Berkeleyside35%
How Californians cope with the state’s staggering inequality 26%
By Felicia Mello50% https:47% www.berkeleyside.org48% #43% schema42% person43% bae4ae9b59531080e39fd4cdfb24c79750%
7/10/2026, 12:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 12 faulty reasoning types, including Fundamental Attribution Error, In-Group Bias, and Framing Effect, with Indoctrination as the most egregious example at 3.6% saturation with 110 hits. Analysis detected 680 faulty-reasoning hits from 3,096 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 38.8% and a BS Rank of 26% (10,632 of 14,328 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 74.20% of the article peer group.
UC Berkeley students sleep in the Occupy Cal campsite in Sproul Plaza in November 2011, during protests in opposition to banks and cuts to higher education.
Credit:AP/Beck Diefenbach
California is perhaps the most economically unequal state in the country, boasting the highest poverty rate when living costs are taken into account as well as, according to Forbes, the highest number of billionaires .
Yet it retains a reputation as a progressive bastion where equality is valued.
UC Berkeley sociology professors G.
Cristina Mora and Tianna Paschel face this contradiction head on in their new book, “ Normalizing Inequality .”
It seeks to understand how Californians cope with the cognitive dissonance of seeing homeless encampments multiply while the state’s tech, finance and entertainment industries drive stratospheric wealth for a lucky few.
How do the state’s residents explain inequality to themselves, and what does that mean for our collective future?
It’s a question that’s especially relevant as Californians prepare to vote this year on a hotly debated billionaire tax that asks the rich to pay more to solve the state’s social problems.
Mora and Paschel surveyed more than 6,000 Californians and conducted in-depth interviews with 136 people from Southern California and the Central Valley, members of a diverse, precariously middle-class group they dub “the barely getting by.”
Examining inequality across three dimensions — class, race and immigration status — they argue that the state’s own mystique can prevent its inhabitants from seeing the issue clearly.
Berkeleyside spoke with the two authors about how their own upbringings informed their research, the three coping strategies Californians use when confronting inequality and how the mythology of the California dream can be a powerful brake on political action.
Their comments have been edited for length and clarity.
UC Berkeley sociology professors, and close friends, G.
Cristina Mora (left) and Tianna Paschel hold up their recently published book “Normalizing Inequality.”
Credit: Brandon Sánchez Mejia/UC Berkeley
You two were friends for years before embarking on this book together.
Mora: We both were up for the same jobs, and it was incredibly rare to have two women of color being interviewed in the top departments across the country.
At one of those universities, they ended up giving us both an offer at the same time, and the chair of that department was like, “I think you guys would really like each other.”
Paschel: As California-raised folks who spent time outside of California, we’ve reflected a lot on this place and what felt unique about it, or why we sometimes had tendencies to romanticize it.
And then, as we come back as grownups, and later as moms, some of that kind of golden-colored glasses wears off a bit once you start to peel underneath.
Could you say more about each of your backgrounds growing up in pretty different communities, but both working-class communities in California, and how that helped inspire the book?
“Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide” by G.
Cristina Mora and Tianna S.
Paschel.
Credit: Brandon Sánchez Mejia/UC Berkeley
Mora : In one of the earlier conversations we had, I remember Tianna suggesting that California was some sort of promised land.
Her family had left Flint, Michigan, to come here.
California was seen by many [during] the African American migration to the West as a place that was different from the South and from the entrenched inequalities and racism of the North.
I grew up in Los Angeles.
My middle school was during the years of [the anti-immigrant] Proposition 187 — that sort of, “You don’t belong here,” Pete Wilson running ads California.
And so it has always stood in direct contradiction to the way that even my [immigrant] parents would talk about why we’re here.
My parents would say, you know, “Your dad slept on a dirt floor, he only went to second grade, and we had no opportunities there.”
And yet, I was also coming of age in this time when there were walkouts, there was all of this [tension].
And so there was a way in which I grew up with a totally different understanding of California from my parents.
Paschel: I think being dizzy from the contradictions is probably a shared experience that we’ve had.
We both have experienced a lot of social mobility, and our parents would probably narrate their coming here as part of a kind of dreamscape, as like a success of some kind, even though we know that underneath that it’s much more complex.
There is this kind of reality of economic mobility that we have achieved, and yet, within our families, outside of our families, we see the limitations and the kind of foreclosed possibilities, even if we were the exact same people existing in the next generation.
We’re living through a similar moment at the national level that California lived through in the 1990s, where the rhetoric around immigration has gotten so extreme and there’s this racist backlash .
How does this current moment frame what you set out to do in the book, and did your thinking about the book evolve at all under this new administration?
