Blacks and the American Economy 2000-07

[Excerpt from "Reversal of Fortune: Economic Gains of the 1990s Overturned for African-Americans from 2000-07" (PDF) by Algernon Austin]

On all major economic indicators—income, wages, employment, and poverty—African Americans were worse off in 2007 than they were in 2000. Although the American economy has grown significantly since 2000, African Americans have not shared in America’s prosperity. Th e current economic downturn and the subprime mortgage crisis bode ill for the immediate future for African Americans.

The overall social well-being of African American communities depends upon strong job growth. The historical evidence shows clearly that strong job and wage growth are the keys to reducing black poverty. Without reductions in child poverty, we can expect continued lower educational achievement, higher rates of teen pregnancy, and a higher than average rate of crime in black communities.

All Americans are hurting from the failure of recent strong productivity growth to translate into wage growth for average workers. All Americans will benefit from a more equitable distribution of the wealth of American society. African Americans, in particular, need policies that will attend to their low employment rates, low wages, and high poverty rates.

A decade ago, the economic outlook for African Americans was quite different. In 1999, the journalist Ellis Cose wrote, “It’s the best time ever to be black in America. Crime is down; jobs and income are up” (Cose 1999). The tight labor market of the 1990s produced increasing employment, higher wages, and a historic drop in the poverty rate for blacks. Home ownership, the major source of wealth for most Americans, was on the rise for African Americans. By 2000, the median black household income had climbed to its highest level ever, while black unemployment and poverty rates had declined to their lowest levels on record. If these trends had continued, African Americans would have made significant advances in closing economic gaps with whites.

These trends did not continue, however. The recession of 2001 brought African American progress to a halt and reversed the gains blacks made over the 1990s. The jobless recovery that followed brought no significant economic progress for African Americans.

The U.S. economy regularly goes through cycles of upswings and downswings, but the recent cycle—including the expansion—has been a particularly bad one for the country (Bivens and Irons 2008) and especially so for African Americans. Job growth since the 2001 recession has been extremely weak. In the 2000s business cycle, employment increased at one-third of the pace of the 1990s cycle (Shierholz 2008).

For most of the 20th century, increased productivity led to increased wages. Since the 1970s, with the exception of the 1990s, increased productivity has not been matched by comparable increases in wages (Mishel et al. 2008). From 2000 to 2007, although American workers were 19.2% more productive on average, the weekly wages for prime-aged workers declined by $1. The weekly wages for prime-aged African American workers declined by $3. The wealth created by the American economy has been going overwhelmingly to the richest Americans.

Overall, the economic condition of African Americans has worsened since 2000. Wage growth for the median black worker has stagnated, incomes and employment have declined, and poverty has increased. This Briefing Paper shows:

• African American median family income declined by $404 or 1% between 2000 and 2007. This is the first decline in black median family income in a business cycle of this length since World War II. Single, African American, male-headed families saw the largest percentage decline—9.1%—in median family income.

• Worker productivity grew 19.2% between 2000 and 2007, but wage growth for American workers generally and African American workers specifically has stagnated. For black workers 25 to 54 years old, the median black weekly wage fell 0.6% from 2000 to 2007.

• The African American unemployment rate increased by 0.7 percentage points between 2000 and 2007, while the employment rate shows a 2.4 percentage-point decline, or three times the number not working indicated by the change in the unemployment rate.

• The black home ownership rate, after increasing to 49.1% in 2004, dropped to 47.2% in 2007. Because the foreclosures from the housing crisis have continued into 2008 and will likely continue into 2009, the African American home ownership rate is also likely to decline into 2009.

• The tight labor market of the late 1990s led to the largest decline in African American poverty since the 1960s. From 1989 to 2000, the black family poverty rate fell by 8.5 percentage points. In contrast, from 2000 to 2007, the African American family poverty rate increased 2.8 percentage points.

• Crime and criminal justice policies are increasingly entangled with the economic outcomes of African Americans and particularly of black men. If one adjusts the employment rate of African American men by counting men in prison as non-working, the already low African American male employment rate drops by about 3 percentage points.

[Read the full report. (PDF)]

Children of Color and the Future of America

[Originally published on The Daily Voice.com.]

The children are our future. All Americans understand this truism. What we don't seem to understand is that this refers to all American children, not just the children of our own racial or ethnic group. Do whites realize that black children are their future? Do blacks understand that Hispanic children are their future? Do Hispanics know that Asian children are their future? So far, I'm not convinced that this is the case.

The latest news from the Census Bureau is that a majority nonwhite America is arriving sooner than we thought. Already, 43 percent of Americans under 20 years old are nonwhite. Whether we are ready for it or not, the future is coming.

All Americans would like the country to be strong and prosperous ten, twenty, thirty years from now. What we don't seem to realize is that the future prosperity of the country depends on how we treat our children today--all of our children. Currently, we are subjecting the majority of our future workforce--nonwhite children--to segregated and inferior schools, high rates of child poverty, counterproductive criminal justice policies and overt and covert racial discrimination in the labor market. We simply won't be the best we can be while continuing this status quo.

Who in America believes that the country would be better off with a less educated workforce than we have today? Yet our current educational policies and priorities mean that this will likely be the case. Hispanics and blacks have significantly lower educational attainment and achievement levels than whites. If we don't improve this situation, the country as a whole will suffer, not just Hispanics and blacks. We need to make sure that Hispanics and blacks have access to education of as high quality as whites from pre-kindergarten to college.

We know that poverty is bad for children. Children growing up in poverty do worse in school and are more likely to become involved in crime. Among developed nations, guess which country has the highest child poverty rate? That's right--the United States. In 2000, by the international standard of 50 percent of the national median income, 22 percent of American children were in poverty. In Germany, it was 10 percent. In Denmark, 2 percent.

If we adopted European-style anti-poverty tax transfers, we could make big reductions in child poverty. Anti-poverty policies would benefit not only Hispanics and blacks, but also a significant number of Asian-American children. Few people realize that Asian Americans, particularly those of Southeast-Asian descent, have higher than average poverty rates. Asian-American children's future success in American society depends on a commitment by non-Asian Americans to reducing child poverty.

Although the nonwhite population is growing rapidly, even in 2050, about two out of every five American workers will be non-Hispanic whites. White children also need good schools, less poverty and smarter criminal justice policies. The impact of our criminal justice policies on whites is rarely discussed since blacks and Hispanics are more adversely affected. But whites too, especially poorer and less-educated whites, are also hurt by our misguided criminal justice policies.

