On September 9, Social Science Matrix hosted an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide, by G. Cristina Mora, Professor of Sociology and Tianna Paschel, Associate Professor of African American Studies, both at UC Berkeley.
Professors Mora and Paschel were joined in conversation by UC Berkeley scholars Lisa García Bedolla, Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Hitchcock Dean of the Graduate Division and Chancellor’s Professor of Education, and Desmond Jagmohan, Assistant Professor of Political Science. Nicholas Vargas, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, moderated.
The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, the School of Education, the Othering and Belonging Institute, and the Departments of Political Science and African American Studies.
The video of the event can be seen above or on YouTube. A podcast and transcript are included below.
About the Book
California has long been mythologized as the quintessential land of opportunity and reinvention — a place where anyone, regardless of origin, can forge a new life and realize their aspirations. Yet beneath this gilded narrative lies a starker reality: California ranks among the most unequal states in one of the world’s most unequal countries, where the middle class finds itself increasingly squeezed. Economic inequality is not an anomaly but part of a broader global phenomenon, as disparities deepen across the world. While we know a lot about its contours, its evolution over time and its intersections with race and immigration, we understand far less about how ordinary people interpret and internalize it. In Normalizing Inequality, sociologists G. Cristina Mora and Tianna S. Paschel illuminate how middle-class Californians perceive and come to accept the inequalities that surround them.
Drawing on extensive interviews and surveys, Mora and Paschel uncover a profound paradox at the heart of middle-class consciousness. They find that Californians are keenly aware of the systemic causes of inequality—they recognize policies engineered to benefit the wealthy, they acknowledge how structural racism makes it hard for some groups to get ahead—yet they consistently minimize these forces. Instead, they gravitate toward explanations rooted in individualism, moral character, and the idea that things are worse in other places. Racism and racial inequality in California become palatable when framed as “not as bad as the South.” Immigrant exploitation, however severe, transforms into evidence of the American Dream fulfilled simply upon arrival. Economic pressures that displace others become surmountable through personal industriousness and forbearance.
These beliefs about inequality grow more troubling still. Middle-class Californians sometimes blame disempowered people for their circumstances—acknowledging structural barriers facing homeless and undocumented populations while simultaneously faulting them for insufficient drive or criminal behavior that compounds their difficulties. When contemplating California’s future, interviewees envision economic prosperity propelled by technological innovation, yet remain curiously unconcerned with how present inequalities might shape that tomorrow. Their imagined future is one where White and Asian American populations thrive, while Black, Latino, and economically marginalized Californians either vanish through displacement or fade into irrelevance. As respondents use these interpretive frameworks to make sense of inequality, they lean heavily on California’s foundational narratives of opportunity, sanctuary and multiracial promise.
Normalizing Inequality offers an incisive examination of how ordinary citizens make sense of inequality and, through that very process of sense-making, how they tolerate and passively reproduce the conditions they often claim to deplore.
Podcast and Transcript
A podcast recording of this event can be found below or on Apple Podcasts.
[WOMAN’S VOICE] The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
[CORI HAYDEN]
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Social Science Matrix. Um, thank you so much for being here today on this sweltering Thurs- Wednesday?
What day is… I have no idea what day it is. Wednesday.
A sweltering Wednesday. Um, my name is Cori Hayden. I’m the new director of the Matrix.
I’m faculty in the anthropology department as well. And I’m really delighted today to welcome the members of this panel who are here for our very first of the semester, our first Authors Meet Critics panel. We are here to discuss, and I think celebrate, Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide by G. Cristina Mora and Tianna Paschel.
Cannot think of a more timely book right now. In this book, Professors Mora and Paschel draw on extensive interviews and surveys to examine how middle-class Californians perceive and come to accept The, shall we say, staggering inequalities around them and around us. This book offers a sharp account of how ordinary sense-making can end up sustaining the very conditions people say they oppose.
Today’s panel, as I said, is part of our Authors Meet Critics series, and is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies. Hello the School of Education, the Othering and Belonging Institute, and the Departments of Political Science and African American Studies. Please plan to join us for some light refreshments after the panel, and thank you so much to the Othering and Belonging Institute for making that reception possible Before I turn it over to the panel and the reason that you all are here, I get to do a little advertising.
Let me briefly mention some upcoming events this semester. And again, not again, for the first time, I do want to thank the prior director of the Matrix, Marion Fourcade, in the sociology department, who has cued up this extraordinary roster of events this fall for all of us to enjoy. So thank you, Marion, for that.
On October 1st, we have another Author Meets Critics panel, again on a very timely theme of the history of questions of democracy, Daniela Cammack’s Demos October 7th, California Spotlight again on questions of wealth and poverty. October 14th, a new directions panel on green transitions by some wonderful graduate students on our campus. A celebration of Norma Alarcón and her book, Forced by Circumstance.
Panels on Watching ICE and the state of U.S. immigration enforcement. And another Authors Meet Critics panel with Matthew Shutzer and the book, Until the Last Ton. Now, before I leave the panel, two more quick things.
First, those of you who have corresponded with the very wonderful Sarah Harrington here in the front row will understand why this news pains me so much. Sarah is leaving the Matrix in two days, on Friday the 11th. Sarah, raise your hand, and let us give you a round of applause for all of your incredible work.
Sarah is an incredible organizational whirlwind, kind person, all around good egg, and indispensable to everything that you see here and everything that’s going to happen here. So thank you so much, Sarah. We will miss you very much.
She’s going to London. It’s not very nice there. Just kidding.
And now, more seriously, let me introduce the moderator for this wonderful panel, and then Nicholas will go ahead and introduce the panelists, and then we’ll have the panel. Nicholas Vargas is the associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies here at UC Berkeley. His scholarship examines Latinx racialization, that is, how Latinx people are identified, perceived, positioned within U.S. racial hierarchies, and how these processes intersect with immigration ideologies, state institutions, and higher education and inequality Professor Vargas has served on the U.S. Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee and is co-director of the Latino Social Science Pipeline Initiative at UC Berkeley.
Among his many other contributions to our campus, he serves as program coordinator of the Chicanx and Latinx Studies, and co-leads UC Berkeley’s Latinx and Democracy Cluster. Without further ado, I want to turn it over to Nicholas, who will introduce our panelists. Thank you so much, Nicholas.
(applause)
[NICHOLAS VARGAS]
Thank you so much. Can you all hear me? All right.
