The Sinking American Electorate: African Americans Still In Depression
THEN...
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| NOW! |
Isaiah J. Poole
April 9, 2013
Campaign for America'a Future
When President Obama formally unveils his fiscal 2014 budget on Wednesday ... there will be another scandalous policy decision reflected in that budget... and this one is a sin of omission.
When President Obama formally unveils his fiscal 2014 budget on Wednesday, a lot of the progressive movement focus will be on his plan to cut Social Security benefits through a reduced cost-of-living adjustment called the "chained CPI." But there will be another scandalous policy decision reflected in that budget as well, and this one is a sin of omission: There will not be an all-out effort to address the depression-level unemployment conditions among African Americans.
In that is a convergence of misplaced economic priorities and foolhardy politics. The African-American community is the most solid bloc of what Democracy Corps calls the "rising American electorate." It is the bloc whose unity around Barack Obama propelled him into the White House in 2008 and kept him there in 2012. But among African-American voters there are a significant segment that has complained for years that their votes are taken for granted by the Democratic party, and among no small number of African-American thinkers, very little has happened in the Obama administration to soften their concerns.
The rejoinder to those who assert that African Americans don't have much to show for their votes for the Democratic Party continues to be that "the Republican party is worse." But while the Republican Party remains too tied to America's Jim Crow past to win significant shares of African American votes, Democrats could still lose in 2014 and beyond when for millions of African-American voters "not much" to show for their loyalty becomes "not enough" to show up at the polls.
An Economic Crisis
Friday's job report was the continuation of a decades-long story of the nation still living with the echoes of its racist past. Unemployment among African Americans was measured at 13.3 percent. That's more than one in eight African Americans looking for work but nonetheless out of a job. The white unemployment rate is half that, at 6.7 percent.
The persistence of disproportionate African-American unemployment is a capstone of the "heads-they-win-tails-we-lose" persistence of African Americans getting the worst when the economy declines and the least when the economy grows.
That pattern was repeated during the Great Recession. An essay on the black middle class in the National Urban League's "State of Black America 2012" report contains some of the stark details, concluding that "almost all of the economic gains of the last 30 years have been lost" since late 2007, and worse, "the ladders of opportunity for reaching the black middle class are disappearing."
In 2010, the median household income for African Americans was 30 percent less than the median income of white households 30 years ago. African-American household income fell more than 2.5 times farther than white household income during the Great Recession, 7.7 percent versus 2.9 percent. Home ownership rates also fell for African Americans at roughly double the rates of whites, essentially wiping out the gains in home ownership since 2000. Today, more than a quarter of African Americans live below the poverty line, compared to about 10 percent of white people.
A newly released report by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies also underscores the severity of economic conditions among African Americans. That report focused on black unemployment rates in 25 states with large African-American populations starting when the economy was at its peak in 2006. "In 2006, prior to the recession, the unemployment rate in the black community was already at recession levels in every one of the 25 states we studied, from 8.3% in Virginia to 19.2% in Michigan, and in 20 of the 25 states the unemployment rate for African Americans was above 10%," the report said. "In 2011, more than two years after the economic recovery began, unemployment rates for African Americans across most age, gender and education categories remained significantly higher than their pre-recession rates."
In fact, the jobless rate for African Americans between the ages of 20 and 24 in these states was 29.5 percent in 2011, two years after the recession had supposedly ended.
"If the national unemployment rate was anywhere near these percentages, we'd be in crisis emergency mode," said Ralph B. Everett, president of the Joint Center, during a discussion of the report last week.
Instead, the "crisis" that has the attention of the Washington political class is the federal debt, and even the Obama administration has now caught some of the fever. This fixation dictates that the federal government not be able to devote the resources necessary to address this crisis. While members of the "Fix the Debt" crowd - overwhelmingly white and disengaged from the day-to-day struggles of African-American communities - pleads concern about the debt that will be handed down to their children, no one speaks of the consequences that the continuing economic depression experienced by millions of African-American households will have on the next generation.
There is no question what majorities of African-American voters consider to be the real threat to their long-term economic interests - it is not the federal deficit, but the inaction in Washington driven by the conservative fixation on the deficit. In a Democracy Corps focus group on the economic priorities of the "rising America electorate," almost three out of four African Americans agreed with a statement that said that while reducing the deficit is important, we must "invest in education, protect retirement security, and reduce health care costs in a balanced way" in order to "invest in growth that creates good middle class jobs." Fewer than one in five agreed with the argument used by congressional Republicans that "our biggest problem is that we spend too much" and that "we must cut spending, including Medicare and Social Security" while protecting the wealthy from tax increases.
The statement that won overwhelming African-American support in the Democracy Corps survey happens to parallel the three issues that were listed as top priorities of African Americans surveyed in the group: retirement benefits, affordable education and affordable health care. It is a list largely borne out of the day-to-day experiences of African-American households. Of those who were surveyed, 48 percent had cut back on purchases at the grocery store, 25 percent had seen their wages or benefits at work reduced, 22 percent had lost a job, 32 percent had moved in with family or had family move in with them to save money, 13 percent had fallen behind in their mortgage and 11 had been affected by cuts to unemployment benefits.