It is much better to have whites in the workforce being productive citizens than languishing in prisons and draining tax revenues. But our criminal justice policies do not reflect this priority. In 2000, the white incarceration rate in the United States was already about three times the European average. In the years since 2000, things have already become significantly worse. For white males, of the prime working ages of 18 to 54 years old, their number in prisons and jails increased by 11 percent from 2000 and 2007 to reach 700,000. For comparable white females, their number increased 51 percent to reach 93,000. The American incarceration rate should not be so high. With better criminal justice policies, we could have less crime and less incarceration.

Americans have a choice. We can begin to make the serious investments in our children--of all racial and ethnic backgrounds--and make sure that the country is strong and prosperous into the future, or we can pretend that the kids who do not look like us don't live in America. We can choose a politics that embraces the multiracial reality of America or one based on fictions of "us" and "them." One of these approaches will succeed and one will fail. The choice is ours.

The Teen Pregnancy Discussion We Are Not Having

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
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________________________________________________________________________


The line of the Republican Party on Bristol Palin’s teen pregnancy is that it is a common event in typical American families (see last week’s article), but that is simply not true. The vast majority of American teens do not have babies. White teens and Alaskan teens are less likely than average to have a child. For these reasons, it is incorrect to characterize the Bristol Palin pregnancy as a common occurrence.

According to 2005 data from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unwanted Pregnancy, [PDF] 11 percent of white girls gave birth to a child by the age of 20. For black girls, it was 24 percent. Even if Bristol were black, her giving birth to a child would be a relatively rare event. (Note that becoming pregnant and giving birth are different things, and thus the pregnancy rates and birth rates are not the same.)

The bloggers at the National Campaign have been mystified like myself by the national reaction to the Bristol pregnancy. Here is one post:

Daddy Get Your Gun: So, let's see if I have this right: teen pregnancy is okay—"beautiful," in fact—as long as no abortion occurs and as long as there is a shotgun marriage. In addition, becoming a parent at 17 or 18 is preferable to a bit of accurate sex education and preferable to using birth control.

A full seven years ago, E.J. Dionne wrote, "It's better for unmarried teens to avoid premature sex than to use contraception, but it's better to use contraception than to get pregnant." I guess the revision we are asked to swallow is, "It's better to get married as a teen than to use contraception," even though 60% of teen marriages fail, and 80% do when the bride is pregnant.

Most Americans, I suspect, would think that the idea that teen pregnancy is preferable to sex education is crazy, but, apparently, not Sarah Palin.

Bristol's pregnancy should be used as an example to spur a deep discussion about teen pregnancy, but this discussion seems to be the last thing that the Republican Party leaders want. For if we were to do so, the hypocrisies and misinformation around Bristol’s pregnancy would be revealed.

The “Bristol statement” by the National Campaign is a good beginning for a serious discussion:

The teen pregnancy and birth rate have declined dramatically since the early 1990s (down 38% and 32% respectively) driven by decreases in sexual activity and increases in contraceptive use.

Even so, recent data show that the declines in teen sex and improvements in contraceptive use have leveled off and that the teen birth rate is on the rise for the first time in 15 years.

At present, 3 in 10 girls in the United States become pregnant by age 20.

At present, half of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned and about 8 in 10 pregnancies to teens are unplanned.

What we can deduce here is that both less sex and more contraceptive use reduce pregnancy and birth rates. Also, teens today, generally, don’t plan to become pregnant.

It is important to have some historical sensibility about this issue. Teen pregnancy was both much more common in the past and less of a big deal because people married and entered the workforce earlier. Also, education was less important.

But times have changed. Some reasons why it is important to reduce the rate of black teen pregnancy and births are:

1. Most teen pregnancies are unplanned. Planned pregnancies are best.
2. Teen pregnancy interferes with completing high school, and it is more important than ever for blacks to complete high school.
3. Children have better social outcomes with older parents.
4. Side benefit: Blacks have high rates of sexually transmitted diseases. The techniques that reduce pregnancy and birth rates also reduce STD rates.

No doubt there are other benefits to reducing the rate of black teen pregnancy. Discussing these benefits are what the Bristol whitewash is preventing us from doing. It appears that one effective means to reducing black teen pregnancy is comprehensive sex education—sex education which teaches the benefits of abstinence and of careful and consistent contraceptive use.

It is not possible to know for sure without a real analysis, but it appears that the decline in black teen pregnancy and birth rates followed the decline in black poverty. Now that the black poverty has risen some, the teen pregnancy and birth rates are also rising.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

What If Bristol Palin Were Black?

An invitation for Thora Institute readers in the D.C. Area

Join Algernon Austin, Julianne Malveaux and Deepak Bhargava in celebrating the launch of the Economic Policy Institute's Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy. This program is directed by Algernon Austin.

Julianne Malveaux, President of Bennett College for Women and author, will introduce the program.

Deepak Bhargava, Executive Director of the Center for Community Change, will discuss the importance of race and ethnicity for community organizing.

Algernon Austin, program director, will briefly discuss the program's agenda and goals and provide highlights from new research on the recent economic experience of African Americans.

An informal reception will follow.

Thursday, September 18, 2008, from 5:30 p.m to 7:00 p.m.
Economic Policy Institute
1333 H Street, NW, East Tower, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20005

Cocktails and assorted refreshments

Please RSVP by Monday, September 15, 2008

________________________________________________________________________
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I’ve spent the past week wondering what planet am I on. In the 1990s, the Republican Vice President, Dan Quayle made a point of condemning the out-of-wedlock birth of a fictional television character for setting a bad example. Now we have a candidate for the Vice Presidency with a teenaged daughter with a real out-of-wedlock pregnancy. For social conservatives, I would have expected this development to be a huge affront to their conception of “family values” in a family that could be expected to be a role model for the country. I waited for the blast of outrage. It never came.

From the news reports, social conservatives seem to range from indifferent to celebratory about this out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy. The New York Times reported:

Early reaction among women at the Republican convention to the news about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy was almost uniformly supportive.

“This happens to people in all walks of life,” said Karen Minnis, 54, a state representative from Oregon.

. . . “She comes from a great family and it just shouldn’t be an issue.”

When Pam Younggren, 61, of Fargo, N.D., was told the news of the 17-year-old’s pregnancy, she shrugged. “Well, she wouldn’t be the first one,” she said.

“We can’t control what our daughters do,” she said. “I don’t see it as a problem.”

There were similar reactions in another Times story:

In Alaska and here in the convention halls in St. Paul, some said Ms. Palin’s struggles only made her more human, more like them.