So when I was invited to be a moderator for this event, I was really excited that I get the opportunity to learn from and hear from some brilliant minds about some of the most pressing topics in California in these moments. So I happily accepted. But I’m gonna be speaking less because I know we want to hear from them.
I’m gonna just give some quick introductions to everybody on the panel here. So first, on the far left, we have Desmond Jagmohan, who is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in the history of American and African American political thought, with a focus on the politics of the oppressed.
His first book, Dark Virtues: The Tragic Realism of Booker T. Washington, is due to come out next year with Princeton University Press, examines the politics of deception under Jim Crow. He is at work on two new projects, Three Traditions of African American Political Thought, an intellectual history spanning 1850 to 1970, and A Duty to Remember: Slavery and the Ethics of Memory In 2026, Jagmohan received the Distinguished Teaching Award, the University of California, Berkeley’s highest honor for teaching, and in 2025, he received the UC Berkeley’s Division of Social Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award. Jagmohan has received the American Council of Learned Sciences Research Fellowship, a Lawrence S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellowship at Princeton University Center for Human Values, and a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Lisa García Bedolla is Berkeley’s Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Hitchcock Dean at the Graduate Division and Chancellor’s Professor of Education. She uses the tools of social science to reveal the causes of educational and political inequalities in the United States, considering differences across the lines of ethno-race, gender, class, geography, and others. She believes an intersectional and an interdisciplinary approach is critical to recognizing the complexity of the contemporary United States.
She’s used a variety of social science methods, including in-depth interviewing, survey research, field experiments, and geographic information systems, among others, to shed light on these questions. She’s published six books and dozens of research articles, earning five national awards and numerous other awards She’s consulted for presidential campaigns and statewide ballot efforts, and has partnered with over a dozen community organizations working to empower low-income communities of color. Through those partnerships, she’s developed a set of best practices for engaging and mobilizing voters in these communities, becoming one of the nation’s foremost experts on political engagement within communities of color.
Professor Garcia Bedolla earned her PhD in political science from Yale University and her BA in Latin American studies and comparative literature from UC Berkeley. Let’s welcome Professor Garcia Bedolla. Tianna Paschel is Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies and Sociology by courtesy, and Faculty Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at UC Berkeley.
Her research explores the intersection of racial ideology, politics, and globalization in the Americas, and has been published in the American Journal of Sociology The Du Bois Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociological Forum, Social Forces, and on and on and on. She’s also the author of Becoming Black Political Subjects, which draws on ethnographic and archival methods to explore the shift in the 1990s from ideas of unmarked universal citizenship to multicultural citizenship regimes, and the recognition of specific rights for Black populations by Latin American states. It is the winner of numerous awards, including the Herbert Jacob Book Award of Law and Society Association and the Barrington Moore Book Award of the American Sociological Association.
Professor Paschel is also the co-editor of Afro-Latinos in Movement, an interdisciplinary volume that explores transnationalism and Blackness in the Americas, and she’s co-PI of the Mellon-funded Black Studies Collaboratory. And G. Cristina Mora completed her bachelor’s degree in sociology at UC Berkeley in 2003, and earned her PhD in sociology from Princeton University in 2009. Before returning to Cal, she was a Provost postdoctoral scholar of sociology at the University of Chicago.
Professor Mora’s award-winning research focuses mainly on questions of racial and ethnic categorization, racial politics, and immigration. Her book, titled Making Hispanics, was published in 2014 by the University of Chicago Press Mm-hmm, and provides a sociohistorical account of the rise of Hispanic Latino pan-ethnic category in the United States. This work, along with related articles, has received wide recognition, including the Best Dissertation Award and the 2018 Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association.
Her work has also been the subject of a lot of national media segments in venues like The Atlantic, New Yorker, NPR, Latino USA, and others. At UC Berkeley, her long-term efforts towards diversity and inclusion have recently been formally acknowledged. In 2021 and 2022, she received the UCB Graduate Mentoring Award and the Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Equity and Excellence, and she led campus’s first social science cluster hire focused on Latinos and democracy, which, thank you, that brought myself and Professor Lorena Oropeza, Chair of Ethnic Studies, Kristina Lovato, and four other scholars to campus.
Thank you, Cristina. And in 2023, she led an initiative to secure a $1 million federal grant from the Department of Education to establish a Latino social science pipeline program at UC Berkeley. So let’s give her a warm welcome.
So now we get 20 minutes to hear from the authors of this exciting book. So the floor is yours, Cristina and Tianna
[TIANNA PASCHEL]
Hello everyone. Just lots of thank yous all around, but a special thank you to Sarah for all of the labor to make this possible, and thank you so much Lisa and Des, and to Nick for your time today and for engaging with the work. We’re going to read so that we are not long-winded So we both grew up in California, but in different parts.
I grew up between Sacramento, Bakersfield, and Fresno in multiracial, working class spaces. And Cristina grew up in LA County, Pacoima to be exact, where everybody was Latino and maybe actually Mexican, everybody almost, right? Neither of us, though, grew up in the California we typically see in movies, where there’s a pristine shoreline somewhere nearby.
And we became friends just as I was moving away from the Bay Area to Chicago, and Cristina was doing the opposite And it was in this transition that we started to have these conversations, and I have to say, including romanticized conversations about what this place is. And years later, as we became mothers, we often found ourselves having to answer really serious questions about the social world around us.
Questions like, “Why are there so many people living on the street?” Asked on the way to school or on our weekend escapades. It was in those moments our children, those humans not so yet desensitized to the world around us, were inviting us to step out of our normal routines of comfortable middle class and upper middle class life.
They were shaking us, and they were saying, “This is not normal.” So we often hear that if California were its own country, right, it would be the fourth or fifth largest economy in the world. What we don’t always say along with that is that it would also be one of the most unequal countries too.
In 2018, The Economist called California both the richest and poorest state in the union, noting that it had some of the wealthiest zip codes and industries, as well as some of the poorest census tracts. In 2021, PPIC determined that the state had the country’s third-largest income gap among families, and when you adjust for the cost of housing, California has the highest rate of poverty of any state in the nation And we also know that many of those folks living in poverty are actually working close to full-time or full-time jobs.
And what we also know is that the pattern is highly racialized. That should be no surprise to people here. In nearly every single measure of material inequality, Blacks and Latinx fare worse than whites and most Asians, though not all.
