6/25/2007

McWhorter’s Culture of Poverty Myth

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.


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Are Failing Black America
by Algernon Austin
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[Find out The Truth about "Acting White".]
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[In the Future of Black America debate, I began by pointing out three blatant errors in the dust jacket of John McWhorter’s Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America. These errors are very common, and their presence on the dust jacket is evidence of that fact and evidence of what I see as a crisis of misinformation about black America today. After the Future of Black America debate, John McWhorter graciously invited me to send him my critique of his book. I accepted. Rather than have the main point be obscured by the many problems I find in the book, I have decided to send him three short, focused pieces and make them open letters. The first one is below and gets straight to the heart of the matter.]


Dear John:

It was very gracious of you to invite me to comment on Winning the Race. I’m quite serious when I state that I believe that there is a crisis of misinformation about black America today. I hope that you can join me in working to correct this misinformation. If I am “getting it wrong,” I hope that you will show me my errors.

You invited me to offer my critique of the book because it seems that you presume that my focus on the errors in the dust jacket avoids the main points of the book. This assumption is not right. The dust jacket does a fine job of providing an introduction to the book as it is supposed to. The errors in the dust jacket are the erroneous assumptions of the book.

Let’s look at the key issue of poverty. The dust jacket argues that “conditions for many blacks have grown worse since 1965: Desperate poverty cripples communities nationwide.” Now certainly there are impoverished black communities today, and certainly there were impoverished black communities in 1965. The real issue therefore is whether there is more black poverty today than in 1965.

I harp on this point because it is the essential assumption of Winning the Race. You write:
My argument, then, unabashedly assumes that there is such a thing as a culture of poverty. We must be under no illusion that this book only ‘implies’ this or that it is ‘dressing up’ the culture of poverty argument in new clothes. My explicit aim is to argue that poor blacks indeed have been waylaid by a culture of poverty. I unhesitatingly agree with all those before me who have analyzed poor blacks post-1970 in that way. The only ‘new clothes’ I intend is in my attempt to get at just what led poor blacks to fall into this culture of poverty so deeply at a particular time. This book is, most definitely, one more in the line of arguments that poor blacks’ problems are primarily due to culture rather than economics. Its argument stands or falls on whether my particular argument is effective. (p. 112, emphases in original)
Winning the Race is an attempt to explain why there is more black poverty and unemployment today than in the 1960s. Thus, one sees why the dust jacket claims that there is more black poverty today than in the 1960s. The entire book rests on this claim being true.

I state over and over again, that there has been no sustained increase in black poverty since the 1970s because Winning the Race is premised on this false idea. In 1966 (a 1965 estimate is not available from the Census Bureau’s “Historical Poverty Tables”), the black poverty rate was 41.8 percent. In 2005, the year Winning the Race was published it was 24.9 percent—nearly half of what it was in 1966. This rate is still way too high, but I see no evidence here that blacks “have been waylaid by culture of poverty” post-1970.

It is also wrong to presume that we can read cultural values from economic outcomes. The leading black public intellectuals like you, Juan Williams, Orlando Patterson, Bill Cosby and too many others divorce black economic outcomes from the goings on of the American labor market and the American economy. This is incorrect.

If we examine the statistics on the economic state of black and white America, it is clear that we cannot treat black economic outcomes as a “black thing” that has nothing to do with the American economy. Below is a graph of the black and white unemployment rates. Blacks have a higher unemployment rate than whites. I will address reasons why this is below. What I want to first focus on is the relationship between the black and white unemployment rates. The rates are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. [click on image for a better view]

Source: “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey,” Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What should be clear is that the black and white employment rates move in sync. When the black unemployment rate increases, so does the white. When the white decreases, so does the black. If a presumed crisis of cultural values produced the black unemployment rate and presumably good white cultural values produced the white unemployment rate, we would not see these parallel trends. It is the overall changes in the American economy, not black culture, which drive the largest changes in the black unemployment rate.

The increases in the black unemployment rate and the white unemployment rate are caused by economic recessions. All of the nearly vertical increases in the black and white unemployment rates correspond to recessions. The overall economic condition of blacks is strongly shaped by the overall economic condition of the American economy. The false idea that culture determines black economic outcomes obscures this important fact.

If we turn to poverty rates, we can see the same points illustrated again. It is harder to see the parallel trends between the black and white poverty rates because the black poverty rate has been roughly 3.5 times the white rate. An increase of 1 percent in the white poverty rate corresponds to about a 3.5 percent increase in the black rate. For blacks and whites respectively, the highest poverty rate is in 1966 and the lowest in 2000. The relatively slight increases in poverty in the graph correspond with economic recessions. The recession of 2001 reversed some of the poverty reduction experienced in the 1990s.

Source: “Historical Poverty Tables, Table 2, All People,” U.S. Census Bureau.

