I fear there’s a misunderstanding here. The subtitle of the 20-page study to which you linked, “The Decline of the White Working Class,” is so poorly phrased as to mislead readers about what the report actually says.
The report you shared tracks five indicators of well-being — income, wealth, homeownership, marriage/partnership, health — and how they’ve been changing for different racial groups.
The report is very clear throughout that it is discussing racial groups’ “share” of wealth relative to each other. They calculate an “average” person from each racial group; the relative wealth of these fictitious people would be equal if they each had the same amount of money. This phenomenon appears to be a zero-sum game because, by definition, for one person to be relatively richer is for the other to be relatively poorer. The report therefore uses the word “decline” — but this is an unfortunate word choice. In the real world, according to the report’s data, no group’s average income, wealth, or likelihood of homeownership declined. Everyone got richer. You can see it in the tables on pages 7–8. While racial groups had slight changes in their rates of marriage/cohabitation and self-reported good health — some up, some down (see page 8) — these estimated declines are nearly within the statistical margin of error (per page 16), so I don’t see any change noteworthy enough to merit announcing any group’s “decline.”
There is also a pretty clear statement on page 11 of the report: Even now, in 2016, although trends have been marching slowly toward equality, “white working class families [still] had nine times more wealth than their black counterparts.” That’s still not equal. At all. And I don’t know why white people would be anxious about the decline of their relative privilege. First of all, there shouldn’t be factor-of-nine wealth gap among working class people based on race; moreover, since there regrettably is such a gap, I don’t know why the nine-times-richer group should be anxious about imagining their nonexistent “decline.” If either group is going to be anxious, and if I had to choose a focus, I would rather sympathize with the justifiable anxiety of the poorer group.
As you said in your final paragraph: “We need to stop thinking of politics as a zero sum game, where one group needs to lose in order for the other one to win.” Agreed. So, the bank’s report should not have framed racial comparisons as a “decline” for any group. We can mathematically compare anything whatsoever, but some such comparisons cause us to focus on the (ethically) wrong things and are politically damaging. A relative decline is not necessarily an absolute decline. In other words, I should worry about my own bank account, and not enviously compare myself to others.
More specifically: Per the report, white people got richer between 1989 and 2016. Yes, these numbers were adjusted for inflation. White people’s median income increased nearly 7 percent and net worth increased 21 percent. (See the table on page 7.) Unfortunately, white people also became slightly less likely to claim they are in good health. White people became slightly more likely to be homeowners and slightly less likely to be living with a spouse/partner. (See the table on page 8.)
When this reported data about white people is examined on its own, there’s no clear decline over time. The only “decline” is in white people’s imagination when they compare themselves against other racial groups and notice that other people are catching up with them. There is no reason to make an interracial comparison to determine whether white people themselves are doing OK. The reason to make the comparison is to determine that the racial gap is finally narrowing, as it should. If this increasing racial equality seems unfair or hurtful to white people despite it not actually hurting them, it is for a reason I cannot ascertain, and let me go out on a limb and make the assumption that the “reason” is probably invalid.
