Portside

In April every year, that pesky gender wage gap jumps to front-page news again as we mark Equal Pay Day. The date signifies the day when American women, on average, have finally earned as much as the average white American man did the past year. Last week is an equally important and depressing milestone: Black Women’s Equal Pay Day.

The middle class, once the backbone of a strong American society, has been broken, beaten down, pushed further and further toward poverty levels. Here are five well-documented ways that this has happened.