Does Obama's Success Mean Blacks Have Overcome?

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
________________________________________________________________________


It has been wonderful to see people of all races celebrate the victory of Barack Obama. His advance does represent an important step forward for African Americans. But those who take his victory to mean that blacks have overcome are seeing the world through very rose colored glasses.

Obama's victory comes on the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission report on the riots of the 1960s. That report can be used to assess how far blacks in general have come as opposed to how much one black elected official has achieved. In 1968, the Kerner Commission identified the criminal justice system, employment, housing and education as areas of significant black-white disparities that needed good public policy and large public investments to move us to an equal and integrated society. Sadly, many of the disparities the Commission highlighted 40 years ago remain with us today.

There may be less of the day-to-day police brutality that led to riots in several cities in the 1960s, but relations between blacks and the police are still not good. The cases of Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo and others still cause many blacks to fear the police rather than see the police as a force promoting safety and security. Further, many also see our criminal justice system as a profoundly anti-black institution. For example, The Cleveland Plain Dealer recently published an investigative report showing that for similar drug offenses blacks in Cleveland were more likely to be incarcerated than whites. Even in some cases where whites possessed more drugs and had more serious criminal records they received more leniency than blacks. There is much more that needs to be done in the area of criminal justice before we can say that blacks have overcome.

In 1968, blacks were about twice as likely to be unemployed as whites. In 2008, blacks are about twice as likely to be unemployed as whites. The crisis joblessness in black communities remains severe. Improving the educational outcomes of blacks will help in this area, but there remains significant anti-black attitudes in the labor market. My current research shows that while college-educated blacks have similar employment rates as whites, as one moves down the educational ladder the racial disparities grow rapidly. The black-white disparities are most severe for male high school dropouts. For some reason, employers see white male high school dropouts as much more desirable employees than black male high school dropouts. In a color-blind world, one high school dropout would be as good or as bad as the next, but we don't live in that world yet. In the American labor market, it helps to be white especially if one is less-educated.

Our schools and neighborhoods were largely separate and unequal in 1968, and they are still separate and unequal today. Barack Obama served Illinois as a senator. The Illinois Education Research Council has done important work on race and teacher quality [PDF, p. 24] in that state. The Council ranked all high schools by teacher quality using 2002 data. It found that nearly half of all black high school students were in the schools in the bottom 25 percent of the teacher-quality rankings. Only about one-sixth of white students were in these low teacher-quality schools. We can't say that we have overcome when blacks students are still segregated into the worse schools in America.

We have not overcome, but it is important to also acknowledge the progress that blacks have made. We know that blacks are not as educated as we would like them to be, but we should also acknowledge that the black population is more educated than it has ever been. In 2006, the year of the most recent data from the Digest of Education Statistics, 9.6 percent of the bachelor's degrees given nationally went to blacks. This rate was up from 7.9 percent in 1996, and it was the highest level on record. There is a substantial number of blacks in the American middle and upper class, and a large number of black elected officials. These are some of the positive developments that we have seen since the Kerner Commission report.

Obama's victory represents a significant advance for America on its path to racial equality. But we aren't there yet. The Kerner Commission report reminds us that while we have made great strides, there is still a long way to go. As Miriam Makeka sang in Portuguese--"a luta continua"--the struggle continues.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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

Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Obama the Non-Racial Centrist

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
________________________________________________________________________


"But even if Obama were not faced with towering crises that have nothing to do with race, ethnicity and special interest demands, he still would hew tightly to a moderate centrist path in his staff and cabinet picks. The tipoff of that was his campaign. There was, and could not have been, the slightest racial or confrontational edge to it. That was absolutely crucial to win over doubting centrist, and conservative independents. In the early stages of the campaign they leaned tenuously to McCain. But Obama's pitch that he'd put priority emphasis on tax and economic aid to the middle-class proved decisive in tipping the vote scale in his favor.

"This was no accident. Though Obama publicly distanced himself from Bill Clinton's conservative Democratic Leadership Council. He still hewed closely to the template that Clinton and the DLC laid out for Democrats to win elections.

