Having children in California is “becoming a white privilege,” an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle argued.
“Our data indicates that the very act of starting a family is becoming a white privilege here in California. The first batches of 2020 census data affirm this, with California reporting its slowest population increase since 1900 — growth that has historically been led by households of color,” the op-ed stated, basing its findings on research from Oakland’s Insight Center and the Center for Women’s Welfare at the University of Washington.
The authors wrote that child care costs have become the highest expense in the majority of California’s counties, including seeing an 81% increase in child care costs since 2014 in San Francisco county.
“Black, Native and Latinx households with no children are more likely to be struggling financially than white households with two children. While households of color make up 59% of all California households, they constitute 73% of those living on the edge of economic insecurity. In Marin County, the percentage of Black households grappling to cover basic expenses increased from 56% in 2018 to 95% in 2021,” the authors wrote.
The opinion piece added that 72% of single mothers are more likely to be paid a salary that does not keep up with a basic cost of living, while that number sits at 57% for single fathers.
“It is clear that the cost of living in California is outpacing the wages being paid to people of color and women.”
But the authors argued that a solution to this problem rests on “government investments.”
“Government investments clearly must be made in housing, child care, utilities and other public goods. It is past time to bolster our safety net by treating child care as a public good, creating a robust and equitable public care infrastructure and trusting people with unconditional cash.”
“As California emerges from COVID-19 pandemic and its related recession, relief efforts must not only address present crises, but also work to quell long simmering racial and gender economic inequities. We can’t continue to allow the color of people’s skin to be the determining factor in whether they can afford to start a family,” the piece concluded.
The handful of reactions to the opinion piece on social media have so far been negative, with people decrying “sick wokeness” in the Bay Area and calling the piece “racist.”
