Essay on Wealth Inequality in the US
requirements: making a clear connection between the graph and the reading, a valid quote from the reading, and an explanation of how the two connect. In putting what you see in the graph into words, you can address the wealth growth of the top 1% or the limited, and sometimes lack of, growth of the bottom 50%, or the growth of the top 10%, or whatever puts into words your interpretation of what the graph represents that you can connect to with one of the readings.
In “From Black Power to Hip Hop: Discussing Race, Policing, and the Fourth Amendment Through the ‘War On’ Paradigm,” Donald Tibbs argues that those born of Black parents who struggled during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and gained political and social consciousness in the 1980s and 1990s witnessed “a society in which changes in the political economy have reduced employment and education opportunities forever [and] state restructuring abetted rather than ameliorated poverty” (54). The reduction in opportunities and failure to ameliorate poverty is evidenced by the graph showing that the top 1 percent of the American society have seen their wealth increased by 300 percent since 1989 while the bottom 50 percent saw a relative decline in their economic means between 1989 and 2019. The wealth of the bottom 50 percent even plummeted between 1999 and 2009 while the wealth of the top 1 percent and the next 9 and 40 percent improved in varying degrees.
