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0:00
- Hello. Welcome. I'm Claudia Rizzini, the executive director of the Radcliffe Fellowship Program at Harvard University. It is my pleasure to introduce the first lecture in our series of Fellows Public Talks. Our speaker today is Professor William Darity, whose work provides a robust framework for analyzing the causes and consequences of intergroup inequality. For this introduction, however, I will refer to Professor Darity as Sandy, the nickname his mother gave him since early childhood.
0:33
On February 11, 2005, in Charleston, South Carolina, Sandy gave an invited plenary lecture at the annual convening of the Academy of Economics and Finance, titled Stratification Economics-- The Role of Intergroup Inequality. In this groundbreaking lecture, Sandy talked about his dissatisfaction with what had become a standard explanation for disparities across various societal groups. The standard explanation put the onus of inferior status on the behavior of the disadvantaged groups
1:09
rather than the societal system they live in. Instead, Sandy argued that a hierarchy that elevates one group above another is a product of the exercise of power and privilege by the group at the top. His presentation that February day was a groundbreaking moment. It effectively launched stratification economics, a growing subspecialty in economics, which looks at policies and structure that maintain advantage for dominant groups. At Radcliffe, Sandy will continue shaking up norms
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by writing a book that explores the foundation of certification economics and its innovative implications for analyzing immigration, wealth disparities educational opportunities discrimination and macroeconomics,. We're so pleased to have him with us this year. Sandy is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy and African and African-American Studies at Duke University. He describes himself as a blues and dust fanatic. So now it is my great pleasure to present this year's
2:17
Catharine Hampson Bessel Fellow at Radcliffe, Professor Sandy Darity. - Thank you so much, Claudia. I am honored to have the opportunity to be the first speaker in the series this year. I would like to begin by sharing my screen. So my topic today is prejudice and power. And I would like to discuss stratification economics as a general theory of inequality. Inequality, of course, is a phenomenon that persists consistently across all human societies, at both the individual and the group level.
3:02
And when I refer to the group level, I'm referring to social groups that are identified on the basis of constructed categories. These include race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, gender, and sexual orientation. So stratification economics distinguishes itself from other dimensions or fields within the broader terrain of economics by emphasizing the role of structural factors and the importance of relative status in generating and maintaining intergroup disparities.
3:43
In this slide, I've made a special attempt to, in a very, very cryptic and compact fashion, distinguish between the perspective of traditional economics and stratification economics. So on the first line, we talk about distinctions in area of focus. Traditional economics emphasizes human well-being, or satisfaction, or happiness as being driven by an individual's absolute status. Stratification economics, in contrast, focuses on the relative status of individuals as the best way
4:24
to gauge the degree of satisfaction or happiness that an individual might possess. And this relates directly to the way in which we think about the measurement of utility, individual utility. Traditional economics says that this is based largely on the individual's position. Now to the extent that traditional economics goes the route of thinking about relative position, it thinks about relative position in the context of interpersonal comparisons.
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But the pivot that's made with stratification economics is to align with the interpersonal comparisons intergroup comparisons. And so individuals are not only concerned about how well they are doing with respect to some reference group, but they're also concerned about the position of the group to which they belong, the group with which they identify compared against other groups. And they also are concerned about their individual position within the group in which they identify.
5:39
So this leads to the possibility of setting up a very distinct set of explanations for intergroup disparities. Whereas the individual-centric approach of traditional economics leads almost invariably to an argument that group-based dysfunction or deficiencies lie at the heart of explaining intergroup disparities, stratification economics goes the route of emphasizing structural factors, including the exclusion and exploitation of subordinate groups by dominant groups.
6:20
So I turn next to trying to provide you with a very, very brief sketch of the nature of inequality in the United States, in particular. And the focus here is going to be on wealth inequality as opposed to income inequality. In large measure because of the significant role that intergenerational transmission of resources plays in shaping and structuring wealth inequality in a way that's somewhat distinct from the way in which income inequality is determined.
6:53
Now there is some very interesting new research from Germaine Tony and Catherine Robertson that indicates that income levels are influenced by parents and grandparents wealth levels, which would suggest that income inequality also has a foundation in intergenerational transmission effects. But the predominant intergenerational transmission effect shapes wealth inequality. And so that's what I'm going to turn to in what follows. So this is a diagram that I refer to as the fish diagram.