“She’s real, and she’s been there,” said Rachel Paulding, 25, of Hatcher’s Pass, Alaska, near Anchorage. “She has got five kids, and some of them are bound to have problems. That is just normal life.”

And in Minnesota, Kris Bowen, an alternate delegate from Indiana, said she now felt more connected to Ms. Palin. “Now she’s a typical American family,” said Ms. Bowen, the mother of two boys ages 10 and 12. “On an individual level, every single person is thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, that has happened to me or someone I know or I’m afraid it will.’ ”

This does not seem at all like Dan Quayle’s Republican Party.

I’ve also been waiting for Bill Cosby, Juan Williams and Orlando Patterson to “call out” Bristol Palin for her bad behavior. These three have been leading the condemnations of black youth for the past four years. Their favorite topics have been teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock births. Cosby has disapproved of the apparent acceptance of out-of-wedlock teen births:

No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband. . . . If you knock up that girl, you’re gonna have to run away because it’s going to be too embarrassing for your family. And in the old days, a girl get pregnant, she had to go down South, and then her mother would go down to get her. But mother had the baby. . . . The mother had the baby—in two weeks.(Quoted in Dyson 2005: 141-2)

. Cosby remembers when girls and their families were so embarrassed that mothers would claim their daughter’s baby as their own. Williams thinks Cosby is generally correct in his condemnations of blacks, and he adds that what people need to do is “have children only after you are twenty-one and married” (Williams 2006: 215). Cleary, Bristol Palin did not follow the path outlined by Williams.

Has Cosby, Williams or Patterson “called out” Bristol Palin? Certainly they should have something negative to say. For four years, they’ve had op-eds in national papers and interviews by the major television networks condemning blacks for teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock births. So far, I haven’t heard a peep from Cosby and company. I may have missed it, but their previous outbursts were unavoidable.

What’s going on? What’s going on with white social conservatives and the new black public intelligentsia? Where is the outrage?

There are lots of things going on. One is that famed Republican Party unity that allows for top down decision-making that keeps everyone on message. The other is the planned “shotgun marriage” to the young man who had previously said he did not want kids.

A third thing that I think is going on here has to do with race. Because Bristol Palin is white, it is easy for Americans to think of her as a “good girl” who made a mistake. For black girls, it is easy for Americans to think of them as “bad girls.” Period.Quayle’s argument about out-of-wedlock births was that they were the ultimate cause of the 1992 Los Angeles riots—the riots that followed the acquittal of the police officers for beating Rodney King. Clearly, Quayle was really talking about black people and their “bad values.”

When black girls have babies, it is worthy of condemnation. When a white girl gets pregnant out-of-wedlock, it’s an entirely different story. It is simply something that “happens to people in all walks of life.” It “just shouldn’t be an issue.” It no big deal because, “We can’t control what our daughters do.” It’s “just normal life.” It just shows that the Palins are “a typical American family.”

It can’t recall at time when the hypocrisy has been this thick.


References

Dyson, Michael Eric. 2005. Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? New York: Basic Civitas Books.

Williams, Juan. 2006. Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do About It. New York: Crown Publishers.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The Minimum Wage, Unions and the Economic Health of Black America

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
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Too many of the discussions of black economic conditions today avoid economic factors. We can take a quick look at a few that are almost absent from popular discussions. Since the 1970s, there have been a variety of factors that put downward pressure on black incomes. One has been the fact that the real value of the minimum wage has been trending downward. In 1965, the minimum wage was $6.57 in 2005 dollars. In 2005, it was $5.15. Blacks are more likely to be earning the minimum wage so this trend affects blacks disproportionately.


Source: Economic Policy Institute

Blacks in unions earn a wage that is on average 12.1 percent higher than non-unionized blacks. In recent years, that means that the non-union median black wage was $12.74 an hour, but the median for unionized blacks was $14.28 an hour. The unfortunate trend is that the share of blacks in unions have declined significantly.


Source: Center for Economic and Policy Research


Source: Center for Economic and Policy Research


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

A Father Is Not Enough

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
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But if we are honest with ourselves, we'll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing – missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.
--Senator Barack Obama

We can all agree that black men who raise children without a spouse are real fathers and not men who are acting like boys. The figure below allows us to examine the fate of these men and their children relative to similar white men. In 2006, 26 percent of these unmarried, black male-headed households with children were in poverty compared with 13.6 percent of similar white households. As far as poverty is concerned, it is better to be white than to be black. Even among married couple families with children, this is the case. Nine percent of these black families were in poverty in 2006 but only 3.7 percent of white families.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Poverty Tables.

These comparisons highlight that there is more to the socioeconomic disadvantage that black families face than simply the absence of men. Even when men are present black families are significantly worse off than white families. In other words, the foundations of the black family are weaker because of deeper racial issues, but many black leaders today seem determined to avoid this fact.

The people condemning black men are missing two important points. First, we are not living in the 1950s anymore, for no group does marriage have the same weight today as it did then. Even pro-marriage activists get divorced today. In the past, divorce and out-of-wedlock births were a source of shame for people of all political persuasions. That was then this is now.

Second, the people criticizing black men have the causality backwards. They assume that if we increase marriage rates, we can reduce negative outcomes like poverty. But they are not considering that the reverse may be true: if we reduce poverty and other negative outcomes, we will increase marriage rates.

There are lots of reasons to believe that if we improve the socioeconomic condition of poor blacks we will increase black marriage rates. Currently, for whites and blacks, the more educated are more likely to marry. If we improve blacks’ educational outcomes by addressing socioeconomic inequalities, then it is likely that more blacks will marry.

In America, people tend to marry people of the same race and class background. This means that the poorest and least-educated black women would in most cases be paired with the poorest and least-educated black men. These black men have high incarceration rates and high mortality rates. The incarceration and mortality rates mean that there simply aren’t enough of them around for all poor black women. Until we address, the social, economic and political factors that lead to the low numbers of these black men available for marriage, the marriage project will face an insurmountable numerical limit.

The poor and less-educated black men who are available for marriage have low employment rates. It seems reasonable to assume that men with jobs are more likely to married because they can contribute economically to a family. Until black leaders find a way to address the deep social and economic problems causing blacks to be disproportionately poor and less-educated, I would not predict an increase in marriage rates.



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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

11 Black Americas

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
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________________________________________________________________________


There are 11 black Americas. This was one of the major findings of a study commissioned by Radio One Inc. and released earlier this year. Only summarized findings were released, so it is not possible to delve deeply into the data. The primary purpose of the study was likely for figuring out how best to market to blacks. Nonetheless it does provide an interesting look at black-American diversity.