"That is talk of strong defense, the war against terrorism, a vague plan for winding down the Iraq War, tax reform, a tame plan for affordable health care and the sub-prime lending crisis, and the economic resuscitation of mid-America. This non-racial, centrist pitch does not threaten or alienate the white middle-class. Meanwhile, Obama was virtually silent on issues such as racial profiling, affirmative action, housing and job discrimination, the racial disparities in prison sentencing, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, failing inner city schools, ending the racially-marred drug sentencing policy, and his Supreme Court appointments."

Read the full op-ed.

Why is the Black Male Employment Rate So Low?

THE WORK THAT REMAINS
A Forty-Year Update of the Kerner Commission Report

Forty years ago, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission, famously concluded that America was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal." Its recommendations to promote racial integration and remedy the economic failures that fostered a wave of inner city violence were ultimately rejected by President Lyndon Johnson, who appointed the commission. Today, minorities still face many of the troubling conditions outlined in the commission report, including under-representation in the labor market, high rates of poverty, disparities in education funding and disproportionate involvement in the criminal justice system.

In collaboration with the Eisenhower Foundation, EPI will present a forum to assess our nation's progress over the last forty years and, more important, to discuss what is still left to do to move us closer to an equal and high-performing society.

When and where
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Registration: 9:15 am
Program: 9:30 - 11:30 am
Economic Policy Institute
1333 H Street, NW, East Tower, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20005
[ RSVP below ]

Introduction
CHRISTIAN DORSEY
Outreach Coordinator, Economic Policy Institute

Opening remarks
DR. VALERIE RAWLSTON WILSON
Senior Resident Scholar, National Urban League Policy Institute
DR. ALAN CURTIS
President and CEO, Eisenhower Foundation
DR. JOHN IRONS
Research and Policy Director, Economic Policy Institute
DR. ALGERNON AUSTIN
Director of Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, Economic Policy Institute

Discussant
HILARY O. SHELTON
Director, NAACP-Washington Bureau
RSVP: Click here to reserve your seat now
________________________________________________________________________


Among America’s major racial and ethnic groups, blacks suffer most severely from a lack of jobs. As indicated in Figure A, from 1997 to 2007, blacks consistently had significantly lower employment rates when compared with whites. In 1997, the white-black differential in employment rates was 6.5 percentage points. By 2000, as a result of job growth in the second half of the 1990s, the gap had fallen to 4.1 percentage points. The 2001 recession and subsequent “jobless recovery” reversed these gains, and by 2004, the white-black employment rate gap had increased to 5.9 percentage points. Since 2004, the gap had been declining again, but the current economic downturn will likely reverse these gains.

[Read more.]

Short Takes: Criminal Justice

THE WORK THAT REMAINS
A Forty-Year Update of the Kerner Commission Report

Forty years ago, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission, famously concluded that America was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal." Its recommendations to promote racial integration and remedy the economic failures that fostered a wave of inner city violence were ultimately rejected by President Lyndon Johnson, who appointed the commission. Today, minorities still face many of the troubling conditions outlined in the commission report, including under-representation in the labor market, high rates of poverty, disparities in education funding and disproportionate involvement in the criminal justice system.

In collaboration with the Eisenhower Foundation, EPI will present a forum to assess our nation's progress over the last forty years and, more important, to discuss what is still left to do to move us closer to an equal and high-performing society.

When and where
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Registration: 9:15 am
Program: 9:30 - 11:30 am
Economic Policy Institute
1333 H Street, NW, East Tower, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20005
[ RSVP below ]

Introduction
CHRISTIAN DORSEY
Outreach Coordinator, Economic Policy Institute

Opening remarks
DR. VALERIE RAWLSTON WILSON
Senior Resident Scholar, National Urban League Policy Institute
DR. ALAN CURTIS
President and CEO, Eisenhower Foundation
DR. JOHN IRONS
Research and Policy Director, Economic Policy Institute
DR. ALGERNON AUSTIN
Director of Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, Economic Policy Institute

Discussant
HILARY O. SHELTON
Director, NAACP-Washington Bureau
RSVP: Click here to reserve your seat now
________________________________________________________________________

Excellent Report on Race and Drug Arrests

If you're arrested for drugs, you're more likely to get a second chance if you're white.

