Class and Ethnic Diversity

Though the United States lacks the traditional class system of countries like the United Kingdom, class as a factor dictating social and economic mobility, and emerging from largely economic factors, is certainly a very real thing. Class is complicated, of course, and there is a sort of vestigial aristocracy in the form of “old money” families (nearly exclusively white) whose opportunities and social class may exceed their actual wealth and incomes, especially relative to “new money.” Further, the [Page 530]prestige of class markers varies somewhat from region to region; college ties to Tulane or Emory mean more in the south than in the north, as ties to Lehigh would mean more in the north than in the south, for reasons independent of those institutions’ actual merits. Education, occupation, wealth, and income are all elements from which class emerges, and all of these things are very affected in the United States by one's race.

Some scholars have argued that class grows out of occupation, either directly—one's own occupation—or indirectly—one's parents’ or forebears’ occupation, as workers in a similar position develop similar lifestyles and ways of thinking, which in turn creates patterns that we call social class. Were this so, economic factors would be important mainly for their effect on mobility and insofar as some occupations are more highly paid than others. Key to the idea of class is that although it can be changed, it changes slowly, and one's own class provides at least the starting point for one's children.

Educational attainment, for instance, statistically affects not only income and wealth but the likelihood of one's children attaining a similar level of education. Asian Americans have the highest educational attainment in the United States, an accomplishment that factored heavily in their being termed a “model minority,” and in many “positive stereotypes” about Asians in America. Nearly half of Asian Americans possess a college degree, compared to a third of non-Hispanic whites, about 17 percent of blacks, and about 11 percent of Hispanics.

Long-term economic studies have found that economic prosperity in the United States, especially long-term trends of prosperity, have correlated with increasing economic disparity: as upper-class and white incomes and wealth increase, the gap between them and lower-class and nonwhite incomes and wealth increases. The received narrative of American prosperity soaring in the generation after World War II, and of economic troubles in the 1970s and 1990s being brief exceptions to an overall arc of progress, is at heart a story about white Americans’ success. The wealthier have become more and more wealthy, and the poor have been left further and further behind.

The white American household has twice as much median wealth as the Asian American household, 15 times as much as the Hispanic American household, 22 times as much as the black American household, and while household net worth fell for all Americans from 2005 to 2010 thanks to the collapse of the housing market and the financial collapse, white household median net worth fell only 23 percent compared to 60 percent for each of the other three groups—despite the fact that white families are overwhelmingly more likely to be homeowners and were more directly impacted by the collapse of home values. While homeownership rates among blacks and Hispanics increased during the housing bubble, they did so on the strength of high-cost subprime loans. Asians, more likely than blacks and Hispanics to own their homes, were disproportionately affected by the housing market collapse as home values on the West Coast, where the Asian population is concentrated, fell the deepest.

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