REGISTER

Please join us on Wednesday, September 9th from 4-5:30pm for 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 will be joined in conversation by Desmond Jagmohan, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, and Lisa García Bedolla, Professor of Education at UC Berkeley. Nicholas Vargas, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, will moderate. 

A reception will follow the event.

This event is 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 Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.

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.

Read a Berkeley News article about the book.

Panelists

G. Cristina Mora completed her B.A. 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 in 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, Making Hispanics, was published in 2014 by the University of Chicago Press and provides a socio-historical account of the rise of the “Hispanic/Latino” panethnic 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 (SREM) from the American Sociological Association. Her work has also been the subject of various national media segments in venues like the Atlantic, the New Yorker, NPR, and Latino USA.

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 Chancellors Award for Advancing Equity and Excellence, and she led campus’ first social-science cluster hire focused on “Latinos and Democracy.” In 2023 she received a million-dollar federal grant from the Department of Education to establish a “Latino Social Science Pipeline” initiative at UC Berkeley.

 

Tianna Paschel is an 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 various edited volumes. She is 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 the Law and Society Association and the Barrington Moore Book Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Professor Paschel is also the co-editor of Afro-Latin@s in Movement, an interdisciplinary volume that explores transnationalism and blackness in the Americas and Co-PI of the Mellon-funded Black Studies Collaboratory.

 

Lisa García Bedolla is Berkeley’s Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Hitchcock Dean of 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 ethnorace, gender, class, geography, et cetera. She believes an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach is critical to recognizing the complexity of the contemporary United States. She has used a variety of social science methods – in-depth interviewing, survey research, field experiments, and geographic information systems (GIS), among others – to shed light on these questions.

She has published six books and dozens of research articles, earning five national book awards and numerous other awards. She has 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 has 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 García Bedolla earned her PhD in political science from Yale University and her BA in Latin American Studies and Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley.

 

Desmond Jagmohan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in the history of American and African American political thought, American intellectual history, and the history of political thought. His research concerns political and moral agency under conditions of extreme oppression. He is completing his first book, Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington’s Tragic Realism (under contract with Princeton University Press), which draws on several years of archival research to recover Washington as a virtue theorist of the oppressed. His second book will read Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative as a work of moral and political theory that grounds the wrong of slavery in property rights in another person.  His work has been published in Journal of Politics, Political Theory, Annual Review of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Contemporary Political Theory, and Boston Review. 

Professor Jagmohan is the winner of several awards and fellowships: The APSA Best Dissertation Award from the Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section (2015), a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University (2018), and  a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and Hellman Fellowship at UC, Berkeley. Prior to arriving at Berkeley, he was Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where he delivered the 2018 Constitution Day Lecture and was awarded the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Preceptorship in the University Center for Human Values. He holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Cornell University.

 

Nicholas Vargas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. His scholarship examines Latinx racialization: how Latinx people are identified, perceived, and positioned within U.S. racial hierarchies, and how these processes intersect with immigration ideologies, state institutions, and higher education inequality. A central aim of his work is to clarify how racial categories and racial meaning are produced in everyday life and policy contexts, and how those dynamics shape public attitudes. Methodologically, Vargas draws on survey research, administrative and demographic data, and mixed-method strategies that connect macro-level structures to micro-level meaning-making. His work bridges ethnic studies, sociology, and education research, and he frequently collaborates with student researchers to develop data-rich projects that speak to pressing public questions and contribute to ongoing debates in Latino/Latinx social science. 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. He also serves as the Program Coordinator of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and co-leads UC Berkeley’s Latinxs and Democracy Cluster.  

 

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