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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A few years ago, I overheard a man telling his friend that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the planning of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. This idea has been discredited, but how did this man come to this conclusion? None of the terrorists involved in executing the attack were from Iraq? This idea is counterintuitive to the facts of the attack. Many Americans believed this to be true because government officials stated or insinuated that Hussein planned 9/11. The point here is that authoritative figures who have easy access to the media can shape public opinion.
Last year, the Pew Research Center released a report showing increased pessimism among blacks and increased negative views among blacks toward the black poor. Many of the pundits have assumed that the negative views of the black poor and the pessimism about black America validate their claims of a cultural crisis, but they fail to consider that the black public may be simply repeating ideas that black pundits have been spreading for more than a decade. There is a little bit of evidence in the Pew Survey suggesting that this might be the case.
When asked a factual question about black America, most blacks answered incorrectly. The survey asked respondents if the living standards of blacks were worse or better off relative to whites today compared with ten years ago. By median income, blacks are about at about the same level that they were ten years ago. The correct answer therefore is no change but only 9 percent of blacks said no change.
This is a difficult question for anyone to answer correctly without looking at Census data. How would one know the median income of millions of Americans? It is therefore incorrect for the pundits to treat these responses as facts about the state of black America. They are public opinion. Opinion and facts are different animals.
About 40 percent of blacks believed that blacks were worse off relative to whites, about forty percent believed that blacks were better off. Whites and Hispanics were about equally likely to answer this question incorrectly, but blacks were the most likely to say that blacks were worse off.
Why are blacks most pessimistic about black America? If blacks paid more attention to the cultural crisis claims about blacks that have been circulating for more than a decade then one would expect blacks to be more pessimistic than other groups. Blacks’ responses on the survey seem to support this view.
There are other possibilities. Over the 1990s, rap music became more violent and more obsessed with alcohol and marijuana. Black America experienced less violence over the 1990s and black youth have relatively low rates of substance abuse, but if people fail to appreciate that rap music and videos are fictional then they might see blacks as declining culturally. This view could lead to increased pessimism.
The year 2000 was the heyday for black incomes. The black median income reached its highest point relative to whites and the black poverty rate reached its lowest point on record. The fact that things have been getting worse relative to 2000 could lead to pessimism.
All of these things could be occurring simultaneously. Or other factors may be the real causes. I will be exploring some other factors in my presentation “Understanding the Strange Class War in Black America” at the How Class Works 2008 conference later this year. After the conference, I will report some of my findings here. I encourage other researchers to try to understand the “strange class war in black America” too.
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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.
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