How Do Californians Tolerate Extreme Inequality?

The 136 conversations took place in roughly the same way: Pleasantries would be exchanged, a recorder started, then UC Berkeley researchers asked middle-class Californians to dig deep. Who deserves government assistance? What values do you hope to instill in your children? What do you think about undocumented immigration? What is the American dream, exactly?

Those wide-ranging interviews form the basis of a self-scrutinizing new book from Berkeley professors G. Cristina Mora and Tianna Paschel, titled Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide. It describes how Californians understand the profound inequality around them, including the mental gymnastics and contradictions necessary to reconcile those disparities with the state's reputation as a progressive land of opportunity.

In part, the book's focus came from questions Mora's children asked about what they observed out of the car window on their drive to school. "Why is it that we live in one of the most expensive places on the planet, with so many resources and in such a progressive area, and yet all these people are also on the streets? The juxtaposition was just wild," she said.

California Budget & Policy Center, CC BY-NC 4.0

A few statistics to underscore her point: If California were a country, it would have the fourth-largest economy in the world, and yet when cost of living is factored in, its poverty rate is tied with Louisiana's as the highest in the U.S. One-fourth of the nation's unhoused people live on California's streets and in its shelters. And while the Golden State is home to the largest number of multiracial people in the U.S., it also includes some of the most segregated school districts in the country. As the authors point out, even if these gaps were not a moral affront, inequality is linked with increased violent crime and lower civic participation, damaging society as a whole.

While there's no shortage of statistics measuring these disparities, Paschel and Mora wanted to complete that picture with qualitative data in the form of candid interviews. To flesh out other under-researched areas, they included the sometimes-overlooked perspectives of Central Valley residents and paid attention to how race might shape people's understandings of inequality.

Over five months, the professors and a team of researchers conducted hours-long conversations with residents of Los Angeles County and the Central Valley who made between 80-120% of their counties' median income. Then they analyzed the transcripts of the conversations closely, considering even minutiae like pauses or "ums" that might indicate people felt ashamed or nervous to articulate certain ideas.

The researchers weren't trying to prove certain hypotheses but rather identify what patterns emerged from the ways these Californians spoke about inequality.

Three strategies to stomach inequality

Their analysis revealed three key ways people papered over the divides around them.

First, there was what the researchers called "exceptional framing." By and large, people were well-aware of the inequality around them, and many could rattle off some of the structural reasons that inequality existed and was difficult to overcome. At the same time, interviewees often voiced a belief that they, personally, could surmount these steep odds to be upwardly mobile.

Second, spatial comparison. Interview subjects would minimize California's problems by measuring the state against places where they believed those issues were more acute, like the economic instability of an immigrant relative's home country or the racism of the Deep South. Even some people who acknowledged they'd actually never traveled much outside of California made these comparisons.

Last, bounded blame, which the authors describe as a "soft way of pathologizing" people in the most marginalized social classes as the "reproducers of their own conditions." This tendency cropped up especially in discussions of homelessness and undocumented immigration. Even when acknowledging how systems had stacked the odds against people, interviewees would find ways to suggest that individuals' actions, values or constitutions perpetuated their struggles.

Paschel and Mora knew it might sound cold and clinical, spelling out the cognitive dodges well-intentioned people use to make peace with the uneven status quo. That's why they asked readers to absorb the quotes in the book "with nuance and grace." The professors also took the unusual step of incorporating their families' personal stories of striving toward the "California dream" to show that the research was coming from people with real roots in the communities they were describing.

"Tianna and I are folks who experienced lots of social mobility in our lives," Mora said. "We live in vastly different neighborhoods than the kinds that we grew up in."

In the introduction, Mora writes about her father, who never finished elementary school, and her own journey from a majority-Latinx high school in LA county to UC Berkeley, where her background made her feel out of place as an undergraduate. She's now a Berkeley professor of sociology and the co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies. Paschel's mother, a prison guard, moved her family from Flint, Michigan to Sacramento, Bakersfield and Fresno. The moves ultimately propelled the family into the middle class, but they experienced anti-Black racism even in ethnically diverse neighborhoods. Today, Paschel's work as a Berkeley professor of African American studies helps students make sense of such racialized experiences.

A deep dive into California's contradictions

Some of the book's insights stem not from what interviewees talked about most passionately, but rather the groups or places they omitted.

Los Angelenos, for instance, rarely considered California's more conservative, rural and poorer regions, like the Central Valley, when painting a picture of the state. When some interviewees gushed about the benefits of multiculturalism, mouthwatering Mexican food came up frequently - but the contributions of Black culture went unmentioned. Similarly, despite California's substantial Asian diaspora, non-Asian interviewees responded to broad questions about immigration by focusing on Latinx immigrants.

"I hadn't anticipated how shushed conversations about race and immigration would be," Paschel said. She interviewed Black participants in the Central Valley, and she remembers someone's voice dropping many decibels just to utter the word "white" in public. That hesitancy to discuss race might surprise the majority of Californians; in a separate poll the professors conducted, only 40% of respondents strongly agreed that racism was alive and well in the state.

Some interviewees got uncomfortable talking about immigration, too. They'd praise immigrants as hardworking embodiments of the American dream, but the researchers noticed they wouldn't acknowledge the reasons, like exploitative labor practices or the difficult-to-navigate immigration system, that confined them to those "hardworking" jobs in construction, service or agriculture. And many interviewees were ambivalent about undocumented immigration; they expressed sympathy but also had qualms about purported criminality or how newcomers might take resources away from American citizens.

Is the California dream alive?

Interviewees spoke at length about California's troubles, but when it came to envisioning the future, they were often more sanguine. In particular, residents of the Central Valley felt that the growth they'd noticed in other areas of the state would reach their neighborhoods, and they would reap the economic benefits. But a minority of people, often Black and Latinx interviewees, answered more gloomily. They didn't believe people like them, facing the counterwinds of economic and racial inequality, would be able to remain in California.

Answers about what California's ethnic makeup might look like in the future were complicated. Some forecasted a multiracial future in line with current demographic trends. Others mentioned San Francisco and Los Angeles' Silver Lake neighborhood as templates, comparisons that Paschel and Mora point out skew wealthy and white or Asian. More conservative respondents voiced concerns about a "Latino takeover."

In other words, the bright future the majority of interviewees thought was ahead for California wasn't a future that included everyone.

In its conclusion, Normalizing Inequality compares the dramatic economic disparities in California to the earthquakes that tend to shake the state: Residents notice, but they aren't rattled. They go on with their days as if nothing happened.

The authors know this presents a bleak picture, one where even well-intentioned Californians turn a blind eye to inequality. But the point of the book is to scrutinize this status quo, Paschel said: "The first step [is] to wake up and to resist the tendency to just be okay with it, or to think of the problems as so enormous that it hurts the brain."

That awareness, they suggest in the book's conclusion, should also extend to a candid look in the mirror. Many of the people they interviewed spoke at length about inequality's structural causes or used progressive buzzwords. But, the authors caution, "Symbolic gestures of 'wokeness' will not save us. Rattling off the 'isms' and clinging onto California's exceptionalism, as some of the respondents did, will not make real inequalities more fixable. It will only serve to justify them, tie a bow around them, and relegate them to the background."