Another High-Profile White Drug User

Busted: Miss Teen Louisiana skips on restaurant bill... but leaves behind purse stashed with drugs

Incarceration, crime, and African American economic outcomes

Crime and criminal justice policies are increasingly entangled with the economic outcomes of African Americans and particularly of black men. Since the 1970s when the U.S. embarked on “tough-on-crime” sentencing policies, the U.S. incarceration rate has skyrocketed. Prior to the 1970s, the U.S. incarceration rate was roughly 100 per 100,000 residents.

Today, the U.S. incarceration rate is about 700 per 100,000 residents. Although the United States leads the world in incarceration, it does not have the lowest crime rate. While the U.S. homicide rate is very high, the overall U.S. crime rate is within the range of other developed nations. Other developed nations, however, still have incarceration rates around 100 per 100,000 residents (Mauer 2006). [read more (PDF)]

Why crime prevention is better than incarceration

Incarceration is a necessary part of criminal justice, but the most effective riminal justice policies are those that prevent individuals from ever engaging in criminal activity. Below are six reasons why actively preventing crime is better than reactively responding to crime with incarceration. [read more (PDF)]



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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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

Rebuilding the American Economy from the Ground Up

In the midst of a financial crisis and a foreclosure crisis, it is difficult for Americans to take a moment, step back and look at the big picture. But that is what we must do to if we really wish to restore the country to economic health. Even if we effectively address the foreclosure and financial crises, another economic crisis will be waiting for us down the road because the fundamentals of the American economy are weak.

America has been competing in an increasingly global and integrated world economy—and losing badly. America’s losses can be measured by the wages of American men. Since the late 1970s, the wages of American men in the bottom 60 percent of the wage distribution have declined in inflation-adjusted dollars. Black wages are lower than average. So, if 60 percent of American males generally have seen declining wages then more than 60 percent of black male wages have declined. These losses are the result of the American economy shedding high-wage jobs due to global competition.

From the 1940s through the 1960s, male wages increased and American living standards followed these increases. Since the 1970s, living standards have increased largely because American women have worked more and at better jobs. But overtime, more and more American households have reached the limit of income gains from women’s work. For these households, the next means of increasing income was to go into debt.

In recent years, the American economy has been growing not on American earnings, but on American debt. In the report Borrowing to Make Ends Meet, Jose Garcia of the Dëmos think tank states that “between 1989 and 2006, Americans’ overall credit card debt grew by 315 percent from $211 billion to $876 billion (2006 dollars).” Also, “from 2001 to 2006, homeowners cashed out $1.2 trillion in home equity, often in an effort to cope with mounting credit card debt and to cover basic living expenses (2006 dollars).” The financial and foreclosure crises ultimately are the result an American economy built on debt—debt absent of the growing incomes needed to repay loans.

We need an American economy where the earnings of average workers—male and female—increase enough so that Americans can pay off their debt and save. This means we need a strategy for competing in the global economy. We cannot continue to simply watch high-wage jobs disappear without having a plan to replace them.

There are many things that we need to do. We need fair trade agreements, not free trade agreements. We need labor and tax policies that aid average American workers, not just CEOs and major shareholders. We need to make repairs and improvements to America’s infrastructure so that it can support a growing economy. We need to improve our educational system especially as it serves black and Hispanic students. We need a health care system that is as inexpensive and as good as our European competitors. These policies just level the playing field for the United States with its global competitors.

Additionally, we need a national economic strategy and a “coach” for the American economy. In other words, we need political leaders who will see that business leaders build an economy to meet tomorrow’s challenges and not only to make a quick buck today. The key example of this failure was when the American auto industry decided to settle with building gas-guzzling SUVS and trucks while the Asian auto industry invested in developing hybrid technology. There was no reason why the U.S. auto industry was not out in front on hybrid technology.

