A cura di @corvoninety.

È quanto afferma questo articolo d’opinione del NYT secondo il quale, contrariamente a quanto capita di leggere, la classe lavoratrice bianca non starebbe perdendo terreno a causa di politiche economiche atte a favorire i lavoratori di altre etnie. Infatti, viene evidenziato come il gap salariale tra bianchi e non bianchi sia rimasto identico (negli USA) a quello di 50 anni fa:

The income gap between black and white working-class Americans, like the gap between black and white Americans at every income level, remains every bit as extreme as it was five decades ago. (This is also true of the income gap between Hispanic and white Americans.)

In 2015 — the most recent year for which data are available — black households at the 20th and 40th percentiles of household income earned an average of 55 percent as much as white households at those same percentiles. This is exactly the same figure as in 1967.

A cosa è dovuta questa persistente diseguaglianza?

Secondo l’autore il divario è dovuto alla persistenza del razzismo nella società americana, visibile sia nell’ambiente scolastico che in quello lavorativo:

Many black children, for example, attend schools that once again are as segregated as they were in the 1960s, and they are far more likely to become trapped in a prison-industrial complex that the scholar Michelle Alexander has called “the new Jim Crow.”

Research by the sociologist Devah Pager in 2009 also found that black job applicants for low-wage jobs receive callback interviews or job offers at half the rate of equally well-qualified white applicants and that black and Latino applicants with clean records “fare no better” than white applicants just released from prison.

Pur non volendo minimizzare l’ansia della classe lavoratrice bianca rispetto alle sue stagnanti condizioni economiche, viene rilevato come questa situazione abbia interessato anche i lavoratori di colore, a differenza del top 0.1% ha visto i propri guadagni crescere in maniera esponenziale negli ultimi decenni.

A genuine populist movement would unite working- and middle-class Americans of all backgrounds, rather than dividing them by exploiting false beliefs about the supposed loss of white economic privilege.

Immagine da Flickr.