White Recession, Black Depression

Barbara Ehrenreich published her fourth and final NYT column on poverty in the U.S. this week, raising the perennial issue of racial economic inequality. (Our previous coverage of Ehrenreich's pieces are here, here, and here.)  From 2000 to 2007, African-American employment and incomes fell almost 3%.  Now, as the "Great Recession" has engulfed us all, the unemployment rate among African-Americans is over 15% (compared to less than 9% for whites).  The black-white and overall ethnic/racial wealth gap is nothing new, but it is easily overlooked at times of crisis when competing senses of "we're all in it together" versus white racial resentment towards President Obama blind us to the disproportionate burden African-Americans face in economic downturns.

Research and harsh realities demonstrate that, on average, blacks and Latinos have significantly less savings and assets to fall back on in times of crisis than whites: the average African-American household had a dime for every dollar held by an average white household.  "Only 18 percent of blacks and Latinos had retirement accounts, compared with 43.4 percent of whites."

Stories like Ms. Dorothy Thomas's alarming fall from white-collar worker to homeless woman reveal how dicey it is to live without that cushion of savings.  The racist rhetoric coming from Glenn Beck et al. at Fox News and at tea parties across the US attempt willfully erase our nation's painful history of consistently and systematically denying African-Americans both equal economic opportunity and a fair return on their labor.  Even with our best intentions - to increase minority homeownership - our resistance to fair and regulated markets pushed predatory and subprime loans onto black households that otherwise qualified for prime mortgages: "Banks replaced the old racist practice of redlining with “reverse redlining” — intensive marketing aimed at black neighborhoods in the name of extending home ownership to the historically excluded."

Ehrenreich makes one critical error here, a false distinction between white and black Americans and the power of positive thinking.  Ehrenreich at this point is preparing us for the release of her new book on this topic, and she gently chides African-Americans for embracing "white culture" and its zeal for "individual wish-fulfillment," using the "prosperity gospel" and mega churches as her evidence.  I see to an extent the historical roots in her remarks, but the prosperity gospel also has roots in self-help traditions, long a theme in African-American churches.  In this moment, as much as Ehrenreich is calling on us to acknowledge the racial wealth divide and bridge it as we all struggle with economic hardship, she's reinforcing the same cultural divisions on which Obama's most vile opponents are preying.  (Blacks and whites think differently; single moms are different than married women; the poor hold different values than us, etc.) The Dream of homeownership and financial success is an American one, not a white or black one; if we continue to embrace that Dream, then we need to restructure the playing field to make it a Reality for all.

(Photo titled "and a white picket fence" by neoliminal)