Staggering facts from Walter Benn Michaels's article in the London Review of Books about the United States, race, sex, class, and equality:
But it would be a mistake to think that because the US is a less
racist, sexist and homophobic society, it is a more equal society. In
fact, in certain crucial ways it is more unequal than it was 40 years
ago. No group dedicated to ending economic inequality would be thinking
today about declaring victory and going home. In 1969, the top quintile
of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of all the money earned in
the US; the bottom quintile made 4.1 per cent. In 2007, the top
quintile made 49.7 per cent; the bottom quintile 3.4. And while this
inequality is both raced and gendered, it’s less so than you might
think. White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US
population, and 62 per cent of those are in the bottom quintile.
Progress in fighting racism hasn’t done them any good; it hasn’t even
been designed to do them any good. More generally, even if we succeeded
completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would
not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality. A society
in which white people were proportionately represented in the bottom
quintile (and black people proportionately represented in the top
quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It
would not be more just; it would be proportionately unjust.
One of the biggest problems of America is that itis unwilling to acknowledge the existence of class in its society in a stubborn and foolish obsession to distinguish itself from Europe and in a refusal to acknowledge that in spite of its Founding Fathers' wishes, it became a society where class matters in a way more than it does in Europe because its politics don't address the problem since it doesn't acknowledge. It is difficult to talk about class politically and constructively in the US without being accused of pursing class warfare and of being un-american for after all the magical symbol of the American dream makes it unpopular to even make the case that the rich and the poor may owe their status to something other than merit.
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