Two Powerful Reasons Racism Is Worse than Classism: Racial Essentialism and Segregation
By: Brett Pelham
Tags: Racism, Social Justice, Psychology, Race, Politics

Two Powerful Reasons Racism Is Worse than Classism: Racial Essentialism and Segregation

Both the widespread belief that race is biological and hidden aspects of modern segregation guarantee that racism is harsher than classism

Rural poverty (L) by Christopher Windus (L). Urban poverty (R) by Gor Davtyan, both courtesy of Unsplash

Poverty Sucks. I grew up in rural Northwest Georgia, living on about two dollars per day. So, I understand very well the sting of poverty. I’ve spent lots of time visiting loved ones in prison, and I have several loved ones who’ve been shot. I’ve also seen the bloody, swollen face, and the broken collarbone, of a teenage brother who was badly beaten by the police. A year later, I saw it again. Thankfully, this beating did not break any bones. But it left facial scars.

I’ve never been beaten by the police. But I still get nervous any time a police car pulls up beside me. And my blood pressure still shoots up when I go to the doctor for a checkup. This spike in blood pressure happens because, when I was a kid, going to the doctor meant my parents thought I could be dying. Otherwise, we did not go. But I don’t get nervous when I go to the dentist. This is because I never once saw a dentist as a child. My first trip to the dentist happened when I was 20. Dr. Matthews quickly relieved my excruciating toothache by pulling a badly decayed molar. The last time my dad had a toothache, he pulled the bad tooth himself, with a pair of plyers. If there is an upside to all this, it is that I admire and adore dentists.

Although many people in my extended family still live in poverty, I do not. Instead, I’m a middle-class psychology professor, and I’ll soon be 60. I’m also White. Further, if not for actor Chris Hemsworth, I’d confidently say I’m wholly and completely straight. Well, there’s also Idris Elba, but you see my point. My wrinkles and bulging midriff notwithstanding, I’m practically the poster boy of White male privilege. But my highly unusual position — having once lived in extreme poverty but now enjoying tremendous privilege — reveals an important lesson about the difference between classism and racism.

Racism is worse. As bad as poverty is, racism is worse. This is true for many reasons, but I will focus on just two.

Racial essentialism is one reason. Centuries of socialization have convinced most Americans that race is an immutable and deeply meaningful property of the person. Most Americans believe that race has deep biological roots. But ask almost any anthropologist or geneticist, and they’ll tell you that race is largely fictional. Of course, people whose ancestors lived where it was sunny have darker skin and tighter hair than people whose ancestors lived where it is less sunny. But moving beyond a few genes for surface features, people who are considered members of the same race have very little in common genetically. The myth of race persists nonetheless because it justifies a wide range of laws, norms, and social institutions that place people of color below White Americans. So, most people buy into the myth that race has a deep biological basis. By the way, kids are not born being racial essentialists. They learn it in childhood. Further, kids who believe more deeply than average in racial essentialism have greater difficulty remembering racially ambiguous faces.

Photos of multi-racial people by Kat Love (L) and Mark Decile (R), courtesy of Unsplash

In contrast to this, almost everyone knows that poverty is not immutable. A poor White person can put on some nice clothes and learn where the salad fork goes. Voila! Classism largely evaporates. (Learning a little French probably helps, too.) But people of color cannot dress their way out of how others perceive them. Perhaps even more important, almost everyone in America recognizes that poverty is a major social problem. But a growing number of White Americans believe that it is an advantage (that’s right, an advantage) to be Black. In a 2011 national survey of 400 Americans, White respondents reported the view that Whites today face more racial discrimination than Blacks do. In 2017, a much larger poll of more than 3,400 Americans conducted by Harvard, NPR, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation yielded very similar results. That’s right; many White Americans today believe that it has become an advantage to be Black. How many Americans of any ethnic background believe it’s an advantage to be poor?

So, whereas poverty is almost universally recognized as a major social problem, racism is not. And whereas poverty can sometimes disappear, a person’s perceived race cannot. In a very real sense, this makes racism more enduring than classism. But the myth of racial essentialism is only one reason why racism is worse than classism. A second reason has to do with the largely invisible details of segregation. Almost everyone knows what segregation is. But very few people know how powerful it remains today — and how it means very different things for poor people of color (especially poor Blacks) versus poor Whites.

Segregation and education. So how, exactly, does being poor and Black mean something different than being poor and White? On average, poor Black people are much more likely than equally poor White people to be surrounded by poor neighbors. In other words, much more so than White poverty, Black poverty is geographically concentrated.

