Americans have a tough time talking about race. White Americans often hear a discussion of race as an accusation, even when it's not. Black Americans often hear speculation on whether the racial climate is improving as an attempt to deny their pain, and historic suffering. Latinos often wonder, and justifiably so, where they fit in the American conversation on race.
The black-white divide in the United States goes back to the arrival of blacks from Africa and whites from Europe in the 17th century, long before the United States was a gleam in the eye of Dutch traders, English religious refugees, and others. In the Spanish part of the hemisphere a centuries-long encounter with native peoples was already well under way. The parts of the Spanish Empire that eventually became parts of the United States... what is now California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Florida did not become a home of plantation slavery in the way the British colonies did.
Different experiences. Different histories. Different roads to living in the United States in 2010. Today, Black, White, and Latino families of the same income have very different levels of wealth. The three groups have different levels of educational attainment, life savings, hourly wages, access to medical care, and different life expectancies.
Here's where it gets hard. We know about the different life chances of people of different racial backgrounds, but it's hard to sort out exactly why the outcomes are so different. Of course, chances are that a kid starts out in a different socio-economic position depending on his racial and ethnic background, and starting out in a more advantageous spot has an effect on the outcome. But why do the differences where these various Americans start out persist in generation after generation? If there's been government intervention from time to time to blunt the effects of historic discrimination, how come it hasn't succeeded in narrowing the gaps in American life much more than we've seen so far?
This has been a tough decade to sort out the different ways different Americans get ahead, since so many Americans of every race have been downwardly mobile for so much of the decade. The burst of the housing bubble took down the weak and the strong, people who had used their houses like ATMs and people who had just managed to squeeze through the front door with a low down payment and an exotic mortgage.
People who haven't done too badly, in relative terms, are in no mood to hear about the persistent gaps between rich and poor, or native-born whites and everyone else. But the differences are real, and while many white families have suffered terribly during this time, many of the economic indicators have dropped even more drastically among other Americans. Unemployment and underemployment have shot up among black and brown Americans. Even in the smaller home owning base, foreclosures and bankruptcies have crippled family balance sheets.
What the panelists in the recent edition of HITN's Destination Casa Blanca wrestled with through the hour is how much racial bias and structural barriers to success in American society played a role in these differential outcomes, and whether the government, at any level, had a role to play in closing those gaps.
We didn't succeed in solving those problems, but we did succeed in having a good conversation about them, and I recommend the excerpts you can find at www.hitn.tv/dcb
When testers from federal agencies and fair housing groups head out to the offices of mortgage brokers across the country they find even with similar assets, income, and credit histories, black and brown borrowers are offered mortgages with less preferred repayment terms and higher rates of interest. Are the troubled repayment histories more common in black and brown residential areas the result of less favorable mortgages, or the less favorable mortgages the result of the more frequently troubled repayment histories. The ability to use real estate as a performing asset has lifted millions of white families into middle class comfort. The inability to use real estate that way represents the single largest difference in the wealth accumulation when compared with other families of different racial and ethnic background but the same level of income.
Those cheaper, less likely to appreciate houses more frequently owned by minority families, also command lower real estate tax payments, making capital spending in minority communities harder to sustain. In school districts where the lion's share of school funding comes from real estate taxes, the lack of assessed value of the family home perversely lowers the chances for well-funded schools. It's harder to imagine a more direct correlation between the socio-economic status of today's families and the ability of their own children to move up the American economic ladder.
Lastly, widespread housing segregation makes it harder for Americans of different races to socialize in an unremarkable, organic way. That lack of exposure makes it less likely for all Americans to understand in any deep way the challenges, pressures, and joys of families unlike their own. The extent to which we have become strangers to each other, unlikely to know other Americans outside our own socio-economic stratum makes sympathy for the other even harder to achieve. Year after year, public opinion researchers ask Americans about race and opportunity, and in recent years wide, yawning gaps between blacks, Latinos, and whites have appeared when all are asked questions about continuing prejudice, continuing difficulty, and whether opportunity is open to all in America.
While black and brown Americans report that prejudice is still a factor in their lives, whites are less and less aware of it by the month. A majority of the eighty million blacks and Latinos in America may find that racial prejudice still plays a role in their lives, but the white majority thinks prejudice is less of a factor all the time. Exhibit A: President Barack Obama. If this country was still all that bad when it came to racial bias, how would the country have elected a black president?
Short answer: White Americans didn't.
Longer answer: John McCain won a majority among white voters, at about the same percentage as Ronald Reagan did in 1980. Reagan trounced Jimmy Carter. McCain lost by millions of votes to President Obama. The difference? The country has changed. The electorate is far from being as white as it was in 1980, and as the Obama campaign demonstrated, you can now lose the white vote as long as you do well enough among other Americans, and find yourself taking the oath of office on the West Front of the Capitol Building. That illustration of the changing face of America can only make a certain part of America even less sympathetic, as black and brown Americans continue to suffer from shorter lives, more frequent infant death, joblessness, lack of medical coverage, and higher poverty levels that the white citizens with whom they share this country. Electing Barack Obama was a big deal... but giving one black man a job, even a very important job, is hard to leverage against the terrifying losses of this past decade.