Apparently, based demographics, values and consumption patterns, black Americans were segmented into 11 distinct groups. The following are abbreviated descriptions of the groups, from youngest to oldest group:

1. Connected Black Teens: “They are tech savvy, highly social, brand driven and fans of Black music (Hip Hop
   and R&B).”


2. Digital Networkers: “Over half of this web savvy, high tech, mobile segment are college or high school students who ‘network’ heavily using Facebook, MySpace, instant messaging and their cell phones.”


3. Black Onliners: “Heavy web users, this mostly male segment is stressed by their work/life balance and the need to straddle Black and White worlds; they are focused on money as the most meaningful measure of success and are the most stressed of any segment about ‘having to fit in’.”


4. Stretched Black Straddlers: “Mostly 18-34, this online, cell phone toting segment is the most stressed by ‘straddling’ the needs of family and work. Stressed about money and a lack of time, they are . . . the most likely to say they have been racially discriminated against in the past three months.”


5. New Middle Class: “The best educated, most employed and wealthiest segment is mostly between the ages of 25 and 44 and is the most technologically forward segment.”


6. Family Struggles: “Mostly female and heavy TV watchers, this segment is struggling economically and is stressed trying to raise their children on a tight budget.”


7. Black is Better: “This confident, optimistic, fun-loving segment is very focused on family and their job. [They have a] very strong focus on Black culture, history and solidarity.”


8. Sick and Stressed: “Mostly over the age of 35, this struggling segment is stressed about money and health, pessimistic about their personal future, and least likely to say things are getting better for them. They are the least likely to have a healthy lifestyle, to play sports or work out or have health insurance.”


9. Faith Fulfills: “This highly religious segment, who spend more time than average volunteering for religious or non-profit organizations, is most likely to trust God to take care of things.”


10. Broadcast Blacks: “Highly confident, independent and positive in their attitudes, this female-skewed, older segment is the most likely to say things are getting better for them. They are heavy users of TV and radio (especially Gospel radio) and have the lowest Internet usage.”


11. Boomer Blacks: “This ‘oldest’ segment (average 52) is tech savvy with high ownership of computers, DVRs, home theater systems and wireless internet access – 90% are online. They are the most likely to believe that Black children should have Black role models and that it’s important to take advantage of the opportunities won by previous generations.”

Some of the more general questions asked of the respondents once again confirm that the punditry on blacks is “getting it wrong.” For example, 90 percent of blacks report being comfortable being black—not racked by self-loathing—as is often reported. Blacks also “don’t need to ‘act Black’” to conform to anyone’s stereotype of blackness. Eighty-two percent of those surveyed stated that education is important to success. (The 1987 General Social Survey reports similar results to this one. In the GSS, blacks had slightly higher levels of support than whites for education as a means to success.)

This survey found more optimism about the future of black America than last year’s Pew Survey. Fifty-four percent of blacks were optimistic in the Radio One survey. Only 44 percent in the Pew Survey. It is not possible to compare the Radio One survey in detail, but the difference between the two surveys is likely due to the Radio One survey including teens who tend to be more optimistic about the future. The Radio One data reminds us to be careful about generalizing about blacks.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

200,000 Black Jobs Lost to China

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
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________________________________________________________________________


Between 2001 and 2007, over 200,000 blacks lost their jobs due to U.S. trade with China, estimates economist Robert E. Scott in “The China Trade Toll.” Further, other research estimates that the average black worker earns about $1,400 less a year because of the downward pressure on wages from trade with less-developed countries. America’s trade policies have been driven by what is most beneficial to economic elites, not what benefits average workers in the U.S. or abroad.

The U.S. trade deficit with China has been growing about 21 percent a year. It increased from $84 billion in 2001 to $262 billion in 2007. There are a number of unfair ways that China achieves this export advantage. China devalues its currency. Currently, the yuan, China’s currency, is about 30 percent below its true value. This devaluation basically puts a 30 percent discount on all Chinese goods. China is very lax with labor and environmental laws. Exploiting workers and the environment is cheaper for businesses than following good labor and environmental practices. The combined effect of these policies produces a large and unfair trade advantage to Chinese goods.

Scott estimates that the overall toll from the U.S. trade deficit with China to be 2.3 million jobs between 2001 and 2007. The job loss for blacks was 10 percent of this amount—about 230,000. Scott concludes his report with these words about what these jobs mean for black and Hispanic communities.

the manufacturing sector provides some of the best jobs available for black and Hispanic workers, who suffer from much lower levels of education and have much lower wages than white workers. Growing China trade deficits are a special tragedy for these workers, who lost more than half a million trade-related jobs between 2001 and 2007 alone.

What is not well understood is that even a job lost in apparel production can be a huge loss for a minority or immigrant worker. Such jobs are more likely to be unionized and to have benefits than alternative jobs outside of manufacturing. A job paying $9 or $10 per hour with benefits, and providing industrial experience, can be a lifeline and provide a ladder out of poverty for such workers. When this worker loses his or her job and the alternative is a near-minimum wage, non-union job, an important pathway out of poverty is washed away.

Asian-American workers also appear to be fairly hard hit by the loss of jobs to China. As computer and electronics jobs leave the U.S. for China, Asian Americans, who are disproportionately in those industries in the U.S., lose jobs.

We need our leaders to force China to stop devaluing its currency. We need fair trade agreements that require common and high labor and environmental standards. Until America has trade agreements with these protections, Americans will continue to lose some of its best jobs. These high-paying jobs with good benefits in the U.S. will find themselves in countries like China where they become low-paying jobs with few benefits. This “race to the bottom” in job quality benefits the rich globally and hurts workers everywhere.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Incarceration, Employment and Marriage Promotion

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
________________________________________________________________________


Blacks have the lowest employment rate of all the major racial groups in the United States. But the official rate provided by data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is actually too high. The official data excludes institutional populations which includes prisons. America has, by far, the highest incarceration rate in the world, and blacks are grossly over-represented in America’s prisons. Excluding this population thus produces an overestimate of the black employment rate, especially for black men.

Blacks are also over-represented in America’s military and the blacks in the military are also not counted. If one counts blacks in prisons as not employed then blacks in the military should be counted as employed.

What happens when one makes these adjustments to calculate the black employment rate? Estimates of the 2007 incarcerated black population [PDF] is readily available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. But these estimates are for individuals 18 years old and above. The labor statistics start at 16 years old. Military statistics for 2007 are more difficult to find. There is 2005 data however. It is not clear, to me at least, whether “accessions” should be included. I counted only the enlisted force and officers and using the 2005 numbers as the best approximation of the 2007 numbers. Because these numbers are imperfect estimates, they can provide only a rough approximation and not a truly precise picture.

