How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide

G. Cristina Mora and Tianna S. Paschel, Center for Research on Social Change faculty affiliates, co-authored a new book, Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide, published by Russell Sage Foundation. The sociologists illuminate how middle-class Californians perceive and come to accept the inequalities that surround them. They find that Californians are keenly aware of the systemic causes of inequality—they recognize policies engineered to benefit the wealthy, and they acknowledge how structural racism makes it hard for some groups to get ahead—yet they consistently minimize these forces. 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.