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As someone from Europe - I find it really weird they just seem to treat racial and economic classes as more or less interchangeable. It's as if white==wealthy

As someone from Europe - I find it really weird they just seem to treat racial and economic classes as more or less interchangeable. It's as if white==wealthy and black==poor - is the situation still so dire in the USA?

subpixel 8y ago
Imagine you are living three generations removed from slavery (not counting your own), and - if you’re lucky - one generation away from racial discrimination as a policy norm. On the whole, you’re far less likely than your more privileged countrymen to have financial security.
- weberc2 8y ago
  “Outlier” is extreme. A significant portion of black Americans are in the middle class. The legacy of historical racism is significant, but exaggerations don’t help anyone.
  - jdavis703 8y ago
    The median wealth of a black person is $17,000, while the median wealth of a white person is $170,000 [0]. Defining what middle class is extremely difficult, but one of the numbers I’ve seen is the minimum cut off at $50,000. If this is true, it means more than half of African Americans are less than middle class. 0; http://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/ http://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/
    - dawidw 8y ago
      > more than half of African Americans are less than middle class What is the reason of that?
      - jdavis703 8y ago
        There’s a lot of complicated reasons. The easiest ones to look at via economic data is the homeownership rate which is significantly lower, higher levels of student debt (a fairly recent phenomenon) and that young black adults start out with less wealth in early adulthood, which means they miss out on the power of compounding interest. All this data can be found from the source I linked to above.
        amanaplanacanal 8y ago
        I'm pretty sure that they were disproportionately affected by the drug war, also. Large numbers of black men are convicted felons, which has to have an effect on future earnings.
        subpixel 8y ago
        It's one thing to state that "the homeownership rate which is significantly lower" and another to point out the systematic housing discrimination that has taken place across America for more than a century and which is certainly not over. https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history... Think about it - in most cities the entire shape of our urban landscape is defined by the movement of white people to avoid living near black people. Similarly, the reason public transit in most of the US is near non-existent is b/c people do not want buses and trains bringing 'other' people to where they live.
    - weberc2 8y ago
      “Median” doesn’t tell you anything about outliers, so I don’t see how that relates to my post...
      - jdavis703 8y ago
        The average numbers are $900,000 for whites and $140,000 for blacks. Averages are more effected by outliers, so read in to this what you will. Never the less I’m not sure what outliers has to do with people being in the middle class. Also if you want to look at the wealthiest 1% as outliers, only 3% of these outliers are black [0] 0: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/business/the-1-percent-paint-a-more-nuanced-portrait-of-the-rich.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/business/the-1-percent-pa...
        weberc2 8y ago
        I was responding to the claim that black people who escape poverty are outliers. I used "middle class" as an approximation for "escaping poverty".
- pacala 8y ago
  It may surprise a naive audience how recent serfdom and slavery were the norm all over the world. Here's hoping for building today a better tomorrow. Serfdom emancipation in Europe: circa 1800, as late as 1864 in Poland. Slavery abolition in US: circa 1800 in the North, as late as 1865 in the South. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom#Dates_of_emancipation_from_serfdom_in_various_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom#Dates_of_emancipation_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
  - iguy 8y ago
    Indeed, good point. The dates there for Russia etc are accurate, but seem very late for the western countries -- in some places it essentially disappeared centuries before it was legally abolished. (I don't have a great link but e.g. "Serfdom was de facto ended in France by Philip IV, Louis X (1315)," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_serfdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_serfdom ) Barbary corsair slave-raiding also only stopped in 1830, when France decided to invade.
    - pacala 8y ago
      Great points, thanks for the link. It appears that serfdom largely disappeared as a mass phenomenon in Western Europe [England/France/Italy/Spain] early [XII - XVI centuries], but persisted in Central and especially Eastern Europe all the way into the XIX century. https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/serfdom-western-europe https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-alm... https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/serfdom-eastern-europe https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-alm... https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/serfdom-russia https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-...
pcbro141 8y ago
The racial wealth gap has only increased since the civil rights movement in America (1960s). There never was anything dramatic enough done by the government to bring living standards up to par for black Americans after slavery and Jim Crow.
- ams6110 8y ago
  It's not a problem the government can fix, that much should be clear by now. Trillions of dollars have been spent on fighting poverty. It hasn't worked.