Black folks are twice as likely to live in poverty than non-Blacks. Latinos are the commanding majority in the state’s poorest rural areas. California’s Latino children, especially in LA, go to some of the most segregated schools in the country.
Latino and Black families also sit on the lower end of California’s household income scale, homeownership rates, and are very overrepresented, especially Black folks among the unhoused. This is also a state where immigrants earn about 26% less than native workers, a margin larger than found in other U.S. states, and where it is rare to see a farmworker live to old age. This is California.
So our book, Normalizing Inequality, examines how people make sense of and grapple with these layered inequalities in a place where they are visible and growing, a phenomenon that we think is particularly evident here. and As we focus on this, our focus is really on sense-making, so we aren’t as concerned about trying to explain the origins or the mechanics of inequality as to kind of think more about how it’s imagined. So we’re thinking about the cultural and ideological aspects of the reproduction of inequality.
In one word, we’re thinking about hegemony. And we focus on these processes because we really believe that there is much to be learned from examining how individuals arrive at their worldviews, right? And how they ultimately come to see inequality as ever-present, as normal, and as an accepted aspect of society
[G. CRISTINA MORA]
So the research was really done in two phases. So in the first phase, we conducted interviews with about 6,000 California residents to ask about a variety of issues, including economic anxiety, ideas about race and racial inequality, and understanding of immigrations, among many other topics. And here we noticed some interesting patterns, including this understanding that folks seem to have a sense that California was somehow both pretty bad economically, that it was hard to get ahead here, that generations before them were much better off
But at the same time, overall, they seemed to have a sense that it was actually a good place, in fact, a better place than most other states to live. So in a second step, we conducted in-depth interviews with 130 respondents. We asked not only questions about inequality, but also how they formed their worldviews about this.
And we paid attention to how they drew on their own experiences and narratives of living here, migrating here, or growing up here, and how this shaped their understanding Now, the interviews were done in person, and our respondents were folks that we think of as sort of being on the verge of middle class status. So some did not have a college degree, but they had stable employment and incomes that placed them at the top of the working class. You might think of a mechanic that might own their own shop or someone that’s been in their job but just didn’t have a BA Others did have college degrees, but they felt that they were barely getting by.
These were teachers, social workers, HR professionals who felt home ownership was far out of reach and who often juggled more than one gig. Though our survey was statewide, we did interviews across LA County and also the Central Valley. And as some of you might know, the Central Valley is often overlooked, not simply in our studies, but also in our imaginings and in our stories of what California is In these broader public narratives, the larger Blue Coast cities often get oversized attention, even though the Central Valley is home to some of the most important dynamics that shape this state, including extreme forms of racial segregation, economic inequality, an agricultural industry unmatched anywhere in the nation, and red and purple districts that keep these dynamics in place.
And put broadly Our argument is that individuals see the inequalities around them. They see them, they’re very visible to them. They can tell us that the economy is getting harder to navigate, that the middle class is being squeezed, and that immigrants are being exploited every day in the fields.
And many folks even have deeper, more elaborate structural understandings of why these inequalities exist So, so many, many folks told us about the fact that Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Silicon Valley tycoons weren’t paying their fair share of taxes and that the rich have found ways to get richer off the backs of the poor and the exploited, that there was a difference between who owned the land and who worked on the land But then somehow we found that these same respondents could push these understandings of inequality to the background or minimize them and present a more optimistic view of society, the future, and more generally the kind of place that California is. And it is this minimizing, this way of seeing and then pushing aside inequalities, this meaning-making process that fascinated us and that we honed in on.
And our book largely lays out the strategies for this, how this kind of culture work of minimization sort of plays out. Because it is in doing this sort of dance of witnessing and talking sometimes passionately about what is wrong here, but then somehow backgrounding this, that folks come to normalize inequalities and ultimately hold an optimistic mythos of California and the dreams that this place can make come true. In normalizing inequality, we reproduce ideas about place and California in particular.
And this is where we argue that sense-making is a critical part of consent-making So with the limited time, what we’ll do is focus on the cultural strategies that we lay out in the book, and note how they relate to broader tropes or myths about California.
[TIANNA PASCHEL]
So the first trope or myth that was prevalent in our interviews was about California as a land of opportunity. And in the book, we draw on the work of historians to trace this idea back to just foundational settler colonialism here, and the mythos of the Gold Rush, right? Which sort of foreshadowed so much of what we see in terms of the thinking today.
So while the idea spread around the country and around the world that the streets of California were paved in gold, in the end, we know that very few people actually made a fortune here. And this way of thinking about California as some sort of land of opportunity, as a blank slate state, as a place of promise, a possibility, a place of dreams, also came up in our interviews despite realities of stunted growth and deferred dreams, or dreams deferred. So the people we interviewed may have very well been solidly middle class in other states.
We kind of informally call them the barely making it. But here, their status in the middle class was a precarious one, a tenuous one. And many recognized that part of what they were experiencing was about these structural arrangements that Cristina talked about, right?
That created not just extreme inequality and impoverishment, but also produced a kind of middle class squeeze But ultimately, we saw them downplaying these structural explanations while expressing optimism about their own personal upward trajectory. And the way this is linked to place is that they imagined this place through these kind of golden-colored pictures of their futures, right? And we talk about this in the book as a kind of exceptional framing, the practice of seeing oneself as distinct from the norm or as an exception from these prevailing structural trends The second trope or narrative that we found that was prevalent in our interviews that helped to normalize inequality, and particularly racialize inequality, was this idea of California as somehow some land of multiracial promise, unmired by legacies of slavery somehow, and unmired by kind of overt racial violence that we might associate with elsewhere.
And so for this trope, I actually want to bring in the voices of one of our interviewees, from the book. Bear with me, it’s a, it’s a longer passage, but we’ll stay with our time So Rich grew up in St. Louis and moved to Los Angeles to attend college at the prestigious University of Southern California, USC.
The campus infamously sits in the middle of a historically Black neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles, and its borders are some of the most heavily policed of any university campus in the country. As a dark-skinned Black man, Rich had many stories of palpable racism at USC Experiences that were not new to him as someone who had experienced racism growing up in the Midwest. He described being on campus as living through an apartheid where he was persistently harassed by the police and was constantly asked to show his student identification.
When he refused to show it after becoming fed up with being surveilled to this extent, he was put in jail. He shared that none of his white friends had ever been asked to show their identification cards, but in contrast, he had to do it, quote, “10 to 12 times.” “It became so offensive to me,” he said, “that I took the position where I wouldn’t show it to them.
