Blacks in Retreat

In his recent NY Times column, Bob Herbert provides some startling data about how the current economic crisis is affecting blacks in America:

As the nation continues to wallow in the trough of widespread unemployment, black Americans are bearing a disproportionate burden of the joblessness. The election of a black president may have been important to African-Americans for myriad reasons, but it hasn’t done much for their bottom line, which continues to deteriorate.

For example, without a dramatic new intervention by the federal government, the poverty rate for African-American children could eventually approach a heart-stopping 50 percent, according to analysts at the Economic Policy Institute. Already more than a third of black children are living in poverty.

Present trends are not good. Communities of color are being crushed economically and the national news media have not fully focused on the carnage. The official unemployment rate for blacks is 16.2 percent and could well pass 17 percent before the year is out. The real jobless rate is far more ghastly. The Boston-based group United for a Fair Economy noted that even “college-educated black men are nearly twice as likely to be unemployed as their white, college-educated counterparts.”

via www.nytimes.com

Our common identity and destiny as Christians summon and empower us to transcend racial boundaries and also imply a shared claim on the fruits of the land entrusted to God’s people throughout the globe. Where great disparities in access to that abundance exists, injustice reigns, particularly in its economic form.  Economic injustice, manifest as gross disparities in the economic realities of non-Hispanic whites and blacks, prevails in the United States in 2010. 

The 39.7 million blacks in the U.S. constitute 13.4% of the nation’s total population.  By 2050, the projected 61.4 blacks will constitute about 15% of the U.S. population.  This 13.4% share of the population is important to remember, for, as we shall see, blacks constitute a disproportionate share of many important metrics that reflect quality of life and economic well-being.  For example, though 44% of black households contain a traditional “married-couple” family, a large number of these are evidently multi-generational households including grandparents. Only 32.9% of black heads of household are actually married with a spouse currently living with them.  In contrast, 50.4% of white heads of household are married with a spouse currently resident. Given the priorities Christians give marriage and the role we assume marriage plays in mediating God’s blessings, black marriage patterns are quite alarming.  Black households constitute 94.9% of all U.S. households headed by non-married persons with opposite sex partners and with children under age 18.6  Similarly, blacks account for 27.6% of all single-parent family groups with children under age 18.7  The vast majority  of these black single-parent households (88.3%) are headed by women.  Black women head just under a quarter of all single-family households in the nation.  This double share of the nation’s single-family households is correlated with almost a triple share of poverty.  Black single-parent households make up 34.9% of all single-parent households in the U.S. who live below the poverty line. Indeed, about 40% of all black unmarried females with children live below the subsistence level.

While marriage patterns among blacks are alarming, educational patterns are on an upward trend.   As of 2005, 80% of blacks had earned at least a high school diploma, while 17% had earned a bachelor’s degree. In terms of graduate education, 1.1 million blacks had earned  at least a Master’s degree by 2005, up more than 400,000 from 1995.  Blacks are increasingly attending college.  There were 2.3 million black students in the nation’s colleges in 2005, up about one million since 1989. This progress in access to education has not yet translated to equal access to the job market, however.  Black men of college age are twice as likely as young white men to be unemployed and out of school.

Indeed, though the black middle class is four times as large as it was at the time the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, blacks continue to trail all ethnic groups in generating income.   Median household income for blacks, at $32,372 in 2006, is only 60% of the median income of whites at $51,429.16  While business ownership by blacks has grown dramatically, up 45% in the period 1997-2002,  only 26% of employed blacks work in management or professional occupations.  About the same percentage are employed in low-paying jobs like “nursing, home healthcare, cook, janitor, maid, cashier, salesperson, customer service representative, secretary, truck driver, or laborer” in which the annual salary or wage ranges from just below to about one-third of the poverty level.

This difference in buying power is reflected in black access to the American Dream of owning one’s own home.    While three quarters of whites own their own homes, less than half (46%) of blacks live in owner-occupied housing.  In spite of fair housing and community reinvestment acts at the federal and state levels, access to the credit markets for housing seem, at least on the surface, to be unfair.  Blacks are 3.6 times more likely than whites to pay the most expensive sub-prime mortgage rates, and 4.1 times more likely to pay the higher sub-prime refinance rates.

In spite of gains in real access to the voting franchise and education, poverty continues to be a problem for many blacks in the United States.  About a fourth of all black household live at or below the poverty level.  At 24.9% in 2005, that rate is down about  7% in the last twenty years, and is half of its value at the time of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but it remains three times as high as the poverty rate for whites.  Similarly, the unemployment rate for blacks remains about double that for whites, and the long-term unemployment rate for blacks “is at an all-time high.”

Health insurance has become one of the hot political issues in America in the last decade. It ought to be particularly hot for blacks.  More than a fifth of blacks (20.5%) did not have access to health insurance as of 2006.  That rate is double that of whites.

The foregoing statistics paint a stark portrait of great economic disparity.  The National Urban League tracks a variety of statistics comparing the status of blacks in comparison to other ethnic groups.  The league’s “Equality Index” suggests that the “overall” status of blacks is just 73% of whites, while the economic status is only 56% of whites.  This economic status disparity is confirmed in   a comparison of median net worths.  The media net worth of blacks was just 16% of the net worth of white.  About a third of blacks have a negative net worth.

This stark portrait of economic disparity between blacks and whites who share a common identity in Christ and under the U.S. Constitution is unconscionable.  Surely the gospel calls Christians to repent of the cultural habits that undergird and tolerate such injustice in our midst.

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