  - rtkwe 8y ago
    Poverty programs aren't aimed and aren't large enough to deal with the issue. Just lifting someone up enough to get them above the poverty line isn't the going to address the problem that their parents and their grandparents were systematically locked out of education, employment, and housing markets. That kind of wealth builds year on year and generation on generation and the gap will take longer to erase.
mc32 8y ago
Obviously this is false, but there are many institutionalized aspects of society which perpetuates that, both from those seeking more equality and those seeking less equality. It’s a dual use instrument that gets results due to thd high emotion tied to it. Bigots will use it to perpetuate myths about some minotities, activists will use it because it makes things look worse.
eckmLJE 8y ago
A higher percentage of black people live in poverty than white people[0], but the disparity is emphasized in cities. Read about White Flight.[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#By_race/ethnicity_and_family_status,_based_on_data_from_2007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#B... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
- duado 8y ago
  When white people move out of a neighborhood, it’s “white flight,” when they move in it’s “gentrification.” What is it called when they stay where they are?
  - sigfubar 8y ago
    We call ourselves trapped.
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    I think you'll find that the bad part here is this business of people acting as a bloc of homogeneous race.
    - iguy 8y ago
      But both "white flight" and "gentrification" are a bunch of individuals making similar choices. There's no pre-arranged conspiracy to all sell up next year & move to X; the only "homogeneous bloc" is in the eye of the speaker. And it is indeed slightly weird how opposite things are perceived negatively.
  - mturmon 8y ago
    There is sometimes a name for that too: a racial housing covenant. When the California legislature passed a law outlawing them in 1963, the initiative process was used the next year to pass Prop. 14, which specifically allowed racial covenants in transferring housing. It passed with 67% of voters approving it.
folkrav 8y ago
Black people in USA are on average way poorer. Higher unemployment rates, lower education, lower average median income, higher risk of living in poverty or growing up in impoverished areas... The income gap between them and whites is still not that different than it was around the Civil Rights Act era.
skh 8y ago
In the U.S. we have a lot of problems that are really socio-economic that are discussed in terms of race. There are historical reasons for this and this is particularly true in the southeastern part of the country. When white people talk about those taking handouts or getting something for free they mostly are talking about poor brown people. This despite the fact that whites - due to being a majority of th population - consume a majority of the welfare. If I talk about poor people in a large city almost everyone will imagine a black person. There is the perception broadly speaking that white = wealthy and black = poor. Blacks on average are poorer and are more likely to be charged with committing a crime but in terms of numbers most crimes are committed by whites and most poor people are white. In the 90s when Hilary Clinton talked about super predators the images were those of black criminals. When Reagan talked about welfare queens the image given was of a black woman with lots of kids. I’ve felt that if poor whites in the U.S. stopped thinking of themselves as better than brown people, if they would stop believing the myths and media narratives about race then we’d have universal health care and free higher education. A former President from Texas once said If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll even empty his pockets for you.
- weberc2 8y ago
  > When white people talk about those taking handouts or getting something for free they mostly are talking about poor brown people. This is not my experience as a lifelong American with many white friends, family, etc. > Blacks on average are poorer and are more likely to be charged with committing a crime but in terms of numbers most crimes are committed by whites and most poor people are white. Of course, whites are a larger part of the population—60ish percent in the USA, but they undercommit crimes. For whatever reason (legacy of historical racism, poor socioeconomic status, etc), black Americans overcommit crimes both according to police data and victim reports. Many are tempted to deny these facts as “supportive of racism”, but these facts don’t support racism because the variance within a race is huge and the overwhelming majority of any race are decent, productive, law-abiding people. > I’ve felt that if poor whites in the U.S. stopped thinking of themselves as better than brown people, if they would stop believing the myths and media narratives about race then we’d have universal health care and free higher education. In America, the media narratives about race are entirely sympathetic toward minorities. I would also appreciate a citation for the implication that poor white Americans are somehow more racist than other Americans (esp other poor Americans).
bluGill 8y ago