7:34
And the fish diagram provides us with a picture of the evolution of wealth inequality in the United States from 1917 into the present moment. And if you look at the diagram carefully, you'll see that there is a parallel degree of inequality that we're experiencing with respect to wealth in the present moment, that is comparable to the degree of inequality that the nation experienced with respect to wealth during the course of the Great Depression. So the blue line represents the share
8:14
of wealth going to the bottom 90% of the population. And the red line represents the share of wealth going to the top 0.1%. This is not 1%. This is not 10%. This is the top 0.1%. And as you can see from this diagram, those shares have converged in the late 2000. And as a consequence, we now have a situation in which the degree of inequality in the US economy with respect to wealth is very similar to the degree of inequality that existed in 1937. And this is staggering.
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The following chart provides you with an additional way to visualize the degree of disparity that exists across the US population. At the bottom of the slide, I point out that the 400 richest people in the United States own more assets than the 150 million Americans in the bottom 60% of the wealth distribution. But the other important dimension of this particular slide is the comparison between income and wealth distributions. So income inequality is significant in the United States.
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As you can see in this particular slide, the top 0.1% of income recipients in this country possess about 11% of the total income. So that's not-- shall we say a fair and even distribution of income by any means. In fact, the bottom 90% of the population possesses about half of the nation's income. But when we look at the wealth distribution, it's strikingly more uneven than the income distribution. So as you can see here, the top 0.1% has 22 to 23% of the nation's wealth.
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And that is an identical share with the bottom 90% of the population. We now know that, if we look at the upper half of the distribution, the amount of wealth that is held by households above the median household in the United States, that's in excess of 95% of the nation's wealth.
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So I want to make a sharp turn to thinking about racial wealth inequality as an adjunct to thinking about the general degree of wealth inequality in the United States. And racial wealth inequality is immense. What we attempt to do in this particular slide is give you a sense of the difference in the degree of inequality measured in two different ways. The degree of Black-white inequality in wealth. So in the upper part of the diagram, there is a comparison made between Black
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and white levels of wealth or net worth at the median. And when I refer to the median, I'm talking about the middle household in each group's distribution. So the middle Black household has approximately $165,000 less in wealth than the middle white household. But if we were to look at what we conventionally think of as the average or the mean, we find that the disparity in wealth is much, much greater. In fact, the average Black household has $841,000 less in net worth than
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the average white household. And as a consequence, closing the gap at the median would require an individual or a typical Black household to save 100% of their income for almost four consecutive years. In contrast, it would take a much, much longer period of time saving 100% of their income for Black households to match the mean level of wealth held by white households. I'm also going to argue that as a consequence of the immense concentration of wealth
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that the upper end of the wealth distribution, if we are concerned about Black and white wealth disparities, we should focus on the mean rather than the median, despite the fact that the median is more indicative of the more representative or typical experience of families in each of the racial groups. As I pointed out, the share of wealth going to the upper 50% of households in the United States exceeds 95%. And that is true, in particular, for the share
13:43
of wealth going to households in the white distribution as well. In fact, we estimate now that about 97% of the wealth held by all white households is held by those that are in the upper 50% of the white wealth distribution. So only 3% of white wealth goes to those households in the bottom 50%. If we were to focus on the median as our target for trying to eliminate the racial wealth gap, we would leave out the overwhelming majority of wealth that is held by white households.
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Now in addition, the fact that the wealth is so heavily concentrated at the upper end of the distribution is not attributable exclusively to the fact that there's a handful of extraordinarily rich white billionaires. There are a handful of extraordinarily rich white billionaires. But that doesn't tell the full story. In fact, 25% or one quarter of all white households have a net worth that is in excess of $1 million. And that is true for only 4% of Black households.
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In addition, further, whites in the working class actually have 2 to 3 times the median net worth of Blacks who are in the professional and managerial class. So the Black/white wealth disparity is not something that can be explained simply by class variations. It is something that must be explained by taking into account the nation's racial history. So the racial history of the United States is part and parcel of the racial history of the Americas writ large.