One comes across a startling finding if one examines the ratio of black to white poverty rates overtime. It is important to note that before 1973, the Census figures did not separate white Hispanics from white non-Hispanics. White Hispanics have had higher poverty rates than white non-Hispanics. White Hispanics increase the white poverty rate, and therefore lower the black-white poverty ratio before 1973 by some unknown degree. Beginning in 2002, blacks who identify as being of more than one race are not included in the statistics. This removal of multiracial blacks increases the black-white poverty ratio slightly, because multiracial blacks have a lower poverty rate. In 2005, for example, the black-white poverty ratio including multiracial blacks was 2.88. Excluding multiracial blacks, it was 3.00.





While the black-white poverty ratio historically has been roughly 3.5, when one looks closely one sees that it has actually been trending downward. You can see this more clearly if you look at the average by decade. The black poverty rate has been 3 times the white rate since 2000. This is a huge disparity. But when black public intellectuals wax romantic about earlier decades, they are simply not looking at the evidence. The black poverty rate was 3.8 times the white rate over the 1970s. Again, the presence of Hispanics in the white category likely means that the ratio in the 1960s and 1970s is actually higher than what we see in the graphs.

Contrary to what you claim in Winning the Race, that black poverty has worsened since the 1970s, in both absolute and relative measures there is less black poverty today than in the 1960s. There is a very positive downward trend in the black-white poverty ratio. This finding is exactly the opposite of what one would find if blacks were afflicted with a culture of poverty. Black public intellectuals should be celebrating this declining ratio but instead they are condemning poor blacks based on fictions.

Even with these improvements, the economic condition of blacks is still far from ideal. Unfortunately, we cannot look to the leading black public intellectuals for solutions to the high rates of black unemployment and poverty because they have ignored the facts, misread the trends and misdiagnosed the problems.

The economic conditions of blacks improve when the America economy improves. We need policies that strengthen the American economy and that reverse the growing income and wealth inequality. Blacks are worse off than whites economically to a significant degree because blacks have lower educational outcomes than whites. The major reason for the lower black educational outcomes is because of the lower quality of black educational opportunities which begin from even before kindergarten. There are effective programs that reduce these disparities running today. We need to push policy makers to make them widely available. And last but not least, there is considerable evidence that blacks still face discrimination in the labor market. We have unfinished business in the area of black civil rights. Improving the economic state of black America requires that (1) we improve the American economy, (2) improve the quality of black educational opportunities, and (3) eliminate anti-black discrimination in the labor market. Spending all of our energy fighting a mythical culture of poverty is a waste of time and resources since it does not exist.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

6/18/2007

Twisted Justice

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.


Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America
by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[Find out The Truth about "Acting White".]
________________________________________________________________________


Part I: “‘bloodthirsty eagerness’ to impose the death penalty”
  • Source: Adam Liptak, “Ruling Likely to Spur Convictions in Capital Cases,” New York Times, June 9, 2007.
In capital cases, only people willing to apply the death penalty are allowed to serve on juries. According to the New York Times, past research has shown that these pro-death-penalty jurors are more likely to find a defendant guilty, and they also tend to be more racist, sexist and homophobic than other jurors.

A recent decision by the Supreme Court makes it easier to eliminate anyone from a jury in a capital case who is not enthusiastically pro-death penalty. The Court argued that it would be legitimate to exclude a juror who “stated six times that he could consider the death penalty or follow the law,” because the juror did not display, as an appeals court judge stated, a “bloodthirsty eagerness” to apply the death penalty.

Once again the current Supreme Court has put on display their twisted sense of justice. Justice John Paul Stevens captures the problem well:
In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the majority had “gotten it horribly backwards” by creating the impression that “trial courts should be encouraging the inclusion of jurors who will impose the death penalty rather than only ensuring the exclusion of those who say that, in all circumstances, they cannot.”
The practices upheld by the Court will lead to exclusion of at least half of potential jurors from capital cases.

When he was on the Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall went even further and objected to the exclusion of anti-death penalty jurors. He argued, rightly in my view,
The exclusion of jurors opposed to the death penalty, he said, “allows the state a special advantage in those prosecutions where the charges are most serious and the possible punishments the most severe.”
It seems to me that excluding half of the potential jurors corrupts the ideal that one should have a jury of one’s peers.

Part II: For the Justice Department, Religion is In, Race is Out
  • Source: Neil A. Lewis, “Justice Department Reshapes Its Civil Rights Mission,” New York Times, June 14, 2007.
In pursuing civil rights cases, it should not be a matter of choosing religious discrimination or racial discrimination, but with the current administration, this seems to be the case. The Bush Justice Department is aggressively pursuing cases it defines as religious discrimination but displaying little interest in race-based hate crimes and voting rights violations against blacks.

