Posted: April 18th, 2022

phenomena—more fraternal than identical, distinctive yet

22 contexts.org

by prudence l. carter

EDUCATION’S

LIMITATIONS

AND ITS

RADICAL

POSSIBILITIES

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In U.S. society, racial and class inequality are twin social

phenomena—more fraternal than identical, distinctive yet

deeply interconnected. One can barely make inferences about

the former without consideration of the latter. Yet, many of us

frequently pit race and class and their related brethren—racism,

bias, prejudice, poverty, unemployment, and discrimination—

against each other as if they are locked in a winner-take-all

competition. Noticeably, the spectrum of the color line (to invoke

W.E.B. Du Bois’ metaphor) corresponds to certain gradations

of the class line. Particular racial-ethnic groups are represented

disproportionately and overwhelmingly in the lowest household

income strata of our society; and other groups in the highest.

For example, data from the National Center for Poverty based

at Columbia University reveal that among children ages 18 or

younger who live in either low-income or poor households, nearly

two out of three African American, Native American, and Latinx

youth live at or below 200% of the poverty line, compared to less

than one out of three of their Asian and White peers. That is to

say, the descendants of those who faced slavery, settler colonial-

ism, genocide, and conquest, respectively, fare worse centuries

later than the descendants of White colonialists and the progeny

of many post-1965 East and South Asian immigrants. This radical

disproportionality is what some sociologists have referred to as

the “colors of poverty” or even the “racialization of poverty.”

Contexts, Vol. 17, Issue 2, pp. 22-27. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. ©2018 American Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504218776956

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Even in so-called good schools and neighborhoods, the achievement and mobility outcomes for Black and Brown youth are lower than for their White peers.

https://doi.org/10.1177/1536504218776956
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The spectrum and colors of affluence are different. In 2015,

Forbes magazine reported that the top 400 wealthiest Whites in

the United States possess a cumulative worth of $ 2.34 trillion.

Those 400 White Americans’ wealth is nearly 1.5 times that of

all 16 million African American households ($1.56 trillion) and

1.3 times that of all 15 million Latinx households ($1.82 trillion).

Naturally, some might counter that differences in either human

capital or education can explain these expansive and jarring dif-

ferences in wealth and income. But, even when we control for

education, we find that the wealth of college-educated Whites

is more than 13 times greater than college-educated Blacks

and Latinx. In fact, Whites without a high school degree have

significantly more wealth, on average, than Black and Latinx

college graduates.

American history, its racial origins, and its political and eco-

nomic systems created and currently sustain startling racialized

economic and educational disparities. As historian Ira Katznelson

laid out compellingly in his book, When Affirmation Action Was

White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Cen-

tury America, our society missed an opportune time to redress

some of its grossest distortions of citizenship, rights, and access

from prior historic eras. For the most part, contemporary middle

and high school textbooks depict the most myopic views of our

collective history of slavery, settler colonialism, conquest, and

Jim Crow, raising little awareness of how government and civil

society worked cohesively to maintain de jure forms of inequal-

ity for centuries, let alone how the impact of this profound

inequality has spread well into the current era. Meanwhile, the

historical accumulation of disadvantages impacts the educational

well-being of the youth who now populate the nation’s public

schools. Many of these young people will lack college-readiness;

others barely will obtain a high school diploma.

In Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent, Too?, John W.

Gardner, former secretary of the Department of Health, Educa-

tion, and Welfare under President Lyndon B. Johnson, predicted

that equal education and opportunity will continue to be favored

by most Americans. Yet, to really achieve this, “it requires the

removal of every removable obstacle” including prejudice and

status and wealth inequality. Gardner’s words are just as relevant

30 years after they were written. Many of us purport to believe

in “equality of opportunity,” but have we really thought deeply

about what it takes to enact the practices necessary to realize it?

Economist Raj Chetty and his fellow researchers have found

that the chances for intergenerational mobility—as measured by

children and parents’ relative positions in the income distribu-

tion—remain roughly constant. Children born today have the

same prospects for rising from the bottom to the top quintile of

household incomes as those born in the 1970s. Those born into

poor and working poor families have less than a 10% chance, on

average, of reaching the upper quintile of earnings—although,

according to Chetty and colleagues, their chances vary by region.

If you were born into the bottom quintile of household incomes in

San Jose, California, for instance, then you have a higher chance of

making it up to the top than if you were born in Charlotte, North

Carolina. The economists also find that the chances for mobility

are higher in communities with less residential segregation, less

income inequality, better primary schools, greater social capital,

and greater family stability. For brevity’s sake, let’s refer to these

as the “opportunity-rich neighborhoods”.