In 2007, the overall black non-hispanic employment rate was 58.3 percent. If one counts the incarcerated as not employed and those in the military as employed, this rate declines to 56.8 percent. The real significance of this adjustment comes when one looks at the rates for men and women separately. The black male rate declines by 3.2 percent to 57.2 percent. The black female rate declines by 0.1 percent to 56.5 percent. Incarceration further diminishes the already extremely low black male employment rate. The white male rate is about 10 percentage points higher before one adjusts for incarceration.

For the other major racial groups in the U.S., the male employment rate is more than 10 points higher than the female rate. For blacks, the rates are almost equal. This is because the black male employment rate is incredibly low.

Politicians and others want to promote marriage among blacks. But if they cannot create jobs for black men and see that employers hire black men, I don’t see how black marriage rates are going to increase. Even underclass theorists used to admit that non-working black men are not very marriageable. But the “children” of the underclass theorists want to talk about marriage as if it has no relation to the low employment rates of black men. Policy wise, we keep moving from bad ideas to worse ones.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Understanding the Black Jobs Crisis

Too few black teens are working this summer. Too few black men are working this year. Do our leaders really understand the problem? Does anyone have an adequate response?

The employment rate for black teens is abysmal. For teens overall, the employment rate last year was the lowest since World War II, according to research by the Center for Labor Market Studies [PDF]. That was the picture last year before the full onset of the economic downturn. Things are bad overall, but, as most people know, they are always worse for blacks. For whites, the teen employment rate last year was 38.3 percent. For blacks, it was 21.4 percent.

We can gain a full appreciation of the problem for black teens by looking at summer employment by class background. For the most part, teen employment rates increase with class background. Black teens from well-off families making $75,000 to $100,000 a year had a summer employment rate of 30 percent last year. This employment rate is significantly higher than the rate for black teens from impoverished families. Black teens from families earning less that $20,000 a year had an employment rate of 18 percent.

Although teens from middle-class black families are much better off than black teens from poor families, middle-class black teens are still worse off than white teens. Even white teens from impoverished families had a higher employment rate than middle-class black teens. Poor white teens had a summer employment rate of 37 percent, 7 points higher than the well-off black teens discussed above. These poor white teens had the lowest employment rates among whites, but they still beat the highest teen employment rates among blacks.

The situation for black men is bad also. Last year, the employment rate for black men in the prime working ages of 25 to 54 was 11 percentage points less than for white men in this age group. For blacks, that difference amounts to over 700,000 men without jobs.

Many argue that the key is to have more black men stay in school and earn college degrees. More education is a good idea for many reasons, but, unfortunately, it’s only a partial solution to the black employment crisis.

Education definitely helps. The employment rate for blacks who did not have a high school diploma was 54 percent. For blacks who had a four-year college degree it was 90 percent. Being better educated improves one’s job prospects.

The gap in the employment rate between black and white men, however, is not just about education. At every education level, whites are more likely to be employed than blacks. White male college graduates had a 4 percentage-point employment rate advantage over their black male peers. The white male advantage over black males for high school dropouts was a whopping 15 percentage points wide.

Surprisingly, the largest employment rate gap is among the least educated men. This finding is the opposite of what many people believe. Many people think that blacks are not finding work mainly because they are not receiving the necessary education for professional and high-tech jobs. But the larger problem is that, for some reason, black male high school dropouts can’t get the jobs that white male high school dropouts get.

I’ve looked at the education issue concretely by calculating the employment-rate gap for black and white men if black men had an educational profile identical to white men. Last year’s gap for prime-age men of 11 percentage points drops to 8 percentage points with this adjustment. Black men make progress but most of the employment-rate gap remains. Most of the gap, therefore, is due to what’s going on with employers in the labor market, not what black men lack in education.

For some reason black teens—even middle-class black teens—are having a much harder time finding work than even the poorest white teens. For some reason, white men who dropout of high school are much more employable than black men who dropout of high school. Why is this? We aren’t going to be able to answer this question as long as we are blinded by the rhetoric of “color-blindness.” It is the twenty-first century, but race still matters.

Black-White Test-Score Gap Narrows; Is NCLB Working?

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
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________________________________________________________________________


The Center on Education Policy has conducted a detailed analysis of test-score trends since the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2002. The report finds reading and math scores up in most states. Further, the black-white test-score gap has narrowed in most of the states analyzed. Some commentators are taking these findings to mean that NCLB is succeeding. The truth is that we really don’t know if NCLB is working or not.

For black students, we have findings from only a little more that a dozen states. This is because it was only appropriate to conduct the black-white test-score gap analysis on states with sufficient data available and with a large enough population of black students to yield reliable statistics. The table below provides a summary of some of the report’s findings. For elementary, middle and high schools, in reading and in math, a large majority of the states analyzed showed narrowing achievement gaps between black and white students since 2002.



If test scores are up and racial gaps are narrowing, doesn’t this mean that NCLB is working? No, it doesn’t. As the authors of the report state on page 1: “it is not possible to directly relate changes in student achievement to NCLB.” Contrary to popular belief, test scores have risen often prior to NCLB, particularly in the lower grades. (See the long-term math trends.) So, rising scores alone do not tell us whether NCLB caused the increase or some other factor that has produced increases in test scores in the past. To complicate matters further, something completely new—that is not NCLB—could be causing an increase in test scores.

Prior researchers have attempted to evaluate NCLB by comparing the growth in test scores before and after NCLB. The logic is that if student scores are increasing at, lets say, on average, three points a year before NCLB and then they increase at five points a year after NCLB, this looks like NCLB is responsible for the additional two points a year growth. Earlier research that I have seen with this methodology has found no significant positive effect after NCLB. (See the Civil Rights Project report using this method.)

This type of research is suggestive, but not conclusive. It’s not a slam dunk. If NCLB is a super, great program one would expect it to have big effects that would be clearly visible. But it could still work and not show much effect. If student test scores go from three points a year before NCLB to one point a year after NCLB, NCLB could still be effective. In this situation, it could be that were it not for NCLB student scores would have been declining by three points a year. NCLB could be preventing negative growth that is due to something else.

