October 4, 2017
Page 11
Minority & Small Business Week
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O PINION
People Who Start Out Poor Often Stay Poor
A rigged system
takes its toll
J ill r iCharDson
We all want to live
in a country where all
it takes is hard work
and some talent for
anyone to succeed.
We tell ourselves that
we do. We even see
examples of people who “came from
nothing” and ended up rich and famous.
And it’s true that it sometimes happens.
Sometimes a child born into poverty
grows up to become the president of the
United States, a multi-billionaire, or an
Olympic gold medalist.
Most of the time, however, they don’t.
And it’s not because they’re bad, lazy, stu-
pid, or immoral. Often it’s because of our
system itself.
Take our school system for a start. By
funding schools with property taxes, we
guarantee that the children from the rich-
est neighborhoods go to the wealthiest
by
schools.
If we lived in neighborhoods that were
economically mixed with families of all
incomes, this wouldn’t be a big deal. But
we don’t. Instead we have areas of very
wealthy people whose children attend
wonderful schools, and areas of concen-
trated poverty where children attend fail-
ing schools.
And the kids in the good schools?
Their parents can afford tutoring, extra-
curricular activities, summer camp, and
SAT prep classes. It’s the kids whose par-
ents can’t provide those extra learning op-
portunities who go to the worst schools.
Meanwhile, careers are sorted into
those that require a college degree and
those that don’t. Once upon a time, one
could support a family on the wage of
a manufacturing job. But America lost
those jobs, and replaced them with poorly
paid service jobs that often have no ben-
efits.
For those without college degrees, get-
ting ahead is difficult. But college is ex-
pensive. Even without the tuition costs,
one has to keep a roof over their head and
eat while attending school. Community
colleges and online programs add flexibil-
ity for students who work full time while
attending school, but it can still be diffi-
cult.
I don’t advocate a return to the days
when men worked and women stayed
home. But at least back then, families had
an adult whose full time duties were to
take care of the home and the children.
When women went to work, the expec-
tations of the workplace didn’t change.
Men with stay-at-home wives never need-
ed maternity leave or flex time or places
to pump breastmilk or time off to pick up
a sick kid from day care.
But in families where both partners
work, or in single parent families, how on
earth are parents supposed to hold down a
full time job and simultaneously be full-
time homemakers?
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild examined
this in her classic book The Second Shift,
finding that the housework often still falls
disproportionately to working women, of-
ten leaving them frazzled and exhausted.
Sometimes the kids lose out, when neither
parent has time to spend with them.
Wealthier families now pay for the
work that women used to do for free:
childcare, laundry, cooking, cleaning, and
so on.
But whom do they pay? Less wealthy
women, usually. And those women, after
spending a day caring for someone else’s
kids or doing someone else’s laundry, still
have to figure out how to get their own
housework done once they go home.
The end result is that most people who
start out poor stay poor. And those who
start out rich usually stay rich. (Recent
studies show that Canada now has three
times better social mobility than the U.S.,
suggesting the American Dream moved
north.)
Ours is a great system, if you’re rich.
But we’d be a better country if we didn’t
rig the game against those whose only
mistake was to be born to poor parents.
OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson
is the author of Recipe for America: Why
Our Food System Is Broken and What We
Can Do to Fix It. Distributed by Other-
Words.org.
A Low Bar for Corporations Rejecting Racism
White supremacy
can wear a
business suit
e Mily n orton
Donald Trump’s fail-
ure to condemn white su-
premacists after the violent
neo-Nazi rally in Charlot-
tesville several weeks back
had an unexpected casual-
ty: the president’s business
advisory councils.
My partner works for a Fortune 500
company whose CEO sat on one those
councils. Along with many other employ-
ees, my partner had been pressuring the
CEO through an internal petition for some
time.
Eventually, the dam broke: CEO after
CEO decided they could no longer associ-
ate themselves with the White House after
the incident, forcing Trump to dissolve two
high-level panels.
I’m glad my partner’s efforts, along
with bigger ones like a campaign to tar-
get “Corporate Backers of Hate,” rattled
these major corporations’ top decision
makers.
Corporate execs know that it’s bad for
business to be affiliated with racists —
and good for business to look like heroes.
But while rejecting racism is good, it’s
a low bar — especially when many still
profit off it.
For example, Jamie Dimon, CEO of
by
JP Morgan Chase, jumped into action
after Charlottesville. He not only issued
a statement, but also announced that JP
Morgan Chase would donate $500,000 to
the Southern Poverty Law Center, an or-
ganization that’s fought racism since the
1970s.
It was a smart business move. The
last time JP Morgan was on the wrong
side of racism, it cost them $55 mil-
lion in settlements for charging black
and brown people higher rates for their
mortgages. Looking at that number,
a $500,000 donation is a drop in the
bucket.
The company can’t take back the dis-
crimination lawsuits or its part in the hous-
ing crisis, which slashed black wealth in
this country in half. That’s a huge percent-
age. Black families had already been de-
nied centuries of wealth accumulation due
to slavery and racist policies like redlining,
and this crisis was a double whammy.
$500,000 also isn’t enough to make up
for the bank’s financing of mass incarcer-
ation.
JP Morgan Chase lent hundreds of mil-
lions of dollars to Geo Group and CoreCiv-
ic, two major operators of private prisons
and immigrant detention centers, despite
investor concerns .
All that dirty money makes Dimon’s
comments in support of DACA after
Trump’s decision to repeal it also ring a
little hollow.
DACA, or Deferred Action for Child-
hood Arrivals, is a program created by the
Obama administration that protects some
young undocumented immigrants from
deportation.
It’s hard to believe that Dimon truly
thinks that “when people come here to
learn, work hard, and give back to their
communities, we should allow them to
stay in the United States” when his com-
pany supports corporations that profit
from warehousing immigrants in deten-
tion.
White supremacy doesn’t just look like
KKK hoods and swastikas — it can also
wear a business suit on Wall Street. Of the
top five Wall Street firms, the highest lev-
el decision makers are 86 percent white.
That’s no coincidence.
Corporations ha. But it’s got to be more
than just words.
JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs could
publicly commit to pull contracts that
contribute to mass incarceration. IBM
could refuse contracts that contribute to
violent immigration enforcement activi-
ties. Wells Fargo could halt its financing
of the Dakota Access Pipeline on Native
lands. At a minimum, that’s what the Cor-
porate Backers of Hate campaign recom-
mends.
And, by looking inward at their hir-
ing policies, promotion policies, and pay
scales, these businesses can begin building
towards long term equality.
Don’t get me wrong, it is a good thing
that they denounced hatred. I just hope
they’ll put their money with their mouth is.
Emily Norton is the leadership devel-
opment manager at the Institute for Policy
Studies. Distributed by OtherWords.org.
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