In March 2018, the New York Times covered some of

Chetty and company’s latest findings. Along with economist

Nathaniel Hendren and Census Bureau researchers Maggie

Jones and Sonya Porter, Chetty analyzed the tax and census

records of over 20 million individuals born between 1978-

1983 in the U.S. They found that living in “opportunity-rich

neighborhoods,” though impactful, is

insufficient to fully close the intergen-

erational mobility gap between Blacks

and Whites—especially among males. In

fact, the intergenerational mobility gap

between Black and White youth born

into the highest quintile households is

greater than that between their coun-

terparts born in the lowest quintile. As

adults, Black males born at the top and liv-

ing in “opportunity-rich neighborhoods”

are equally as likely to fall into the bot-

tom income quintile as they are to remain in the top quintile.

Meanwhile, White males born into the top household income

quintiles are five times as likely as Black males to remain there

as adults. Strikingly, Black women earn slightly more in the next

generation (at a 1 percentile difference) than White women,

conditional on parental income.

The intergenerational mobility gap between Native Ameri-

cans and Whites is akin to that of African Americans to Whites,

averaging about an 18 percentile point difference at each income

level, conditional on parent incomes. This pattern does not hold

for any other comparisons of racial-ethnic groups. Between

Asians and Whites, the intergenerational mobility gaps are tiny,

and analyses reveal that Asians obtain similar and even higher

incomes than Whites in the next generation at nearly every par-

ent income level. And Latinx persons are not far behind with

A fundamental and philosophical purpose of public education is to grow generations of literate, critically thinking, creative, civically engaged students who work to edify and build a cohesive nation and democracy. Somewhere in the social system, this purpose has faltered.

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small intergenerational gaps of 2 percentiles at

the 25th percentile and 6 percentiles at the 75th

percentile.

One of the most dramatic findings from

Chetty et al. is the magnitude of the gap between

Black and White males living in “opportunity-

rich” neighborhood contexts. Like any good

social scientists, Chetty and his coauthors tested

the conventional explanations offered by sociolo-

gists and economists, including the influence of

educational attainment, neighborhood effects,

family structure (specifically the presence of mar-

ried, heterosexual parents), and even wealth (as

measured by home ownership). Such analyses

showed that the intergenerational gap would fall

by 25%, at most, if Black and White boys were

to grow up in the same neighborhoods. Even

after accounting for all of these possible explana-

tions—education, neighborhood, parents’ marital

status, and wealth—the intergenerational mobil-

ity gap between Black and White males persists.

Notably, the incarceration rates for Black

men on a single given day at 10.6% ranged any-

where from twice as likely as Native American

men (the group with the next highest rate of

incarceration) to about 10,000 times more likely

than Asian American women (the group with

incarceration rates of less than .001 percent). All

other groups fell somewhere in between, including

Black women at 0.6% and White men at 1.6%

Class matters, too: Black men from the lowest

income backgrounds were incarcerated at the

highest levels with 21% locked either in jail or

prison at the time of the 2010 Census—a rate ten times greater

than those of Black men from the highest income percentile.

Incarceration patterns by race and gender mirror the patterns

of disproportionality in suspensions and expulsions in schools.

Recently released data from the General Accounting Office and

the Office of Civil Rights reveal that Black males experience signifi-

cantly higher rates of suspensions and expulsions than any other

group—a precursor to what is now commonly referred to as the

“school-to-prison pipeline.” In general, Black youth—males and

females—as well as LGBTQ youth and students with disabilities are

suspended at disproportionately high rates. Furthermore, studies

show that young Black children are suspended more often from

pre-school and kindergarten, and thus criminalized as early as

young as age 4 or 5. Apparently, many Black preschool children

are not granted the developmental benefit of the doubt that

mischief and naughtiness bestow. Their bodies and behaviors are

read differently in schools, and, in the long run, they may suffer

from it academically, materially, spiritually, and physically.

What does social science research tell us already about the

social status and experiences of Black males that would engender

such disparate findings in mobility and well-being? Addressing

this question requires intersectional analyses that recognize

how gendered forces operate in society. For myriad reasons,

high school drop-out rates and college attendance rates are

significantly lower and greater, respectively, for females across

all racial-ethnic groups. Thus, the interactions of race, class, and

gender most likely influence the differences between Black men

and women in both academic and economic outcomes.

In my first book, Keepin’ It Real, I shared that adolescent

Black and Latinx boys explained to me why they perceived that

it was more difficult for them to obtain service jobs than for

their sisters and female peers. Even then in the mid-1990s,

economist Harry Holzer had found that among Blacks, the hir-

ing of females instead of males increased with the number of

tasks performed and credentials required, although both groups’

hiring percentages were significantly and strikingly lower than

their White counterparts’. In addition, the probability to be hired

was greater for Black females than males when the job required

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customer contact. Some of these differences may owe to the

actual feminization of certain job sectors; there are more females

than males in clerical and sales jobs. These patterns might also

occur because of the differences in occupational choices by

gender. Black males—as the research of scholars such as Elijah

Anderson and Khalil Gibran Muhammad inform us—are read

as threatening with a propensity for criminality; and the media

remind us far too frequently how that plays out on the streets

with police. Some—Philando Castile, Stephon Clark, Terence

Crutcher, Eric Garner, and Alton Sterling, to name a few—are

surveilled, disproportionately suspected of engagement in illicit

behaviors by police, and killed for no other apparent reason other

than they are perceived as dangerous Black men.