But, but not doing that, by refusing to show it to them, they arrested me, and that’s when I found out that USC has a jail on campus. I didn’t know that.” These experiences with the police made it impossible for Rich to give California a pass.
He explained that he gets frustrated when people see racist incidents happen and say, “This is not who we are.” He retorted, “This is who we, who we… This is what it is.
It’s always been vicious. There’s a savagery in this country.” He concluded, “Wherever people are, there is racism.”
Although later in his interview, he added the following caveat But I think it’s more nuanced, more it’s racism is on display really where you just see people, It’s not on display really where you just see people, you know, with animus on their faces. He’s talking about California here.
People kind of go about their business and, and it’s a blue state, and that matters to me, you know? You could say all sorts of things about California, but at the end of the day, it’s a consistently blue state, and most of them aren’t So I would hate to be in a red state, just because it would feel like I’m surrounded by people who are maybe even willing participants in my demise, you know?
So even though there’s a lot of people here, I have to feel like at least there’s a progressive spirit, you know? Rather than deny the existence of racism and racial disparities in California, Rich, like many other Black respondents, settled in on an idea this place is not as horrific as other places. Even so, Rich’s use of words like, “I have to feel,” or, “At least,” to describe his own attitudes towards race relations in his adopted home perhaps told another story.
These phrases, uttered almost like mantras, may say less about what kind of California respondents like Rich are actively experiencing and more about what they need California to be
[G. CRISTINA MORA]
So if one of the strategies was acknowledging the inequality but thinking that one’s own personal future, one’s own personal trajectory was exceptional, that they were going to make it even if they could be social pessimists, the other strategy that Tianna was mentioning is more about spatial comparison. Um, softening the inequalities because, quote, “At least we’re not as racist as Texas,” or, “At least this isn’t a red state.” Right?
And of course, each of these strategies has held a particular myth about California as better, as leading the future, and even as just not too bad. And so the last myth that I’ll talk briefly about relates to immigration Now, I don’t think anyone has to look far to see how the idea that California is, quote, good for immigrants is repeated many times over throughout the state’s history or even in contemporary political and cultural discourse.
The signs are everywhere. The fact that half of the state is foreign born or is a child of an immigrant continues this understanding of California as a beacon for many around the world, especially those coming from Latin America and Asia. And just over the summer, Governor Newsom proclaimed June in California to be Immigrant Heritage Month.
And in our study, respondents seemed to repeat this narrative time and again. In fact, many could equate the very fact of migrating, just moving to the US, as the American dream personified. So I remember, for example, one respondent, when we asked them what they thought about the American dream and whether it was alive in California, stated, “You, the American dream, you mean, the one about how immigrants come here?”
Like, that sort of equation was almost automatic At the same time, the signs of contradictions are everywhere as well. And here again, respondents told us readily that immigrants are treated unfairly by employers, that they are discriminated against, that they live in the deepest form of poverty and exploitation in the state. And they could all bring up the image of the farm worker laboring in the sun for hours on end with little rest in conditions that no one should endure.
They knew this. They saw this. They could repeat it.
Yet here again, this concern could be minimized, and in the book, we show a variety of ways that people did this by somehow reasoning sometimes through spatial comparison that, well, at least it’s probably better for immigrants here than if they had stayed in Mexico, or at least the immigrants are not living in some, quote, “third world country.” And perhaps one additional strategy I want to highlight here is one we call bounded blame in the book. Here we saw folks do an intricate dance of telling us how difficult immigrant life was, how exploitive and dangerous the labor was, the lack of social safety net, no real healthcare access.
All of this they understood But they could somehow also turn the story back on immigrants themselves, and even blame them, especially the undocumented, for their own conditions. So we have several respondents, many of whom label themselves as Democrats, as progressives, and certainly never ever MAGA supporters, who told us, who could speak of immigrants as living in a problem and eventually becoming a problem themselves. So they’d say things like undocumented immigrants are not going to get a job here or be able to get a good education.
They have to work under the table. So eventually they’re going to do bad things. They’re going to engage in crime, et cetera.
Statements like this were often. And in many ways, the inequalities that immigrants face could be rationalized, normalized, and somehow blamed on immigrants themselves. And when you can blame others for the problems at hand, it can become much easier to accept the inequalities and live in the world that we do
So we’ll end here with some of the book’s empirical insights. I think that overall, the purpose behind this book was to examine how sensemaking is part and parcel of consent-making, and that there’s so much to be learned by examining how ordinary citizens make sense of inequality, and through that very process, how they tolerate and passively reproduce the conditions they often claim to deplore. And, you know, this book came out a few months ago in the spring
And since then, we’ve given media interviews. And honestly, we’ve had great fun. It’s been great to do it with Tiana and both of us with mics, and it’s wonderful to do this with your friend and sister and co-author.
But honestly, these interviews tend to end with a request. Time and time again, no matter what format, journalists will ask us to somehow sum up something like “the biggest lesson learned or the key takeaway.” Not for the academy, not for scholars, not for the writers, but what are the key lessons for everyday people in the state?
And I think a passage from the end of the book sums this up best for us. We write in the conclusion, “In the end, symbolic gestures of wokeness will not save us. Rattling off the isms and clinging on to California’s exceptionalism, as some of the respondents did, will not make real inequalities more fixable.
It will only serve to justify them, tie a bow around them, and relegate them to the background.” Holding on too fiercely to the narrative that California is somehow beyond racism and xenophobia may make it even harder to address the very real issues in the state. What is clear is that valuing a vague diversity will never in and of itself guarantee the dignity or well-being of racially marginalized groups.
To achieve that would require a long-term commitment to a collective pursuit. We would all have to get more uncomfortable with inequality and human suffering and more comfortable with the idea of redistribution of material goods and the rethinking of what belonging actually means in the state. After all, who truly belongs in places that fashion themselves as progressive but that are defined by enduring forms of racialized inequality?
We can no longer wait to answer this question. The faster we barrel towards a future that continues to erase some, and that builds itself on the back of others, the more we all risk collective losses. So thank you.
We’ll end there.
(applause)
[NICHOLAS VARGAS]
Now we’ll hand it over to Lisa for her remarks.
[LISA GARCÍA BEDOLLA]
Oh.
[NICHOLAS VARGAS]
Oh, I’m sorry. Desmond. Yeah, I’m sorry.