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And in stratification economics, close attention is paid to the creation of these types of contemporary wealth disparities in the crucible of the colonial and-- the colonial system of enslavement in the Americas. And I turn, in particular, to a fascinating set of comments that were made by Karl Marx in chapter 31 of Capital Volume 1, where he said, "The colonial system ripened, like a hothouse, trade and navigation. The societies monopolia of Luther
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were powerful levers for concentration of capital. The colonies secured a market for the budding manufacturers, and through the monopoly of the market and increased accumulation the treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder floated back to the mother countries and was turned into capital." And then further, Marx says in the same chapter, "Whilst the cotton industry introduced child slavery in England, it gave in the United States
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a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veil slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world." So essentially, Marx is arguing that there is a direct relationship between the way in which colonialization and slavery operated in the new world and the creation of the types of disparities that we observe today, not only at the intergroup level,
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but also at the International level. Now what about the specific sources of racial wealth inequality in the United States? So in the research that we've been doing, that's linked to the stratification economics project, we argue that the degree of racial wealth inequality in the United States is a direct product of government policies from 1865 onwards. So the process begins with the federal government making a commitment to provide 40 acre land
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grants to the formerly enslaved, a promise that was never kept. On the other hand, the federal government was giving simultaneously a 160 acre land grants to 1 and 1/2 million white families. 160 acre land grants in the Western territories as the nation completed its colonial settler project. And as a consequence, it created the origins or the beginnings of the racial wealth gap in the United States. So although Black Americans who were emerging from slavery
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were promised 40 acres, which is actually one quarter of the 160 acres given to white families in the West, they actually received zero acres. And that's in contrast with the 160 acre land patents given to white households. And Trina Shanks Williams now estimates that today there are 45 million living white Americans who are beneficiaries of the Homestead Act land grants. The next phase of government policy really involves, to a large extent, inaction on the part of the federal government.
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100 massacres took place from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the 1940s. White terrorist massacres that resulted in extensive loss of Black lives in the United States, but also the seizure and appropriation of Black property by the White terrorists. This, again, reinforced the racial wealth gap. In the 20th century, the federal government shifts away from asset building via land provision to asset building by supporting home ownership.
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But it does so in a highly discriminatory fashion. It introduces redlining, and it introduces a GI Bill that is discriminatory applied between returning Black and white veterans. And so as a consequence, you have a situation in which the middle class that is built in the United States, through the process of supporting homeownership, is a middle class that is overwhelmingly white and excludes Blacks from entry into that social status. Then subsequently, you had efforts
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to engage in slum clearance and to introduce a Federal Highway system that resulted in the destruction of Black neighborhoods and the destruction of Black business districts across the country, particularly with the running of interstate freeways or local freeways through the heart of Black business districts. Now I want to say that underlying all of these policies is a system of violence. And this is quite explicit in the context of the 100 massacres.
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But this system of violence has a practical purpose, intimidation and preservation of the status of whites. On the other hand, there may also have been a pleasurable dimension to this violence. And I put a question mark in front of this because this is not the most salutary set of remarks to make. But if we think about our images of lynchings that have taken place, we see crowds where individuals are smiling, white individuals are smiling, in the presence of a mutilated Black body
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hanging from a tree. In Ralph Ellison's short story about a lynching where the main character is a white boy from Cincinnati, Ohio who is visiting relatives in the deep South, Ellison calls that story, a party down at the square. And this is to capture the notion that there was festive savagery taking place. Now of course, in the context of the massacres, the terrorists displayed a high degree of exuberance in the process of conducting their horrors and atrocities.
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And so I just want to insert the notion that there may actually be a dimension of pleasure for the Barbarians in the context of conducting these kinds of violent acts. So the central thing that I would like to share with you today, though, is an analysis of the sources of the principles that underlie stratification economics. And so I'm really talking about stratification economics before it was called stratification economics. But the ideas that are central to the works of some
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of these scholars are also heavily manifest in the way in which stratification economics is being executed now. So I'd like to share a quotation from W.E.B Du Bois with you. And this quotation is one that I think is relatively famous and familiar to folks where Du Bois is talking about why the white laborers do not align with the Black masses for the purposes of trying to improve their own situation. And Du Bois talks about their benefit being associated with a psychological wage.
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So in fact what Du Bois is doing is introducing into the parlance a concept that economists were later to refer to as psychic costs and benefits. Du Bois is really the first to talk about this idea. The difficulty is that many people interpret this passage in Du Bois as referring to symbolic or intangible benefits that were associated with whiteness, that led to the position being taken by white laborers, that they would align themselves with the white cause writ large.