The Agenda We Need
The Democracy Corps survey also picked up something that should be very worrying to the Democratic Party. In a generic "who would you vote for if the election were held today" matchup, African-American support for Democrats fell from 90 percent at the beginning of the year to 85 percent in March. And only 71 percent of African Americans surveyed said they were "almost certain to vote" in the 2014 elections after having voted in 2012, compared to 78 percent of white voters. Yes, it is a relatively small sample in one poll and campaigning for the first of the midterm elections is still at least eight months away.
But it pays to remember 2010, when African Americans were only 10 percent of the electorate, down from 13 percent in 2008. According to the Joint Center for Political Studies, 16 of the 60 seats Democrats lost in the House that year were in districts in which at least 10 percent of the electorate was African American.
Turnout rebounded strongly in 2012, perhaps as much in reaction against the Republican Party and Republican-backed voter suppression efforts as it was a desire to keep President Obama in the White House and increase Democratic Party power in Congress.
What could energize African-American turnout in 2014 that was absent in 2010? The answer is clear: Candidates speaking directly to the economic depression in African-American communities with a plan to rebuild the rungs on the ladder of upward mobility, including putting people back to work at good jobs; quality, affordable education; accessible health care and retirement security.
To be fair, President Obama has frequently touted a jobs program that would put additional money into infrastructure spending and schools, and he has in the past championed the kind of green energy investments that can provide a broad range of new job opportunities in high-unemployment communities. He has promised more of the same in the upcoming budget proposal. But President Obama's proposals have never been proportional to the need, trimmed by the political constraints imposed by an obstructionist Republican opposition and timid Democratic allies.
That opposition in the immediate term certainly renders out of reach anything on the scale of the Congressional Progressive Caucus infrastructure plan, which would not only add 7 million jobs in the first year but would produce a sizable share of those jobs in communities and job categories where African Americans are strongly represented. But President Obama and Democratic party elected officials should want to be seen as leading the fight for economic justice and equality for African Americans, hastening the day when economic disparities rooted in America's legacy of racism are eradicated once and for all. Accepting the limits imposed by the inheritors of the Confederate legacy may appear politically expedient, but it is the way of moral and electoral bankruptcy.
-----------------------------
How America Built the Racial Wealth Gap
By: Lawrence D. Bobo
Posted: April 9, 2013
Straight Up: Will leaders ever step up to fix the mess that social policy and our checkered past created?
(
The Root)
-- The cynic might say that except for a small number of exceptional
figures like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey or Michael Jordan, America is
not much interested in truly full inclusion for African Americans. Any
fair assessment must concede that the black road to full citizenship in
America has been marked by a lot of rough patches and more than a few
major detours, and in some important respects remains an incomplete
journey.
To begin with, one need only think about the most recent era in this
journey. Black communities and leadership are deeply preoccupied, even
today, with trying to find a path out of unacceptably high rates of
poverty and unemployment, as well as unacceptably high rates of school
dropouts and poor achievement. The civil rights and black activist
communities must, tragically, also remain mobilized to defend an
effective right to vote in many places, including before an apparently
skeptical U.S. Supreme Court. And, of course, the scourges of racial
profiling, arbitrary stop-and-frisk policies, mass incarceration and an
utterly failed drug war could be added to this list of major detours and
bad stretches still remaining on the path to full black citizenship.
None of these, however, would be the top exhibit in the cynic's case
for bemoaning the persistently marginalized status of blacks in America.
No. As a number of recent reports have underscored, the ultimate marker
of the hard road that blacks have traveled in America is the wealth
gap. When pioneering sociologists Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro first
reshaped the academic and policymaking landscape with their book
Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality
in 1995, they identified a white-to-black wealth gap, a ratio of
roughly 11-to-1. For every dollar of wealth in white hands, blacks had a
mere 10 cents.
Two recent reports make it clear that the gap has significantly
worsened, not improved, since that time. In the wake of the Great
Recession, a
Pew Research Center report
showed that the white-to-black wealth gap rose from a dispiriting
figure of 11-to-1 in 2004 to 20-to-1 in 2009. In concrete dollars the
report showed that blacks lost 53 percent of their wealth as a result of
the Great Recession, falling from a median net worth of $12,124 in 2005
to only $5,677 in 2009. For whites, the comparable figures are $134,992
to $113,149.
The greater proportionate wealth decline for blacks is largely
attributable to the fact that a much greater share of black wealth
involves homes, many of which lost considerable value in the recession. A
more recent
report
(pdf) out of Brandeis University, based on a representative sample of
families who have been followed for 25 years, shows that the 1984
black-white wealth gap of $85,070 tripled to a whopping $236,500!