Mora: In these moments, it is a lot easier for us in California to kind of look away from the problems of this place, the extreme inequalities, because it’s easy to see ourselves as exceptional, vis a vis the politics at the national level [and] the legislation coming out of Southern states, Arizona and elsewhere.
There is this kind of reality of economic mobility that we have achieved, and yet, within our families, outside of our families, we see the limitations and the kind of foreclosed possibilities.” — Tianna Paschel
It does feel true that California is a sanctuary state, and it looks different from the national level, and politicians here are saying different things.
It is also true that many immigrant families live in some of the most exploited, difficult conditions, that many communities still lack safe running water, that farmworkers in some conditions have very low life expectancies.
Los Angeles Unified School District is one of the most segregated school districts in the United States.
The difference between what a citizen earns and what an undocumented immigrant earns is the highest [of any state].
So we’re trying to think, OK, this is a setup that exists.
How are people making sense of it?
And is there anything we can learn about how people are making sense of this that tells us about how these conditions are reproduced, even in a state that says it doesn’t like these conditions, where it’s not supposed to happen?
Who did you end up interviewing for the book, and how did you make that choice?
Paschel: We like to refer to them as the barely making it.
So these are, like, upper working class, lower middle class folks.
These are folks who, if they were in other states, might be homeowners, but in California cannot be.
These are social workers, professionals, small business owners, teachers, who often have some other kind of hustle in order to make it here.
They rely on their grown children to make their rent.
It is a lot easier for us in California to kind of look away from the problems of this place, the extreme inequalities, because it’s easy to see ourselves as exceptional.” — G.
Cristina Mora
We decided to focus on the middle because we felt like sociologists had covered how inequality ravishes the lives of the impoverished themselves.
We have economists focusing on the higher end of the equation and the accumulation of wealth.
There’s a whole set of people in between that we wanted to focus on in part because we wanted to think about the ways that we’re implicated in this story of inequality, that we all are part of it.
These are people that have sort of steady employment, but they’re not really feeling stable.
They’re in this middle class squeeze.
Many of them recognize that if they took their salary and moved to Kansas, they’d have a totally different lifestyle.
And so they’re here, and they’re trying to make sense of being here and create economic futures here, and then also telling themselves a story about why they’re here.
So, big picture, what did you learn about how this group of Californians views inequality?
Mora: We learned that they understand the structural kind of factors, that the system could be rigged, they understand that history and policymaking absolutely shape the patterns of inequality that they see around them.
At the same time, they often fall back on more individualist narratives about their own kind of possibilities in this place, like if they work hard enough, if they are prudent, if they have certain ethics, that they will be able to make it despite it all.
We also learned that place-based narratives about California are really, really powerful ingredients that help them feel OK about being here.
The ideas of this place as a diverse sanctuary, a place of multiracial promise, a land of plenty, are ingredients to these narratives that help them live what otherwise might be not justifiable or not livable.
There are three different narrative strategies that people rely on, that help them to minimize these structural arguments of inequality, put them to the background and foreground a more positive understanding of California.
And this, we think, is an essential part of how people make sense of living here, and also helps to reproduce the broader pattern.
So in some ways, inequality doesn’t just exist because we don’t have a better tax code or because companies don’t do more or government officials don’t do more.
It also exists because we buy into it in these smaller cultural ways.
Can you share more about those three narrative strategies?
Mora: One is a sort of exceptional framing: You can be a social pessimist, but an individual optimist.
Like, “I’m gonna make it” or “People that I know are gonna make it.”
These structural conditions can exist, but I’m going to beat the odds.
A second way is spatial comparison: “These things suck in California, but at least we’re not Texas.”
So there might be some racial discrimination, some difficulties, but at least we’re not Texas.
Immigrants can be exploited and have a hard time, but at least they’re not living in Mexico.
At least they’re not in Vietnam.
The difficulties of California can be minimized through comparison, even if people have never been to Red America, Texas, Vietnam, Philippines, whatever that control is.
The ideas of this place as a diverse sanctuary, a place of multiracial promise, a land of plenty, are ingredients to these narratives that help them live what otherwise might be not justifiable or not livable.” — Mora
And the third way, we call it bounded blame.
There are two groups of Californians that really get the brunt of the individualist discourse, the homeless and the undocumented.
[People] can acknowledge that economic inequality is real and it creates difficulties so that some people might fall into homelessness.
But the unhoused also don’t make it better for themselves, or they do drugs or have mental difficulties, and same thing with the undocumented.
And so we saw that these two groups sort of sit outside any kind of woke politics, and often this individualizing discourse creeps in and allows us to blame them for their conditions.
Where do these strategies come from?
Paschel: There’s a perpetual kind of frontierism that seems to be part of the landscape here.
Half of Californians are either immigrants themselves or have at least one parent that’s an immigrant.