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But when we read this passage very carefully, we find that there actually some very tangible benefits that Du Bois is talking about. He refers to the capacity of white people to be admitted freely with all classes of whites to public functions, parks, and the best schools, the police being drawn from their ranks, the courts relying upon their votes and treating them with greater leniency, so much leniency, Du Bois says, as to encourage lawlessness.
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They also have the capacity to elect public officials. And this could influence the degree of deference and attention that was drawn to them, even if their incomes were significantly lower than other whites. And so the key point I would like to make here is that the kinds of benefits associated with whiteness transcended class position. They continue to transcend class position. And we can then make the argument, in stratification economics, that the White working class
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is not acting against their own self interests. That if we take into account the importance that is assigned to relative group position, they are actually acting out of their own self interest in a far more complicated way than we normally ascribe to them. This leads me, in turn, to the influence of Herbert Blumer on the thinking about prejudice or the theories of prejudice. And I want to juxtapose Gordon Allport and Herbert Blumer's perspectives on prejudice.
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So Allport, in 1954, writes a major study called the theory of prejudice, in which he argues-- and I believe I'm being fair to him that this is not a caricature of his position, that prejudice stems largely from ignorance and irrationality. And that if we could create more opportunities for structured contacts between members of the dominant and the subordinate groups, we could improve relations between them. We could erase these prejudicial beliefs.
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In contrast, Herbert Blumer in an article in 1958, where he never mentions Allport. But it's fairly clear that this is an article that is a response to the Allport perspective, Blumer argues that, actually, prejudice is functional. It's functional and producing and maintaining relative advantage for the dominant social group. Now my good friend Larry Bobo says my views of the distinction in their perspectives paint them in two extreme polar positions. But I'm going to say, yes, I'm going
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to paint the perspectives in extreme polar positions, particularly because of the way in which I read the text that each of them have left us with some 70 years later. So I would like to talk in some detail about Blumer's theory of prejudice, because Blumer emphasizes this notion that there are certain feelings associated with race prejudice that are held by the dominant group. And he highlights four feelings. The first of these is superiority. The dominant group feels superior to other.
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The second is the otherness of the subordinate group, treating the subordinate group as intrinsically different and alien. This is particularly significant when we think about the pleasurable dimension of violence. It's essential if you're going to enjoy observing the abuse, or murder, or maiming of another human being, that you don't think of them as being equivalent human beings. And so otherness is very, very important here. Then he talks about proprietary claims
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to certain privileges and advantages. And I'm going to elucidate this in a moment, because I think this is a very important dimension of his argument. And then a companion position, which is the fourth point, is that the dominant group lives in fear that the subordinate or subaltern group harbors designs on their privileges and advantages. And so not only is the other alien, but the other is dangerous. The other jeopardizes your relative position.
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So what are the proprietary claims? Well, this is a very, very profound and powerful list of items. Greater access to ownership of property, especially land. The right to certain jobs, occupations, and professions, preferential advantage. Preferred access to certain kinds of industry over lines of business. Dominion over certain positions of control and decision-making as in government and the law. Exclusive membership in given institutions, for example, schools, churches, recreational areas.
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Restricted access to certain positions of social prestige. And special access to certain areas of intimacy and privacy. So Blumer has actually set up the apparatus in this very short article in 1958 for the premises that underlie much of stratification economics. These proprietary claims are associated with pecuniary benefits, both absolute and relative. So Blumer's analysis points toward a material basis for racism. The dominant group seeks to render the subordinate group noncompetitive.
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And this notion of noncompetitiveness is something that was elaborated in W. Arthur Lewis's lectures that were published in a volume by the Harvard University press in the 1990s. There are additional forerunners to stratification economics. My colleagues, James Stewart, who has provided some profound insights into the origins of group identification, and Patrick Mason, who has advanced some of the most compelling critiques of cultural determinism as a basis for thinking about group inequality.