Why does it matter? Social scientists agree that wealth is a key
factor in the ability of individuals or families to maintain a
particular standard of living and to accomplish important goals in life.
Wealth is a material cushion in case of job loss or serious illness in a
household. It can provide a foundation for sending children to college,
launching a business or making other forward-looking investments (e.g.,
saving for retirement).
In an economy in which fewer and fewer people have traditional
pensions, in which we are all likely to undergo more job changes and
therefore potential spates of unemployment and in which higher education
and training are essential to job-market competitiveness, having the
financial wherewithal to support these adaptations is increasingly
essential. A far higher fraction of whites than blacks possess the
resources needed to navigate these challenges.
Now, here's the rub: Both discriminatory social policy and everyday
racial discrimination played the major roles in creating today's
gargantuan wealth disparities between blacks and whites. And I'm not
even mainly referring to slavery here, though it, too, is part of the
story. Savings rates, family structure, even educational attainment
amount to small elements of the story. The real issue here is that at
numerous points, social policy in the U.S. either openly acted against
or short-changed African Americans while privileging whites.
Old-age insurance and Social Security initially excluded most African
Americans. Agricultural and domestic workers, the great bulk of the
black workforce when these New Deal-era policies were first enacted,
found themselves expressly sidelined. Likewise, access to unemployment
insurance and even to GI Bill benefits was turned over to local
administration and discretion, allowing bias at many state and local
jurisdictions to severely curtail the provision of coverage to African
Americans when introduced.
Characterizing many of the New Deal-era social policies that built
today's robust American middle class, distinguished political scientist
Ira Katznelson wrote in his important book
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
that " ... Most Blacks were left out. The damage to racial equity
caused by each program was immense. Taken together the effects of these
public laws were devastating."
No arena of policy bias was perhaps more significant with regard to
wealth accumulation than how social policy curtailed black access to
home ownership and encouraged residential segregation. The tale has been
recounted in many places, including in Oliver and Shapiro's
award-winning book.
Of more immediate relevance today is that residential segregation
helped pave the way for targeted predatory subprime lending in minority
communities. Indeed, recent scholarly research shows that segregation
was a key factor in the extent of predatory lending and risk of home
loss and foreclosure in response to the recession. Analyzing patterns in
the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas between 2006 and 2008,
sociologists Jacob Rugh and Douglas Massey
found
(pdf) that the higher "black segregation a metropolitan area exhibits,
the higher the number and rate of foreclosures it experiences."
This history is known, but the real remedies are scarcely voiced,
much less seriously discussed and debated, in the public arena. Politics
is always a complicated and messy thing, to be sure. Even when handled
well, it involves the art of the possible, not the utopian or ideal. But
people must not misunderstand or become complicit in a distorted take
on their own history and circumstances. America and American social
policy built the black-white wealth gap.
I am not suggesting that the policy agenda or remedies here are
simple and obvious. What I am saying it that there is an unambiguous
moral obligation here that cannot be denied, yet in the current social
context it can hardly be given political voice.
The great scholar, activist and writer W.E.B. Du Bois understood the tragedy of this circumstance all too well. Writing in the
Souls of Black Folk
in 1903, he characterized the depth of disprivilege that blacks faced.
"He felt his poverty," Du Bois wrote, "without a cent, without land,
tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed,
skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a
land of dollars is the very bottom of hardship." Indeed.
What sense are we to make of the contrast of conspicuous success on
the one hand -- witness Obama, Winfrey and Jordan -- and the abysmal
depth of the fundamental black-white wealth divide on the other hand? I
think the cynic would say that America has found it necessary to make a
viable path to success for those extraordinary talents of any race to
rise. But inasmuch as the numbers don't lie, America never intends to do
right by those it has wronged and marginalized for generation after
generation. I don't want to be cynical. Yet it seems that for some,
membership has its enduring disprivileges!
Lawrence D. Bobo is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.
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Friday's job report was the continuation of a decades-long story of the nation still living with the echoes of its racist past. Unemployment among African Americans was measured at 13.3 percent. That's more than one in eight African Americans looking for work but nonetheless out of a job. The white unemployment rate is half that, at 6.7 percent.
"If the national unemployment rate was anywhere near these percentages, we'd be in crisis emergency mode," said Ralph B. Everett, president of the Joint Center, during a discussion of the report last week.
That opposition in the immediate term certainly renders out of reach anything on the scale of the Congressional Progressive Caucus infrastructure plan, which would not only add 7 million jobs in the first year but would produce a sizable share of those jobs in communities and job categories where African Americans are strongly represented. But President Obama and Democratic party elected officials should want to be seen as leading the fight for economic justice and equality for African Americans, hastening the day when economic disparities rooted in America's legacy of racism are eradicated once and for all. Accepting the limits imposed by the inheritors of the Confederate legacy may appear politically expedient, but it is the way of moral and electoral bankruptcy.
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