Wealth and power disparities among racial groups in the U.S.

Racial Disparity

Although we have come a long way in the last 30 years, the U.S. continues to show racial divide -- alienation and disproportionate wealth and power, not just between blacks and whites but other races such as Latinos, for example. Lower minority representation in earnings, voter enfranchisement and other desirable attributes can be the result several causes: minorities' inability to perform up to so-called 'normal' standards; the inability of institutions to accommodate minorities, or a systematic repression by those monopolizing the rewards of enfranchisement: control of public policy, resources and the ability to perpetuate alienation.

Barak, Leighton and Flavin demonstrate that while black median household earnings were about two-thirds that for whites in 2009 (106), there "is a sizeable black middle class" (107) earning between $50,000-$100,000 per year and while share of blacks in the highest-earning categories is low, there are and have been black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies (Barak, Leighton and Flavin 107). This undermines the arguments minorities cannot perform at dominant-norm standards or that institutions of power are not able to integrate minorities equally. The higher median earnings for Asians in 2009 (Barak, Leighton and Flavin 106) also shatter the potential argument minorities are not capable of performing up to white standards or that minorities cannot be enfranchised in the current system. This leaves intentional control of policy, resources and the power to perpetuate discrimination, as explanation.

Barak, Leighton and Flavin also demonstrate the lowest-earning minority groups vastly outnumber the highest-earning for blacks and Latinos (107). These low earnings put these minorities in the way of law enforcement, as the poor turn to crime when faced with deliberate barriers to earnings growth, deliberately maintained to keep labor costs down for producers, "which makes them vulnerable to exploitation and control by the criminal justice system" (Barak, Leighton and Flavin 94). If poverty leads to crime, and conviction results in lower earning power, and those who control the conviction power pay the wages, then the wage payers have an interest in convicting the poor in order to provide themselves a steady supply of cheap, willing labor. This type of conviction also conveniently disenfranchises the poor of whatever minority from voting if they are convicted felons, and conveniently prohibiting the right to bear arms, or harsher sentencing if they do.

These effects of the initial cause, wage payers using the courts to provide themselves cheap labor, push down on eligible voter rates and election to office as well, which makes sense if election takes expensive campaign expenditure and time off working in order to win. Those with the wealth to take time off work to campaign, and to generate the publicity that translates into higher campaign contributions dominate the highest elected office and participation rates compared to ethnicities with lower median incomes (Barak, Leighton and Flavin 108). The result is that minorities lack the power to change public policy and thus the institutions that represent higher incidence of blacks and Latinos in prisons; lower earnings for everyone but white males; education disparities which aggravate earnings differentials; different law enforcement for minorities and whites; all the mechanisms that perpetuate discrimination, evidence of which persists year after year in official demographic statistics, whatever the cause.