The Sun Magazine Interview: Separate and Unequal -Chuck Collins on How Wealth Inequality Divides Us

Chuck Collins may seem an unlikely activist. Born into the wealthiest 1 percent, he has dedicated himself to helping relieve the suffering of those at the very bottom of the 99 percent. He was raised in an affluent suburb of Detroit and attended elite private schools. He played tennis at country clubs and took trips to exotic destinations. He had a loving family, and his great-grandfather was Oscar Mayer, a German immigrant who cofounded the hot-dog empire. When Collins was sixteen, his father informed him that he was going to inherit part of the Mayer-family fortune as a trust fund. Collins’s reaction was complicated: he was relieved he’d have enough money to pay for college, but it also felt unfair.

Collins had first become aware of inequality in 1967, when Detroit’s black residents rioted against police brutality and racial injustice. He was transfixed by the violent images on TV and in the newspaper: buildings burning, armored tanks in the streets, and people dying just twenty miles from his home. It was obvious to the seven-year-old that other people’s lives were very different from his. He told his mother it wasn’t right. She agreed.

This youthful sense of right and wrong stayed with him, influenced by his parents’ Christian faith, with its emphasis on helping those less fortunate. After high school, unlike all of his classmates, he skipped college. Instead he went to live in working-class Worcester, Massachusetts, where he volunteered in a soup kitchen and became an organizer for public-housing tenants. As he continued to work in disadvantaged communities, he was struck by the generosity he often witnessed. People came together and shared their burdens in a way he hadn’t experienced in his own life. It hit him that he’d been “disconnected from a really important part of what it means to be human.”

Collins did eventually draw from that trust fund to go to college, but by the time he was twenty-six, he’d seen enough to decide that his inheritance wasn’t helping him — and it could be helping others. So he made the momentous decision to give it away — half a million dollars — to social-justice organizations. As he explained to his parents, he wanted to “pass the wealth on.” His father was concerned: What if something terrible happened, like an illness or an accident? Would he rely on our “terrible” social safety net? Yes, Collins replied, and now he’d have a stake in improving the system. As fate would have it, just a few months later the house Collins was living in caught on fire, and everything he owned was destroyed. But when a dozen of his new friends came over to give him food and help clean up, he knew he’d be OK.

Of course rejecting his financial legacy didn’t erase all of Collins’s advantages in life. He says much of privilege is “hardwired” and doesn’t depend on what you have in the bank. Privilege is about multigenerational access to good schools and doctors, healthy environments and social connections. And if you’re white, you’ve benefited from a long, often unacknowledged history of government subsidies. “I don’t hate the 1 percent,” Collins says, “but I deeply hate the ways extreme inequality wounds people’s lives, fuels racial divisions, rips our communities apart, and destroys our ecological home.” Though he understands why people are angry at the super-wealthy, he believes that a movement for real change needs to be built on empathy. He insists that, whether rich or poor, “we are all dependent and interdependent.”

Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank where he directs the program on Inequality and the Common Good. He also coedits the website inequality.org. He lives with his daughter, his partner, and his partner’s children in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, where he works to support the local economy. His many books include Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes (with Bill Gates Sr.); Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality & Insecurity (with Felice Yeskel); and his latest, Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good. Collins also cowrote, with Mary Wright, The Moral Measure of the Economy, which explores the economy through Catholic social teachings.

Collins spent five hours talking with me by phone for this interview. He is warm, funny, and passionate about dismantling economic inequality. He told me that he often feels overwhelmed by what’s going on in the world. But then he gets back to work, raising awareness of the monolithic, rigged system that is undermining our democracy.

 CHUCK COLLINS

Wildhood: Why should we be concerned about inequality? How does it hurt me for someone else to make a hundred or even a thousand times as much money as I do?

Collins: Extreme inequality of wealth, income, and opportunity is warping everything we care about. It takes away the sense that we’re all in the same boat. It screws up communities. You can see it in the housing market, where wealthy buyers bid up prices, making homes unaffordable for everyone else. It creates economic volatility even for the rich, which is one reason why the wealthy cling to their wealth. We live in a society where even people who don’t appear to be at risk can lose it all, and the fear of that happening makes them greedy and shortsighted.

Inequality rips communities apart. U.S. Census data show that, over the last four decades, high- and low-income families have become increasingly unlikely to live near one another. Mixed-income neighborhoods are becoming rarer. As we divide into affluent and poor enclaves, people’s sense that they share a common destiny withers, replaced by fear, misunderstanding, and class and racial antagonisms. Public investments in health infrastructure and social opportunity often decline.

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW: https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/506/separate-and-unequal