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Obviously, Patrick is saying that cultural factors do not explain the kinds of disparities that we are observing. There are additional forerunners to stratification economics, some contemporary and one from a much older vintage. Cheryl Harris and George Lipsitz, as architects of critical race theory, are the two individuals who have made the strong, strong claim and important claim that whiteness has pecuniary value, that there are property rights in whiteness
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that are associated with strong material advantages. Now the economists from a much older period in time who is relevant to the development of stratification economics is Thorstein Veblen, and this is because he is the individual who introduced end to economic analysis, or discussions, and in a sense, very briefly because his perspective didn't have sustained influence. Although the macro economist James Dusenberry made good use of Veblenian point of view. But it's Veblen who really introduced
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the notions of conspicuous consumption, invidious comparisons, the idea that actually patriarchy originates with conquest and violence, and the notion of the importance of relative status. Now Veblenian relative status was not linked to group identity. And so that's the departure that occurs in stratification economics. But Veblen's hand lies very heavily on the development of this subfield. So the final thing that I'd like to share with you today, and I'm going to do this very quickly
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is to try to enumerate a list of areas or applications of stratification economics, some that are already underway, some that are projected projects for the future that may be components of the book that I'm working on. I'm working on this book in collaboration with my partner Kirsten Mullen and with Sam Meyers Jr., who is an economist at the University of Minnesota. And some of the topics that I'm going to mention here are topics that I anticipate will appear in the book.
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So from 2005, when I gave the lecture in Charleston to the present moment, here are some of the things that have become ways in which stratification economists have tried to change the way in which we think about intergroup disparities. So one of the issues is colorism, lighter complexion members of a status group being higher on the subaltern ladder in racialized systems of hierarchy. So if you think about there being stratification within groups, in the subordinate group,
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in a racialized system, folks who are lighter complexion may tend to be higher on the within group hierarchy than those who are darker complexion. Also, there's been, particularly on James Stewart's part, an attempt to address how racial and ethnic fractionalization threatens military cohesiveness. Gregory Price and Banerjee have looked at why authorities respond inequitably to the needs of subordinate communities after natural disasters. Price focusing heavily on Hurricane Katrina
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and New Orleans. Tim Diette and co-authors have looked at why Black students do worse in schools that are most evenly mixed with white students. And what I mean here is that there is a nonlinear relationship between the racial composition of schools and Black student outcomes. Black students appear to do best in all Black schools or in schools where there are very few Black students. So the extremes are the better situations. In the first case, I guess there is a comparative degree
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of insulation from racism. And in the latter case, their presence is deemed so insignificant that people don't try to prevent them from doing well in school. So Black students do worse in the intermediate case where there's the greatest degree of integration at the facility level between students because, even in those schools, there's usually a high degree of within-school segregation with respect to curriculum and instruction.
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And here finally are some opportunities for further exploration, the implications of group position on individual productivity, the impact of stereotype lifts, stereotype threat, and stereotype boost, or identity threat, the work of Claude Steele obviously is pertinent to thinking about productivity outcomes. Intergroup disparities and political responses. The phenomenon of passing, passing both from low to high status and from high to low status. The origins of intergroup wealth differences,
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which I've talked about briefly in emphasizing intergenerational transmission effects. And then stratification economics is insights about immigration with respect to the selectivity of immigration, the lateral mobility hypothesis, and the phenomenon of imported stratification, i.e., ethnic and ethnic groups importing the patterns of intergroup disparity that exists in their countries of origin. For example, the transmission of caste disparities to the UK
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and to the United States with the migration of Indian populations to this country. The last slide, I'm going to share with you is a set of references that are some of the documents that have been formative in the development of stratification economics as a field. And now I'd like to turn things back to Claudia, Rizzini. - Thank you, Sandy. This was amazing. So we do have questions. And the first one is, does stratification economics differ from the views expressed in Heather McGhee book that
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says that Racism Costs us all? - Yes. And I'm actually a tremendous fan of Heather McGhee. But the perspective or the theoretical position taken here is different. And the unfortunate dimension about viewing racism as being beneficial to some while being detrimental to others, perhaps many others, is the fact that it makes it more difficult to eradicate. And if it's beneficial to all individuals in a numerical majority community, then that makes it very, very hard to eradicate
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under conditions where, to some degree, majority vote affects the kinds of policies that take place. One of the sadnesses in the United States is in the present moment, we're being subjected to minority rule. But that's a slightly different issue. - Yeah. So the next question, how does stratification economics change the way economists think about identities? - So I think that the crucial dimension of this is that identities carry with them material consequences.