Not exactly. There are wealthy black people - but they are a small minority of all black people. There are a lot of poor white people as well, but there are a lot of white people in every economic class. As a result the classification of white == wealthy, black == poor is generally true even though it is just a correlation with no causation behind it. The problem is complex and simple solutions. Most people discussing the problem want to push their quick fix solution and so do not care to think about how complex it really it. (often vote for me - their opponents would say that they don't want to fix the problem as then they wouldn't get votes) Don't forget that the USA is a large place with many different cultures. I never saw any race issues when I grew up - I didn't even know the car dealer was owned by a black man until he spoke to our class and said he choose to buy the dealership in this town over 6 other nearby towns because we wouldn't care that he was black and the other towns would. As I get older I now see that things are progressing - some areas faster than others.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jagthebeetle 8y ago
Doesn't this trend manifest in European countries as well? (E.g. https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/poverty-rates-among-ethnic-groups-great-britain https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/poverty-rates-among-ethnic-gro...). I don't know about equality, but correlation seems to be there and doesn't strike me as intuitively "weird," or surprising, if undesirable. Now the linkage in the zeitgeist of race and socioeconomics is another matter. I'd be curious if it can be attributed convincingly to some American social factor (racial heterogeneity, our media, our relative lack of ethnically meaningful home states), but that's one for the social historians.
- Balero 8y ago
  It's not as clear cut. Much of the non-European immigration took place fairly recently (post war time) and people migrated mainly to cities. Urban areas tend to be wealthier (obvs not always, but it is a trend) and have more opportunities. SO whilst these immigrants were at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder where they were, they were on a different ladder to those in rural areas. So you get rural areas of poor people of largely European descent, and a more mixed (due to more economic mobility) city wealth demography. This is not the whole story, but I think could be part of it.
  - gph 8y ago
    That sounds roughly the same as the US, just at a different scale and more recent.
  - systemtest 8y ago
    In the Netherlands, people in rural areas are wealthy. They are either older folks with large pensions and investment accounts, farmers with large plots of expensive land or people with good paying jobs that want out of the busy city. A nice house out in the country is at least half a million.
  - iguy 8y ago
    In the northern parts of the US, the timeline is not so different -- there were some black people there in 1940, but a large majority moved up postwar. To work in industries which are now dead, concentrated in certain cities, but not to the rural parts in between.
mameluco 8y ago
Well, yeah. Europeans and their barbaric way of managing colonies created the current socio-economical situations that plague Latin America. Europeans and their self-righteous nature that led to millions of people being slaved in Latin America, both africans and natives. So don't try to push some kind of blame game as if the USA is some kind of barbaric place in the world where inequality exists in terms of race. Almost every country in Latin America has the same problems than the US in a much bigger scale, with a much larger gap. Why? Because Europe created this mess and now wants to place itself as some sort of morally superior super race. Stop messing with the Americas, Europe.
glitchc 8y ago
Europe is far worse than the US. France, Germany and Italy are full of ghettos. In the US at least, money buys you a modicum of respect. A black man can’t catch a break in France, regardless of how wealthy he is. That’s real classism.
- iguy 8y ago
  No first-hand experience either way, but this is a good excuse to recommend Thomas Chatterton Williams, a black American guy who moved to France and likes it there, and has many interesting things to say: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/304246/losing-my-cool-by-thomas-chatterton-williams/9780143119623/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/304246/losing-my-co... Also lots of essays worth reading, NYTimes, LRB, etc.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  Have you ever been to France? Because what you say does not accord at all with what the French people I know would say. It’s all about class. There are many fewer black or Arab French who go to good universities and go on to get good jobs but once you’re middle class and not in les banlieues you’re not going to be treated badly because you’re visibly different any more than the Vietnamese are.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    liberté, égalité, fraternité... pour les blancs.
Bartweiss 8y ago
One point I don't see in the other responses: that conflation is way more coherent when you're looking at specific areas. Citylab is looking at relative wealth in cities, and urban poverty really is hugely tied to race in the US for a bunch of reasons ranging from inherited wealth (having ancestors who owned land is a very big deal if they bought it in now-expensive cities) to overt discrimination in the recent past (white flight, blockbusting, etc.) Looking around the country as a whole, things get much less clear. There are heavily-white rural areas where lots of people are in extreme, <$2/day poverty. (Although nonwhite people in comparable places are generally even worse off.) And then other areas (e.g. northern US suburbs) are heavily white, but (in large part thanks to selection bias like housing prices) they don't necessarily have major racial wealth gaps among the people who do live there. The national numbers are a pretty confusing mixture of inequality in comparable situations and differences between situations, but looking at specific areas like Los Angeles the association is disturbingly strong.

