By Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammed
To judge from most of the commentary on the Gates-Crowley affair, you would think that a "black elite" has gotten dangerously out of hand. First Gates (Cambridge, Yale, Harvard) showed insufficient deference to Crowley, then Obama (Occidental, Harvard) piled on to accuse the police of having acted "stupidly." Was this "the end of white America" which the Atlantic had warned of in its January/February cover story? Or had the injuries of class -- working class in Crowley's case -- finally trumped the grievances of race?
Left out of the ensuing tangle of commentary on race and class has been the increasing impoverishment -- or, we should say, re-impoverishment -- of African Americans as a group. In fact, the most salient and lasting effect of the current recession may turn out to be the decimation of the black middle class. According to a study by Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy, 33 percent of the black middle class was already in danger of falling out of the middle class at the start of the recession. Gates and Obama, along with Oprah and Cosby, will no doubt remain in place, but millions of the black equivalents of Officer Crowley -- from factory workers to bank tellers and white collar managers -- are sliding down toward destitution.
For African Americans -- and to a large extent, Latinos -- the recession is over. It occurred between 2000 and 2007, as black employment decreased by 2.4 percent and incomes declined by 2.9 percent. During the seven-year long black recession, one third of black children lived in poverty and black unemployment -- even among college graduates -- consistently ran at about twice the level of white unemployment. That was the black recession. What's happening now is a depression.
Black unemployment is now at 14.7 percent, compared to 8.7 for whites. In New York City, black unemployment has been rising four times as fast as that of whites. Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, estimates that 40 percent of African Americans will have experienced unemployment or underemployment by 2010, and this will increase child poverty from one-third of African American children to slightly over half. No one can entirely explain the extraordinary rate of job loss among African Americans, though factors may include the relative concentration of blacks in the hard-hit retail and manufacturing sectors, as well as the lesser seniority of blacks in better-paying, white collar, positions.
But one thing is certain: The longstanding racial "wealth gap" makes African Americans particularly vulnerable to poverty when job loss strikes. In 1998, the net worth of white households on average was $100,700 higher than that of African Americans. By 2007, this gap had increased to $142,600. The Survey of Consumer Finances, which is supported by the Federal Reserve Board, collects this data every three years -- and every time it has been collected, the racial wealth gap has widened. To put it another way: in 2004, for every dollar of wealth held by the typical white family, the African American family had only one 12 cents. In 2007, it had exactly a dime. So when an African American breadwinner loses a job, there are usually no savings to fall back on, no well-heeled parents to hit up, no retirement accounts to raid.
All this comes on top of the highly racially skewed subprime mortgage calamity. After decades of being denied mortgages on racial grounds, African Americans made a tempting market for bubble-crazed lenders like Countrywide, with the result that high income blacks were almost twice as likely as low income white to receive high interest subprime loans. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, Latinos will end up losing between $75 billion and $98 billion in home-value wealth from subprime loans, while blacks will lose between $71 billion and $92 billion. United for a Fair Economy has called this family net-worth catastrophe the "greatest loss of wealth for people of color in modern U.S. history."
Yet in the depths of this African American depression, some commentators, black as well as white, are still obsessing about the supposed cultural deficiencies of the black community. In a December op-ed in the Washington Post, Kay Hymowitz blamed black economic woes on the fact that 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers, not noticing that the white two-parent family has actually declined at a faster rate than the black two-parent family. The share of black children living in a single parent home increased by 155 percent between 1960 to 2006, while the share of white children living in single parent homes increased by a staggering 229 percent.
Just last month on NPR, commentator Juan Williams dismissed the NAACP by saying that more up-to-date and relevant groups focus on "people who have taken advantage of integration and opportunities for education, employment, versus those who seem caught in generational cycles of poverty," which he went on to characterize by drug use and crime. The fact that there is an ongoing recession disproportionately affecting the African American middle class -- and brought on by Wall Street greed rather than "ghetto" values -- seems to have eluded him.
We don't need any more moralizing or glib analyses of class and race that could have just as well been made in the 70s. The recession is changing everything. It's redrawing the class contours of America in ways that will leave us more polarized than ever, and, yes, profoundly hurting the erstwhile white middle and working classes. But the depression being experienced by people of color threatens to do something on an entirely different scale, and that is to eliminate the black middle class.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the president of United Professionals and author, most recently, of This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation.
Dedrick Muhammad is a Senior Organizer and Research Associate of the Institute for Policy Studies.