Follow Ray Suarez on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DestinationCB
meanwhile at goldman sachs let's see what blankfein takes home in BONUSES
9/21/10
Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, took home $125 million in cash bonuses over the past decade, Bloomberg reports.
Shareholders, however, haven't been quite so lucky.
Even though Goldman has outperformed its peers over Blankfein's tenure, Bloomberg points out that one-year certificates of deposit and 10-year Treasury bonds purchased in September 2000 beat Goldman's total return over the same period. The logic behind lavish CEO pay depends on maximizing returns for shareholders, but Bloomberg notes that the S&P 500 Financials Index, which includes 80 companies, has dropped 49 percent in the past ten years.
Blankfein, who paid $26 million in 2008 for a condo in the Robert Stern-designed 15 Central Park West building in Manhattan, and who last month sold his previous apartment at 941 Park Avenue for $12.15 million...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/21/lloyd-blankfein-compensation_n_733132.html
As such, if you look at the questions from a strictly racial perspective, the outcomes seem not to add up, but when you factor in the class angle as primary, and race as the secondary factors, then the data might fit a bit better.
As I said in my book, "WHITEFOLKS", racism is basically "color-coded" classism. But that does not negate the fact that many of the "white" poor and middle-class who've been given perks in the white supremacist world, don't accept their privileges without working too hard to spread them to their "unwhite" cohorts.
Right?
http://buythecover.com
August 5, 2009 --
GOLDMAN Sachs boss Lloyd Blankfein has warned his employees to avoid high-profile spending, as The Post reported -- but his wife evidently didn't get the memo.
Laura Blankfein and her friend Susan Friedman, wife of another Goldman honcho, Richard Friedman, caused a huge scene at Super Saturday in the Hamptons last weekend when they arrived at the event before the noon start time and balked at waiting in line with the other ticket-holders.
"Their behavior was obnoxious. They were screaming," said one witness. Blankfein said she wouldn't wait with "people who spend less money than me."
Another observer said the women were so impatient, it was as if they were waiting on line for a kidney transplant instead of a charitable designer clothing sale.
Friedman shouted at the event organizer, "You have lost so much money because of this . . . Why should we be treated like the $650 donors?"
Sources said Blankfein and Friedman had bought tables with blocks of tickets going for $833 apiece...
No word on how much of their husbands' money they spent. But Lloyd Blankfein -- wary of bad publicity over the big bonuses he and his colleagues expect to collect at year's end -- has called for an end to conspicuous consumption.
http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/item_VddIjS4IenJXTwP5ihUg1M;jsessionid=7CC04C7BCBC5C02A5310B6F92FA4B852
we are at that time now!
the neocon wealthy elite own this country and just executed the greatest redistribution of wealth in history
UPWARD to the wealthiest elite
their lawyers and bought politicians cement it in place as Edward J. Kane describes
we are all hamsters on neocon wheels
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/business/economy/03gret.html?_r=1
Due to this, the United States already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis. Since the crisis, which has hit the average worker much harder than CEOs, the gap between the top one percent and the remaining 99% of the US population has grown to a record high. The economic top one percent of the population now owns over 70% of all financial assets, an all time record.
As mentioned before, just look at the first full year of the crisis when workers lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k. During the same time period, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans increased by $30 billion, bringing their total combined wealth to $1.57 trillion, which is more than the combined net worth of 50% of the US population. Just to make this point clear, 400 people have more wealth than 155 million people combined.
So while US workers are now working more hours and have become dramatically more productive and profitable, our pay is actually declining and all the dramatic increases in wealth are going straight into the pockets of the Economic Elite.
If our income had kept pace with compensation distribution rates established in the early 1970s, we would all be making at least three times as much as we are currently making. How different would your life be if you were making $120,000 a year, instead of $40,000?
So it should come as no surprise to see that we now have the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world and the highest inequality of wealth in our nation's history. The backbone of America, a hard working middle class that has made our country a world leader, has been devastated.
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/145705
You say:
"What the panelists in the recent edition of HITN's Destination Casa Blanca wrestled with through the hour is how much racial bias and structural barriers to success in American society played a role in these differential outcomes, and whether the government, at any level, had a role to play in closing those gaps."
I assume this is a rhetorical question. Anyone who knows even the rudimentary facts of American history knows how "the government" was the leading perpetrator in initiating the very idea of white supremacy and racial separation. So, of course, the government has not only a role to play in doing the damage it caused, but the leading role.
But I'm glad you emphasized the fact that if it had been left up to "white" America, Barack Obama would be, at best, still the junior senator from Illinois. It's time for "blacks", "browns", real "white" American patriots and every other "color" of US to finally turn this country into the land of equality, freedom and justice it has always professed itself to be.
I just hope "white" Hispanics like you don't fall for the "honorary white" ploy that the GOGs (Gods of Greed) have used to sucker "white" ethnics into betraying America's ideals to join the White Club.
http://buythecover.com