This was written by staff at the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters. It was republished by The Mendocino Voice in partnership with CalMatters to bring relevant nonpartisan news to Mendocino County readers. Learn more about CalMatters here.
BERKELEY, CA., 6/29/26 — 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.
This article first appeared in CalMatters here.
When it comes to slavery and reparations in California its the Native Americans who actually suffered it and would deserve compensation before any Black people. Beginning with Spanish military forces and friars rounding up or luring local Indigenous populations into enclosed, agricultural mission communities where they were forced to build infrastructure, farm crops, tend livestock, and produce goods that enriched the Spanish Empire. Of course that was before the white settlers came and without “White Guilt” it does not fit the popular narrative, so it does not get mentioned, does it?
At least the documented Native Californians got some of their land back. Yet illegal aliens who are basically undocumented Natives still get treated like slaves to this day. The same arguments slave owners made to preserve the system of slavery like the economy was founded on slavery and relays on slavery to flourish, or slave owners are actually helping slaves by taking care of them, those same arguments are being made to preserve the system of illegal labor in California today. Not only do illegal laborers cost less, you can just dispose of them if they get injured on the job. Extreme hypocrite and former Vice President Kamala Harris lives on a private beach in Malibu (Little Dume), the only Mexicans that allowed on her beach are the illegal laborers who are working her plantation like estate.
Agree. Modern slaves do not have slaveowners who feed them, provide shelter and care for sickness just as they would their livestock. The modern slaves are on their own after the day’s work to mostly care for themselves. There’s state-run seasonal migrant centers but that just means the state is running the slave camps. So free Medi-Cal coverage makes sense, as well as resisting federal immigration enforcement.
California has a state-run slave operation using illegal immigrants and most everyone living here just accepts it. After all, it’s work “no one else will do.”
DFC, your claims about the benefits American Black slaves received from their masters is blatantly naive. Since you appear to be a MAGA cultist, you probably get your “news” and informaton from Fox. So here’s a link for you: https://www.foxnews.com/science/final-survivor-of-last-american-slave-ship-revealed
The article includes a 1786 drawing of how slaves were positioned on slave ships. The Fox article states that “around 12 million African slaves were shipped to the Americas. . . About 15 percent of slaves died during the horrific voyages, which lasted around 80 days.
And I’m sure you have heard of the Zong massacre, a mass killing of more than 130 enslaved African people by the crew of the British slave ship over several days in 1781. “They had taken out insurance on the lives of the enslaved Africans as cargo. According to the crew, when the ship ran low on drinking water . . . the crew threw enslaved Africans overboard. “
So much for those benevolent slaveowners who “feed them, provide shelter and care for sickness just as they would their livestock.” There was never such a thing as a good slave owner; only some who were not as bad as the others, just as there are some people who keep their horses in good working condition, and others who beat them to death.
Also, Cal, not sure how Kamala is any more of a hypocrite than you. What have you done to help the homeless or improve the lives or income of hard laborers recently? If farm laborers and other presumed illegal immigrants were paid the same as us comfortable hypocrites, you would complain even more about the unaffordable cost of livng and blame them, too, as well as the current “liberal” government that you both despise so much.