Just as we could not assume that declining test scores were the result of NCLB, we can’t assume that increasing test scores are the result of NCLB either. Scores are going up, but we’re seen big jumps in test scores in the past for reasons other than NCLB. In the past, however, few people in the media paid any attention.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

Video: Race, Ethnicity and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

Researchers studying the housing market believe that the foreclosure crisis is just beginning. Some of them say that it will continue into 2010. Black communities are expected to experience a historic loss of wealth and suffer further from the negative ripple effects of communities with vacant homes and declining tax bases. To gain some perspective on this crisis watch the Economic Policy Institute event: Race, Ethnicity and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis. Scroll to the bottom of this page for the full-length video, in three parts.

American Health Care: Very Expensive, Very Low-Quality

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
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________________________________________________________________________

[re-post]

Source: Karen Davis et al., Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: An International Update on the Comparative Performance of American Health Care, The Commonwealth Fund, May 2007, p. viii.

The U.S, spends more than twice as much per capita on health care as the United Kingdom, yet a recent report ranked the U.K.’s health system first and the U.S.’s last among six nations. We pay the most to get the least.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: An International Update on the Comparative Performance of American Health Care by Karen Davis et al. compares the health care systems in Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The researchers compare the countries on the quality of care, access, efficiency, equity, and the promotion of healthy living. The U.S. scored last on access, efficiency, equity, and the promotion of healthy living. On quality of care the U.S. was second to last.

The report states:

The most notable way the U.S. differs from other countries is the absence of universal health insurance coverage. Other nations ensure the accessibility of care through universal health insurance systems and through better ties between patients and the physician practices that serve as their long-term “medical home.” It is not surprising, therefore, that the U.S. substantially underperforms other countries on measures of access to care and equity in health care between populations with above-average and below-average incomes.

With the inclusion of physician survey data in the analysis, it is also apparent that the U.S. is lagging in adoption of information technology and national policies that promote quality improvement. The U.S. can learn from what physicians and patients have to say about practices that can lead to better management of chronic conditions and better coordination of care. Information systems in countries like Germany, New Zealand, and the U.K. enhance the ability of physicians to monitor chronic conditions and medication use. These countries also routinely employ non-physician clinicians such as nurses to assist with managing patients with chronic diseases.

For decades, nations in the developed world have provided high-quality, inexpensive health care to all of their citizens. The U.S. stands alone with an expensive, low-quality health care system than covers fewer and fewer of its citizens each year.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

The Greatest Story Never Told

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
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[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
________________________________________________________________________


. . . Well, At Least, in the Last 10 Years

For a recent presentation, I needed to quickly illustrate some of the major facts about black America that none of the leading black public intellectuals have paid attention to. I came up with the figure below. The figure allows us to compare the direction and percent change in the poverty rate, the violent crime victimization race, the share of bachelors degrees earned and the teenage birth rate for blacks from 1990 to 2000. The poverty rate was cut by nearly 30 percent, the violent crime rate by nearly 50 percent, the share of bachelor’s degrees increased by 50 percent and the teen birth rate was cut by nearly a third. Somehow black public intellectuals missed these positive developments and claimed that conditions in black America were worse than ever.





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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

Should We Be Worried about the Declining Black Marital Birth Rate?

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
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[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
________________________________________________________________________


It is difficult to understand the current changes in the black family because many different things are happening at the same time. Many people know that the percent of black births that are out-of-wedlock is very high, but few people know that there are three different reasons why this is the case.

Most people probably know this one: there is a large number of black single parent families. But one rarely hears discussions about the other two: the low black marital birth rate and the high rate of black adults who are single and without children. If married black women had babies at the rate they did in the past and single black adults married and also had babies, the percent of black births that are out-of-wedlock would drop significantly because there would be many more in-wedlock births.

It is important to realize that the “percent of births” is not a birth rate. The birth rate is the number of births for every 1,000 women in a specific category. The last marital birth rates calculated by the National Center for Health Statistics were for 2002. In 2002, the black marital birth rate was 64.9 births for every 1,000 married black women. The white marital birth rate was 88.2 for every 1,000 married white women. The black marital birth rate was 23.3 births less that the white rate. In the past, the black marital birth rate used to be higher than the white rate. Because there is such a low number of births among married black women, the percent of births to unmarried black women is especially high.

The percent of women ages 18 to 44 who were not married and have no children is higher for blacks than for whites. By my calculations from the American Community Survey, in 2006, 32.8 percent of white women in this age range were single without children. There were 6 percent more black women in this category, 38.8 percent. As recently as 1990, only 29.3 percent of black women in this age group were unmarried and without children. Last year, scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill reported that these single adults living alone were making up a larger share of the black middle class.

The changes in black family structure are far more complicated than most people realize. Few people know that there are three separate factors producing the high percent of births that are out-of-wedlock among blacks. Is the low birth rate for married black women a good thing or a bad thing? Should we be concerned about the increase in single black adults without children? We haven’t asked these questions because there has been more hasty assumptions than serious data analysis about black families.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

Criminal Justice Reform Is Pro-Marriage, Pro-Family

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
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[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
________________________________________________________________________


Barack Obama delivered another masterful speech Sunday. The news report I saw made it seem like he merely did an impersonation of Bill Cosby, but he was more subtle and sophisticated than that. Nonetheless, it was a speech that Cosby would be proud of since it did endorse Cosby’s arguments.

Obama said that yes black communities needed more jobs and better schools and that past injustices did play a role in the absence of fathers in black homes, but that black people could not use those things as excuses. He said that black men should not be languishing in prison when they should be out looking for a job.

There are too many issues here that should be unpacked and discussed for me to deal with all of them at this point, but I’ll tackle a few.

The injustices are not only in the past. Our current criminal justice system is biased by race and class as I illustrated last week in “Whites, Blacks and Illicit Drugs”. If we had different criminal justice policies there would be fewer black men in prison. We need to work to eliminate the race and class biases in the criminal justice system. We need to expand opportunities for drug treatment. We need to use alternative, community-based sentencing for certain non-violent offenders. If we had elected officials who were committed to reforms of this sort, there would be more black men available to be the fathers that Obama and Cosby would like to see.

This is a very real issue for black women in the poorest black communities. Even the conservative (by my standards) scholar Isabel Sawhill admits that “for certain subgroups of African-American women” she “did find a shortage of eligible men” for them to marry.¹ We simply can’t improve the rate of two-parent families in the poorest black communities without dealing with the present racial injustices in our criminal justice system.

Obama argues that blacks should not use issues like the lack of jobs, the high rate of poverty, the high degree of economic inequality as excuses for the absence of men in black families. But there is a growing body of research that identifies the lack of jobs, poverty and economic inequality as important causes of the higher rates of crime in black communities.² If we want to keep black men out of prison, we will also need economic policies to address these issues.

