News Release

By DAVID WILLIAMSON
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL—In American life, "equality has become submerged in a growing torrent of disadvantage" that threatens the nation’s longstanding and proper emphasis on democracy, equal dignity, justice and opportunity, the dean of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law believes.

"Lincoln thought that the ‘central idea of America’ was that the weak would gradually be made stronger and ultimately all would have an equal chance," wrote Gene Nichol, also the Burton Craige Professor of Law at UNC. "Barbara Jordan put it similarly: ‘government has an obligation to actively seek to remove those obstacles that block individual achievement – obstacles emanating from race, sex and economic condition.’ That obligation is ‘indigenous to the American ideal.’

"But what was ‘central’ for Lincoln and ‘indigenous’ to Jordan is alien to us," Nichol wrote. "We have come to think that a regime of economic apartheid is unremarkable, unavoidable and untroubling."

Nichol described the current widening economic disparities of American life in a book that NewSouth Books recently published and titled Where We Stand: Voices of Southern Dissent. He and other Southern lawyers and legal scholars, historians, activists and theologians contributed essays about their concerns.

Much evidence of growing inequality exists, Nichol said. For two years in a row, both the poverty rate and the number of U.S. residents living in poverty rose, according to a spring 2004 U.S. Census Bureau report.

"Almost 35 million Americans (12.1 percent) made less money last year than the extraordinarily modest federal poverty threshold ($18,500 for a family of four)," he wrote. "Almost one in five of our children live in wrenching poverty (compared to one in 12 in most of Europe)."

At 24 percent and 22 percent, respectively, the figures were even worse for black and Hispanic children, Nichol said.

"The report could have added that we also apparently lead the world in wealth disparity," he said. "The concentration of resources in those at the top of the economic ladder has reached an historic high. The top 10 percent earn 40 percent of our national income. The top 1 percent holds 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.

"Vast privilege has accumulated in the hands of a relative elite that pays itself proportionately more, and pays its workers proportionately less, than the other major industrial democracies."

In North Carolina, the median family income is almost $5,000 below the national average now, he said, and the state was one of 10 in which the median income fell from the previous year. About one in seven Tar Heels live in official poverty. In Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi, that number is almost one in five.

"We produce (in the South) more poverty and more politicians who are untroubled by it than the rest of the nation," Nichol said. "Once each year, whether the economy is booming or sputtering, we learn that the wealthiest nation in human history countenances shockingly high levels of poverty."

More than 43 million Americans have no health care, he said.

"The comparison with other industrial nations is particularly galling," Nichol said. "We stand alone among the major advanced nations in failing to provide universal coverage – as if we were forced to bolster our economic competitiveness on the backs of the most vulnerable.

"We spend more per capita on health care than any country in the world. But we also leave more of our fellows in the shadows outside the system. And we do this despite Dr. King’s warning that, "of all inequities, inequality in health care is the most inhuman."

Also, because schools are financed locally, poverty and inferior education go hand in hand, Nichol wrote.

"We countenance rich and poor public schools," he said. "Not just private schools: rich and poor public schools. As if it were thought acceptable to treat some of our children as second- or third-class citizens."

Unequal educational opportunity extends through college, Nichol added.

"Twenty years ago, children from parents in the top (economic) quarter were four times more likely to get a college degree than those at the bottom. Now it’s 10. America now likely has the most unequal educational system in the industrial world."

The U.S. legal system is possibly the most inegalitarian of all, Nichol said.

"Huge percentages of us are priced out, mystified out, of the voluntary use of the civil justice system," he wrote. "Study after study finds that about 80 percent of the legal need of the poor and near poor goes unmet.

"Less than one percent of our total national expenditure for lawyers goes toward services for the poor. Legal aid budgets are capped at amounts making effective representation of the poor a statistical impossibility."

Typically, Nichol said, the impoverished are "left without representation on the most crushing problems of human life – divorce, child custody, domestic violence, housing and subsistence. But we seem unbothered by the knowledge.

"We carve ‘equal justice under the law’ on our courthouse walls. The sentiment stops there."

Now too, he wrote, political office and access to office holders have become effectively off limits to everyone except the wealthy and those with access to wealth.

"Those lacking resources fall beyond official purview," Nichol said. "And our economic system comes to swamp our political one. A system of government in which those who seek certain policies are allowed to give essentially unlimited amounts of money to those who make the policies may be called many things. But it can’t be called democratic. And it can’t be called fair."

Stunning economic disparities in the U.S. "sweep aside our rhetorical claims to equal citizenship," he wrote. "We grant the greatest opportunities to those who are already blessed. We leave standing -- unmolested -- virtually impenetrable barriers to the progress of the disadvantaged."

Americans ignore the "growing, silent marriage of privilege and privation" at the "cost of our national mission" and at "the cost of our best selves," Nichol said.

Among contributors to Where We Stand is Daniel H. Pollitt, professor emeritus of law at UNC, who described recent and, in some cases, unprecedented threats to civil liberties in the United States. Former President Jimmy Carter wrote the foreword.

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Note: Nichol can be reached at (919) 962-4417 (w), or gnichol@email.unc.edu.

School of Law contact: Audrey Ward, (919) 962-4125

News Services contact: David Williamson, (919) 962-8596