American Inequality and Globalization

The United States is the first and the biggest modern democracy in this world. However, it also has a rather dark history of inequality that has its root in slavery. Things have gotten much better in the recent decades, but the situation is still not quite what we would like it to be, despite all the legislation reforms and affirmative actions. The black community is still suffering from lower income, higher crime rate, lower education and poor health care. All of these are unjust.

American Inequality

After the civil war and the abolition of the slavery in the south, the US envolved into a kind of caste system for a social hierarchy: The old white, or the WASP (white, anglo-saxon protestant) at the top, the new whites (later immigrants from the Europe) at the middle, and the blacks (freed slaves and their decendants) at the bottom. Over the next few decades til the 1960s, the integration between the old whites and the new whites had gone very well; while the integration between the whites and the blacks was negligible in comparison. Many policies, such as the policies on housing, financing, education, all the way to the right to vote were heavily unfavorable to the blacks. In essence, the old whites, by sharing power and joining with the new whites, successfully built a system that suppressed and exploited the blacks to strengthen their dominance, despite being few in numbers.

After the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the intentional suppression largely ceased to exist. However, subconscious and subtle prejudices are much harder to get rid of. The concentration of police brutality on the blacks is a prime example. As a newcomer to the United States, I can’t help but notice that the demographic taxonomy of blacks/whites using the one-drop rule, which we still use today, is based on racial prejudice and nothing else. The United States has come a long way; yet there is still so much longer to go.

The cause of inequality between black and white Americans is rooted in human nature. The ones with power and privilege would like to keep their power and privilege, consciously or subconsciously. So some level of inequality will always be there in society. What makes American inequality especially bad is that this inequality is based on an external attribute, the color of the skin, that one cannot change, thus inhibiting social mobility. The inequality in opportunity is the worst kind of inequality because it perpetuates itself.

Global Inequality

The inequality in the world is but a larger version of the same thing in the US. Likewise, it was always there. Before globalization, the world was segregated into several smaller worlds, just like the black/white segregation in the earlier US. The developed countries (Europe and North America) have too few people to perpetuate their dominance status, so naturally they need allies that have ambition to move up the hierarchy and are willing to suck up to them. In the last few decades of globalization they found their allies in Asia. However, the door is closing to all the laggard countries, such as sub-Saharan Africa, because the world can’t afford for everyone to be rich.

Just like the inequality in the US, the inequality in income across countries is only the symptom of the deeper inequality in opportunity, which is based on an external attribute, which is political alliance during a brief period of time (the last years of the cold war). So although globalization reduced some inequality, such as extreme poverty, it also enlarged inequality in other areas, such as the internal inequality in the US and China. It does not cost the ones in power much to pull some people out of extreme poverty and it also looks nice on them; however, the system is almost as unfair as before.

What can we do

I believe the inequality in opportunity is fundamentally wrong; it will cause stagnation in development in human civilization; and even the ones who are better off now will suffer in the long run. However, we humans are notoriously short sighted; so I don’t think equality can be granted by the privileged from top down. It is up to the underprivileged people to rise up, to demand equal opportunity everywhere, not afraid of putting themselves on the line. The civil right movement in the 1960s was a very good example of this.

On the other hand, the business leaders are not in possession of the power to cure inequality, nor do they have the responsibility of doing so. They can see the inequality as an opportunity for arbitrage, such as outsourcing to countries with cheaper labor, etc. If the market is healthy, the invisible hand should play in favor of reducing inequality. If the market is not healthy, whatever the business leaders can do at the individual level does not matter, or worse.