The descriptive incarceration statistics from the Chetty et

al. study hint at something pervasive in the ethos of our society.

Yet, the limitations of the available data did not allow them to

prove it. Although we learn that low racial bias among Whites

reduces the mobility gap to some extent, Chetty and colleagues’

measure of racial bias is, by their own admission, not necessarily

the best or most reliable. Thus, we can only infer that racism

accounts for some intergenerational mobility gaps. The Chetty

study leaves us begging for more as it invokes the question of

how researchers can more fully capture how disparate racial

forces (also disproportionately and intimately entangled with

poverty and low levels of employment) afflict the daily lived

experiences of Black people in the U.S.

Certainly, not all racially marginalized and economically

disadvantaged youth fail to reach the higher rungs of academic

success and mobility. In fact, a critical number will sail the winds

of upward mobility by entering the doors of higher education.

Many will enter a stratified higher education system via com-

munity colleges, and as Tressie McMillan Cottom’s best-selling

book, Lower Ed, documents, via for-profit colleges, which enroll

Latinx and first-generation college students disproportionately

and dominate in the production of Black bachelor’s degree hold-

ers. In contrast, U.S. flagship public universities, especially some

elite ones, underserve many of its most marginalized students.

In California, Proposition 209 prohibits state institutions from

considering race, ethnicity, or sex, specifically in the areas of

public employment, contracting, and education; the driving

principle behind political support for Prop. 209 is the equivalence

of access and fairness, based on test-score measures.

Surely, there is absolutely nothing wrong with fairness. But

let’s face the facts: our society asks students with widely disparate

ecological contexts of life—in terms of exposure to poverty, racism,

and other forms of disadvantage—to compete similarly. Those

contexts are associated with test score outcomes. Sociologist Sean

Reardon and colleagues have examined every school district in the

U.S. and found that the correlation between the median wealth

of a district and its test score median is roughly .85. Test scores

increasingly reflect socioeconomic status and material wealth.

Achievement gaps in school districts reflect opportunity gaps.

Even when African American, Latinx, and Native American

students are on the upward mobility track and attend “good”

schools or, in the case of Blacks, live in opportunity-rich neigh-

borhoods, as the big-data studies of Chetty, Reardon, and

colleagues indicate, something malevolent still impedes their

chances for true equal opportunity within those resource-rich

contexts. These studies and others (including mine) find that

even in so-called good schools and neighborhoods, the achieve-

ment and mobility outcomes for Black and Brown youth are

lower than their White peers, even if they perform and fare

relatively better than their co-ethnic peers in poorer contexts.

Additionally, as MacArthur award winner and social psychologist

Jennifer Richeson and her colleagues reveal, when racial and

ethnic diversity increases in education or elsewhere, often the

sense of group threat and entitlement increases.

The most visible, contemporary examples of this are the

highly ethnocentric, populist campaign and election of Donald

Trump as President of the United States and the controversial

(and costly) free speech events held on various university cam-

puses in the year since his inauguration. Last fall, the nation’s

attention was roused by the tragic events in Charlottesville.

Some of us could not believe our eyes as neo-Nazis and White

supremacists—many men dressed in business casual khakis

and buttoned-down shirts—marched across the University of

Virginia campus, shouting “blood and soil” and “Jews will not

replace us,” among other exclusive utterances. Many of us were

heartbroken by the attack on a crowd of anti-racist protestors,

including Heather Heyer, who was murdered when one White

supremacist plowed his car into the crowd.

Not that racial resentment and hatred ever fully disap-

peared, but today’s conspicuous display of them by groups of

Whites, all with their free speech guaranteed, is disturbing.

Marching boldly and loudly, they decry the significant social,

economic, and political gains fought for and earned since the

Civil Rights era. The cost of liberty, freedom, and rights for those

previously denied all three is to bear witness to and counter-

protest against marchers who spew hateful language and wield

To shift the tides of both economic and racial inequalities substantially, we must find dynamic ways to reimagine and enact education’s equitable promises.

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historical artifacts of violence. On public university campuses,

people of color, LGBTQ, Jewish, Muslim, and immigrant people

bear the disproportionate psychological burden. They are asked

to pay the communal tax for the liberty of ultra-conservative,

(mainly) heterosexual, Protestant White men to foment psycho-

logical terror… all in the name of free speech. Hate speech defies

democratic, American ideals of equality, liberty, and justice for

all. Throughout history, our nation has experienced repeatedly

the consequences of exclusive, intolerant, unbridled views. Social

progress necessarily demands some moral and legal constraints

on different types of expression. Paradoxically, tolerance in the

United States of America—by way of unfettered, offensive,

hateful free speech—divides our nation deeply.