And that doesn’t even include migrants, like my family, from Michigan.
The majority of this place are people who have come to this place looking for something.
And so it’s not that California is exactly what people are saying it is, it’s more like California has to be that because people have sacrificed so much to be here.
And so in terms of where it comes from, it comes from migrant dreams.
It comes from immigrant dreams.
This is a state that markets itself as a dreamland.
There is the American dream, and then at the sub-national level, there is the California dream.
It’s very rare to hear other states talk about themselves as places of dreams and not specific language.
We market it the most, and maybe the best.
So these strategies come from a need to have a positive perspective on one’s own future, to survive and to be OK with the decisions you’ve made.
And one of those decisions is to stay here, to know about these other places where you might be able to live differently, where a degree matters for living a solidly middle class life, but that you are not going there.
And you will be scraping your money together to pay rent next month.
It’s almost, like, a strategy of self soothing that we see.
You examined inequality across three different dimensions: class, race and immigration status .
Were there differences in how the people you talked to were thinking about inequality across these different dimensions?
Paschel: Our final chapter is about how people see the future of California.
And that’s where we really saw a distinction between our Black and Latino respondents and everyone else.
Everybody, in accordance with some positive way of thinking about the place you live in, says California’s going to be booming.
California’s the leader of the future, it is the technological leader, the cultural leader, the agricultural leader, the economic powerhouse.
But then we also saw our Black respondents [saying], “This can be a boom that makes a great place for everybody.”
And then saying, “But I wonder to what extent Black folks are still going to be here?”
It’s very rare to hear other states talk about themselves as places of dreams and not specific language.
We market it the most, and maybe the best.” — Paschel
The future is where these contradictions come to a head and where the veneer of California starts to wear off, especially for Black and Latino respondents.
The narratives start to diverge, like “Yeah, they’re building all these skyscrapers for who?
Not for me, not for us.”
There is a kind of existential fear there.
How do you two see the future?
What can we learn from your book about the choices the state can make going forward?
Mora: The ethnic studies in high school movement, we think, could do a good job at helping [people] see the way different groups have experienced this exact same place, and open our eyes to our interconnected experiences of economic and racial inequality.
Students from Students Together Opposing Prejudice (STOP), a group that helped establish an ethnic studies requirement at Berkeley High, pose for a yearbook photo in 1991.
Credit: Berkeley High
Nothing is going to happen in California unless we have affordable housing.
When you ask about the effects immigrants have in California, no matter where people live, they talk about farmworkers.
And we think that’s a great place to start in thinking about the conditions of farmworkers and the set of policies we would need to help them, not to survive, but to become more fully part of California.
Paschel: The book is kind of like when someone is in denial and you grab both of their shoulders and you just shake them, and you’re like, “Girl, no.”
That is kind of the spirit of the book.
Like, this is not normal.
We have kind of normalized it, but there’s nothing natural, there’s nothing inevitable, there’s nothing dignified about the way that we have structured our society, and we cannot rely on the comfort of this place being special.
There’s a New York Times labor reporter, Noam Scheiber, who has this book called “Mutiny.”
The argument he’s making is that people with college degrees have seen that their degree is no longer a ticket to a stable life, and that’s fueling more economic populism among educated people across the country.
Do you think this experience of being stuck and barely making it is leading to more of that kind of mobilization for people in California?
Or are these narrative strategies you describe getting in the way of folks either taking action or drawing some political conclusions from their circumstances?
Mora: It’s part of what is helping us stay a little bit numb.
It’s not the only thing.
I mean, certainly social media silos, the feeling of overwhelm, fake news, it’s all part of it.
But this is the thing that we are creating ourselves, right?
What do then we need to start telling ourselves to believe another world is possible?
And before we get to that step, we need to snap out of this step.
So the mutiny thing — maybe.
But it will not come if people are sticking to this very strong individualist narrative that’s incredibly powerful in California, where the American individualist ethos meets the frontier.
The book is kind of like when someone is in denial and you grab both of their shoulders and you just shake them, and you’re like, ‘Girl, no.’” — Paschel
Whether you agree that things are going well here or not, what we all agree on is that this is the place where you’re supposed to dream, right?
And we’re saying that this has infiltrated so much into the way we think about our lives, that more of us are not on the streets, that it is a barrier to us getting to that creative space of possibility.
So there’s going to be more work than us just, like, not being able to buy that condo with a college education.
So, the California dream is keeping us asleep?
Paschel: Yeah, the California dream is keeping us asleep, for sure.
Berkeleyside partners with the nonprofit newsroom Open Campus on higher education coverage.
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Felicia Mello covers UC Berkeley and other East Bay colleges as Berkeleyside’s senior reporter for higher education.
She works in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on strengthening...
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