All the signs are that the energy future is clean and green, but once again the United States is lagging. We still have political leaders who get excited about drilling for oil—yesterday’s energy—when they should be devising a plan for how we will compete with Germany, Spain and Denmark in clean and green energy production. There a lots of opportunities for the United States to develop high-wage jobs manufacturing products for the world’s future needs, but we are not taking advantage of them.

We can fix the financial crisis and the foreclosure crisis, but that will still leave us with a country with a broken economic engine. Male wages are declining and household debt is increasing. We cannot have a growing economy when each year the average household has less and less real income to spend.

The Republican Party’s Race Problem

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
________________________________________________________________________


The Republic Party has a big problem. The current election has reinforced the idea that the Republican Party is a party of racially prejudiced white people. The country is becoming increasingly non-white. The Census Bureau estimates that by 2042, the nation will be majority non-white. The McCain-Palin campaign has stoked animosity to the Republican Party among non-whites. Even if John McCain and Sarah Palin were able to win the election, the Republican Party would still appear to be on the wrong side of history.

With Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee, this would have been a difficult year for the Republican Party among non-whites regardless. Obama is a charismatic, centrist, "post-racial" politician. Exactly the type that or person who could peel away the votes and support of Hispanic, black and Asian independents and conservatives from the Republican Party. It is not suprising that the Republican convention was the whitest one in recent history, because Obama was able to secure strong non-white support.

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that the Republican convention had "the lowest black representation in 40 years" due to "Senator Obama's historic candidacy, the deep and genuine enthusiasm for him in the black community, and Senator McCain’s association with President Bush, an exceptionally unpopular figure among African Americans."

Instead of running a high-minded campaign, the McCain-Palin ticket has resorted to playing with racism and xenophobia in an effort to excite its conservative base. It has also made baseless charges of voter fraud against an organization that registers primarily poor and non-white people. It has challenged other policies and officials in what looks like an effort to suppress or disqualify the votes of primarily poor and non-white people.

Since whites are still a large majority of the population and are more likely than non-whites to be registered to vote, a political campaign based on securing white votes only can still win. But the overall demographic and political trends make this a losing strategy over the long term.

The Republican Party can recover from these strong negatives with non-white voters. It is not the first time that the Party has played on racial prejudices to win votes. If the Party makes a concerted effort immediately after the election for several years, it can once again make inroads in minority communities. The question is will the leadership of the Party recognize its race problem and act to address it. Or will the reactionary forces, keep control of the Party and continue to pursue a strategy based on reinforcing prejudice against people of color.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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

What Does Obama’s Post-Racialism Mean for 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
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com
________________________________________________________________________


The Obama campaign has treated “race” and “blacks” as words best not mentioned in polite company. Even when it would have been natural or expected for Obama to discuss race or the needs of black communities, he has sidestepped the issue. The most blacks received were occasional lectures about personal responsibility which could have been uttered by Bill Cosby or Bill O’Reilly.

Only when cornered by opponents’ references to Reverend Jeremiah Wright did Obama speak seriously of racial discrimination. Even then, all of the issues Wright raised were treated as issues from the past that had no relevance for today. On the other hand, Obama has made passing references to gender-based discrimination as something existing today.

This strategy is very smart for trying to get a black man elected. Obama has to navigate two minefields to win. He has to deal with conscious and overt anti-blackness as well as subconscious anti-black bias. A recent study has suggested that about a third of Democrats have some degree of overt anti-black attitudes. About 50 percent of Americans have subconscious anti-black attitudes. These individuals think that they are free of racial prejudice, but in specific instances they behave with anti-black bias. Also, white Americans are more likely to subconsciously associate blacks with being non-American. These conscious and subconscious attitudes make one less likely to support Obama.

To win, the Obama campaign has avoided anything that could make Obama seem like a candidate concerned about black people. The stronger Obama’s association with black people and black issues, the more likely he would trigger conscious and subconscious anti-black attitudes in the American electorate and lose the election. Thus, the Obama campaign has treated race like superman deals with kryptonite. The further away from the topic Obama stays the better his political health. This means that, ironically, because of anti-black prejudice in American society, Obama has to pretend that there is no anti-black prejudice, if he wishes to win.