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
Thanks. So let me begin by thanking Sarah for organizing this and wish you an enjoyable time in a freer republic than our, than our own as we descend into dictatorship here. And by congratulating Professors Mora and Paschel on a timely, important, and beautiful book.
From the pages of Normalizing Inequality, one discerns both admiration for And frustration with fellow Californians who reconcile themselves to the massive inequalities haunting the state. This is a state where the doctrine of liberal individualism comes easily, where people see only bright futures for themselves and their children in the golden land, to channel Joan Didion there. This pervasive delusion flourishes even as they witness the social hemorrhaging of their neighbors.
The homeless encampments increase at nearly the rate at which the promise of a middle-class life Recedes. To be clear, these dreamers are awake to the fact that economic and social opportunities have narrowed significantly in their lifetimes. That entering and remaining in the middle class is no longer the predictable destination for college graduates and hard workers.
That destination is now reserved for the exceptional. It seems that many of the men and women Professors Mora and Paschel interviewed are children of those who fled places like Mexico and the Philippines or who came to California to slip their skin Yet neither the migrant nor the Midwesterner seem capable of slipping their thinking, of parting ways with or accepting the threadbare lie that anyone in America can lift themselves out of poverty and into a beautiful, affirming future through the virtues of hope, industriousness, and frugality, three of which they underscore in the book This faith in the redemptive power of liberal individualist virtues only seem to strengthen as the hill between today and tomorrow grows steeper.
Normalizing inequality focused on those who, at the lower end of the middle class, exist between a place of promise and precarity. Those who are always at risk of backsliding, or, as the comedian Dave Chappelle said, “those whose parents were rich enough to be the poorest person in a nice neighborhood.” To remain in the middle class, they make their peace with mixed family households to pay the mortgage, working second and sometimes third jobs, sustaining a gig economy that technology will soon sweep away.
What looks like a strategy for improving their odds of entering or remaining in the middle class is at best a form of work that survived the first rain but will not withstand the flood to come. See Waymo and Uber drivers. This religious imagery is deliberate.
The reflections of the men and women in the book reveal an implacable faith in succeeding despite structural disadvantages they recognize and lament, as Mora just pointed out. Yet they insist they will not only stay afloat, but soar. To their credit, the authors resist treating California’s precarious middle class as victims of false consciousness, though the turn to hegemony near the book’s end risks undercutting that admirable presumption of reason.
The presumption that their subjects are thoughtful, if blindly hopeful. These men and women live in a state where the ethic of striving slips seamlessly into an unconscious social Darwinism, an acceptance that life is a cruel race in which only the fittest survive What is frustrating and what makes the book so compelling and beautiful is that it lets in some clarifying light into this ideological sore called individualism. For the authors, the subject’s simultaneous recognition of massive structural disadvantage and their belief in their own exceptionalism normalizes inequality, meaning it reinforces the structural disadvantages that are rapidly closing the gates of a middle-class life in America.
The book could have easily been titled The Irony of Inequality. The paradox lies in the fact that despite abundant evidence to the contrary These men and women remain wedded to the conviction that they can lift themselves up on the rungs of hope, resilience, industriousness, and frugality. Knowing how to do more with less, as one of them said.
Without knowing the context, one could easily believe these interviews were conducted in the 1880s. The original Gilded Age rather than our own. We have, in essence, gone from manifest destiny to manifest your own destiny.
Mm. Substituting a talking point For a political strategy. So let me wind down with a provocation and a question.
Let me end with the following provocation intended to help cut through the ambiguity of Californians’ response to inequality, their habit of meeting disadvantage with optimism Their faith in one’s ability to defy the gravity of disadvantage might be read as one of the mixed blessings of liberal individualism, the conviction that one can succeed despite all evidence to the contrary. At first glance, this conviction looks like little more than unquestioned faith in liberal individualism, sustained despite a daily walk through the revolving doors of dead-end jobs For Mora and Paschel, this contradiction lies at the heart of the book and the heart of California’s woes. But what if the hopefulness one finds in these interviews, an ethic of self-help and a belief in possibility, an insatiable optimism, amounts instead to an unsentimental realism?
It effectively says, “Given that I have no faith in my country, no faith in America, I look only to myself to improve my condition.” This turning inward to oneself need not arise from a normative commitment to individualism, nor from a latent libertarianism. It may instead arise from a realist conviction that America is an irredeemably unequal place, one where neither white supremacy nor capitalism is in retreat, but to the contrary, thriving and will for decades to come.
These men and women may not bring themselves to voice it, for the depressing belief may lie just below consciousness. But if they hold that America is an irredeemably white supremacist and capitalist nation, a belief many should reasonably hold, I certainly seem to hold that Sadly, this is being videoed, so there goes my career. Then looking to oneself makes sense to me at least.
The odds of altering your own fate, however low, far exceed the odds that a country whose majority elected Donald Trump, not once but twice, will ever enact the transformative policy needed to move us forward rather than backward. What I see in these interviews is a tragic realism, holding a belief that is necessary but regrettable. But we are all optimists in the face of intractable injustice.
Consider, for example, the book’s epilogue, where the authors hope for racial repair, housing for all, better working conditions, and a more dignified life for immigrants. Nothing in the recent history of this country, much less the state, suggests that any of these hopes will be realized. These ends, however admirable, invite the charge of unwarranted optimism Yet many of us in this room had compelling statistical reasons, to use that wonderful language of social science, to have no optimism, to not pursue the paths we pursued.
I am sure from the biographies of Cristina and Tianna, there was little statistical patterns that suggest they should become professors. And yet here we are with them writing transformative work. That optimism might be the only thing that helps us escape the reality of inequality
So the question I would leave with is what is the counterfactual here? Is there a case in which people respond differently, and what outcomes would follow? If one responds to declining opportunity with despair instead of optimism, would that produce an upswing in progressivism?
Or would it devolve into the politics of destruction and despair that has fueled white working class politics in America, the very kind of pessimism that gave us Donald Trump? We might consider the optimism of the oppressed a sort of protective optimism. Think of what Ritz said.
Think of how sad that conclusion is, that he only hopes, he can only take solace, he can only take hope in the fact that things aren’t as bad here as it is elsewhere. That has become our moral horizon as a nation And that to me seems incredibly tragic. Thank you.
[LISA GARCÍA BEDOLLA]
That is a tough act to follow, but I will try. So first, just want to say how grateful I am to be here, and what an honor it is to participate. And to thank Sarah and Corey for having me, and what a privilege it is to have the opportunity to engage the two brilliant minds at this table, who are amazing colleagues and friends and folks
that- I think represent everything that is good about the academy. And so thank you for letting me talk about your work.