Some of the cases the Justice Department has pursued are questionable as to whether they are really examples of religious discrimination. For example, the Times illustrates one recent questionable initiative:
Intervening in federal court cases on behalf of religion-based groups like the Salvation Army that assert they have the right to discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money.
The government is therefore fighting to allow religious groups to discriminate.

Along with this focus on religion, the Justice Department is recruiting more from religious universities and less from the top-ranked universities than in the past.

Part III: Throwing Out a Case for Having Too Much Evidence of Discrimination
  • Source: Linda Greenhouse, “Justices Limit Discrimination Suits Over Pay,” New York Times, May 29, 2007.
Lilly M. Ledbetter was the only female among 14 men in a Goodyear Tire plant in Gadsden, Ala. For almost 20 years she was paid less than her male co-workers--including those with less seniority than she had. The Supreme Court decided that she could only sue Goodyear within the first 180 days of experiencing pay discrimination. Of course, it is just about impossible for someone to be certain of pay discrimination and to have evidence for a case in this six-months time frame. The Court has made it a lot more comfortable for employers who discriminate.

Sadly, we will see more twisted justice from the Supreme Court for years to come. Register and vote for an administration with a better sense of right and wrong.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

6/11/2007

Income Inequality Increasing; Male Incomes Declining

The Great Debate

Algernon Austin, Thora Institute and Demos
John McWhorter, Manhattan Institute
Orlando Patterson, Harvard University
Moderator: Felicia Lee, New York Times

The Future of Black America: The Burden of History or the Audacity of Hope?
Does the twenty-first century require a new black politics? For many, the success of Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Oprah and Richard Parsons signals the emergence of a post-race America where anyone with the right values and skills can succeed. For others, the persistence of segregated schools and the increasing numbers of blacks in America's prisons indicate that we are still living in the shadow of Jim Crow. What are the major obstacles to a prosperous future for black America? What are the best policies for moving forward - an effort to change values, an anti-discrimination offensive, or something else? Is it useful to continue to think about politics through the lens of race?

June 13, 2007, 6:30 PM
Donnell Library, Manhattan, NYC
20 West 53rd between 5th and 6th
Register here or call (212) 633-1405 x533

Sponsored by Demos and the Donald and Paula Smith Family Foundation

[Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America
by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com]

[Find out The Truth about "Acting White".]
________________________________________________________________________


Pop quiz: In which country can a person most easily change her class standing through her efforts?
  1. United States
  2. France
  3. Canada
  4. Denmark.
Hint: It’s not the United States.

According to current research discussed in a new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, an individual has the best chance of achieving relative upward mobility in Denmark. Of the countries listed above, the United States had the least relative mobility. Of the nine countries examined in the report, only the United Kingdom is a less economically mobile society. Canada is more than twice as economically mobile as the U.S. “Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?” the title of the Pew Charitable Trusts report, finds the American Dream sick and in the hospital.

It is not clear whether the U.S. ever offered as much economic mobility as it claimed to, but, today, one’s parents’ economic status plays a large role in one’s possibilities for economic success. The Pew report states:
Most studies find that, in America, about half of the advantages of having a parent with a high income are passed on to the next generation. This means that one of the biggest predictors of an America child’s future economic success—the identity and characteristics of his or her parents—is predetermined and outside that child’s control. To be sure, the apple can fall far from the tree and often does in individual cases, but relative to other factors, the tree dominates the picture.
It is possible to advance relative to others in American society, but if one wishes to be rich generally it is better to have rich parents or be born in Denmark.

Most Americans probably failed to recognize the limited relative mobility in the U.S. because, we have had a good deal of absolute mobility. Relative mobility refers to how much shuffling there is of people’s position in income rankings. Absolute mobility refers to increases of income even if the ranking stays the same.

For most of the past century, Americans’ individual incomes have generally increased overtime. This historic trend appears to have come to an end. We can see this in men’s income. Between 1964 and 1994, adjusted for inflation, the median income of men in their thirties rose 5 percent from $31,097 to $32,801. When comparing men in their thirties from 1974 to 2004, the picture is starkly different. Men’s incomes declined 12 percent from $40,210 to $35,010.

Although absolute mobility does not occur broadly for men anymore, it is still occurring for American families. Because women increasingly work, their added incomes have caused household incomes to rise even as men’s individual incomes declined.

Part of the reason for men’s declining incomes is that the American economy generally has grown much more slowly post-1960s compared to pre-1960s. Another important factor is that the benefits of increasing American productivity are not being distributed widely. Productivity and income used to grow together prior to the 1970s. Since the 1970s the productivity growth has been increasingly disconnected from income growth. The benefits of economic growth have been increasingly concentrated among the rich.