The economic development of poor black communities is also important because black men who are unemployed are probably less likely to marry. Poor black women are probably not interested in marrying unemployed black men. Unemployed black men are probably reluctant to marry if they cannot contribute financially to the household.

The more education one has the more likely one is to marry.³ The issue of the separate and unequal education that black students receive is, again, not simply an excuse. If we improve the educational attainment of blacks, we will likely increase marriage rates.

If Obama wishes to increase the marriage rates in black communities, he needs to (1) recognize the racial disparities in our criminal justice system as one of the current injustices facing black America, (2) institute policies that lead to good jobs for blacks, and (3) improve the quality of black schools. Is Obama able to recognize the importance of these policies? Will Obama be willing and able to deliver them, if he does?


References
1. Isabel V. Sawhill, “The Behavioral Aspects of Poverty,” The Public Interest, Fall 2003, p. 88.

2. Eric D. Gould, Bruce A. Weinberg, and David B. Mustard, “Crime Rates and Local Labor Market Opportunities in the United States: 1979-1997,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 84(1), February 2002: 45-61; Stephen Machin and Costas Meghir, “Crime and Economic Incentives,” Journal of Human Resources 39(4), Autumn 2004: 958-979; Jens Ludwig, Greg J. Duncan, and Paul Hirschfield, “Urban Poverty and Juvenile Crime: Evidence from a Randomized Housing-Mobility Experiment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116(2), May 2001: 655-679; Morgan Kelly, “Inequality and Crime,” Review of Economics and Statistics 82(4), November 2000: 530-539.

3. David T. Ellwood and Christopher Jencks, “The Uneven Spread of Single-Parent Families: What Do We Know? Where Do We Look for Answers?” in Social Inequality, Kathryn Neckerman ed. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004), 3-77.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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[The Thora Institute needs you.]

Whites, Blacks and Illicit Drugs

[From the Daily Voice.com]

It is easy to be misled about the reality of race and drugs in America. Movies, television shows, rap music and the incarceration statistics could lead one to believe that drug abuse and drug dealing are far more common among blacks than among other groups.

Occasionally, however, some news reaches the general public to suggest that this might not be the case.

So far this year, 95 San Diego State University students (PDF file) have been arrested for drug dealing and possession. The picture one gets from looking at the arrested students--and the school student newspaper did provide pictures--is radically different from the picture in much of America's popular culture. The arrested students look like middle-class California--white, Hispanic, Asian and black--with blacks in the minority.

This large number of arrests is the result of a special focus by the University police, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the San Diego County District Attorney's Office after the death of a white student from a drug overdose last year. Although San Diego State University may be rare among universities in seriously pursuing illicit drugs on its campus, it is by no means the only university with drug users and drug dealers. As the president of the University stated, "Drug use is a concern on virtually every campus in our country."

When a white student was arrested at New York University for dealing drugs in 2004, a spokesperson for that university concurred. "The issue of drug use by college students is an issue that institutions of higher learning confront on a daily basis," he stated.

Contrary to the popular stereotype, drug use surveys like the National Survey on Drug Use and Health show similar levels of drug use among blacks and whites. If whites across the country use illicit drugs, they have to get them from somewhere. Criminologists are convinced that most whites get them from other white friends and acquaintances.

At San Diego State, apparently, many students purchased their drugs from other students. In the Washington D.C. area, my neck of the woods, police recently arrested students from some of the region's elite, predominantly-white high schools for allegedly selling marijuana to other students.

We have every reason to believe that blacks and whites use drugs and deal drugs at roughly comparable rates but the black incarceration rate for drug offenses is about ten times the white rate. For men, the disparity is about twelve times the white rate. Black women are incarcerated at about five times the rate of white women.

These disparities mean that white youth involved with drugs are much more likely to have opportunities to rehabilitate themselves and then get on with their lives. For many students at universities like San Diego State, they can use drugs or deal drugs and still end up in later years as respected adults in the American middle class.

For the many black youth who have similar levels of drug involvement, they are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated. For these black youth, a criminal record makes the prospect of finding a good job--or any job--very difficult. Black youth who are incarcerated carry that scarlet letter of a criminal record for the rest of their lives.

If we want to change this lopsided racial disparity in drug incarceration there are two options. We could begin to police predominantly white high schools, colleges, workplaces and neighborhoods searching for drugs as intensively as we police poor black communities. Drug dragnets like the one at San Diego State University would have to become the rule rather than the exception.

The second option is that we rethink the whole idea of the "war on drugs." A recent report by the Sentencing Project states that we've arrested 31 million people for drug offenses since 1980. These arrests have been disproportionately in lower-income black communities, yet I doubt there is a poor black community where we can say the "war on drugs" has been won.

There are many advocates at the Sentencing Project, the Justice Policy Institute, the Drug Policy Alliance, Common Sense for Drug Policy, Efficacy and other organizations with ideas for a new approach to the issue of illicit drugs. After two decades and 31 million arrests have failed to solve the problem, isn't it time to consider another approach?


Copyright © 2008, TheDailyVoice.com, Inc.

Quotes on Race and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

An Economic Policy Institute Event

Race, Ethnicity, and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

June 12, 2008, 2:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Economic Policy Institute
1333 H Street, NW, Suite 300, East Tower
Washington, D.C. 20005

Moderated by
Dr. ALGERNON AUSTIN
Director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy
with presentations by
GRACIELA APONTE, National Council of La Raza
DEBBIE BOCIAN, Center for Responsible Lending
WILHELMINA LEIGH , Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
DEDRICK MUHAMMAD, Institute for Policy Studies
GREGORY SQUIRES, George Washington University
RSVP here.
________________________________________________________________________


Fraud has been rampant in the sale of subprime mortgages.--Economist, March 22, 2008.


An analysis for The Wall Street Journal of more than $2.5 trillion in subprime loans made since 2000 shows that as the number of subprime loans mushroomed, an increasing proportion of them went to people with credit scores high enough to often qualify for conventional loans with far better terms.

In 2005, the peak year of the subprime boom, the study says that borrowers with such credit scores got more than half -- 55% -- of all subprime mortgages that were ultimately packaged into securities for sale to investors, as most subprime loans are. The study by First American LoanPerformance, a San Francisco research firm, says the proportion rose even higher by the end of 2006, to 61%. The figure was just 41% in 2000, according to the study. Even a significant number of borrowers with top-notch credit signed up for expensive subprime loans, the firm's analysis found.--Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2007


Even with risk controls, the neighborhood minority share is consistently significant and positively related to subprime share in both years. Furthermore, the neighborhood educational level is consistently significant and negatively related to subprime lending.-- Paul S. Calem and Jonathan E. Hershaff, and Susan M. Wachter, Housing Policy Debate 15(3), 2004.