I wanna start by just honoring how ambitious this project is. So they didn’t fully describe They interviewed in LA and the Valley, so two very large geographic areas. They looked at four racial groups, and while we may quibble about then how we talk about those, but just doing that is very Difficult.
In addition, they open the book with a really profound personal vulnerability that I think is meaningful for the readers and really a model for understanding your trajectories, your motivations, and how your lived experience really informs the questions that you ask and then how you answer them The book is elegantly framed from a theoretical standpoint and evocatively written. I highly recommend buying it. Y’all should have a little square thing.
We should do better at the marketing, people. Um, they, they, in ca- as you saw, the, the use of quotes is just beautiful in terms of bringing the respondents’ voices to life, and they do a masterful job of weaving in the literature and contextual information to help the reader understand and interpret what their respondents are talking about I think it’s an incredibly important intervention in our understanding of what living in profoundly unequal contexts means for people in their day-to-day lives, and something that I think we don’t look enough at as academics. I also really appreciate that they combine the discussion of economic inequalities with racial dynamics.
This is hugely important. As they allude to, most of the work on economic inequality, and especially in my field of political science, does not talk about race at all. They nod at this.
You know, you talk about this in the intro, but I just want to say how important it is to use that intersectional approach That allows us to see marginalization and privilege simultaneously, and so bravo because that’s really difficult. I think part of why people don’t do this is because it’s actually very difficult to hold so many narrative strands together and tell a coherent story. But as they point out, race, class, and immigration are profoundly entangled, and they managed to delineate and discuss them all with care, thoughtfulness, and grace
So why this book matters, they say it quite eloquently in the opening. Quote, “It is crucial that we pause and reflect on how people make sense of, tolerate, and even consent to our shared and increasingly precarious trajectory. We hope this book illuminates the overlooked commonplace processes and helps us dream of new economic possibilities, racial repair, counter-hegemonic action, and true belonging,” unquote.
They focus on, quote, “How the precarious middle class makes meaning of profound inequities they engage with every day,” unquote, providing us with, quote, “Stories of struggle and fear, as well as optimism,” so it does, “for this place at this moment in history,” unquote. So as they talked about, they lay out these three narrative strategies that their respondents are engaging in, exceptional framing, social comparison, and bounded blame, as the mechanisms that folks use to make meaning of this moment. And they argue that their—the narrative strategies result in folks’ complicit support of the status quo, and allows them to, quote, “Imagine the world as a place where hard work pays off, and where ultimately they will be rewarded for their frugality and patience,” unquote.
And that Quote, “Understanding how individuals make sense of inequality can tell us a great deal about how society reproduces it.” They talk about the arguments about whether people are individualist or structuralist and demonstrate, quite effectively that in fact people use both, but that individualist framings are more common and more powerful, perhaps because they’re less abstract and align with existing narratives around US national identity and the American dream. Individual explanations, they argue, provide agency and simplicity in a way that structural explanations do not.
And then they say, quote, “By unpacking the link between worry and hope, and between anger and resolve, we can better understand how tolerance for the status quo gets reproduced and how inequality comes to be normalized.” Unquote. I’m very intrigued.
One of the things they talk about that I think few do is the use of time. Dez refers to this a little bit, that people in the book frame the present in reference to the past and to the future, and that many talk about and imagine a future where technology saves us, right? That technology’s going to solve all the problems we currently had.
So one of the curiosities I was left with is how these temporal framings varied across respondents’ ages. Did younger respondents think about the past and future differently than those that were older? And I really appreciated you including the reminder from Du Bois that the future will not save us from the present.
That was really beautifully done. But are we surprised, given the current fetishization and commodification of technology, that respondents would rely on sort of the invisible hand of progress, right? to fix things, because that seems to be the powerful force that they see in society.
And that you find people want to see their future as bright, even in, in the face of present difficulties. And I’m feeling very sad for the baby, who is probably like, “What are you talking about, and why am I here?” I’m so sorry, Nene.
Okay. Um. Yeah, maybe.
He’s got his own interpretation. Um- So, but seeing the future as bright, right, allows you to see yourself as a change agent in charge of your own destiny.
Mm-hmm. And within that context, how do we understand the cognitive orientation? I think it was Tiana, you were the one that referred to this with Rich, right?
Those respondents who tend to be Black and brown who are more cynical about the future. Like, how do we think about what happens when people stop believing in the American dream, sort of what Dez referred to. But when you have nothing to fill that space, and we just did a series of focus groups with Latine registered voters in Nevada, half of them said the American Dream is dead.
[NICHOLAS VARGAS]
Mm-hmm.
[LISA GARCÍA BEDOLLA]
And those were really, really hard focus groups to listen to because there was nothing else for them to put their hopes into, and that’s a really hard- Space for people to hold. And so— Mm-hmm. Your folks make a lot of sense within that context.
[NICHOLAS VARGAS]
Mm-hmm.
[LISA GARCÍA BEDOLLA]
Another important contribution you’re making is the focus on geography. I really appreciated thinking about the narratives around characters of certain places, both good and bad, right? Texas, New York, California.
California is a place of possibility. The South is a place of oppressive racism. And that kind of gives California a free pass in some ways, was super interesting, and I think really should be the focus of future work as we think about how to contextualize people’s lived experience in different historical contexts that have histories behind them.
And I think, especially, at least in political science, we decontextualize almost all of our analysis, and you really bring back why that’s so important Um, I appreciate, I mean, Cristina, you already said, so I’ve got, I’ve got your quotes. Um, the limits of symbolic diversity I think is another really important contribution.
You say, quote, “When a person feels accepted, part of something larger than themselves, they can more easily minimize the inequality around them and learn to live with it.” Unquote. Not sure I totally agree with you on that, but it’s an interesting premise.
And then this idea that valuing vague diversity will never guarantee dignity or well-being. I would put it another way. There is no racial justice without a true structural reckoning that intentionally addresses the material consequences that are caused by racial stratification.
I feel like that’s what you’re saying, right? You can’t have racism and profound economic inequality along the lines of race Um, I also wonder if the individualist frame makes redistribution impossible because private goods and wealth belong to the individual and not the collective.