subpixel 8y ago

Imagine you are living three generations removed from slavery (not counting your own), and - if you’re lucky - one generation away from racial discrimination as a policy norm. On the whole, you’re far less likely than your more privileged countrymen to have financial security.

weberc2 8y ago
“Outlier” is extreme. A significant portion of black Americans are in the middle class. The legacy of historical racism is significant, but exaggerations don’t help anyone.
- jdavis703 8y ago
  The median wealth of a black person is $17,000, while the median wealth of a white person is $170,000 [0]. Defining what middle class is extremely difficult, but one of the numbers I’ve seen is the minimum cut off at $50,000. If this is true, it means more than half of African Americans are less than middle class. 0; http://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/ http://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/
  - dawidw 8y ago
    > more than half of African Americans are less than middle class What is the reason of that?
    - jdavis703 8y ago
      There’s a lot of complicated reasons. The easiest ones to look at via economic data is the homeownership rate which is significantly lower, higher levels of student debt (a fairly recent phenomenon) and that young black adults start out with less wealth in early adulthood, which means they miss out on the power of compounding interest. All this data can be found from the source I linked to above.
      - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
        I'm pretty sure that they were disproportionately affected by the drug war, also. Large numbers of black men are convicted felons, which has to have an effect on future earnings.
      - subpixel 8y ago
        It's one thing to state that "the homeownership rate which is significantly lower" and another to point out the systematic housing discrimination that has taken place across America for more than a century and which is certainly not over. https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history... Think about it - in most cities the entire shape of our urban landscape is defined by the movement of white people to avoid living near black people. Similarly, the reason public transit in most of the US is near non-existent is b/c people do not want buses and trains bringing 'other' people to where they live.
  - weberc2 8y ago
    “Median” doesn’t tell you anything about outliers, so I don’t see how that relates to my post...
    - jdavis703 8y ago
      The average numbers are $900,000 for whites and $140,000 for blacks. Averages are more effected by outliers, so read in to this what you will. Never the less I’m not sure what outliers has to do with people being in the middle class. Also if you want to look at the wealthiest 1% as outliers, only 3% of these outliers are black [0] 0: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/business/the-1-percent-paint-a-more-nuanced-portrait-of-the-rich.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/business/the-1-percent-pa...
      - weberc2 8y ago
        I was responding to the claim that black people who escape poverty are outliers. I used "middle class" as an approximation for "escaping poverty".
pacala 8y ago
It may surprise a naive audience how recent serfdom and slavery were the norm all over the world. Here's hoping for building today a better tomorrow. Serfdom emancipation in Europe: circa 1800, as late as 1864 in Poland. Slavery abolition in US: circa 1800 in the North, as late as 1865 in the South. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom#Dates_of_emancipation_from_serfdom_in_various_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom#Dates_of_emancipation_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
- iguy 8y ago
  Indeed, good point. The dates there for Russia etc are accurate, but seem very late for the western countries -- in some places it essentially disappeared centuries before it was legally abolished. (I don't have a great link but e.g. "Serfdom was de facto ended in France by Philip IV, Louis X (1315)," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_serfdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_serfdom ) Barbary corsair slave-raiding also only stopped in 1830, when France decided to invade.
  - pacala 8y ago
    Great points, thanks for the link. It appears that serfdom largely disappeared as a mass phenomenon in Western Europe [England/France/Italy/Spain] early [XII - XVI centuries], but persisted in Central and especially Eastern Europe all the way into the XIX century. https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/serfdom-western-europe https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-alm... https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/serfdom-eastern-europe https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-alm... https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/serfdom-russia https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-...

pcbro141 8y ago

The racial wealth gap has only increased since the civil rights movement in America (1960s). There never was anything dramatic enough done by the government to bring living standards up to par for black Americans after slavery and Jim Crow.

ams6110 8y ago
It's not a problem the government can fix, that much should be clear by now. Trillions of dollars have been spent on fighting poverty. It hasn't worked.
- rtkwe 8y ago
  Poverty programs aren't aimed and aren't large enough to deal with the issue. Just lifting someone up enough to get them above the poverty line isn't the going to address the problem that their parents and their grandparents were systematically locked out of education, employment, and housing markets. That kind of wealth builds year on year and generation on generation and the gap will take longer to erase.