Between 1979 and 2004, the income of the poorest one-fifth of Americans grew 9 percent. Over the same period, the income of the richest fifth grew 69 percent and the richest 1 percent by 176 percent. An article in the New York Times states the recent economic trends make it appear as if “every household in [the] bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent.” (David Leonhardt, “Larry Summers’s Evolution,” New York Times, June 10, 2007.)

Americans seemed to have been satisfied with the American economic policy because although there was little relative mobility, there was a significant degree of absolute mobility. With declining absolute mobility and increasing income inequality, there may be opportunity for creating new and innovative economic policies. Now might be a good time for the so-called black leaders to start articulating an economic vision that will help poor Americans. The so-called black leaders need to remember that Martin Luther King Jr. died beginning the Poor People’s Campaign. Will they continue where King left off?


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

6/04/2007

Health Care for All?

The Great Debate

Algernon Austin, Thora Institute and Demos
John McWhorter, Manhattan Institute
Orlando Patterson, Harvard University
Moderator: Felicia Lee, New York Times

The Future of Black America: The Burden of History or the Audacity of Hope?
Does the twenty-first century require a new black politics? For many, the success of Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Oprah and Richard Parsons signals the emergence of a post-race America where anyone with the right values and skills can succeed. For others, the persistence of segregated schools and the increasing numbers of blacks in America's prisons indicate that we are still living in the shadow of Jim Crow. What are the major obstacles to a prosperous future for black America? What are the best policies for moving forward - an effort to change values, an anti-discrimination offensive, or something else? Is it useful to continue to think about politics through the lens of race?

June 13, 2007, 6:30 PM
Donnell Library, Manhattan, NYC
20 West 53rd between 5th and 6th
Register here or call (212) 633-1405 x533

Sponsored by Demos and the Donald and Paula Smith Family Foundation

[Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America
by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com]

[Find out The Truth about "Acting White".]
________________________________________________________________________

[re-post]

In 2004, 19.7 percent of black Americans did not have health insurance, according to the Census Bureau. For Americans generally, the percent without health insurance has been rising. It reached 15.7 percent for all Americans in 2004. Blacks are more likely to be uninsured than nonblacks.

The growing number of uninsured is only one of several critical problems facing the American health care system. The New York Times highlighted another problem in its series of articles on diabetes in January of last year: the American health care system does far too little in terms of preventive care.

Blacks are more likely than nonblacks to be diabetic. Diabetes is the fourth leading cause of death among blacks. The New York Times article "In the Treatment of Diabetes, Success Often Does Not Pay" by Ian Urbina (January 11, 2006) illustrated how dysfunctional the American health care system is. Effective diabetes treatment centers were closed down because they did not make money, and they did not make money because they provided good preventative medicine. Urbina writes:
[The diabetes treatment centers] were victims of the byzantine world of American health care, in which the real profit is made not by controlling chronic diseases like diabetes but by treating their many complications.

Insurers, for example, will often refuse to pay $150 for a diabetic to see a podiatrist, who can help prevent foot ailments associated with the disease. Nearly all of them, though, cover amputations, which typically cost more than $30,000.

Patients have trouble securing a reimbursement for a $75 visit to the nutritionist who counsels them on controlling their diabetes. Insurers do not balk, however, at paying $315 for a single session of dialysis, which treats one of the disease's serious complications.
The United States spends a greater proportion of its wealth on health care than any other county, but Americans have rather little to show for it. In international comparisons, American health care ranks highly for treating some specific diseases, but overall the American system tends to fall near or at the bottom of developed Western nations. In 2000, the World Health Organization ranked the U.S. healthcare system 37th in the world.

In December of 2005, the New York Times had another important article on the American health care system. Eduardo Porter in "Health Care for All, Just a (Big) Step Away" (December 18, 2005), explained that, from a purely economic standpoint, the U.S. could fairly easily shift to a universal health care system that would provide health insurance for everyone.

What Porter explained was that the federal government provides about $130 billion to businesses in tax breaks to encourage them to provide health insurance to their employees. If the federal government collected these taxes and added a little more revenue, it could provide health care for all. The 20 percent of blacks without health care would be much better off under this system.

Randolph K. Quaye (African Americans’ Health Care Practices, Perspectives, and Needs (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 2005), 50-51) comes to this conclusion after assessing the American health care system and the needs of black Americans:
Countries that have provided universal health care coverage for all their citizens have realized the massive health care cost savings associated with such a policy. As we in the United States struggle to contain health care costs, it is time to recognize that tax incentives for health care coverage only to big corporations will in the long run not be in the best interests of this country. As has been demonstrated, the loss of manufacturing jobs overseas and the high cost of prescription drugs in the face of a potentially bankrupt Medicaid and Medicare systems will in the end frustrate the aspirations of younger and older Americans. The time to act is now, and act we must.
Quaye concludes that blacks and other Americans would benefit from a system that provides health care for all.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.