Rev. Al Sharpton: Greatest Racial Wealth Gap in Decades; Time for Immediate Action
It is desperate times for many people.
It is my belief that the sub-prime mortgage debacle was a planned and orchestrated travesty. I believe this because of the wealth detruction in the Black and Hispanic communities that your article projects!
Just a few weeks ago, I read an article about a bank that is being sued, I believe, for targeting the Black community with sub-prime loans. Current and former workers at this bank described, graphically, how the scheme worked. Large bonuses were paid to its loan officials to get Blacks to take sub-prime loans. If lies had to be told about their credit worthiness, by the bank, no problem. If the clients' applications had to be forged by the lenders, no problem, again! How many financial institutions are guilty of the same thing? I wonder? Also, why are so many mortgage companies going bankrupt?
Were they that stupid to risk their financial solvency on sub-prime mortgages? Or, is there more to it than that? Meaning this. Why would mortgage company executives not have been aware that this "scheme" (as I call it); would one day unravel? Inquiring minds want to know?
This assault on the the Black working class is by DESIGN.
Lee Atwater, Reagan's RNC Chairman, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater :
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can't say “ni**er”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni**er, ni**er.
The wealth gap between the top 1% and the middles class is what has been widening by some 100 times in the last two decades. Yes racially, most of the super rich are white, THAT"S why the averages show "average" whites are doing less bad than "average" blacks.
I have no doubt it IS worse for blacks, but perhaps not as much as you think.
Further, I really think we need to stopping finding differences between we oppressed.
The Plutocracy has gotten 24T over 2 years, while the rest of us have gotten 500B over ten years.
We need to stick together.
They never caught on that the movement was about their rights. too. Others were supposed to wait, to be patient. Things would change. Others knew better, though and continued to press. All they ever wanted was support for what was theirs now, by law. Those who had chose not to recognize that dynamic, they got caught up in the "race" of things.
If one could be denied one's rights and the majority chose silence on the matter, and if one is denied those rights because of one's race, then it is all about race and nothing else, really. The simple fact of the matter is that no matter how it gets twisted, it falls back into the same place as that is all it was ever about anyway.
Yes, we need to stick together. In my book for all the obvious reasons, it is 7 -1 that it ain't gonna happen.
However, no matter how you slice it, most of these people want to move back to the Jim Crow Era (or even worse, slavery) even if it is to their own detriment. That is why the fight for the rights of minorities will always be a 2-tier fight -- One for the common good and one for the selective discrimination against Blacks and Hispanics.
The Black middle class and working class is seldem talked about. It seems that all the media care about are thugs on end of the spectrum and Obama / Oprah / Cosby on the other end.
There are plenty of Black Regular Joes in America and we matter just as much as anyone else.
The fate of the black middle class is distressing as was that of the poor middle class, revealed by Ehrenreich in books written not that many years ago after she had lived among them.
Time maybe that this smart and sympathetic lady is included in the councils in Washington that determine public economic policy.
she was at 90 k
now she cannot find employment any where near this amount actually keep telling her she is over qualified
now her unemployment is about to run out, and everything is in jeapordy
all her hard work thru divorce being a successful single mom with a good kid, and what was her reward for being a dilligent trust worthy professional.
thanks but no thanks,a nd now there are no ned jobs that will pay you enuff to maintain your home nor you almost paid for car....................yes it is the destruction of the black middle class, you were holding on by your finger nails, and society has some big ol clippers just your size
on the way down black males lead the way with the highest unemployment numbers then black women who is also the last hired, blacks,....
yes this would be a depression for me if i had not had sum good fortune. I am depressed but employed, i am depressed because of stagnation in advancement etcetc...
no raise no bonus, no promotion, cannot post out internally, they want you to work 10 tiems as hard and then they all ow the no degreed lady off the phones to work on special projects while you toil in doldrum, they uuse my knowledge for their advantage, but give you none of the credit recognition nor compensation you deserve......and if you complain too much, you are onthe list....
First, Former President Pan's war on the middle class and poor wasn't just limited to one ethnic or racial group. And some liberals say that Republicans discriminate. I guess that shows just how wrong they are.
Second, admittedly, the greatest successes to date in the war have been on certain fronts (inner cities, etc). But the genius of Former President Pan is that the economic wreckage he has left will gradually erode the status of the rest of the middle class and poor probably over the next 10 to 20 years despite which party controls the Presidency or the Congress.