This strategy took Obama far, but it did not seem to be enough. A month ago, it seemed like a significant portion of Democrats were still more swayed by anti-blackness than by their political beliefs. Only about 70 percent of Democrats supported Obama while 85 percent of Republicans supported McCain. Apparently, it took the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression and missteps by the McCain campaign to finally produce a commanding lead for the Obama campaign.

Assuming that Obama wins, what does this post-racial stategy mean for blacks? Ironically, a black president automatically presents significant obstacles for addressing the needs of black communities. If elected, Obama will surely wish to be re-elected. This means that he has to continue with post-racialist politics. The best blacks can hope for is a few more “Cosby” speeches. Also, the highly-organized Republican attack machine will look for any opportunity stroke anti-black attitudes and racial fears in the American public. Any overtly racial policies will be condemned by the right-wing pitbulls. In other words, race will continue to be kryptonite.

People concerned about racial justice and justice specifically for blacks will need to be at least as organized and effective as the right-wing, if they hope to see any race-specific progress under an Obama administration. The bad news is that this is not likely to happen. The good news is that Obama’s centrist Democratic policies will still be far better for blacks than the policies of George W. Bush or of a president John McCain.


Share this article with a friend. Use the email icon below.

--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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

Is Black America Too Important to Fail?

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
________________________________________________________________________


“I’m still waiting for my 40 acres and a mule,” my friend said as we talked about the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. We both worried that once again black America would not receive the full economic assistance that it needs. While the nation’s attention has been drawn to the economic crisis generally, there seems to be little attention to the even worse economic news for black communities. Since no one is paying attention, my friend and I had little hope that black communities facing more extreme troubles would benefit from direct aid anytime soon.

On many measures, it is clear that blacks are being hit the hardest by the declining American economy. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies had already informed us that blacks and Hispanics were about twice as likely as whites to receive a subprime loan. This fact would lead one to think that blacks would have about twice the foreclosure rate as whites. If that were true, that would be bad enough. But a new report by AARP [PDF] finds that blacks and Hispanics have foreclosure rates about three times that of whites.

Last August, the black unemployment rate was 7.7 percent. That is a low rate—for blacks. In the past 10 years the white unemployment rate never rose beyond 5.5 percent. This August the black unemployment rate reached 10.6 percent. In September, the black unemployment rate increased again, to 11.4 percent. The white unemployment rate was 5.4 percent in August, and it stayed at 5.4 percent in September. America’s past nine months of declining jobs have had a greater negative affect on black communities than on white communities.

Since 2000, the white family poverty rate is up 0.5 percentage points. The black family poverty rate has risen 2.8 percentage points. For white children, the poverty rate is up 1.0 percentage point; for black children, 3.3 points. The most startling rise is for black families headed by an unmarried male—yes, male. These families have experienced an increase in their poverty rate of 9.4 percentage points. White single males heading a family have only seen a 1.1 percentage point increase in their poverty rate. Americans of all races are hurting, but the level of economic pain is above average in many black communities.

Washington D.C., my hometown, is a good bellwether for black communities generally. The city is majority black, and it has a sizable poor black population. The Washington Post reports that the percent of people receiving food stamps in the District is up 9.2 percent from July 2007 to July this year.

Now that the Wall Street bailout has passed, the issue for blacks to be especially concerned about is that fiscal conservatives of both political parties will use the immediate cost of the bailout as a justification to cut programs that directly benefit average Americans. The argument will be that we cannot afford program X or spending Y because we are $700 billion dollars deeper in debt. This argument is not acceptable.

We still need to effectively address the foreclosure crisis, and we still need economic stimulus policies that will help pull the country out of the current economic recession. Economic growth is ultimately necessary for the country to regain financial stability. Economic growth that reaches black communities is desperately needed.

For a very long time black communities have needed investments, job creation and economic development. The government finds money for bridges to nowhere, missile defense shields of dubious effectiveness, ill-advised wars, Wall Street bailouts and everything else deemed too important to fail. When will our leaders decide that black communities are too important to fail economically?



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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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

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
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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.

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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
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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.

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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
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________________________________________________________________________


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
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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.

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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.