Class, Not Race

By: American Decency Staff

In contemporary America, “the conversation about race” never ends. It fuels political debate and cable chatter, and practically every week some new outrage — real or imagined — is fodder for the hungry maw of the interminable conversation.

We don’t talk about class nearly as often, even though the bifurcation of American life along class lines continues apace, with distressing consequences for the state of the American Dream.

Children of more affluent and better-educated parents have substantial, and growing, advantages, beginning with the fact that they are much more likely to grow up in stable homes.On the heels of conservative scholar Charles Murray’sComing Apart, a much-discussed study of class divisions in white America, arrives Our Kids by the respected political scientist Robert Putnam of Bowling Alone fame. It paints much the same picture as Murray, with an emphasis on how the differences among high- and low-income parents affect the prospects of their children.

Over and over, Putnam cites data showing college-educated and high-school-educated parents sliding in different directions.

College-educated mothers delay childbearing about six years later than they did 50 years ago, and thus tend to be better prepared; high-school-educated moms have their kids slightly earlier than 50 years ago, and a decade earlier than college-educated mothers.

Since the 1970s, nonmarital births have increased only a little among college-educated women, while they have risen inexorably among high-school-educated women.

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