So it serves capitalism in that way because there’s no commons from which to redistribute. It’s only from people, right? And so that’s another, um, way in which that sustains, I think, the status quo My one little critique is there’s some judgment here about these folks, in the sense of sort of saying they should be thinking something different.
And I’m not sure it’s fair to say that they can or should. This could be, as Dez was talking about, a very rational response to a very difficult situation, and just trying to get through, right? To the best of your ability and not be deeply depressed all the time.
You say, quote, “The greater the cultural conditioning to accept the status quo, the less likely we are to feel enraged about it or to engage in open revolt against it,” unquote. And then quote, “By emphasizing individual striving and minimizing structural challenges, they could come to see inequality as normal.” And the reality is that it is normal, right?
It’s not okay, but in our world it is normal. And so, um, you know, you talk about sense-making as a nuanced process, but not evidence of resistance. So I feel like you keep trying to find resistance, um, but it seems like you’re saying that they should be making different sense of things, and I’m not sure that they can People want to have, you say, quote, “an agentic, protagonist-driven approach to describing inequality.”
Are we surprised by that, right? People want to feel like they have power. People want to feel like they’re in charge of their day-to-day life.
People don’t want to feel like their lives are formed by forces they have no control over. And do they place bounded blame on others and emphasize, you talk about how they talk about homelessness as a structural problem, but then the homeless engage in activities that lead them to it. But maybe it’s because they are afraid that There but for the grace of God go I, right?
Like one paycheck, one illness, one… So you have to believe there’s some fault there because otherwise it would be quite difficult to live day to day without that. Yeah, that fear, right?
Mm-hmm. Profound fear about your precarity in the world. I really did appreciate your path forward discussion in the epilogue.
The epilogue is great if you don’t read anything else. But I guess, is it fair to ask individuals to be enraged and organize around what is a collective problem? Is, is the problem actually a failure of collective imagination?
And the difficulty of building a world we’ve never seen, right? What model do they have to work toward? And that’s at least what we’ve heard in a lot of our work, right?
That people want things to be fixed, but they don’t know how. They don’t know what, how we could be different as a society, and that’s real, right? And so that’s the only criticism I would have is a little bit of judgment, right?
Mm-hmm. But, you know, because as you say, retrofitting our lives to fix it seems insurmountable, right, to them. That’s a real issue that I think is the core issue.
And for the ones who, you know, maybe your more critical respondents are actually the canary in the coal mine because they’re experiencing both economic inequality and racial inequality, and that makes the structural elements more difficult to ignore, but I’m not sure that puts them in a position of empowerment or of action, right, on a collective level. And that by focusing on the individual, right, they’re able to Make sense, right? Or at least get through their lived lives.
But the part that I really enjoyed was the last, in the epilogue, you say, quote, “That what we need is deep empathy and connecting our stories of privilege and disadvantage to each other so that we might start to see ourselves and our futures as intertwined.” And so I’m going to end a little more optimistically than Des to say maybe that is what we need, is a better sense of how, in fact, we are all woven together, and the fact that our stories are treated as separate, the sort of white people, Asian people, you know, all the things, poor people, rich people Makes other people into abstractions, right? It makes other people into two-dimensional characters.
And that maybe what we need is a sense of mutual social connection so that we fully understand, you know, the suffering, right, of others and how that intersects with oppression in important ways. And so I’ll end but with, with your words, that people’s structural understandings can become the foundation for quote, “New possibilities, new demands, and new forms of interconnectedness.” And it’s that hope of interconnectedness that I leave the book with, and I just wanna thank you for the work, and for the opportunity to talk about it with you.
[TIANNA PASCHEL]
Thank you so much.
[NICHOLAS VARGAS]
All right.
[TIANNA PASCHEL]
Yeah, you can start. Oh my gosh. Those were such different comments. And I appreciate both of them. What were you gonna say, Lisa?
[LISA GARCÍA BEDOLLA]
Well, I was saying to Dez earlier, if y’all need an example of why AI should not be able to give you a summary of a book and have it be what you would’ve taken from that book, right? We both read the same book.
[TIANNA PASCHEL]
Yeah.
[LISA GARCÍA BEDOLLA]
Very different.
[TIANNA PASCHEL]
Yeah. Right? And we appreciated.
It’s really great. Um, I think, you know, we can’t possibly respond to everything, but I will say that, um, two things. One-
That there are people in this book that don’t follow the general pattern like any work and those are like the canaries in the coal mine. I think we may even use that language. We’re thinking of Lani Guinier’s work
and I think that I think that it’s important to focus on them some, right? To kind of think about alternatives. So tragic realism, I mean, gosh, I was depressed at the end of those comments because I think it’s true that there, there is something Non-redeemable about this place, unredeemable about this place.
And maybe that’s what it is. They know that, right? And so they do turn inward, and at the same time, we have a small group of people within the folks that we interviewed who are collectivists, right?
We have activists that we interviewed. We have folks who do work teaching Hmong farmers in Fresno and the surrounding areas about water, management and resources available to Hmong farmers. Like, we had folks who had other ideas about how to get out of this, right?
I think what we see is a lack of- Of, of any possibilities within formal politics as any kind of solution to anything, and I think that that is the vacuum. And so I do want to say about the judgment part, like we actually…
So we have this preface that’s incredibly vulnerable. Um, that I, I, I made Cristina write. And it’s beautiful what she wrote.
But one of the reasons why, I mean, I think we’re always, you know, like we take Black feminists seriously, and we know that we are always on the page whether we say it or not. Um, but it’s also the case that we knew that it would be judgy, right? And we also knew that we, we sound like these respondents sometimes
And so we wanted, I guess, rather than judgment, though I can see the judgment, I can hear it, we wanted to show everyone that we’re implicated in this. That we’re implicated in it, and so not to say that we have caused the problem, but we’re implicated in the problem. And we also have a tendency to like glamorize and romanticize this place that we call home, that our parents would be like, “Girl, you know this was the dream.”
You know, that’s what my mom would tell me. Like, look, she’s a homeowner. I was born in Flint, Michigan.
I’m a college professor At UC Berkeley, you know? Like, what do you mean, right? And yet there’s a million other things I can tell you about even my own close family’s trajectory that points to the impossibilities of these dreams, you know?
And so I think one of the things we wanna say is not that it’s ordinary people that are causing this inequality or they’re even the main thing to look at in terms of why it persists, but it’s one of the mechanisms through which inequality gets reproduced, and it’s one that we have to take seriously. And I do think rage Is great and powerful, and I think it can change things. Like, if I didn’t, I would not study social movements, you know?