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And I think economists have largely thought about identities as having a certain degree of frivolity to them. There's a body of literature that argues that individuals see group identities as having certain kinds of behavioral practices associated with them. Some of them that they might find exciting and interesting. And so people opt to be members of that group so that they can engage in those activities or behaviors freely. And that's very different from a story that
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says that the group identities actually originate in the crucible of violence, and enslavement, or colonialism, and that they carry over to the present moment sustaining certain kinds of disparities and advantages for one group to the disadvantage of another group. And so I think it's really, really the association of, in effect what, Cheryl Harris and George Lipsitz would refer to as property rights in an identity, that really separates stratification economics from the way in which economists
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have conventionally thought about these things. - All right. The next question starts with, thank you for an enlightening talk. So and it has, stratification economics seems to resonate with sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's conceptualization of cultural, social, and symbolic capital. Do the theory of Bourdieu contribute to the field of stratification economics or diverge from the developing conversations in the field? - Yeah, that's a great question. When I first read Bourdieu's major book
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on culture and class, I thought it was brilliant. And then subsequently, Bourdieu did some work on Brazil in which he attempted to argue that there really wasn't a system of raised stratification in Brazil, that it was all a matter of class. I was kind of startled. And so I have to go back and reconsider what I was thinking about the way in which Bourdieu's framework could be used. But I think that the original body of work is actually somewhat consistent with stratification economics.
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Because if you make the argument that cultural practices are associated with certain social class positions, then it becomes a way of thinking about how classes distinguish themselves from one another, and how they preserve identities as social classes. I think where Bourdieu has come into trouble is when he tries to address the intersections between social class and race or social class and other types of categories of distinction. And that's one of the most important areas of research
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and stratification economics now, is thinking about the consequence of these intersections of multiple identities, particularly when some identities might be privileged and others might be denigrated in the same social context if somebody possesses both of those identities. So I think, yeah, his book distinctions is very important. But I think it requires a sound scholarly transition to the question of intersection between class and race or ethnicity. - Right.
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Do you see commonalities in the patterns of experience across stratified groups? For example, gender-based groups or immigrant-based groups? - I think that the real question for both is whether or not those groups are in a subordinate position. Now let's keep in mind all immigrant groups are not in a subordinate position. It depends upon the selection process and screening process upon their entry into a country. So for example, we have some immigrant communities
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that consist of very highly skilled professionals who take positions in Silicon Valley. And so no, I wouldn't view their experience as being parallel with the experiences of marginalized social groups. So I think we have to be very careful. If we use the term immigrant, we have to be very specific about which types of immigrant groups, which immigrant communities we're referring to. And I think the same issue applies with respect to gender. So one of the questions that I take up in the paper,
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my recent paper in "The Journal of Economic Literature," called "Position and Possessions," which is an elaboration on stratification economics, one of the issues I take up is, how do we situate the position of white women? Are they a subordinate community or are they not? Or if they are a subordinate community, to what degree are they complicit in that subordination? Now the reason I raise this really, really awkward question is because of the fact that the majority of white women who voted,
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voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and an even larger proportion of them voted for Donald Trump in 2020. And that would seem to be something that's inconsistent with whatever interests they might have as a gender community. And that's very evident now with the decision that was made by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. So what's going on? And so the argument I make in the paper is that a majority of voting white women actually place racial supremacy over gender equality.
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So let me throw that out as a hot one for people to think about. - Yeah, absolutely.
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And the next question is, what is to be done? Any [INAUDIBLE] - Yeah. So this is the troubling question that arises when you think about the implications of stratification economics. Stratification economics, unlike the perspective that says, well, we can make everybody better off if we get rid of racism, stratification economics is saying, no, the world doesn't work that way. And unfortunately, that means it's much more challenging or difficult to alter things.
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There's an extended discussion in my paper "Positions and Positions" of circumstances under which members of dominant social groups may actually choose to defect and to side with efforts to overturn the intergroup hierarchy. And that's a really complicated question. I try to suggest that, perhaps it's the most advantaged members of the dominant group who might be more receptive to change because they may have less to lose in the process of the transition. But that's the real question. Who loses?
