectivity of an immigrant group can assuage a child’s poor socioeconomic status (SES) and reduce class differences within an ethnic group. In turn, this produces stronger educational outcomes than would have been predicted based on parental SES alone.

Here are a few results from Lee and Zhou's publications available in JSTOR.  They are shorter journal articles that highlight segments of their later published book (mentioned above).

From Inside Higher Ed
The Asian American Achievement Paradox

Here are presentation slides from Lee and Zhou.

From Columbia University,
hyper-selectivity and Asian racial mobility by van c. tran

Asian Americans Advancing Justice resists efforts that use Asian-Americans as a wedge against affirmative action.

"Asian" Americans and Implicit Bias; Shattering the Model Minority Myth

Although on average Asian Americans have a higher median income and higher educational level than all racial groups in the US, they face implicit bias in their own ways.  It should be noted that the higher average level of income and education hide the wide disparities within the Asian American community.  This post should show that Asian Americans as a model minority is an overgeneralization that hides important realities about implicit biases both in the Asian American community and in other communities.

How Good Are the Asians?  Refuting Four Common Myths about Asian Americans, from the journal Phi Delta Kappan in 2009

Are Asian Americans Becoming White?
See this article from the Winter 2004 Contexts.

The Model Minority Myth of "Asian Americans"

This 2009 research published in the Annual Review of Sociology explains that many laws, and racial resentments changed in the second half of the 20th century which allowed more opportunities for Asian Americans, but the successes of Asians on average hide wide disparities that still exist.


This article published by Kevin Kumashiro, dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco highlights findings that were published in the Journal of Higher Education.

"Research in higher education shows that class and ethnicity shape Asian-Americans’ post-secondary decisions, opportunities and destinations. The model minority stereotype, in fact, begins to break down when we look at the data by ethnicity and class. While Chinese-Americans and Indian-Americans do have high rates of educational attainment, it’s a different story for Southeast Asian-Americans.Southeast Asian-Americans have among the lowest educational attainment in the country (e.g., fewer than 40 percent of Americans over the age of 25 of Laotian, Cambodian or Hmong descent have a high school diploma). Compared to East Asians (Chinese, Korean, Japanese) and South Asians (Indian, Pakistani), Southeast Asians in the U.S. are three to five times more likely to drop out of college. Southeast Asian-American students struggle with high rates of poverty and are often trapped in programs for English learners, which fail to prepare them for college. But this diversity among Asian-Americans is often lost in conversations about the “Asian disadvantage.” As a result, the interests of the most vulnerable Asian-Americans are not represented by anti-affirmative action rhetoric."

And this working paper by Nathanial Hilger writing for the National Bureau for Economic Research shows

"US immigration policy generated positive selection of Asians both into migration and family formation, that Asians likely experienced similar or worse prejudice and legal discrimination than blacks living in CA before the 1960s, and that all of the harshest forms of legal (though not necessarily de facto) discrimination against non-white minorities in CA disappeared during the period 1943-59."

From the LA Times March 28, 2018 implicit bias affects hiring of Asian Americans:

"Asian Americans think an elite college degree will shelter them from discrimination. It won't."

by Jennifer Lee (@JLeeSoc), a professor of sociology at Columbia University and Karthick Ramakrishnan (@karthickr), a professor of public policy at the UC Riverside.

"In numerous interviews with corporate leaders, we learned that Asian Americans are less likely to be seen as leadership material, and are thus given fewer opportunities to advance and succeed. Part of this is based on stereotype. Asians are often viewed as smart, diligent, focused, quiet and technically competent — traits that make them desirable employees, but not desirable leaders. So strong are these stereotypes that even when Asian workers take creative risks, supervisors may still prefer to promote someone else."

From the Asian American Advancing Justice institute in Washington DC also addressing implicit bias and job promotion:

"While many Asian Americans have high educational attainment and work in professional fields, some encounter a glass ceiling that blocks their professional advancement.  This often takes the form of perceptions that Asian Americans have poor communication skills or that they are passive and lack leadership potential. Reliance on stereotypes should not continue to pose barriers to advancement in the workplace."

From the Asian American Achievement Paradox, different groups of Asians were disparately shaped by more than their own will to succeed:

A Russel Sage 2015 publication authored by Jennifer Lee, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine and Min Zhou, professor of sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and the University of California, Los Angeles.

"While pundits ascribe Asian American success to the assumed superior traits intrinsic to Asian culture, Lee and Zhou show how historical, cultural, and institutional elements work together to confer advantages to specific populations. An insightful counter to notions of culture based on stereotypes, The Asian American Achievement Paradox offers a deft and nuanced understanding of how and why certain immigrant groups succeed.

Asian Americans are often stereotyped as the “model minority.” Their sizeable presence at elite universities and high household incomes have helped construct the narrative of Asian American “exceptionalism.” While many scholars and activists characterize this as a myth, pundits claim that Asian Americans’ educational attainment is the result of unique cultural values. In The Asian American Achievement Paradox, sociologists Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou offer a compelling account of the academic achievement of the children of Asian immigrants. Drawing on in-depth interviews with the adult children of Chinese immigrants and Vietnamese refugees and survey data, Lee and Zhou bridge sociology and social psychology to explain how immigration laws, institutions, and culture interact to foster high achievement among certain Asian American groups."

From PRI, Asians face implicit bias in their healthcare:
A University of Chicago Research Study showed that

"More than half of Asian Americans with Type 2 diabetes don’t even know they have it. That compares to one in four Americans with the disease overall who are unaware. Even though the American Diabetes Association changed its screening guidelines for Asian Americans, a large number are still going unscreened....That difference is so significant that two years ago, the American Diabetes Association changed the screening guidelines to recommend Asians are screened for diabetes at a lower body mass index, but that didn’t necessarily result in more screenings, according to Elizabeth Tung, a physician at the University of Chicago. She recently wrapped up a study looking at the disparities in diabetes screening between Asian Americans and other adults.

What we found was that Asian Americans were the only racial and ethnic group that was consistently screened less than other racial and ethnic groups,” Tung says. “We found that overall, Asian Americans had 34 percent lower odds of being screened than whites.”

Educationally, teachers will call home disproportionately for different races of students.
This article from the Atlantic highlights research by Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, a sociologist and an assistant professor of education at New York University's Steinhardt school.

"Cherng’s statistical analysis found sharp contrasts in how math and English teachers communicate with parents from different racial, ethnic, and immigrant backgrounds, reflecting many existing stereotypes of black, Latino, and Asian American students....Cherng attributed this to the “very implicit, really deep bias” that certain kids “get math” and certain kids don’t...teachers were less likely to contact immigrant Asian parents about academic and behavioral struggles. Only 5 percent of math teachers and 9 percent of English teachers communicated with parents of first- and second-generation Asian students about misbehavior. And less than 5 percent of English teachers contacted parents of first-generation Asian students who rarely do homework, which was 10 points less than the frequency of contact with the parents of their third-generation white counterparts."