This has been guaranteed by practices such covenants and redlining that have concentrated Black Americans into the tightly packed red zones of cities across the nation. One of the most dramatic examples of this can be found in Chicago, where only about 4% of Whites but about 30% of Blacks live in neighborhoods where many of their neighbors are also poor. One of the many negative consequences of this fact has to do with school funding. Poor White kids are much more likely than equally poor Black kids to attend schools where the property taxes of their much richer White neighbors give them a decent education. So, because of segregation, rich Whites often help pull poor Whites out of poverty. But in Black neighborhoods, the concentration of poverty often makes this mathematically impossible.

Of course, if Americans did not fund their schools based heavily on local property values, this problem might slowly correct itself. But we do fund schools this way, and this aspect of systemic racism virtually guarantees that Black and White poverty are lived differently. I should add that a 2016 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that between 1980 and 2010, both racial segregation and the racial wage gap in the United States decreased slightly. But even the authors of this mostly hopeful report concluded that “the end of black segregation is not at hand.” They added that “As of 2010, half of the metropolitan black population … [lived in] … neighborhoods that were home to only 3.6% of the nonblack population.” That’s right. Half of all the Black Americans who live in cities live in places where almost no one is White. Segregation is alive and well, and it is harming people of color, especially Black Americans.

Segregation and overincarceration. The geographically concentrated poverty of Blacks and the geographically dispersed poverty of Whites also contributes in hidden ways to Black overincarceration. Large-scale national surveys consistently show that Whites and Blacks use illicit drugs at virtually identical rates. So why are Blacks arrested and convicted for drug crimes much more often than Whites? There are many answers. But consider the implications of segregation — the geophysical concentration of Black poverty.

Police officers get paid for making arrests, and their police chiefs and state legislators tell them why people should be arrested. If you were a police officer from another planet — who saw only in infrared and had no idea what Black and White skin looks like — would you patrol for signs of drug crimes in what we earthlings know to be U.S. Black neighborhoods — or would you select White ones? If you wanted to make plenty of arrests, you’d go to the physically smaller areas where more of the crime is.

This would all happen not because Black people are more likely than Whites to use drugs but because Black drug users have been corralled by decades of housing discrimination into much tinier geographic areas. If you were an alien police officer who was merely trying to do your job, you’d develop the intuition (the stereotype) that Black people use drugs much more often than Whites do. You’d carry that intuition around with you even when you were in desegregated places — such as the streets between Black and White neighborhoods. As a result, you’d come to feel like racial profiling is just common sense. The sheer physical concentration of Black poverty, combined with your interest in doing your job, would have converted you into a practicing racist. Why would you go driving all over the place to find and arrest a few White people when you could stay in one small place and arrest lots of Black people?

New York CIty is NOT a hotbed of illicit drug users. It is a hotbed of people.

This situation is even worse than this because Black Americans are much more likely than White Americans to live in cities. A 2018 study by the Pew Research Center’s Kim Parker and colleagues showed that between 2012 and 2016, only 44% of Americans living in urban counties were non-Hispanic White. In the suburbs (68% White) and rural areas (79% White), Whites were a very clear majority. The nation’s most densely populated city, New York City, has more than 26,000 people per square mile. Only about one third of New Yorkers are non-Hispanic Whites. Contrast that with the population of highly rural and White Wyoming. Even if we include Wyoming’s cities, Wyoming has six (yes, 6) people per square mile, and 84% of them are non-Hispanic Whites. About one sixth of both Black Americans and White Americans admit to using illegal drugs. The real figure for both groups is likely to be higher than this. But the key points are (a) that a sizable minority of Americans are illicit drug users and (b) that there are no meaningful ethnic differences in illegal drug use. This means that in New York City there are more than 4,000 illegal drug users per square mile. In sparsely populated Wyoming, there is one illegal drug user per square mile. Where do you suppose police officers spend more time on the lookout for drug users?

Image by the author, based on recent data from Kim Parker and colleagues (see below)

Maybe you’re not a police officer but an ICE agent who would like to crack down on undocumented immigrants. Cities are the best places to find them, too. Well, they’re certainly the best place to finding immigrants, and by definition all undocumented immigrants are immigrants. Kim Parker and colleagues showed that in 2012–2016, only 4% of people living in U.S. rural counties were immigrants. Contrast that with 11% in suburban counties — and 22% in urban counties.The hidden geography of anti-immigrant biases is muchlike the hidden geography of racism.

This point about the nonrandom geographic distribution of poor people — and how it differs radically for poor people of color (especially Black people) and poor White people — is just one of many well-documented ways in which racism operates under the radar. Until America begins to address the enduring legacy of redlining and school segregation — including the school re-segregation that has occurred over the past couples of decades — we are not going to make a real dent in our biggest social problem. The stories of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery will repeat themselves until we (a) tackle poverty head on and (b) recognize that Black poverty and White poverty are often very different things.