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Who gains? And to what extent will the losers be willing to accommodate making a social change that would move us towards greater justice? I'm an advocate of reparations for Black American descendants of us slavery. But I also recognize that the implications of stratification economics suggest that that's something that would be very difficult to achieve. There are some grounds for optimism on that score, though. In the year 2000, only 4% of white Americans
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endorsed reparations as monetary payments to Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States. By the year 2018, that figure had risen to closer to 15%. And then today, the most recent estimates that we have suggest that it's about 30% of white Americans. And so clearly, there is a segment of the White American population that is saying, they are willing to change the racial calculus in this society. And so I think it would be very important to try
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to explore what the reasoning is for those individuals, because the changing the racial calculus may actually change their relative position. And so if they're willing to do that, that's a very profound and powerful position to take.
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- There is a question that it's related to your comments about white women voting for Donald Trump. So don't the action of white women who voted for Donald Trump suggest that they see their whiteness as a material advantage, but not their gender. In other words, women who vote to maintain the privileges of whiteness do so precisely because femaleness is a source of subordination and they know that. - No, I wouldn't think that's actually the explanation at all.
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I think that the ideological framework that shapes their privileging of whiteness or prioritizing whiteness is quite consistent frequently with a package of attitudes and beliefs that are pretty much consistent with a more traditional view of what family arrangements should be like or what the role of women might be. And I'm particularly thinking that this is a bundle of ideas that are very consistent with the Phyllis Schlafly view of the position of women in American society. - Right.
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How might we approach indigeneity from the perspective of stratification economics? - Well, I think if we're talking about indigeneity that's associated with the exploitation of Native peoples, and the taking of their land, and the formation of colonial settler projects, then that's very compatible with the way in which stratification economics sees the historical landscape that shapes modern inequalities. So in the United States alone, I mean if you were to think about the unequal status
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of Native American communities, that clearly originates with the dispossession of their land. - Right. And the next question is, is your position irreconcilable with the position taken by others like Heather McGhee, that working class whites are acting against their own self-interest in supporting racism? - Yeah, I don't think there is a reconciliation in those positions. But I wish there was.
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- And what are the implications, I think we partly answered this question. What are the implications of stratification economics for our understanding of the intersection of race and gender, or the intersection of race and sexual orientation? - I think that's very much an important ongoing project in stratification economics that's not adequately developed yet. I think there's a better analysis at the present moment of the intersection of race and gender
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per se than there is of race and sexual orientation. But this is something that I think requires further scholarship. - Right. And is racism found to be equally spread among whites of all classes? Or-- let me just see-- or is it different in different social classes, any different in groups of wealthier people or less wealthy individuals? - I don't the answer to that. I think that the manifestations might be different. So if you think about more affluent, more highly educated
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whites, there's a significant segment of them who are hostile towards affirmative action. I would say that that's a manifestation of a form of racism. So on the other hand, you've got--
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they probably are less likely to have Confederate flags on their property, although some of them may have sentiments that are very much the same. But because of Veblenian demonstration effects and self-presentation and self-representation, they may be less likely to do that. So you might find more of those kinds of images in the possession of whites who are not necessarily poor, but who may not be as well-educated. And so yeah, there is-- I think there's a distribution of manifestations
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of racism across all social classes of whites. But I don't necessarily think that one social class is more racist than another.
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- So the next question is about reparation, which is the comment that you made earlier. So what do you think helped shape the change or attitudes toward reparation among white Americans from a small percentage to 15% or more?
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- I think, actually, a lot of it has to do with people-- and this is my feeling as an educator, that actually that this is a process-- this is a consequence of enlightenment about the nation's history. I think that this is really a response to that. And I think some of it was triggered, the most recent increase in support. Some of it was triggered by the final recognition that there really has been a sustained pattern of anti-Black police violence and murders
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of unarmed Blacks in the United States, consequent upon the events of 2020 where people visibly saw a police execution take place of an unarmed Black man. So I think it's actually people being better informed and better educated about the nation's history that has had a significant effect on this process. And I think, correspondingly, that is why we have this uprising against so-called critical race theory. It's precisely because there is a hardcore segment of the White
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population that recognizes that the ground has shifted, that attitudes are changing. And they are extremely, extremely hostile towards those changes taking place. And so they have crafted a program of action to try to repress having a better informed American public about the nation's past and present. - Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Sandy. Thank you for your thoughtful presentation and for your perspectives. I also want to thank our audience for their terrific questions.
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I hope you are able to join us for other Radcliffe future programs. You can find out about future programs and watch videos of past events at radcliffe.harvard.edu. Thank you again for joining us today and have a great rest of the day. Bye-bye.
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