Only 20 percent of subprime loans in 2005 were made by banks or thrift institutions, two entities that are supervised by federal regulators. More than half (51 percent) were made by unsupervised mortgage companies, and 29 percent were made by the more lightly supervised subsidiaries of supervised lenders. --The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studites


In 2006, more than one-half (52.9 percent) of African Americans and nearly half of Hispanics (47.3 percent) who acquired home-purchase loans had subprime loans. This is in contrast to the fourth (26.1 percent) of counterpart white borrowers who acquired these loans.38 Almost a third (31 percent) of American Indian or Alaska Native homebuyers also purchased homes with subprime loans.----The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studites


African-American women, who represent half of African-American home purchase borrowers, are particularly vulnerable. In fact, there is evidence that subprime lenders charge black women and Latinas higher rates and fees than same-race men and white men, again, regardless of income and across all loan types. --Anita F. Hill, Boston Globe, October 22, 2007


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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U.S. Has Highest Child Poverty Rate in Developed World

One of the 10 Best Black Books of 2006! --Kam Williams, Dallasblack.com

I taught Getting It Wrong to my undergrad black politics class. The book is a real tonic. --Adolph Reed, University of Pennsylvania

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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________________________________________________________________________

[re-post]

The U.S. has the highest child poverty rate among 24 OECD countries, indicates UNICEF in its latest Innocenti Research Centre Report Card. The Report Card was issued in February of this year, and it rates many different aspects of child well-being in OECD countries. This week and in coming weeks, I will review some of the findings.


Source: UNICEF, Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries, Innocenti Report Card 7, 2007.

When child poverty is defined as the percent of 0 to 17 year-olds in households with earnings of less than 50 percent of the national median income, the United States scores worst among developed nations. Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have the lowest child poverty rates.

The U.S. is not only last, it is far behind the second-to-last country, New Zealand. New Zealand beats the U.S. by more than 5 percentage points. This is the largest difference between two adjacent countries in the entire ranking.

We cannot blame the last place ranking of the U.S. on that favorite target—single parents. The Report Card states,

Variations between countries in the proportion of children growing up in lone-parent families do not explain national poverty rates. Sweden, for example, has a higher proportion of children living in lone-parent families than the United States or the United Kingdom but a much lower child poverty rate than either.

Poverty is still fundamentally an issue of low income, not family structure.

This measure of poverty, as less than 50 percent of the national median, is really a measure of income inequality. It is a relative measure, not an absolute one. In terms of the absolute value of income, a household defined as in poverty in the U.S. could have higher earnings than a household that is not in relative income poverty in a poorer developed nation.

This point is an important one to keep in mind. On the other hand, Americans judge their well-being relative to other Americans, not relative to the living standards of people in countries like Greece, Poland and the Czech Republic.

On the broader measure of the material well-being of children, the U.S. places 17th out of the 21 countries with complete data. This placement is better, but not much better.

The Report Card defines material well-being as an average of measures of relative income poverty, households without jobs and reported deprivation.

The U.S. is 17th in well-being but places highly—5th (out of 24)—in the percentage of children living in households without an employed parent. Many of the countries with lower rates of relative income poverty among children have higher unemployment rates than the U.S. It is easier to find a job in the U.S. and also easier to be impoverished. This situation occurs because in most developed nations, the public sees poverty as harmful to the nation. In the U.S., we see people not working as the greater threat. The end result is that we have many families that can be described as working poor.

The reported deprivation scale is an average of three items: affluence, educational resources, and books.

The affluence measure asks children if their family owns an automobile, if they have their own bedroom, if they have traveled on vacation with their family and how many computers their family owns. This measure allows the high standard of living in the U.S. to be factored in.

The U.S. scores highly on affluence—6th (out of 20)—but still some distance from number one. Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, Canada and Switzerland all score higher. Denmark is immediately behind the U.S.

The U.S. is 13th (out of 24) in the percentage of children reporting less than six educational possessions, and a depressing 22nd (out of 24) on the percentage of children reporting less than 10 books in the home. The low score for the U.S. in these areas cannot be simply because children are using the worldwide web for their information. Countries with equal or higher technological development (e.g., Japan, Germany and Canada) outscore the U.S. in children with books.

“Variation in government policy appears to account for most of the variation in child poverty levels between OECD countries,” states the Innocenti Centre. In others words, the U.S. could have lower child poverty rates, we just have to want it.

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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.
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Class and Racial Disparities in School Construction Spending

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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Many people focus on the general disparities in school funding as an explanation for disparities in educational outcomes. This is an important point, but it is not as precise an argument as it could be. Critics point out that there are schools with high levels of funding that have low educational outcomes.

The issue is not merely how much dollars in general is going to a school. Some schools are in areas with higher costs of living. Some schools cost more to run. Some schools are better managed than others. These and other factors may absorb additional dollars in school funding without necessarily producing increases in school quality. The better argument, therefore, is about school quality. Predominantly black schools are more likely to be low-quality schools than predominantly white schools. People should make arguments specifically about reducing the disparities in school quality rather than school funding.

In general, however, there is a relationship between school quality and school funding. This relationship is probably particularly strong when one looks at the amount of dollars spent on school construction. Growth and Disparity: A Decade of U.S. Public School Construction by Building Educational Success Together (BEST) allows us to look at the class and race disparities in public school construction spending.

High income areas spent nearly three times as much on school construction as low income areas. In zip code areas where the median household income was at least $100,000, $11,500 per student was spent on school construction. In zip code areas where the median household income was less than $20,000, only $4,140 was spent on school construction.

There was a weaker disparity by the race of the school district. Predominantly white school districts spent about a third more than predominantly minority school districts. School districts that were more than 90 percent white spent $7,102 per student, but school districts that were more than 90 percent minority spent $5,172 per student.

Although the quality of school buildings may not be a common school quality measure, it matters for educational outcomes. BEST states, “An increasing body of research indicates that poor building conditions such as a lack of temperature control, poor indoor air quality, insufficient daylight, overcrowded classrooms, and a lack of specialty classrooms are obstacles to academic achievement.” Having science labs that are up-to-date and working and other good facilities also probably provide some educational benefit. In America’s schools, wealthier and whiter schools tend to have all of these things and poorer and blacker schools tend not to.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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