Birmingham wasn’t wrong to say that making people work for so little that they can’t meet their needs is redolent of the Jim Crow economic order: the twenty-one states that have kept their minimum wages at the lowest possible level ($7.25) have some of the largest African American populations in the country. Most people of color are operating in a poverty-wage economy; nationwide, the majority of African Americans and Latinos earn less than $15 an hour. But white people are still suffering from that same economy, and in great numbers.
