This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
In their new book, UC Berkeley sociologists G. Cristina Mora and Tianna S. Paschel set out to understand how we make sense of the difference between the California we see in the movies and the California we see while we’re driving our kids to school.
The authors of Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide, discovered that inequality isn’t something we fail to notice. We recognize it, and then we rationalize it in one of three ways:
- Exceptional framing, where people believe their hard work and perseverance will break the norms.
- Spatial comparison, such as “at least it’s better here than in Mexico.”
- Bounded blame, a way of pinning structural failures on the poor, homeless or undocumented.
For both Mora and Paschel, their work is deeply personal. Both are daughters of (im)migrants who were raised in California. Mora grew up on the northeastern edge of Los Angeles County with her parents from Michoacán. Paschel’s family moved from Flint, Michigan and she was raised, as she puts “in the parts that most people don’t care to know about and don’t know to care about,” like Fresno, Bakersfield and Sacramento.
Their research was based on surveys of more than 6,000 Californians and more than 100 in-depth interviews.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: You’re both Berkeley professors, and you confront your own mobility head-on. How did that shape the book?
Mora: I grew up in one of the most segregated parts of L.A., and now I live in one of the most diverse areas, and I still feel all the status anxiety of raising my kids in this place. I don’t have nearly the kinds of issues my parents had keeping us safe and keeping us housed. A two-bedroom home in Berkeley is $1.5 million. We drive past multimillion-dollar houses and encampments on the same way to school, and my kids have to make sense of how such great need lives beside such great wealth. This is by design. This is what we’ve created, and this is what we’ve normalized.
Paschel: My entire family’s in Flint and Arkansas. Compared to my mom’s siblings, she’s a success story. By my family’s measure, I’m a success story. The mobility itself is uncomfortable. It was important for us to talk about it. To be able to say this inequality thing that we have going on here that we have naturalized that we step over, walk to the side of, turn our heads to is something that implicates all of us.
Q: My job assumes people don’t see inequality, so I keep reminding them. Your book argues the opposite: that Californians see it clearly and talk themselves out of it. Why is that important?
Mora: It’s important for thinking about what reproduces it. Why is California one of the most unequal places? The easy hypothesis is that it’s hidden, that all the poverty is tucked away at the border or in the desert or people don’t understand it. But it exists in our faces. … They’ve just developed mechanisms to background it and minimize it and justify it so they can keep living here.
Paschel: I think one of the most interesting things in the book is that the way people are thinking about inequality is so linked to how people think about their own possibilities and their own futures and their own narratives of the places they call home. It’s an identity question. So, throwing more data at people so they can finally “see” the problem, that won’t fix it. Any real intervention has to reckon with the contradictions and the normalizing of the different kinds of inequality.
Q: Of the strategies you lay out, what surprised you most and which is the most powerful at protecting the status quo?
Paschel: Exceptionalism is baked into almost all of the strategies. You can intellectually understand in a rigorous and nuanced way, the forces beyond your control that produce the inequality around you, forces you’re just one inch or one income bracket or one neighborhood away from, and yet still believe that because of your fortitude or your hard work, you’ll be the exception and you will prevail. It mirrors the way California tells its own exceptional, racial story.
Q: When I covered reparations, I got many reader emails fixated on one fact: that California wasn’t a slave state, even though the first governor actively tried to ban Black people from the state and we had dozens of sundown towns. Does that fit the book?
Paschel: We know that racial violence and racial inequality takes a lot of different forms. Slavery is only one modality of racial violence. California has a lot of versions of white supremacist violence. It’s multifocal. My son’s school in San Francisco celebrates the Lunar New Year, but he wouldn’t know, if I weren’t his mom, how many times Chinatowns were burned down here and throughout the state. We need a more textured, local understanding of what racism looks like, not just the version that gets canonized in a high-school textbook about the Civil War.
Q: Immigration has obviously been a very busy topic for the last couple of years. The book describes a narrow script: immigrants come here to toil, and that itself is the American Dream. How did people express that?
Mora: One way to think about it is holding these contradictions together. Agriculture is the iconic way that people think of immigrants working. So immigrants will often say they’re being exploited. Look at how hard they’re working in the fields. Nobody else is going to take those jobs. They were in the sun. They know it’s exploitation. And then at the same time, those same immigrants have achieved the American dream simply by coming here. We don’t connect the contradiction, and that disconnect is part of how we reproduce the inequalities we dislike. California has the most extreme pay gaps between U.S.-born and foreign-born workers, and between documented and undocumented workers, and I kept telling Tiana, and this is the best-case scenario. California is the best-shot state, and this is as good as we can get.
Q: How does the sacrifice narrative play into it?
Mora: It’s crazy-making. The family left everything, lost everything, and then the child in L.A. ends up in one of the most segregated, underfunded school districts in the country. But this is the best case. The family left everything for this. Is this the best we can create? One of our interviewees in Fresno, a recent college grad, is being crushed by student debt, working side gigs, raised by parents who worked the fields and fell in and out of homelessness … Ask her about the American Dream, and she says: “I think about my parents. They came. They made it.” When she had just described the opposite. The things that were supposed to come back to her aren’t coming back, and she’s already in her 30’s.
Q: Any closing thoughts?
Paschel: I think there’s a lot to be proud of in this place. I also think there are some beautiful social movements that have come out of this place that suggest things aren’t so perfect to begin with. You can’t have globally-recognized farmworker movements and the Black Panther Party if everything is already perfect. One of the things I would hope is that we stay critical about the things that we’re proud of and the things that we should not be proud of here. It makes sense to be proud of our racial diversity and our own families’ trajectories. Where we run into trouble is when we romanticize and take pride in an idea of a place instead of the reality.