mc32 8y ago

Obviously this is false, but there are many institutionalized aspects of society which perpetuates that, both from those seeking more equality and those seeking less equality. It’s a dual use instrument that gets results due to thd high emotion tied to it. Bigots will use it to perpetuate myths about some minotities, activists will use it because it makes things look worse.

eckmLJE 8y ago

A higher percentage of black people live in poverty than white people[0], but the disparity is emphasized in cities. Read about White Flight.[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#By_race/ethnicity_and_family_status,_based_on_data_from_2007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#B... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

duado 8y ago
When white people move out of a neighborhood, it’s “white flight,” when they move in it’s “gentrification.” What is it called when they stay where they are?
- sigfubar 8y ago
  We call ourselves trapped.
- scarejunba 8y ago
  I think you'll find that the bad part here is this business of people acting as a bloc of homogeneous race.
  - iguy 8y ago
    But both "white flight" and "gentrification" are a bunch of individuals making similar choices. There's no pre-arranged conspiracy to all sell up next year & move to X; the only "homogeneous bloc" is in the eye of the speaker. And it is indeed slightly weird how opposite things are perceived negatively.
- mturmon 8y ago
  There is sometimes a name for that too: a racial housing covenant. When the California legislature passed a law outlawing them in 1963, the initiative process was used the next year to pass Prop. 14, which specifically allowed racial covenants in transferring housing. It passed with 67% of voters approving it.

folkrav 8y ago

Black people in USA are on average way poorer. Higher unemployment rates, lower education, lower average median income, higher risk of living in poverty or growing up in impoverished areas... The income gap between them and whites is still not that different than it was around the Civil Rights Act era.

skh 8y ago

In the U.S. we have a lot of problems that are really socio-economic that are discussed in terms of race. There are historical reasons for this and this is particularly true in the southeastern part of the country. When white people talk about those taking handouts or getting something for free they mostly are talking about poor brown people. This despite the fact that whites - due to being a majority of th population - consume a majority of the welfare. If I talk about poor people in a large city almost everyone will imagine a black person. There is the perception broadly speaking that white = wealthy and black = poor. Blacks on average are poorer and are more likely to be charged with committing a crime but in terms of numbers most crimes are committed by whites and most poor people are white. In the 90s when Hilary Clinton talked about super predators the images were those of black criminals. When Reagan talked about welfare queens the image given was of a black woman with lots of kids. I’ve felt that if poor whites in the U.S. stopped thinking of themselves as better than brown people, if they would stop believing the myths and media narratives about race then we’d have universal health care and free higher education. A former President from Texas once said If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll even empty his pockets for you.

weberc2 8y ago
> When white people talk about those taking handouts or getting something for free they mostly are talking about poor brown people. This is not my experience as a lifelong American with many white friends, family, etc. > Blacks on average are poorer and are more likely to be charged with committing a crime but in terms of numbers most crimes are committed by whites and most poor people are white. Of course, whites are a larger part of the population—60ish percent in the USA, but they undercommit crimes. For whatever reason (legacy of historical racism, poor socioeconomic status, etc), black Americans overcommit crimes both according to police data and victim reports. Many are tempted to deny these facts as “supportive of racism”, but these facts don’t support racism because the variance within a race is huge and the overwhelming majority of any race are decent, productive, law-abiding people. > I’ve felt that if poor whites in the U.S. stopped thinking of themselves as better than brown people, if they would stop believing the myths and media narratives about race then we’d have universal health care and free higher education. In America, the media narratives about race are entirely sympathetic toward minorities. I would also appreciate a citation for the implication that poor white Americans are somehow more racist than other Americans (esp other poor Americans).

bluGill 8y ago

Not exactly. There are wealthy black people - but they are a small minority of all black people. There are a lot of poor white people as well, but there are a lot of white people in every economic class. As a result the classification of white == wealthy, black == poor is generally true even though it is just a correlation with no causation behind it. The problem is complex and simple solutions. Most people discussing the problem want to push their quick fix solution and so do not care to think about how complex it really it. (often vote for me - their opponents would say that they don't want to fix the problem as then they wouldn't get votes) Don't forget that the USA is a large place with many different cultures. I never saw any race issues when I grew up - I didn't even know the car dealer was owned by a black man until he spoke to our class and said he choose to buy the dealership in this town over 6 other nearby towns because we wouldn't care that he was black and the other towns would. As I get older I now see that things are progressing - some areas faster than others.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jagthebeetle 8y ago