And so I really think there’s a place for it. And I think it is shocking how little rage we saw. Yeah.
Yeah
[LISA GARCÍA BEDOLLA]
Although it is exhausting.
[TIANNA PASCHEL]
It is exhausting.
[G. CRISTINA MORA]
It is. We were writing, we were doing the final edits and the final revisions, and maybe even the proofreading, the summer of ’25. And I was in Los Angeles as I was-
I spent many summers in Los Angeles doing other research, and I was in Los Angeles, and I tend to go back to the neighborhood where I grew up in. I actually sort of rent the same sort of little house about a mile from my grandmother’s house, half a mile from where I went to elementary school. So it’s back in this exact same neighborhood.
And any other year that wasn’t 2025, everyone, the town, the city, LA would be bustling Uh, at 6:00 AM, the, like, Latina Zumba class in the park next door at 6:00 AM would be loud, right? You’d see people waiting for the bus. You’d see.
It’d be hard to find parking in the grocery store. Like, this was the, the sounds of immigrant Latino LA life, but not the summer of 2025, right? I remember as we were sort of thinking the end of the epilogue here, I sat in so much silence because ICE was on the streets in LA kidnapping our neighbors, because the Zumba class was not in session.
no one was going to parks, churches, hospitals Everything was silent. It looked like this beautiful city that I grew up in was a ghost town. And so I, throughout this book, but even last summer, you ask yourself, “Why isn’t everybody on the street?”
If this is the best case scenario, let’s just take immigration. If this is the best place for immigrants, if this is where we have… Why isn’t there more rage?
Why, in the best case scenario, we have these dynamics? So there were some throughout the summer of skirmishes in and out, but here we are now a year later, right? Here we are now.
It feels like a lot of the rage is simmering down, and there are many, many arguments. Fear, and I understand all of those, right? But in general, one sort of way in which we came to the book was thinking, “Why isn’t there more outrage?”
Like, why aren’t people out? And It’s really funny. I love now being a Berkeley professor and being able to finish a conclusion to the book by writing about the footbridge overpass over the 80.
So if you read the conclusion, it starts at, if you’re ever on Interstate 80 going south from University Avenue and you sort of are in your car, you’re going to see a protest You’re going to see a protest on any given Friday afternoon, right? It’s a variety of issues from, you know, the Trump administration to Palestine to any of these issues ’cause people are gathered there. And the thought was, why, why isn’t this sort of much more widespread?
Why aren’t we sort of… And I think that is the ethos that we brought to us, and that was also then the sense. And, you know, with the judgment thing, we were very careful to see our own selves in all of these chapters and to see the stories of our parents, the stories of sort of the people, our neighbors in all of these stories.
These are very easily things that I Probably have told myself in different points in my life. As a teenager trying to make sense of rising homelessness around me, as sort of a mother trying to understand how do I get my kids into a better school, things of the sort. We are implicated in this, and I think Tiana has a wonderful line in there, um That I think it’s in the epilogue of like, this is not a calling out, but a calling in of us to imagine ourselves differently.
And when I thought about, you know, we kept getting from the publisher and from reviewers, so what is this big like policy prescription or what are the, what is this thing that you wanna say at the end? And sociologists are much better at telling you what’s wrong in 30 different ways than in telling you anything about how to fix it. But when we kept thinking about what are different movements that we can talk about I personally kept going back to AB 101 and the ethnic studies in high school movement as a way of thinking through the way that we can sort of cut across and create this empathy across different communities as one of the ways to do it And
[TIANNA PASCHEL]
break down some of the mythologies, right?
[G. CRISTINA MORA]
Exactly. Mm-hmm. Exactly.
If done right, right? Mm-hmm. And I think one of the things that we thought in the book as well is none of these things exist on their own.
They’re powerful because they exist in combination to one another. So optimism isn’t the only thing. Optimism is sustained because there’s compare- because we’re not Texas, right?
Optimism is sustained because we’re not Texas because somehow at the end of the day you can also blame others for their own misfortunes. And in all of these is this sort of collection of things that we are doing that reinforces individualism But I think also when I’m thinking about some of your comments, Lisa, about how do we sort of think about a movement towards a collective new beginning, you know, I can’t help to sort of think that the collective has to also go through the individual.
Like, we as individual people are part of the collective and must see ourselves as part and parcel of that. And I think that one step in doing that is to recognize, even just sort of name, call out the things that we are sort of imagining that we are reproducing in our very lives around this. And so When we can get to the collective, when we can get to really truly, you know, and on with this, you know, I have a, Tiana has an 11-year-old, I have an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old, and she recently switched to a new school For very many reasons.
And in this school, compared to her old school, they have her do the Pledge of Allegiance, and she’s like my child, right? Or she is my child, not like my child. So she comes home after the first day of doing this, and she sort of has conflicting feelings about this, and she…
And yes, I also know this is being filmed and, you know, same thing. She has conflicting feelings about this, and I have to sort of think through what am I going to tell my child on the spot, and we’re actually, like, driving somewhere, maybe to the grocery store And I have to think through what I want to tell her, and I think this is why this matters here, because I sort of said, “Mom, Mommy, like, the idea of America, the idea even of American dream is, you know, is not necessarily a pledging of what we have right now, is not necessarily a pledging to this president, to this form of sort of society that we have right now.”
But it can be a sort of real sort of imagination of what you want us to be. Like, can we actually become that sort of place of true democracy? Can we actually become truly a place of equal opportunity for us?
And I said, “That’s not a state right now, but it is an imagination that we can move towards, and you can… You know, that seems like something that you can actually stand up and want to see and work for.” And it sort of made her feel better, and I was like, a sigh of relief.
But it makes me think that these things That there’s always opportunity to reimagine some of these ideas that we have. And as long as we can remember that we are on a path to creating something, and that on that path to creating something, we have these moments of being uncomfortable and of knowing the ways in which we’ve veered wrong directions or sort of reproduced the opposite of what we need. I think all of those moments of self-reflection are for the better, and they’re for the better for ourselves and for the future and the generations that we are trying to build this next stage for Yeah, on that.
[NICHOLAS VARGAS]
That concludes. Thank you. Thank you. Um, let’s give a round of applause to Social Science Matrix, and the authors, to the panelists. Thank you. Um, and thank you all.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Thank you.
[WOMAN’S VOICE] Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.
