Aunt Chloe, in brief, now feels herself the equal of anyone. The Civil War was a huge milestone in the history of equality in the United States. In 1868, three years after the end of the War, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing "due process of law" and "equal protection of the laws" to United States citizens.

However, the history of equality is also troubling. The 14th Amendment, for example, excluded "Indians not taxed" and all women from key electoral processes. Today, we must ask "What is the condition of our equality?" This question entails another, "How do we measure equality?" Do we compare the condition of individuals? Or of racial and ethnic groups? As we measure equality, do we look at equality of opportunity, what people have when they begin, or at equality of outcomes, what people have when they end up? Do we wish to focus on social and economic equality? Or, do we wish to expand our focus to include culture? Do we wish to say that all cultures and sub-cultures are equal in their values and accomplishments? If not, how do we evaluate them?

Michael Walzer asks us to confront a dangerous reality: social inequality in the United States has declined, but economic inequality has increased. In presenting this issue for discussion, he looks at the question of economic classes in the United States today.

All American citizens are equal before the law (even if they can't hire equally good lawyers), and they are supposed to be equal also in their opportunities to pursue the careers they choose, to shape their own lives. Beyond that, inequality is an accepted feature of American society. It is only acceptable, however, if the inequalities are dispersed across all the groups that constitute the society, so that we can at least imagine individual men and women doing the best they can. Concentrated in equalities, dividing Americans according to race or religion or ethnicity or gender, suggest a program or pattern of discrimination and neglect, cutting off individual opportunity.

By and large, inequality in the United States, in the past and still today, is concentrated and patterned: certain groups are more unequal than others; their members travel a harder road. But the pattern is complex, and some of our troubles today derive not so much from its existence as from its internal structure. Briefly put, social inequality has declined in the last half-century, while economic inequality has increased. And so we have more assertive groups with more limited resources-a formula likely to produce noise, tumult, violence, and rancor.

Social inequality describes the experience of collective powerlessness that produces fear, deference, silence, and "invisibility." Most adult members of minority groups will remember a time whey they and their fellows were more fearful, more deferential, more often silent, far less visible than they are today. Whatever else "multiculturalism" means, it signals an end (which we ought to welcome) to minority timidity. But the claims made in its name are unlikely to be realized in practice without strong minority organizations capable of mobilizing resources. And that mobilization is more and more difficult in a time of widening income inequality and declining prospects for individual advance.

Most importantly, the wealth of our cities has migrated to the suburbs, leaving behind a population, racially marked, without a strong economic base, whose access to political office and patronage does them little good. They are materially weak, morally unreconciled to their weakness-ripe for exploitation by political demagogues and religious cults. There is no way to help them, there is no way for them to help themselves, without challenging the contemporary pattern of inequality.