Doesn't this trend manifest in European countries as well? (E.g. https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/poverty-rates-among-ethnic-groups-great-britain https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/poverty-rates-among-ethnic-gro...). I don't know about equality, but correlation seems to be there and doesn't strike me as intuitively "weird," or surprising, if undesirable. Now the linkage in the zeitgeist of race and socioeconomics is another matter. I'd be curious if it can be attributed convincingly to some American social factor (racial heterogeneity, our media, our relative lack of ethnically meaningful home states), but that's one for the social historians.

Balero 8y ago
It's not as clear cut. Much of the non-European immigration took place fairly recently (post war time) and people migrated mainly to cities. Urban areas tend to be wealthier (obvs not always, but it is a trend) and have more opportunities. SO whilst these immigrants were at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder where they were, they were on a different ladder to those in rural areas. So you get rural areas of poor people of largely European descent, and a more mixed (due to more economic mobility) city wealth demography. This is not the whole story, but I think could be part of it.
- gph 8y ago
  That sounds roughly the same as the US, just at a different scale and more recent.
- systemtest 8y ago
  In the Netherlands, people in rural areas are wealthy. They are either older folks with large pensions and investment accounts, farmers with large plots of expensive land or people with good paying jobs that want out of the busy city. A nice house out in the country is at least half a million.
- iguy 8y ago
  In the northern parts of the US, the timeline is not so different -- there were some black people there in 1940, but a large majority moved up postwar. To work in industries which are now dead, concentrated in certain cities, but not to the rural parts in between.

mameluco 8y ago

Well, yeah. Europeans and their barbaric way of managing colonies created the current socio-economical situations that plague Latin America. Europeans and their self-righteous nature that led to millions of people being slaved in Latin America, both africans and natives. So don't try to push some kind of blame game as if the USA is some kind of barbaric place in the world where inequality exists in terms of race. Almost every country in Latin America has the same problems than the US in a much bigger scale, with a much larger gap. Why? Because Europe created this mess and now wants to place itself as some sort of morally superior super race. Stop messing with the Americas, Europe.

glitchc 8y ago

Europe is far worse than the US. France, Germany and Italy are full of ghettos. In the US at least, money buys you a modicum of respect. A black man can’t catch a break in France, regardless of how wealthy he is. That’s real classism.

iguy 8y ago
No first-hand experience either way, but this is a good excuse to recommend Thomas Chatterton Williams, a black American guy who moved to France and likes it there, and has many interesting things to say: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/304246/losing-my-cool-by-thomas-chatterton-williams/9780143119623/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/304246/losing-my-co... Also lots of essays worth reading, NYTimes, LRB, etc.
barry-cotter 8y ago
Have you ever been to France? Because what you say does not accord at all with what the French people I know would say. It’s all about class. There are many fewer black or Arab French who go to good universities and go on to get good jobs but once you’re middle class and not in les banlieues you’re not going to be treated badly because you’re visibly different any more than the Vietnamese are.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  liberté, égalité, fraternité... pour les blancs.

Bartweiss 8y ago

One point I don't see in the other responses: that conflation is way more coherent when you're looking at specific areas. Citylab is looking at relative wealth in cities, and urban poverty really is hugely tied to race in the US for a bunch of reasons ranging from inherited wealth (having ancestors who owned land is a very big deal if they bought it in now-expensive cities) to overt discrimination in the recent past (white flight, blockbusting, etc.) Looking around the country as a whole, things get much less clear. There are heavily-white rural areas where lots of people are in extreme, <$2/day poverty. (Although nonwhite people in comparable places are generally even worse off.) And then other areas (e.g. northern US suburbs) are heavily white, but (in large part thanks to selection bias like housing prices) they don't necessarily have major racial wealth gaps among the people who do live there. The national numbers are a pretty confusing mixture of inequality in comparable situations and differences between situations, but looking at specific areas like Los Angeles the association is disturbingly strong.