Segregation, both racial and economic, is arguably the

stickiest thorn in the side of American society with regard to

the reduction of racial and economic inequality and the heal-

ing of our nation’s divides. The above-mentioned studies have

convinced me—a sociologist of inequality and education—that

policies and practices primarily targeting improved educational

attainment and opportunity for historically disadvantaged racial-

ethnic groups, though vital, are not enough. I infer this based on

studies like one by Reardon, Lindsay Fox, and Joseph Townsend,

which reveals the fact that even when individual incomes and

educational outcomes are well-above average, stubborn racial

differences persist. The average Black and Latinx worker with an

annual salary of $100,000 lives in a neighborhood significantly

poorer than the ones in which their White and Asian counterparts

with similar incomes live; the median neighborhood income for

this group of upper-income individuals was $54,393 for Blacks;

$59,371 for Latinos; $65,653 for Whites; and $75,043 for Asians.

Couple these findings with recent research about the

exchange of information and ideas: In a network analysis of 10

million Facebook users published in the March 2015 issue of

Science, researchers found that “friends” in networks are quite

homogeneous along partisan and ideological lines—Democrats

versus Republicans. Only about one in five of any given Facebook

user’s friends are ideologically opposites from the user. The implica-

tions here are great. Notably, race and political party affiliation are

correlated to some extent. African Americans are overwhelmingly

registered Democrats, for example. Critically, the limited ability of

both educators and students to engage effectively across social,

cultural, and ideological differences—because of their neighbor-

hood compositions and friendship networks—challenge our

schools and universities. Growing up in homogeneous economic

and racial communities and schools inadequately prepares us for

the differences that await us beyond the fold.

Social scientists and decision makers who focus on macro-

level and structural conditions can direct our attention to

much-needed economic and social policy changes that meet

targeted thresholds for higher standards of living and improved

mobility in a wealthy, liberal democracy. At the same time, we

cannot afford to ignore the macro-meso-micro connections.

On the other end of the spectrum, civil society must engage to

advance our personal mindsets and social choices. Many of us

maintain racial and economic inequality (of opportunity) through

our daily behaviors and our consumption of education as primar-

ily a personal or private good. We have strong and well-founded

desires for the “best” schools and neighborhoods—based on

tests and neighborhoods—for our own children. In the process,

we keep the “others” out.

While subject to debate, presumably, a fundamental and

philosophical purpose of education—from pre-kindergarten to

higher education—is to grow generations of literate, critically

thinking, creative, civically engaged students who work to edify

and build a cohesive nation and democracy. Somewhere in the

social system, this purpose has faltered. Some will argue it was

never realized in our schools. Others will express a lost faith in

the power of education due to racism’s and poverty’s unyielding

persistence. Many of our school-communities—including afflu-

ent ones—are in desperate need of radical makeovers both inside

and outside of the schools’ walls. To be sure, education alone—in

particular, schooling—is not the sole intervention for our society’s

problems. Still, I continue to believe in the fundamental power of

education. It is one of the most dominant socializing institutions in

our lives. To shift the tides of both economic and racial inequali-

ties substantially, we must, nevertheless, find dynamic ways to

reimagine and enact education’s equitable promises.

recommended readings Darrick Hamilton and William A. Darity, Jr. 2017. “The Political Econ- omy of Education, Financial Literacy, and the Racial Wealth Gap,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review First Quarter: 59-76. A review by two of the foremost experts on racial differences in U.S. wealth and the intergenerational transmission of advantages.

Nikole Hannah-Jones. 2015. “Segregation Now,” Propublica. A highly acclaimed article by an investigative journalist, this piece delves into the relationships between housing and school seg- regation across generations through profiles of several families.

Amanda Lewis and John Diamond. 2015. Despite the Best Inten- tions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools. New York: Oxford University Press. Uses years of observations within a diverse, suburban public school, to reveal how even the “high- est quality” public school may engender educational inequality across different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups.

Daniel Losen, ed. 2015. Closing the School Discipline Gap: Equi- table Remedies for Excessive Exclusion. New York: Teachers Col- lege Press. An edited volume that comprises research-based chapters from multiple social science disciplines, highlighting how disproportionality in school suspensions and expulsions by race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and disability compounds already existent achievement disparities; it also offers some con- crete policy and practice recommendations.

Prudence L. Carter is in the Graduate School of Education at the University of

California–Berkeley where she is also the dean. A sociologist, she is the author of

Stubborn Roots: Race, Class and Inequality in U.S. and South African Schools.

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