But there are ways that inequality between different races and/or different social classes can be enforced by a society's way of doing things. And good people's unquestioning acceptance of "the way things are."
A young city mother, who quit high school and has a baby, or a newly-divorced young city mother, would dearly love to get a job and get off welfare. But the decent-paying jobs she's qualified for are in the suburbs and she doesn't have a car, can't afford a car. And for years the Powers That Be have conspired to keep bus lines - or Metro Rail - from running from the city to the suburbs: a way for them to manipulate Who Gets the Jobs. No car - no job. No public transportation going to the jobs: no job. Many, many men and women can't get out of poverty because of lack of a car and lack of an adequate system of transportation.
Many young people would prefer job training to going to colleges. Many school systems have shut down adequate vocational training programs. Why?
Our Welfare system needs a huge overhaul of its rules and regulations so that it encourages and helps people to use the system temporarily and doesn't encourage a Welfare Mentality of learned helplessness. But we don't overhaul the System. Some cynics suggest that this way we keep a lot of people out of the job market.
Labor unions - which the Churches have always defended because they were created to defend the rights and safety of workers - are being quietly dismantled because some have grown corrupt. Reform the Unions, don't do away with them. Otherwise we leave our workers to the mercy of Corporate Gods.
Institutional housing for the severely mentally ill barely exists, so they inhabit our jails and our underpasses.
We praise - and rightly - the generosity shown to the poor at Christmas. But the poor need more than food, clothing, and Christmas gifts handed to them. They need the dignity of jobs. They need the dignity of home ownership. They need the dignity of appreciating the value of education. Above all, they need courageous people to teach them and show them that these are the ways to achieve dignity, that they have the right to dignity because they are the children of God.
God has bestowed on all of us the dignity of His boundless and unfailing love. We ignore the inherent dignity of all God's children at our spiritual peril. We are called to preach and to teach others about their dignity as children of God, not relegate them to stereotypes in our minds.
Pope Francis says powerfully "Just as the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say 'thou shalt not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not an item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of inequality.
"Can we continue to stand by," he says," when food is thrown away when people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today, everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape." (from "The Joy of the Gospel" or "Evangelii Gaudium," the Pope's Apostolic Exhortation to all.)
Our country organizes quite well when it decides to wage war. How well can we organize when we choose to wage peace and a battle against inequality?